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A Weekend of Upgrades

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Good Morning Folks! I played a heck of a lot of Path of Exile this weekend and a lot of that time was focused on gold acquisition to feed the league mechanic. I did some Photoshop magic to create a single screen that shows all of the parts of the town that I have maxed out. The only thing not shown here is the Recruiter which does not have its own doodad on the town view. Mining helped a lot because it means that I get gold from marking ore in my maps, which also means if I happen to find two nodes in a map it increases my gold gain significantly. Generally speaking, I am clearing 8k to 20k depending on a bunch of variables in each map but more often hover around the 10k mark. I still have my enchanter, disenchanter, mappers, and recombinators to max out before I have everything at the level cap of 11.

The thing is… I am not sure it is really worth pushing through to level everything up. Granted I have not put any effort into significantly upgrading my workers… but with capped shipping I seem to be largely getting the same results that I have always gotten. The main difference is I have three ships and all of the ports unlocked at this point. The league mechanic feels like it pays out significantly better in gear than it does in currency. This can be really cool as I will talk about a bit later when I go over my gear upgrades, but since gear isn’t selling amazingly well in this league due to the mechanic is generating so much of it… it is not like getting a ton of gear really helps your bottom line. So long as I get a few chaos per boatload I am mostly happy. I’ve yet to pull anything higher than an exalted orb from a shipment, and I think in truth I will be better served tweaking my map runners to be able to reliably do t16s.

That said occasionally you get some amazing gear from the mechanic. The gloves that I swapped to yesterday are better rolled than a pair that I was looking at on the market going for 8 Divines. I legitimately was contemplating making that purchase and I am so glad I did not given that I wound up with essentially the same thing for free. I’ve also been wearing league mechanic boots for a while now with no signs of finding reasonable upgrades. The big upgrade of the weekend though is that I sold a big ticket item and bought a rather expensive fractured sceptre base and then crafted it into a replacement weapon. Lastly, I swapped out my pseudo-six-link helm for a slightly better-rolled one. I had picked up my previous one for a steal and was able to flip it for 3 Divines when I only paid 1.5 Divines for the new one. For things like that I tend to overprice because I don’t necessarily care about a fast sale.

In other news, I ran into one of the new optional boss encounters that can show up in T16 maps. The Black Knight is in theory a replacement for the Black Morrigan encounter, but instead of showing up in the Viridian Wildwood, he shows up as a clickable hole in the ground called the Starfall Crater. Fighting him feels an awful lot like fighting Aul the Crystal King, so it was not a big deal to beat him since I have done that fight so many times down in Delve. I was hoping to get him to down Svalinn so I can make a dumb block build that triggers spellcasts… but mostly I just got a ton of Verisium and Runes. Really hoping that I can find a bunch more of him so I can try and farm the shield. All in all, it was a really fun optional encounter, similar to finding the Nameless Seer.

The biggest progress from the weekend is that I have completed the 115 normal and unique maps that make up the Atlas. On top of that, I have done Vinktar Square and am only lacking Doryani’s Machinarium from the challenge of running all of the unique maps. I am hoping a Doryani’s drops down in Delve soon because I am beelining to fight any bosses that I encounter down there. What prompted me to push through and buy the last few maps is that I needed the crafting recipes that they generated in order to craft my scepter. Truth be told, none of the maps were more than 20 chaos with Doryani being the outlier going for around 2 Divines. Now my focus really turns to trying to knock out some of the challenges that I am close to finishing up. Basically, my goal as always is to do enough challenges in order to unlock a totem pole for my hideout. Once I have done that… any progress after that is gravy.

Finishing out my 115th map also unlocked the last of the rewards in Kirac’s Vault, with that very last item being a simulacrum. One of the big changes that they made in this league is that Simulacrums essentially start 15 waves into the previous progress and cap out at 15 waves instead of 30. So essentially doing a 15 now is the same level of accomplishment as doing a 30 previously. I am a big fan of this change because it did previously feel like you spent a lot of time facerolling waves until they started to matter. I took a ton of deaths and basically lost any progress toward 97 that I had made… but managed to complete all fifteen waves. Truth be told in those last few waves… the trash mobs were WAY more difficult than the boss encounters. That said I did try really hard to split up Ominphobia and Kosis so that I did not have to be fighting them at the same time. I didn’t necessarily get anything amazing for my troubles but did manage to pull a few different copies of Megalomaniac.

I’ve not made it super far into Delve this league and am sitting around 150 depth. I have gotten several lucky divine drops from nodes, however, which has been great. Recombinators continue to be my most reliable method for earning a bunch of chaos quickly, and the currency exchange is freaking amazing. I need to spend more time down there, but the mapping has just felt better because it helps feed the league mechanic more efficiently. I’m mostly running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual strategy in maps and have lucked into one spawn of Black Morrigan that happily occurred when I was running a duplicating scarab so I got two copies. What has been shocking however is just how many Omens have been dropping from the map spawned ritual mobs. I’ve already pulled two Omen of Connections, a few Omen of Blanching, and pretty much every other more common Omen a half dozen times. The biggest challenge is that none of my trees have a lot of map drop support so sustaining maps is a big fraught at the moment.

All told however I am still having a freaking blast. This legitimately might be my favorite league even though the ground loot that is dropping in maps has not been that phenomenal. If I need money I can go farm up more resonators and fossils down in the dark, but for now, I am mostly able to afford anything that I really want. There are some upgrades that I still need… namely I have been trying to roll a large cluster jewel to replace the janky one that I am using currently. I also have a nice corrupted Cloak of Flame that I am slowly working on getting socketed and linked, but it is a bit of a stretch goal. I also have another Shaper Shield that I am occasionally trying to craft into something better than the one I am currently using. I like having some long-reaching goals though so I am not in any real rush to acquire anything. Getting my Six-Link chest due to getting Black Morrigan went a long way to improving my league experience. I also need to swap out some of my gems for Awakened versions, but it isn’t like I am struggling with anything currently.

I got a really nicely rolled Widowhail, and found a pretty nice quiver to go with it from the league mechanic… so I am starting to get that itch to try rolling a bow character. I’ve been stockpiling decent drops for that eventuality given that I seem to always end up wanting a bow character. I’m also contemplating trying to build something around Volcanic Fissure of Snaking again. Then there is the whole desire to try Lacerate of Haemorrhage Gladiator like literally everyone else in this league. Basically, I am starting to feel that alting itch, so I fully expect before the end of the week I will have rolled something new.

A Week of Recession League

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I did my obligatory “First Day of Blaugust” post and today I am back to my usual nonsense. As of today… specifically about seven hours from now… it will have been one full week of playing Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile. During that time I have made a ton of progress and quite possibly made it further in a shorter period of time than I have ever in the past. The League mechanic slowed me down a bit and it took me roughly 20 hours of play to get through the campaign into maps. It has taken me an additional 42 hours to reach the point where I feel like I am fully ready for endgame shenanigans. Path of Exile players hit these games freaking hard… and I have put in time before work, at lunch, and many hours after work to get where I am now.

At this point, I have completed all sixteen tiers of normal maps and a number of the unique maps leaving ten more of those to go. Two will be rather expensive as they always are because they unlock some meta crafts… but my mappers brought back Poorjoy’s overnight so that is another one I should be able to knock out quickly. I also have my four voidstones and as a result, most of the maps that are dropping normally and not through specific league mechanics will be dropping at the t16 level meaning I will have lots of stuff to farm with soon. I have all but four of my favorite map slots and currently, they are all set to Glacier which is probably my favorite map of the pool that is available this league.

It is wild that I have as strong of a build as I have, given how poor I feel this league. I think across the board everyone is feeling this because this league is the recession following the insane boom leagues of Affliction and Necropolis. Affliction had nonsense levels of juicing coming from the Wildwood Wisps and Necropolis had all manner of ways to force scarabs to spit out hundreds upon hundreds of uniques per map. This league dialed back a lot of the ground loot strategies and the death of magic find as we knew it previously… where folks focused on scaling the quantity of drops, is pretty much dead. Big group juicing parties are declaring group play dead, but ironically in spite of all of this… I am probably having more fun than I have in a long while. Sure I can’t buy bargain basement headhunters for 4 divines… and squires for a handful of chaos… but the league mechanic is actually producing legitimately useful gear.

I’ve recently shifted up my build to go into the block-based Righteous Fire as Pohx has done this league, and I gotta say it feels really great. Crafters are understanding this is the direction everyone is going to go and as a result have wildly inflated the prices of these shields. The stat that you care bout the most is that 5% life gain on block and to get a shield with decent armor and decent life you are looking at 3 divines or more. What I did instead was pick up a shaper-influenced base for 40 chaos and then do reforge life harvest crafting until I got something that looked halfway decent. At some point, I want to upgrade this but for now, it works. Similarly, I was able to snag a pseudo-link elder helm for 1.5 divines… which was a bit of a steal considering these are mostly going for 3 divines or higher. Maybe when I make a bit more currency I can upgrade this but for now, it works and was a huge boost in damage.

The Light of Meaning is a prismatic jewel that is technically new to this league, but it largely replaces the craftable version from Necropolis league called The Perandus Pact. It has all of the same rolls that you could craft and largely works in the same manner. I picked up the +6% increased fire damage version again and worked it into my build in the same location as the last league. Where it is placed currently it is hitting 18 nodes for an additional 108% increased Fire Damage. According to POB, it is adding roughly 50k damage to my build. However when I drop the Spiritual Aid nodes for a cluster jewel that will take it down to only hitting 16 nodes and 96% additional Fire Damage but probably still worth it. I picked up a cheap cluster jewel base and am trying to roll a large cluster with Burning Bright, Primatic Heart, and Widespread Destruction… since I can’t really afford to buy it outright. For now, I am using reforge fire Harvest crafting, but if I go back into delve and get some more fossils and resonators I might just do single socket scorched fossils and yolo it. Once I hit the large I will start trying to craft my mediums.

Admittedly part of the reason why I am so poor at the moment is that I have not been Delving. I am full up on sulphite and ready to go… but have been focusing on finishing out my Atlas and gathering resources for my town. Delve is a great place to get gold… but has zero way of getting any of the mined ore to feed the smelters and shipments. Now that I am through all of the baseline maps and have my voidstones, I am probably going to shift up my focus and dive down into the dark. I’ve only made it to depth 115 and would like to get down to around 200 before I start farming horizontally hunting for cities. I also need the bulk maps that come from Delve to feed my mappers. So this weekend is probably going to be me returning to the virtuous cycle of map until full on delve juice and then burn through it in the mines. This should help me considerably in bubblegum currency and also having resonators both to craft with and bulk sell on the currency exchange. I got a quick shot of 300 chaos yesterday when I sold all of my resonators off in about 15 minutes through Faustus and the automated trades.

Speaking of mappers… I thought I would share what they look like right now. I’ve not been heavily focused on them that much and have not poured a ton of resources into leveling them up. Right now I have a single party with a level 6, level 5, and two level 4 mappers. This allows me to burn through white maps pretty reliably without risking losing them. That does not mean that they 100% complete every map but they do bring back a lot of random stuff, most of the gear I feed into the disenchanter. Last night before going to bed I made sure I had two shipments going and twelve maps in the hopper, and this represents what the mappers brought back. It isn’t phenomenal loot but it also isn’t nothing. Since I was never going to bulk sell my maps, this allowed me to turn a resource that was rotting in my bank into a non-zero quantity of usable items. There is an achievement for running t14 or higher maps with the mappers so at some point I will upgrade to where I can do that.

Similarly, I have been keeping shipments going pretty much as much as I can swing. Essentially I have one boat that I have dedicated to the longer route that takes about 2 hours per run, and another boat that takes the shorter runs at around 45 minutes each. Last night before going to bed I set up two shipments and the left side of the above image shows the returns from each. Again it is not spectacular loot but produces a lot of bubblegum currency that is still useful. There is a Kingsmarch Wiki page that maths out all of the details around sending items, what sorts of rewards they bring, and what the various breakpoints are. Right now I am filling whatever I can towards the items that are being asked for from the port as I am trying to level the hidden faction system for every destination. Then I will add 55 of each other crop, and 8104 Thaumaturgic Dust because it acts as a multiplier to the entire load and that specific number is the 200% more breakpoint. 55 for dust is the 100% more breakpoint, and I am largely just using it as a number for crops. Sending multiple types of crops seems to increase the total yield in currency… so I am just winging it and it seems to mostly make each load worth the time and gold expenditure.

I think my focus over the next few days is going to be gold acquisition. There are a lot of upgrades that I want to make for my town that are going to require forty thousand gold or so each. If I am delving more… I am generating less ore that requires workers to work… and when they go idle they stop draining my coffers. So I am probably going to shut down shipping and mapping and just focus on building up a nest egg for the next phase of development. I have a quad tab full of rare items that I can feed my disenchanter to at least keep it running during this interim. I’ve been running a lot of maps with my Ritual/Einhar/Beyond atlas in the hopes of maybe just maybe either lucking into a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections because I am still using a five-link chest piece. I have a second Cloak of Flame that is better rolled that dropped while mapping, that I have been using to try and link and then eventually swap.

All in all, I am having a blast in Recession League, in spite of what the hardcore juicers are saying about it. I’ve made a ton of progress in a single week and now my focus is on subtly improving my build. I really need to swap out my weapon for something a bit better with at least +1 to all fire gems on it. I have a fractured base that I am crafting into a new pair of gloves and am just now trying to get elemental proliferation implicit on them before wearing them. I have a side project of trying to level a bunch of Purity of Fire gems so that I can hopefully get a level 21/20% quality gem out of the batch. I guess I feel like I have so many projects that I want to devote time to, and that is keeping me in the hype cycle of enjoyment. Eventually, that will slow down, but for me personally, this is one of the best leagues I have ever played in.

Fully Specced Betrayal is Wild

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Hey Folks! Tomorrow is the start of Blaugust and with it will come some more Blaugusty-themed posts, and probably a few days without proper league updates. Not that I think anyone out there is hanging on my words wanting to know what I did the day before… but you know I can pretend right. At this point, I am completely done with white maps and almost done with yellow maps. I get in this weird place where I try and finish the yellow maps before I run any of my red maps because I know Kirac will progressively stop offering lower maps when I actually do that. Tonight we have raid night and I will be back in Final Fantasy XIV, but after I bid Ace adieu for the evening I plan on starting running corrupted reds to begin knocking them out.

I did some more upgrades. First I bought a +1 fire gem neck for pretty cheap and was specifically looking for one with a lot of dex on it, fire res, chaos res, and everything else was negotiable. I picked up a second amethyst ring which gave me quite a bit of life and was enough to cap my chaos resistance while also pouring on more fire resistance to feed my regen. The boots came straight out of a shipment and all I had to do with it was drop a chaos/fire affix on them and resistance swap cold to fire with harvest. I still need to get relevant eldritch implicit on it, but did manage to hit ignite proliferation on my gloves. I think my gear is good enough for now to make it all the way through T16s. At some point, I plan on probably going block-based and dropping determination.

Right now I am running my first Atlas with Niko and Jun and will probably splash in some more points into Ambush and Scarab gain. My second Atlas for the moment is Einhar and Beyond with the goal of trying to farm Black Morrigan for six linking my chestpiece eventually. I believe Black Morrigan can only spawn in T14 or higher so I will get a bit more serious about that when I get up there. I’ve never done Betrayal with full Atlas support and it is honestly pretty wild. I will kill a single Betrayal mini-boss and end up getting a big ole loot explosion. For example, the above loot is from killing Hillock who spawned by himself and then offered to drop some currency. So I get why folks are talking about this mechanic for early loot bases. For me, I mostly was trying to speed run my way through the betrayal crafting unlocks. Once I get all of those I am likely going to shift over to Expedition since it is also on that same side of the tree.

At this point, I am sitting at 69 maps in my atlas and the only yellow-tier map that I have left is Leyline. I used a horizon orb to get a copy of that map, and will probably run it after I finish work and before I start doing some FFXIV nonsense. So like I said we have raid night and then I need to start running experts again because new bookrocks unlocked today, but tomorrow I will likely push through as many of the red maps as I can and see if I can maybe wrap my atlas up before the weekend. I running a bit low on chaos and do not want to cash in any of my divines yet, but I will likely start buying some of the unique maps needed to finish out the atlas. I am slowly pushing my way through Maven, Searing Exarch, and Eater of Worlds and hope to have those unlocked by the time I hit T16s. Hopefully, I get some more big ticket items to drop so I can be a little more liquid.

This league is so freaking good folks.

Settlers League is Great

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Good Morning Folks! I am a bit late getting a post started today because work things got in the way early early this morning. Friday was the launch of the Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile and I have been having a blast. I was a bit slower going through the campaign than I normally would be, largely because I spent a lot of time doing the league mechanic once it unlocked upon arriving in Lioneye’s Watch in Act 1. Normally I don’t invest heavily in the league mechanic until I have made my way into mapping, but I feel like doing it while campaigning was the correct choice because a lot of the upgrades end up being time-gated. As a result, it took me roughly 20 hours to finish the campaign which was Friday evening, off and on throughout Saturday, and then finishing my 3rd lab and killing Kitava early Sunday morning.

As of this morning, I am 44 maps into progressing my atlas and very smoothly running through white and yellow maps without significant upgrades. I’ve actually kept track of my expenditures this time around so that I would be able to recap in a blog post. Currently, I’ve spent 51 Chaos on everything I am wearing, including an -15 Immortal Flesh (1c), Cloak of Flames (5c), Rise of the Phoenix (2c), a Fire/Chaos/Dex Helm (3c), Chaos/Fire/Life Ring (20c), and Chaos/Fire/Life/Dex Gloves (20c). I had a bit of a windfall pretty early on where I sold an influenced base for 80c, and an Enlighten support for 260c. On top of that, I have picked up miscellaneous Chaos Orbs and 2 raw Divine Orbs. I’m not in a real rush to buy items but it feels good to know I have some spending money when I ultimately want to replace most of my rare gear. You can get a ton of life on items right now, and I hope to end up replacing pretty much everything with at least 100 life rolls on various slots.

What has kept me from needing to buy a ton more gear is the fact that the league mechanic produces a ton of really good items. While it isn’t generating a ton of raw currency it is producing a lot of items that have relatively high tier rolls, including lots of really good resistances on them. I was kind of screwing up the shipping mechanic a bit, but Sunday a bunch of videos came out explaining how it works or at least how to improve your results and I hope to see a big payoff at some point either today or tomorrow. Essentially each port city has a hidden faction system, and you unlock higher tiers of faction by fulfilling their requested goods. When you fill all of the items on an order it unlocks a new higher tier of demands and again… just by shipping only those items you are basically guaranteed to get more return than you are sending.

I’ve gotten some truly wild items out of this. For example, never did I expect to have it in the cards to be using a one-handed axe right now instead of a scepter but…. that is where we are in the league. I got this axe back from a shipment that had +18% Dot Multi, and +24% Fire Dot Multi on it… which was infinitely better than the scepter I had been using. I threw the new Ignite enchant on it and crafted the Fire Damage/Ignite Combo Betrayal mod on it. This is pretty much better than anything I could get for less than six or so Divines at the moment. Sure the physical attack damage doesn’t really do anything for me… but also I might end up recycling this item into some sort of a fire-based melee build later once I can afford to craft or buy a “forever” scepter.

Legitimately I am having so much fun with the shipping mechanic, and a lot of the items it brings back… might be useful for throwing into the recombinator later. Right now I am using my cast-offs to feed into the disenchanter as arcane dust seems to be a premium commodity that a lot of the upgrades require. At some point, I need to spend some time hiring and firing better people, because I have a bunch of workers that are less than optimal. You can get these combo workers that have lots of different skills… but you end up paying a premium for each additional skill level that they have. I would be better off replacing those with single-stat workers to hopefully bring down my total gold sink for the town a bit.

I’ve not made it super far into Delve, largely because… you can’t gather resources down there. You get a heck of a lot of gold in a short period of time which is good, but I keep running dry on the various ores that are needed to feed shipping. As a result… I might be spending a lot more time mapping this league instead of plumbing the depths for cities. I’ve found my very first city, but it is at around 80 depth which means that the payoff is not amazing. I am still working on spending Azerite to unlock things because if nothing else Delve is amazing for producing sheer quantities of bubblegum currency… something that I find myself tragically lacking. For example, I have zero of my flasks automated at this point… because I don’t have the Glassblower’s Baubles to quality them… nor do I have the Instilling Orbs in order to craft on the auto-use enchant. Both of these are problems that will likely be solved by delving more.

What makes this league so great is honestly the virtuous cycle that takes place between mapping/delving and then returning back to town whenever a shipment comes in. Right now I have two ships going one that is working the 45-minute routes nearest to Wraeclast and one that is working the 2-hour routes that are furthest away. This gives me two distinct reward horizons that look forward to, and nothing feels quite as good as seeing the pop-up in the corner of your screen indicating that it is time to go back and see what the journey brought. It puts me in this pattern of trying to see how much I can get done before the ship comes back and the two cycles feed each other. Mapping and Delving generate gold and resources that I can then invest in my town and keep moving forward. I legitimately hope this system goes standard because it is pretty freaking great.

Honestly, I am super glad that I went ahead and stuck with old and reliable Righteous Fire because it has given me more mental bandwidth to explore the league mechanics without also having to figure out my damned build. Are you playing Settlers of Kalguur league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.