Bleed

Jack Attack

by

Hey Folks! I am running very low on spoons this week but wanted to get a post out this morning since I already missed one on Tuesday. Basically last night I kept my head down and pushed through the campaign on my Bleed Gladiator. Right before taking out Kitava for the second time, I made the tree swap over to drop all of the two-handed damage nodes and pick up all of the block nodes. While it is not as fast as Bleed Cleave was while leveling… it sure feels immortal on what is effectively some pretty scuffed gear. It feels weird to be this strong, this early, without really doing much other than fixing my resistances.

The biggest portion of the swap required me to be at least level 65, so I could throw on Jack, the Axe. This is not the most optimal weapon for this build, but everyone is using it because it is “good enough” and does not require much thought. I picked up one that was really well rolled and has the 11% increased Physical Damage corruption which helps out a bit. The shield is also really important but this is a hand-me-down from my Righteous Fire Chieftain. A lot of builds are going with spell suppression and as such using an evasion base shaper shield, but I already had this one lying around and did not want to shell out additional currency right now. I figure if I run into issues I might shift over to a suppression-based setup but like I said yesterday… I am not that sold on suppression as a required layer.

I dumped a POB this morning just so you could see the state of the build if you wanted to. Largely for the next little bit I will be keeping my head down and pushing through levels to build out more of my tree. The gear that I am wearing is not amazing, but save for my necklace and the abyssal jewel this is all stuff that I had sitting in my vault that I made do with. I had to do a few harvest resistance swaps to get everything balanced out and I have a much better six-link chest for 78… but I have to get there in order to swap to it. Random pet peeve… I really wish that GGG would make it so that Pride had a buff icon indicating it was turned on because I keep finding myself checking that constantly.

The playstyle is a little weird right now in that I am mostly using Bladestorm for clear and then when I encounter something that does not get one-shot I will stop and Lacerate. Just charging around honestly does a pretty decent job of triggering bleeding… which triggers explosions… and takes out normal mobs effectively. It feels slower than Righteous Fire does because I am not dealing massive amounts of passive damage all the time. Essentially my playstyle right now is to charge around dropping bladestorms and then when I charge into a large pack cursing and lacerating the hardest target. I jumped straight into yellow maps upon completing the campaign, and tonight I will likely try a T16 just to see how far from the goals on the build I actually am. I don’t have ailments fixed at all… nor do I really have a plan for that. For the moment I am leaning on Brine King and Abberoth to take care of two of the three… then will have to figure something else out for shock.

This build feels insanely powerful, and honestly… I get why everyone seems to be playing some variant of it. It also seems to be super effective at taking down bosses so I might try some guardians and see how it does on those before moving up to Shaper/Elder. I want to do a bit more research into POE.Ninja builds because I can’t say I am super sold on Lacerate.

Belghast Bleed Bro

by

Good Morning Everyone! Yesterday I was off from work, and wound up starting a character that I had been meaning to start. During the Settlers of Kalguur league, they completely reworked the Gladiator Ascendency along with a number of changes that improved melee. As a result, Bleed Gladiator is really freaking good and I’ve been wanting to create one with maxed block chance and recovery on block for a while. I upgraded the shaper shield I had been using on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and plan on using that hand-me-down on this character paired for the time being with a maxrolled Jack, The Axe. If I really love the build I might look at picking up a better itemized Rare weapon but for now the Unique slots in nicely and does not require much in the way of thought.

I’m level 51 and just a little bit of the way into Act 6. I’ve already completed my second Lab, which means that I have a 100% chance to inflict bleeding on hit, all of my bleeds are treated as aggravated damage, and when something dies that has been bleeding it causes a nice explosion. While I am a bit on the squishy side for now, at least until I go block-based… I am dealing stupid amounts of damage. Pretty much everything gets one shot. For now, I am largely a Bleed Sunder build following the tree from Zizaran’s league starter video, but at some point, I am going to pivot into something more along the lines of this. Zizaran is really focused on right-side builds and right-side defenses, and I am personally way more comfortable on the left side of the tree and as such I plan on pivoting in that direction. I will likely wear a lot of Armor/Evasion gear but plan on taking Iron Reflexes to convert all of that to Armor. I’ve personally never found Spell Suppression to be that amazing of a defensive layer but I know Ziz loves it and as such his build goes for 100%.

In other news, I have now maxed out my town and have upgraded everything that can be upgraded. This means I will no longer be draining large chunks of gold at once for upgrade purposes. I did another one of my Photoshop jobs showing everything sitting at rank 11. The only thing that is not ranked to 11 is the recombinator but it caps out at a much lower level. The big thing that I need to do still is go shopping for workers and upgrade some of the options I currently have available to me. I also need stupid amounts of ore, and I kind of wish there was some atlas support to increase the amount of ore you get from mapping. I am growing crops at a good rate, but I always feel like I am out of ore.

They released a patch on the 13th and it has been a bit on the controversial side. Namely this specific block:

Reworked how shipping Thaumaturgic Dust affects Shipping Risk and Rewards. Previously, it was multiplying the shipment value and having a disproportionately high impact on risk compared to rewards. Now, it simply adds to Shipment Value and scales the amount of rewards based on the other goods being shipped. This means the way Thaumaturgic Dust affects Shipment Value/Risk now directly correlates with the amount of rewards you will receive, and in almost all cases this is a buff from before.

In my experience, this has been true. Folks who had previously worked out some system other than what I have been doing… it is apparently not true. This seems to negatively impact folks who were shipping massive shipments. For the most part, I have shipped some items that were requested… maybe 1000 of each, then 55 of each other crop, and 8300 Thaumaturgic Dust. So far this seems to bring reasonable rewards and over the last few days, I have pulled four Divine Orbs doing this. It is very much not an every shipment sort of thing, but maybe one in three or one in four shipments. I might simply have hit a lucky streak of “Bel Luck” as my friends call it, but whatever the case it seems to be good.

The thing that I have noticed however is a massive increase in interdictions. During the entirety of this league until the patch, I had only seen a single instance where the Pirate Admiral waylayed my crews. Since the patch, I have fought him five more times. Don’t get me wrong I largely consider this to be a huge net positive because it is a fairly easy fight, and worth a huge chunk of gold. However, there are a lot of folks who are not terribly amused by this. The biggest problem is that if for some reason you disconnect in the middle of one of these interdiction fights, you lose your entire crew. You only get a single portal and when you disconnect it counts the encounter as failing and the fail condition is always that it is 100% wipe of the team that was abducted. This is especially tragic for folks who have a maxed-out crew of map runners. For me… none of my workers are terribly min-maxed so it would suck but not that much.

A lot of my focus right now is knocking out the low-hanging fruit when it comes to League Challenges. At the moment I am sitting at 21 of 40, and there are a number that would not be terribly awful to complete. Just mapping will eventually finish Overwhelming Opposition and Peddler’s Produce requires me to either craft a Grasping Mail or a Loreweave… both of which I have a tab full of rings for and it is only a matter of time before I complete one or the other. I am still missing a Doryani’s Machinarium map, but when one drops I can finish off Remarkable Realms. Sublime Starlight is doable but requires me to craft a bunch of enchants that are largely going to be throwaways, the hardest being Power Runes which are currently going for almost 4 Divine Orbs each. The cheapest enchants take at least three of them as well as a bunch of other runes. So for shipping purposes, I am probably going to focus on running things back and forth between Kalguurian ports for the chance at getting runes.

All told I am still having a lot of fun with the league, but I definitely feel like I am in the mindset of trying to wrap things up and get as far as I can before I lose steam. I want to push up the Gladiator today and see how fun of a build it ends up being. I am looking forward to the shift over to Lacerate of Haemoragging, which honestly I should chuck into a spare gear slot to start leveling now.