Good Morning Friends! It is another day and another Path of Exile post. I thought maybe breaking the atlas complete boundary, would end up taking away my desire to play the game but thus far it has not. In fact, I seemed to have a grand ole time last night running maps for experience and actually manage to push over the level 90 barrier. When I dinged I got an achievement called Diminishing Returns, which apparently only 6.5% of players have ever accomplished. My rarest achievement is Atlas of Worlds for completing the Atlas and only 2.2% of players have accomplished that. Now in theory I begin working on gaining a reputation with the Maven, Searing Exarch, and Eater of Worlds.

I’ve been woefully neglecting that side of the game while grinding out the Atlas since I was laser-focused on getting the maps completed and getting the map bonuses. In theory, I probably should have been letting the Maven watch my victories, but adding the Maven makes them ever so slightly more difficult and at that point, I wanted to get those bonuses before anything else. This morning I took care of my Tier 12+ Maven invitation, and now must have her witness my victories on Tier 14+ fights. Based on the wiki, this is the last step in that sequence, and will give me her final invitation to the crucible. If I were min-maxing this apparently choosing specific bosses to have her witness changes the odds of getting specific unique drops. I’ve made zero progress on Searing Exarch or Eater of Worlds, so I guess I need to focus on getting some progress there as well. I know all of this is ultimately what unlocks access to boss invitations, and in theory, my next BIG objective would be to down all of the “ubers”.

Last night I dove further into the trading system than I have ever before. Up until this point I had only been involved with purchasing items, but last night I sold a Divine Orb in order to get some liquid Chaos for other purchases. This was a bit of a disorienting mess and I quickly realized why folks run the POE Trading overly as it catches the messages and buffers them for you. Within minutes of me putting up my Divine Orb, I was flooded with messages and in less than 5 minutes from pricing it I had sold it. Essentially at this point, I have done enough trading that it seems to follow a specific sequence of operations.

• Buyer clicks message link from Official Trading website
  • This sends a canned message indicating which item and what stash slot the item is located in and its price.
• The seller teleports to a location with a stash box, usually a hideout.
• The seller chooses one of the incoming messages.
• The seller invites the player to a party.
• The buyer teleports to the location the seller is at, with currency in hand.
• The seller opens a trade window and drops the item being sold.
• The buyer drops the currency in the trade window.
• Both sides have to mouse over the trade to verify it is what they are expecting.
• The seller usually seems to hit trade first.
• The buyer hits the trade and completes the transaction.
• The seller kicks the buyer out of the party.

I’ve seen this exact same sequence play out over and over, and often times not a single word was exchanged during it. It happens so quickly and efficiently that it might as well have been an auction house transaction.

Why I was bothering with selling a Divine last night, is that I was attempting to play broker and purchase some items for a friend. The trade aspect of the game is daunting and not everyone is willing to deal with it, but there comes a time in most builds when you need some items to beef up your progress. The other problem with the trade game is that you are trying to find the best item at the moment you are searching. It is extremely rare that you are going to find the perfect item, or if you do… it might be prohibitively expensive. For example, I was trying to follow a guide and the guide got the gem colors wrong… that is easily fixable. What is not fixable however is that the helm I got had the wrong implicit… which is apparently super important. The cost difference between the item was 35 Chaos for the slightly wrong item… and 3 Divines or roughly 600 Chaos for the correct implicit. I know when I got my gear I made some slight sacrifices and have largely been fine, and I am hoping that the same will be true. Otherwise, I will keep shopping for that perfect hat.

In other exciting news… I got an email yesterday in my inbox that I had been waiting for. I finalized my purchase of the Steam Deck and am now waiting anxiously to see a shipping confirmation. I went with the 64 GB model because the price was right for my interest at the time. I am also not concerned with upgrading the SSD inside after the fact, but based on the testing I have seen there is not a massive difference between loading off the SSD and loading off an SD Card. So for the moment, my plan is to use a 512 GB SD card for storage. Expect some coverage of my first steps into this world at some point in the future.

Good Morning Friends! I am still mostly sickly, and as such, I spent most of the weekend parked on the couch and playing Path of Exile. When I last talked about the game I spent a large chunk of in-game currency in trades to get the four uniques that make up the foundation of my build. I cannot underscore just how much of a difference they made, and now I can pretty comfortably run through red maps without taking many deaths and often none at all. I’ve also come up with a reasonable way to handle the bane of my existence… elemental reflection. Essentially I swap over to the minor pantheon ability from Yugul, and equip Sybil’s ring in the left slot… which collectively gives me more than 100% elemental reflect damage protection. Combined all of this has allowed me to churn through the remaining maps that I had left on my altas.

Yesterday evening I managed to finish the last of my 115 maps and earn not only the completion achievement but all of the bonuses that grand atlas passive tree progress. This was the main overarching goal that I had for this league, and I managed to make it through in slightly less than a month’s time. The Kalandra league started on August 19th, and I managed to wrap things up on September 11th. The next obvious goal would be all of the seasonal achievements, but that might be a bit more grindy than I am willing to go after right now. One of those achievements requires the running of maps with 6000 explicit modifiers, and at last count, I was sitting at less than 900. I might be able to finish out the tier 2 set of cosmetics with enough low-hanging fruit on the achievement stack… but there is no way I am getting through tier 4.

I think my goal now becomes helping those in my guild who are interested in getting Atlas completion to reach that goal by feeding them maps. In theory for those who are curious I employed a handful of practices in order to get to the end of the list. Firstly my Atlas tree has a lot of nodes that are designed to feed me maps and it is very rare that I run ANY map and not walk away with at least four new ones. Other than that there are a handful of tricks that you can use to get the specific maps that you are after.

How To Get Specific Maps

• Vendor Pattern – You can sell any three of the same map to the vendor and you will receive a new map from one tier higher. There is some dark calculus in the way this works and every map has a unique id, and different combinations of different unique ids will produce different maps. So if you have six of the same map, try listing different combinations of those six maps to see if you can get the specific one that you need.
• Kirac Atlas Missions – Kirac offers daily atlas missions and these are a godsend for completing the White and Yellow tiers of maps. They become a little hit or miss once you get into reds, because in order for you to get bonus credit the map has to have been corrupted. If you see a red map that you have not completed and it is not corrupted… go ahead and run it because there are things you can do later to get a clean copy of that map.
• Kirac Inventory – Kirac is also a vendor and sells a selection of white, yellow, and red maps. These are extremely costly and in theory, you could probably buy the maps cheaper from players via the trade economy… but in a pinch especially for early tiers of maps, these are a quick way of getting some specific maps.
• Scouting Reports – As you run maps you will encounter scouting reports, which are used to re-roll Kirac’s missions. This is an extremely good way to get unique missions because often times immediately after a re-roll there will be one or more unique missions available.
• Horizon Orb – I happened across a ton of these while grinding out some of the lower tiers of maps, and thankfully saved them for the red map grind. Essentially a Horizon Orb will change a map into any other map of the same tier. This is completely random, but I did manage to luck into several conversions along the way that got me the “clean maps” that I needed. By “clean maps” I mean a white no-modifier version that I can use to craft whatever I need.
• Harbinger Orb – These are extremely rare items, but they allow you to reforge a map and turn it into a random map of one tier higher. In absolute desperation, I tried using one of these to get the map I needed one tier up… and succeeded, but it could have gone completely wrong as well.
• Map Favorite Slots – On the left side of the map, you have a series of slots that unlock as you achieve various requirements. The easiest slot is attained the first time you complete a T16 map, and then others are mostly tied to elder/shaper maps and specific bosses. Remember earlier when I said it was a good idea to go ahead and run red maps even if they were not corrupted? Once you have cleared a map it becomes something that you can favorite, and then you have a higher chance of seeing that particular map drop from that point forward. I absolutely utilized this to get the last two maps I needed.
• Trade – The last resort is to just buy the maps for currency from other players. Most maps go for 1 Chaos Orb each, with a few highly lucrative maps going for significantly more. One of the unique maps that I needed was going for 29 Chaos… but thankfully using Scouting Reports I was able to get access to it through a Kirac Mission.

Now that I am finished with the Atlas, I am probably still going to continue to run the occasional map mission because they are still pretty enjoyable. More likely though I am going to start diving further into Heist and Delve, which are alternative game modes that I’ve not focused as much on in this league. Other than that I am probably going to be spending some more time in Diablo III and finishing up my season’s journey over there. I have a fully kitted-out character, and just need to devote the time and effort to getting Set Mastery and three Conquests. I could stop playing Path of Exile this season and be pretty happy with the process I made. I might take a pass at some more of the elder bosses, but I need to spend some time unlocking The Maven fully before I can dive too deep into that. Side note… all of the currency I spent on gear, I have long ago made back completely so it was a good “investment” as far as easing my access to higher tier content.

For the last week, I have been in a very weird place with Path of Exile. I was largely dissatisfied with the state of my build and was teetering on the edge of either quitting the season or trying to restart as something else. After some advice from Ashgar and Carthuun and a bit of tweaking here and there, I decided that before I gave up… I should really make an effort to at least try out the specific combination of unique items that the build suggested. This meant that I would need to be engaging with the trade market, and when I got my six link… it seemed at that time that prices were all over the place. Prices are still considerably worse at the moment than during the Sentinel league, but I came to a realization. I don’t actually care about the accumulation of wealth in the real world or in the game. Why should I sit on what little I have gathered up when I could put it towards some gear and at least feel like I gave this build its all?

Velyna’s Storm Brand build is centered around four unique items, and honestly, at the time I was uncertain what any of them would do for me. Spending a bit more time, and watching a much older video on the build… I finally grok what this was going for. Essentially the goal is to convert some of the lightning damage we have been stacking to cold… then we get 100% chance to shock frozen enemies, and when they die they explode dealing more lightning damage to their friends. The freezing makes running the build significantly easier because it halts a lot of packs in their tracks. I created my shopping list and set forth to purchase everything that I would need.

• Call of the Brotherhood – 1 Chaos
• Burden of Truth – 2 Chaos
• Crown of the Inward Eye – 5 Chaos
• Inpulsa’s Broken Heart – 150 Chaos

Call of the Brotherhood I already had sitting around, but it readily goes for 1 Chaos and is easily found. Burden of Truth was also a really cheap buy, and we did not get into some hard decisions until I got to Crown of the Inward Eye. Getting the colors and links that I needed, in a non-corrupted version came with a significant price tag, but I was able to find a slightly imperfect item for only 5 Chaos. The Inpulsa’s Broken Heart was the real challenge as to get one that was completely ready to go it would cost me around 3 Divines which translates to roughly 500 Chaos. After some searching, I managed to find a five-link with the correct socket colors already for 150 Chaos, and I pounced on it. So far I am opting to use it in the five-link state as I gather up the bindings to go for turning it into a six-link later.

By the numbers, it does not seem like I made a significant change. My resists are largely in the same place but I did gain quite a bit of armor, over 700 points of evasion, and while I only gained 2 points of raw health I added 875 energy shield. I’ve also added about 17% spell block and 30% crit reduction. Another big thing that has changed is that I am now immune to Shock, Ignite, and Freeze… with the last coming from finally getting some Divine Vessel drops and working on my pantheon. I’m up to 64% stun recovery and 73% total physical damage reduction. So while again the numbers did not seem that drastic, in actually playing… I feel so much less squishy than I did. I still can’t really afford to let anything big beat me for long, but I am less likely to get randomly one-shot.

Last night I spent most of the evening working on getting some experience by running low-tier maps that I have either run as they stood, or applied an alchemy orb. I had some pretty solid luck last night, like this moment when I opened a storage chest and got three uniques to drop at once. When I finally called it for the evening I was just shy of hitting my next level. So I am likely going to keep this up until I ding, then maybe focus on something risky for a while like trying to progress in red maps again. Essentially if I am in xp earning mode I want to take very few risks, and if I am very far away from a level… then I don’t care how many times I die.

Thanks, I guess in part to the way I have specced my Atlas passives, I have seemingly phenomenal map sustain. It is very rare that I don’t come out with more maps than I put in, and it seems like I get at least three maps the majority of the time. Last night I hit a lucky cartographer’s chest that paid out massively, with the only negative being that all the maps were corrupted meaning they have to be used “as is” without modifications. This however will keep me doing these low-risk maps for awhile, which seem to be extremely lucrative in materials and resources. Essentially I am banking my bindings so that I can make an attempt at converting this five-link to a six-link without risking breaking the configuration that I currently have and that is working so well.

So while I spent the one Divine Orb that I have found so far to get to this point… my general outlook on the game is greatly improved. I would consider that “money” well spent.