Trial of the Ancestors (3.22)

Summon Raging Spirits Guardian is Great

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Good Morning Friends! I’ve spent a lot of the weekend fiddling around with my Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build and thought I would talk a bit more about it in-depth this morning. For the uninitiated, Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons low-life minions that ultimately die after a short period of time. While they are alive they deal a lot of fire-based melee damage and auto-target the nearest enemy. Essentially think of them as a sentient fireball or something akin to the Demon Skulls from the Doom FPS series. There are a lot of ways to play this but traditionally this has been done with a Witch using the Necromancer ascendancy, in fact, I have played this a number of times in the past both during the Sanctum league and a very short-lived minion instability version during Crucible league that caused them to explode and deal damage based on their maximum life.

The 3.22 league, brought forth some significant changes to both the Chieftan Marauder Ascendancy and Templar Guardian Ascendancy. Essentially the Guardian now has two unique pets, the first of which is the equivalent of a giant Righteous Fire Juggernaut called the Sentinel of Radiance. It is a temporary minion that moves extremely slowly but blankets roughly half of the map in burning damage for 20 seconds before poofing. In order to combat the EXTREMELY slow movement speed… we use a spell called Convocation to teleport all of your minions to you allowing them to bip around the map. The other unique minon is called the Elemental Relic, and you can have 3 of them up at a given time and they are summoned by your minions hitting targets. If you have all of them up, they will be granting you and your minions Level 27 versions of Anger, Hatred, and Wrath. Raging Spirits hit extremely quickly, so for the most part you are guaranteed almost 100% uptime of these buffs while in combat.

This weekend I recorded one of my dumb little videos showing off running a map. Essentially I have been spending most of my time running tier 14 and 15 maps to farm Maven invitations, but in the above video, I am doing a Tier 13. In the video, I state that 16s were a bit “rippy”, which was true… until I poured on a bunch of levels and swapped out some of my gear. Essentially now I am zip through 16s as quickly as I do a 13 in this video. Mostly the gameplay is me charging to a pack of mobs, using convocation to summon my Fiery Lad on top of the pack which between the Righteous Fire Damage and Carrion Golem Bone Flechettes pretty much explodes everything but the Rares at which point I summon a string of Raging Spirits to burn those down… and then repeat until the map is cleared. One of my problems with SRS builds in the past is that they were pretty slow to map because they revolved around trying to herd a pack of raging spirits around the map. Shield Charge + Convocation takes care of this problem and quite honestly I am not sure if I would play SRS without this combo in the future.

The build in its current state is not exactly what I would consider a budget build. That said… I am uncertain that any of my gear is actually required. I have no clue how much currency I have spent on it, but I would guess in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 Divine Orbs. The build felt good and was completely viable from essentially the point I got my first two ascendancies that gave me my unique minions. You could likely perform well with this in a Solo-Self-Found environment because while all of the uniques are nice-to-haves, I don’t think they are really required to make the build function. You would need to do quite a bit of abyss to farm up Ghastly Eye jewels with minion damage and some survival stats on them, however. At the time of writing this… here are a few price checks for the above items:

In reality, you could run this build without any of this… save for maybe crafting your own minion wand. I picked up my first +1 wand off the ground, so they are common enough that I usually end up seeing several so long as you put Convoking Wand on your loot filter as something you want to stand out. There is nothing in my gear that I am really relying on to make the build work. Sometimes you have a series of uniques that produce a very specific interaction that if you don’t have it… your build is bricked. This is absolutely not the case with Guardian SRS, and in theory, you could run happily with a +2 Minion Gem Tabula Rasa(roughly 20 Chaos) and then just a bunch of decently rolled Armor/Energy Shield items.

If you want to give this a shot, then I would definitely check out the build guide from GhazzyTV. I veered slightly off course to stack up some more defenses, so you can also check out my latest POB if you want to see what my tree and gear look like exactly. Essentially right now I am working on building toward being Spell Block capped and then picking up some more minion survival nodes. I had this problem for a bit where my Spectres would die anytime I attempted to take on a high-end Legion pack, and I was trying to gain some additional health and regen to keep them and my carrion golem alive more often. The spell block thing was an oversight I completely missed that node cluster earlier. I feel plenty tanky as is, but as I talk about in the video the combination of Mind Over Matter and Eldritch Battery put me in a situation where if I start taking damage… it sort of snowballs into a death.

This is what my defenses look like. I have decent enough armor but if I have enough points and manage to get this character a bit higher… I will try and pick up another jewel socket on my tree and attempt to get a bit more armor and health. Health truthfully is probably fine as I am a little over 4000, with an Energy Shield that is a bit over 2000. Most of the time I have 75% chance to block attacks, and hopefully will also have 75% chance to block spells soon… though currently, I am sitting at only 65%. I don’t have much in the way of raised elemental resistances but they are all capped along with Chaos Resistance. I feel way sturdier than either of my two past SRS Necromancer builds. In a perfect world, I would pick up Golem Commander and also run a Stone Golem but I am just not sure I can spare the points and I definitely can’t give up my Testudo anoint.

What I did not expect, is how quickly this has become my mapping character of choice. Essentially I have been working on unlocking an attempt on Maven by using this character to get 10 T14+ witnesses and then hopping over onto my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to complete the 10-way. Whenever I manage to fill up my Sulphite, I shift gears and go delving on the Juggernaut until I run out again… then return to the cycle of SRS Guardian Maven invites. At some point, I will start doing some altars and see how well the Guardian can deal with a lightweight boss like the Black Star or Shrek. In theory, SRS tends to be pretty great at bossing and while I am not entirely certain what my damage looks like… according to Path of Building it should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million. POB is notoriously bad at calculating minion damage however so I have no clue what the realistic damage looks like whether that is higher or lower than that number.

All in all though, if you are looking for a really chill minion character that you can in theory play without any expensive gear… you might give this one a shot. I’ve definitely spent a lot of currency on mine, but I am not really sure I had to. I think I might just be gilding the lily at this point.

Slow Motion Righteous Fire

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Sometimes I get something stuck in my head, and presently it is making a Summon Raging Spirits Guardian. In this league, there were a number of changes to the Guardian Ascendancy, not the least of which was adding two extremely powerful minion nodes. Starting from your first Ascendancy you can have a very very very slow minion that follows you around and does a Righteous-Fire-like aura that covers half of the screen. Because this minion moves so slowly, you have to use an ability called Convocation which summons minions to you. The end result is what feels like a really weird slow-motion stagger step Righteous Fire build as you move ahead, summon your big boy, and repeat until you have cleared the map.

When you add to this the fact that you can summon 20 Righteous Fire Minions, and have any other assortment of additional minions… you have this rolling ball of death. This is my first time really experiencing the Carrion Golem and I have to say… it is pretty great. I did not realize just how well that single minion shotgunned packs of mobs as it sprayed them down with bone flechettes. For the moment I am running with Zombies but I am not sure if I will keep this in my final configuration. I really really really do not want to run Animate Guardian, so I am going to try my best to find a solution that works well without it. I hate that you lose all of your gear if your animate guardian dies. I hate the whole process of equipping gear on the animate guardian. I want to see how well I can do without having to deal with it.

At the moment I am level 71 and am sitting near the end of Act 9. With ease, I will be wrapping up the campaign this evening and then working on gearing my character properly. I’ve snagged a few build-defining pieces already, but generally speaking, I wait to do the whole “balance my resistances” thing until I actually kill Kitava for the second time. I am still not entirely certain how I am going to survive on this build. At the moment I am running Eldritch Battery, and contemplating picking up Mind Over Matter which I believe will allow me to use my Energy Shield once again as a defensive barrier. I need to run my third Labyrinth soon, but given how fast the first two were, I feel like it is highly unlikely the third one will give me any trouble. So far this build is most definitely in the “stupidly powerful”
department. Right now I am running Purity of Elements to make the campaign easier, but I am going to try my best to gear out enough resistances to not have to run it in the final configuration.

All in all… I am enjoying this character and I am really interested to see how it feels once I have finished gearing it.

More Angry Fireballs

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Good Morning Folks! Something happens in Path of Exile when you get past around level 95… you start trying your best never to die because a single death can cause an experience loss that sets you back multiple hours worth of experience gain. As a result I tend to go through periods where if I am very very close to leveling up… I only want to tackle content that I am not likely to take a death on. I had been in this mode for several days, but last night I hit level 97 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and as a result… I am now shifting into the other phase… where I try more tricky content while taking a death doesn’t feel quite as bad.

So last night I did a lot of things… I took down my first Elder and am working up to another one. I burned through several guardian maps to try and get fragments to try some of those fights. I took down two breach lords that I had saved up. What I am working towards now is getting enough fragments to try Shaper, Maven, and Uber Elder aka Elder in the Shapers realm. I was kinda shocked at how “facerolly” Elder went last night. Normally speaking this is a fight that I have at least struggled a bit on in past leagues, but I was able to take him down without even coming close to using a health potion. I picked up a decent enough Grace/Purity of Elements Watcher’s Eye as well. Essentially now I need to do a lot of Maven witnessed maps in an attempt to build up a stockpile of Guardian maps… that I can then run to get more fragments. The irony is… that likely all of this activity will once again put me close to dinging a new level… which means I will slow down again until I push through and hit the next plateau.

I had been working on a Storm Brand Inquisitor, and I have to say… I am just not feeling the character so far. I’ve only made it to Act 5, but it already feels a little sluggish for my tastes. I am certain that I could push through and eventually reach a point where I have enough crit to make this feel good… but for now I just am not in the mood for it. Rather than rerolling to something else… I am just going to park this character for awhile and see if maybe I am in the mood for it later. Mostly Storm Brand is way slower than I remember it being, and I think it is because I just don’t have enough crit support yet in my passive tree. The problem with lightning damage is that it has a VERY large range of damage values… and in order for it to feel good you have to throw your thumb on the scale and try and make sure that it is ALWAYS rolling at the top end of the damage curve. I think maybe I switched to Storm Brand a bit too fast, so I might flip over to Armageddon Brand or Wintertide Brand to finish leveling.

What I am working on at the moment… as in I just literally started this character last night… is an Elemental SRS Guardian. This is apparently the new hotness and I remember SRS being extremely good at Sanctum. Essentially I would like to have SOME character that makes Sanctum easymode so that I can at the very least knock out some of the achievements. There are an awful lot of them this league that are gating my progress towards unlocking yet another sad little totem pole. I am also curious to see how an SRS build aka Summon Raging Spirits… feels with something other than the Necromancer. I feel like it is probably much easier to make this feel tanky than it was with the witch.

I’m not terribly far along but have swapped over to a three link Summon Raging Spirits with Melee Splash and Minion Damage support, and am already zipping through the content. It is hillarious that last league I saw I think 8 raw Tabula Rasa drops, and so far this league I have seen zero. I picked up a +2 minion gems Tabula last night and it is sitting there waiting for me to hit level 16 so I can equip it. Mostly I am wanting to focus on making this a Sanctum runner, but it would not be bad if this was good at bossing either. Supposedly the elemental variant with Guardian can hit the peaks that Poison did with Necromancer. It is also apparently much cheaper to gear because the required items for poison have trickled up in price after having four leagues of that being a phenomenal build.

Other than that, today the Runes of Power patch drops in Last Epoch, so I am certain I will be poking my head into that game to check out the changes. They have apparently done quite a bit to add some random encounters in the Monoliths, which ultimately is the part of the game that needed the most improvement. Running Monoliths gets stale way faster than running Maps in Path of Exile. There are apparently rogue mages that are a cross between a Diablo Loot Goblin and a Path of Exile Essence monster. I am curious to see how these work and I am hoping that their drop tables are generous and give you a bit of a way to target farm some uniques.

Anyways! I hope you are having an excellent week and I hope we can all slide into the weekend without much hassle.

Old Men Warring

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Good Morning Folks! I had a bit of a crazy day yesterday. I took the day off from work, but it was to ferry my dad around to some doctor’s appointments which meant a lot of rushing around and a lot of driving. When I got home I opted to crash on the couch and return to my audiobook while playing some Path of Exile. This really is my happy place, and I am glad to be returning to it because there is just something about listening to an audiobook while plugging away in an ARPG. It also helped greatly that shortly after I nested downstairs with my laptop, I had Josie join me and snuggle up beside me, and then shortly after that Gracie came and laid on my legs. Legit… not sure there is a more perfect evening that could have been had.

I’ve been working my way through the Old Man’s War series by John Scalzi. I think for most folks this might have been the first series they read from this author, but for me… that honor goes to Kaiju Preservation Society earlier this year. I definitely like the author and the style of writing, so I had been holding this series in reserve for something to dive into when I had time to focus on it. So far as I commented on Bookwyrm last night, I think I enjoyed this second book much better than I did the first. The first novel in the series spent a lot of time building the world, and this novel spent a lot more time living in it. It does not hurt that the novel focuses on one of my favorite characters from the first, and continues to flesh out the world of special forces known as the “Ghost Brigades”. It is always hard for me to judge a single novel in a series because my mind tends to focus on the totality of the experience. I love Avengers Endgame for example, but that movie wouldn’t mean anything were it not for the 30 or so odd movies that came before it.

I wrapped up the second novel last night and immediately started my way into the third. This series is doing something that I love when a book series does it. Namely, each book takes a viewpoint from the previous book and pivots to where that is now the primary perspective. This was my favorite thing about the Santiago series from Mike Resnick, in that it would focus on a side character and elevate them to the primary focus of another book. The positive here is that Scalzi does not appear to be a shitbird, and is at least an author I can feel a little bit better about reading. In the first book, we focused on the perspective of a Colony Defense Force Recruit, in the second book the perspective of Special Forces, and this third book is shifting down planet side to the perspective of the Colonials. I only made it I think four chapters in before turning in for the night, but I fully expect tonight to return to my perch on the sofa and pick back up where I left off.

This brings my total books for the year up to twenty-eight, even though I am likely the only one counting. I’m continuing to use my Bookwyrm user profile to track my progress. The original goal that I set for myself this year was twenty books, and I am well past that. I believe there is a third book in Lindsay Ellis’ series coming soon as is I believe another John Gwynne novel and a sequel to Legends and Lattes. I vaguely remember all of these landing around October along with another James Butcher novel. I also have a fat stack of things that I should read, and I am sure I will finish out the year with plenty to do. I took about a three-month gap, but it feels good to be back in the swing of things.