Apothecary

Buying Freedom

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Good Morning Folks. If you remember yesterday I talked about finally getting an Apothecary card drop. Now these go for roughly 25-30 Divines each because they are hot property for folks wanting to do late league gambles. The thing is I do not need a Mageblood this league, nor do I really think that Magebloods are actually that much fun. They fix builds but they don’t really do anything cool and after played with a handful of them through several leagues the magic of that item is broken for me. Headhunter however is the really fun belt and I will choose it over Mageblood all of the time because it actually does something. So after writing yesterdays blog post, I happened to look over and see that someone was advertising a Primeval Hideout on TFT, and I thought… I wonder if they will trade for this Apothecary card so I could take one rare drop that I don’t particularly care about right now for another thing that I have been desperately seeking for way too long.

Unfortunately it was a Chinese language user that did not speak English, so they invited me with me not knowing if they would actually accept the trade or kick me from the instance. I got to their hideout, popped the Apothecary in the trade window and they accepted without a moments thought. So here I was heading to the hideout, and weirdly unlike the one other time that I bought a hideout on TFT they did not take the time to unlock it. So thankfully I was sturdy enough to clear the mobs inside the hideout and there was another person who had also bought the hideout with me, but I had already cleared 90% of it before they got there. Just like the screenshot that I linked to yesterday, the hideout does in fact appear as a path going down off the side of one of the floating islands. I was always so damned scared that I would miss the hideout in one of my farming runs, but I am pretty sure this would have been impossible to miss.

So now I have my Primeval Hideout unlocked and at some point I want to swap from my Ghost-lit Graveyard Hideout over to this one, but that has to be a challenge for a day I feel like building a new hideout. The biggest problem that I have had when I tried to swap hideouts is that the locations of everything is so baked into my brain that I struggle if I end up moving anything to a different location. I really like the decor of this place, especially if I change up the lighting to make it a little darker. I also have the ability to dump a backup of my current hideout so I can always quickly revert back to it at a moments notice. The only negative is that I have a stash tab full of Primordial Blocks maps… that I might as well run as I flip my favorite map slot to something else and build up a stash of those. Right now I am targeting Toxic Sewer which is one of my favorite layouts because of how compact everything is.

In other related news I recorded one of my dumb little videos last night and it is hard to believe that I have made 37 of these… just for Path of Exile. Specifically I show off what doing a t16 looks like with mid-range investment I think maybe I have spent 50 div on the build… which to new players is a lot, but to folks who spend multiple mirrors on a build is an entry point. I think I have probably spent around 150 Divines on my Righteous Fire Chieftain over the course of this league for reference. Delve was good to me and allowed me to easily generate large quantities of currency to then blow on dumb ideas later. This is legitimately probably my second favorite build I have had in Path of Exile behind my menagerie of Righteous Fire characters. It is not sturdy enough to straight up face tank everything, but it is sturdy enough to feel good playing it with max res and max block and a reasonable amount of life/es regeneration. The thing that would make this feel better would be to try and work in Stone Stance or something like that and maybe a bit more max resist.

Anyways pending this build is still around it will be a contender for 3.27 league starter for me, given that I would like to see what this can be if I really make it my full focus for a league. I also want to see what happens if I just swap out Storm Brand of Indecision for Penance Brand of Dissipation for bossing. I will be doing some testing on that over the weekend but I need to acquire a 21/20 gem for Penance Brand first.

Desperately Seeking Primeval

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Good Morning Folks. This is Primordial Blocks, and I have lived here for every league that has had this map in the rotation. It is the source of the Primeval Ruins Hideout, and I want it bad. The problem with this is that it is extremely rare… and I have likely run over 1000 copies of this map spread between multiple leagues and I have NEVER seen it. The only knowledge I have of what the entrance to this hideout in the map looks like comes from this post from 2021 where they talk about farming it, and then link a screenshot of the hideout showing up as a ramp downwards. Ironically they talk about finding the Nocturnal Hideout being equally difficult to find, and I have found it through running the unique Twilight Temple map three times, which is something that I do exactly once per league and not farm over and over. I am not opposed to buying my way out of this problem… but they are selling right now on TFT when they do show up for 20-30 divines for a portal allowing you to claim it. I fear that this league will be yet another where I do not find it, but when I do… y’all are definitely going to know about it.

I can cross a different drop off my bucket list though, because I have finally acquired my first Apothecary as a drop in a map. This is the token thing that most people farm as it provides access to a Mageblood and is generally popular amongst people who like gambles where they buy a single card of this set and attempt to double or nothing their way to a full set through harvest crafting. I have run a truly stupid number of Crimson Temple and now Defiled Cathedral maps attempting to get one of these as my default farm map in the leagues where Primordial Blocks is not available. This time around I ran enough Defiled Cathedral to get a Nameless Seer so that I could scry the Apothecary drop chance onto Primordial Blocks. I would gamble this off but given that I do not really need a Mageblood this league, I am going to sit on it in case I end up getting more drops while I continue to farm this accursed zone.

The real MVP of the Mercenaries league however has been the Map Device Inventory. Probably the most tedious part of running a lot of maps is rolling them. For those unfamiliar this is the process of scouring and applying alchemy orbs until you get the map modifiers that you want to run, or in my case… re-rolling any mods that I do not feel comfortable running because it will in some way brick my build. For example the mods that disable regeneration or lower your maximum elemental resistances are instant re-rolls for me and always will be regardless of what build I am playing. What the map inventory tab does is allows me to load it up with a bunch of maps, ready to be run, so that I do not have to stop and either retrieve a map from a bank tab or hold them in my inventory limiting what I can pick up in a given map. This has been a game changer and has made the entire process of running maps so much more enjoyable.

I will admit at this point I am getting so freaking tired of Betrayal, but it continues to be some amazing experience gain. The only real annoying thing about it is needing to run the safehouses every so often. It is absolutely worth it because you are pretty much guaranteed to get at least a veiled chaos orb now, but it does break up the flow of mapping. They are selling for roughly 3 to a divine so it is worth the time running it given that they go super quickly. I wish there was a way in the passive tree to block trapped chests and crafting benches because really all I want are boxes to click on super quickly and I cannot be bothered to learn who does what when they are leading. I know that Awakened POE Trade has a cheat sheet button and I run that all of the time for price checking… but it just seems like a lot of effort when all I really want from this mechanic is the sweet sweet burst of experience when I click the buttons. It legitimately is one of my least favorite league mechanics but it is just too much experience to ignore when all I care about are levels.

What I really need now is some more memory tears. I am at 22 of 33 memory altars for the last challenge that I need to hit 34 or 40 for the league. This gives me the same size totem pole that I have gotten for the last two leagues and if I can get that I will be perfectly happy with where I left off for this league. I am not going to be tryhard enough to get 40 of 40, especially when this time next week I will be diving into the new Last Epoch season. It is at this point in the post when I realize… that I am mostly talking to myself. There are so few people that read my blog that are actually this deep into the madness that is Path of Exile to care about anything that I just said. I could talk about flying unicorns or whatever now, and it is unlikely anyone is actually going to get to this paragraph. Then again I would say 90% of the posts I write… are mostly just me journaling my own thoughts about something and provide zero tangible benefit to anyone who reads them. When I write about more mainstream topics that people care about, that is probably not the case but going deep into a niche game late in the league… is probably only for the diehards of which I am probably not enough of one to attract that audience.

Anyways! I got an Apothecary which I think is pretty cool. Tomorrow I might actually try writing a Blaugust post of some sort since I have not really interacted much with the topics.

First Apothecary

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Good Morning Folks. I did not end up blogging at all yesterday because I am feeling like a truck run over me. I had been fighting what felt like generic crud, but Tuesday night the bottom dropped out on me. I had scheduled an appointment with the doctor and shortly after I took one of my over-the-counter Covid tests to see two lines. This is my official first positive Covid test, though I think I have had it on two other occasions. There was one time early on in Covid that I am pretty sure I got it, but this predates the existence of easy testing options. Then there was the time my wife tested positive and I was also sick but tested negative. Essentially I am having a right lousy time of it at the moment, which is pretty much harshing the enjoyment of anything.

What I probably would have posted about yesterday is the fact that I crafted my fourth legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2. This is legitimately the weapon that I wanted the most back in the day when I first found out about legendaries. Unfortunately, it is going to be a long time before I craft my next one because I have essentially drained the bank of all resources. I am getting dangerously low on ectos and coins, and am pretty much entirely out of trophies and would be buying them from scratch. I might turn my eyes to working on legendary armor sets and maybe some of the other legendary extraneous items like sigils and runes. All of these are still major grinds, but it would be nice to have a set of sigils to make equipping the cache of weapons that I currently have a bit easier.

I’ve been back playing Path of Exile, largely in part because charing around in maps on a Righteous Fire Chieftain is about all of the mechanical skills that I currently have. I’ve been running maps in the hope of getting the Nameless Seer on Defiled Cathedral so that I can swap the div card pool over to a map that I actually like such as Glacier. Ironically I can seemingly get the damned seer on every tileset but the one I am targetting. I’ve been juicing up maps with rogue exiles, lots of einhar beasts, and ritual in the hopes of winning the lottery and getting something really cool. I’ve seen every omen multiple times at this point so the drop rate of those seems really good if you are specced into ritual on your atlas. I really think I am probably going Ritual/Beasts more often in future leagues because it has made it super easy to get six links because either I get an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan beast to do it for me.

I did get my very first Apothecary, but weirdly I got it from a stacked deck that I opened while sitting inside of Defiled Cathedral. This makes me wonder… are stacked deck chances skewed by the map you are sitting in when you open them? Since I don’t particularly need a Mageblood and I am not the biggest fan of gambling with harvest juice… I flipped this immediately on the currency exchange for 53 Divines. I was expecting it to take a bit to sell, but sold pretty much instantly making me think that I probably should have priced it a bit higher. My guess is we are in the phase of the league where folks are gambling away their earnings on dumb bets like trying to make magebloods.

I dinged 99, and as such I took out a few things that I had been holding onto. Since I bought carries for my last two voidstones I had never actually done a baseline shaper, and it was not until recently that I got a cortex map to drop. I’ve also run Sirius which gives me all but my last favored map slot unlocked. In theory, I could start working on getting The Feared set up by witnessing other bosses, but I will probably just go back to doing things that are actually fun… like chewing through maps. Bossing just feels like a bad bet, because it takes forever to kill them with anything but the most bossing-focused build and you really don’t get much loot. Even then you basically have to buy fragments off the market to keep running them back to back. I am just more of an “alch and go andy” at the end of the day, which I find immensely enjoyable.

I may actually flip back over into World of Warcraft during my sickboi hours, and attempt to get into War Within. I’ve heard it is rather good, but I just have failed to attach to it. Combat in World of Warcraft just feels worse than the games I am currently playing. It isn’t as structured as Final Fantasy XIV but isn’t as fluid and reactionary as Guild Wars 2… sort of making it feel like the worst of the options. The other problem that I have had is that I am just not sold on the story anymore. I know they are trying to make a fresh start, but they lost me years ago and it is really hard to care about Azeroth anymore. I do want to see all of the expansion however so at some point I will get through it.