Boneshatter

Fourth Day of Affliction

by

Hey Folks! Apologies for the bit of a break that I took towards the tail end of last week. I have to admit it was a bit of a shit week, and some things happened at work that have pushed my morale into about the tenth-floor sub-basement. However, starting on Friday I mostly poured all of my attention into the launch of the Path of Exile Affliction league and all of the shenanigans that come along with that. This league is fairly unique in that it is the first time we are doing a private league giving us a semi-solo-self-found style playstyle as we either have to acquire something ourselves or it has to come from one of the other folks playing in the league. I have never really done a true SSF playstyle other than the random events that take place… I admit it is a bit weird not having access to the trade economy to fix my mistakes. I think I will be able to arrive at the same place as a normal league, but it will just take much longer.

There are a bunch of interesting things that come with playing a private league… not the least of which is the fact that we seemed to be immune to the game-crashing bugs that most of the other players experienced while going into a town. Additionally, we have our own copy of the ladder, so unfortunately I spent most of the weekend spamming the guild as I entered new zones. I was leading the “level race” until I went to bed Friday night, and then for a while, Kodra leapfrogged me until I could catch up Saturday morning. At this point, I think I have pulled far enough ahead that I will be here for a while at least until I hit level 95 and things start to slow down significantly. We also have our own copy of the trade website, which has allowed me to post a bunch of interesting things I find in dump tabs that I have priced for 1 Scroll of Wisdom instead of constantly clogging the guild bank.

As far as my league starter goes… I am largely enjoying myself. Since Affliction League essentially killed Righteous Fire, I had it suggested to me that I check out Boneshatter Juggernaut instead. That it should in theory be a similar playstyle and in large part,` I would agree. Instead of shield charging around and burning things up with my fire aura and then dropping fire traps when I encounter anything harder… the equivalent for Boneshatter is leap slamming and tapping my attack watching entire packs explode… and then dropping totems when I encounter anything that takes a bit. The biggest challenge is that I had three leagues to learn what Righteous Fire could and could not take… and I am having to rapidly reach a point of understanding what I can take and what I need to perform evasive maneuvers to avoid.

I did the thing that I often do this morning and recorded some gameplay of doing a Tier 8 map. You can see what I call the “Spiral of Death” take place as I stand in Voll’s slam and then can’t quite recover. In theory, I should leap out to safety to allow my recovery to solve my problems. My instinct from Righteous Fire is to just pop a potion and muscle through it, but Boneshatter seems to need some “quiet time” as I bounce away from the fight, let my life stabilize, and then leap back into the battle. It might even be a scenario where stopping attacking for a second might have given me enough time to bounce back from the slam. Essentially I am in this phase of trying to learn how to pilot this new ship when I had multiple hundreds of hours of experience with the previous one.

I have some fairly solid defensive layers, but I am using the crutch that is Purity of Elements to resolve my resistances. That will change as I craft better gear, but I need either an influx of essences, harvest juice, fossils, or just sheer dumb luck to pull myself out of that hole. Where I am currently is that I have a good deal of armor, decent enough regen especially when combined with my boneshatter recovery, and fairly decent damage. What I need the most at the moment however is a better axe, and I have been pouring yellow harvest juice into trying to craft one. At some point, I will have gathered up enough fossils to hopefully be able to at least attempt a 600 Physical DPS axe. Again this would be a trivial problem to solve if I had access to the trade economy, but instead, I have to sort this all out myself. As such I am currently running nothing higher than a four-link.

This is where I am progress-wise for three days. Essentially by the time we were recording the podcast on Saturday night, I was progressing my Atlas and mapping at the end of day two. On day three I focused on knocking out more maps and starting to progress my Delve seriously. While I ran out of sulphite, I was sitting just shy of depth 100, which is my target farming depth for the time being. My goal is to live in that 100-150 range and start hunting out Delve cities. Most of my atlas strategy has been focused on getting delve online, but now I am pivoting a bit into Harvest for crafting gear once I get some better bases. Essence spamming would also be an option, but since I am not playing a “map blaster” I can’t say that Essences are the best option. I mean I can take down Essence monsters extremely well, but I am not sure I can run enough maps efficiently to make it worth my time.

All told I am pretty damned happy with where I am gear-wise and progress-wise for the beginning of the fourth day. Unfortunately, I seem to be ignoring the league mechanic. Doing it just seems to make the maps way less predictable. For farming purposes, I have been going back to the campaign and running Desecrated Chamber. Normally league mechanics stop spawning when a zone is 10 levels under your current level, but because of the way that the forest works… the portal still exists even when a zone stops rewarding experience. So you can pop over into a campaign mission, run the forest, and then reset the zone giving you a new forest. I plan on doing this a bit today in order to complete my “kill all the treants” mission and get the next set of ascendancy points.

Since I am melee and hit-based… I ended up going with Warden of the Magi and Tinctures. While I had some fun shouting at corpses for loot… having a utility flask that I can change up seems to be more useful. I cannot reasonably work Culling Strike into my build as it stands, but having access to it at the cost of giving up a flask seems like something I can live with. I am not sure what all can roll on the Oakbranch Tincture but I figure I will keep perfecting this one as I go. For now, the one I have works pretty well for my purposes. I might switch over to Wildwood Primalist at some point if I get enough charms to make something interesting happen. The least interesting of the three seems to be Warlock of the Mists but that is probably because I am not using spectres currently.

All in all, though I am pretty damned happy with where I am sitting currently in a semi-SSF environment. I am hoping some other options will begin to come online as more folks get up to better content. For the moment Kodra and I are leading the Vanguard which means we are not really getting to benefit from having access to other players finding interesting things. The highlight of my weekend though was getting a six-link bow that then allowed Ace to build into that for their character or finding the weapon that Kodra was looking for that became build-defining. At some point, I hope to find a better axe and maybe a viable six-link chest. If not… I still seem to be shockingly viable for nothing more than four-links.

Are you playing Affliction league? How has your league start gone? Drop me a line below.

Bolt Crafted Sorta

by

As we get closer to Friday, I think I have finally come to terms with the fact that I will be going Boneshatter for the league start. After sifting through many different guides and POBs, I think I honestly prefer the one that Zizaran released for 3.22. This is mostly because the gear seems pretty straightforward and craftable and it features some of the things that I knew that I wanted to lean into like double-dipping evasion for armor with Iron Reflexes. We have a Trello for all of the folks doing league starts in the private league we are running and I have highlighted some of the uniques that I am looking out for, but in theory, this should be able to be done with nothing but rares at least for a while. If this can get me down into Delve at around 150 depth I will be very happy.

Additionally, since yesterday was the official stop of the Trial of the Ancestors league, it meant that they opened up the ability to create private leagues for Affliction. So we now officially have the “Bel League Affliction” set up and running and most of the participants have joined. Ash and Kodra helped split the cost of the league three ways with us each chipping in 100 coins, with more folks willing to chip in if we decide to expand it past the initial 40 days. I figure at the 40-day mark we will either allow the characters to drop down into the trade league or if folks are still going hot and heavy, expand it out by another 30 days.

The other big thing that I did in Path of Exile last night was to get both my personal and the guild’s stash set up in standard the way I want it to look in Affliction. Essentially the state of your standard stash is what gets imported into the next league, and for the guild, I mostly wanted to get the tabs named and affinities set properly so that hopefully I don’t have to do this on the first day of the new league. Similarly, I did a bunch of rearranging things in my personal stash to go ahead and set up some of the common folders that I used in Ancestor League. As far as all of those “Remove-Only” tabs I tend to shove them into a folder named after the league they were created during. Not that I spend much time in Standard, but I figure this will make this a bit easier at a later date when I might be looking for something.

In other news, I have been playing a not-insignificant amount of Guild Wars 2 lately. I’ve talked about this a bit, but I have been popping in at least once each day to chip away at my “wizard chores” which is a humorous term that I picked up from my friend Ace regarding World of Warcraft Dailies. Given that I am actually doing them for a tower full of wizards… and the reward system is called the Wizard’s Vault… it is finally the perfect term for what I am doing. Doing various daily, weekly, and period objectives gives you a currency called Astral Acclaim which can then be used to buy all manner of things from cosmetics, to pieces of usable gear… to probably the most valuable item which amounts to a massive boost in crafting your choice of a legendary from four different options.

Astral Acclaim stacks to 1300 points, and I was nearing the cap where I could not earn anymore and needed to spend down some of it. So I opted to pick up the Legendary Weapon Starter Kit – Set 2. This gave me access to shortcutting the crafting process for Bolt, The Moot, Quip, or The Predator. Since I use Sword on a few of my characters and am looking forward to playing around with Sword on my Necromancer soonish… I opted to go with Bolt. I don’t really love the appearance of any of these weapons, but the other one I was considering for a bit was Quip just to give me access to a pistol as that seems to be a weapon archetype I also enjoy. What this box does is give you the precursor weapon, the “gift of” for the specific weapon shortcutting the need to level a profession to 400, and either a Gift of Magic or Gift of Might. This then requires you to supply your own Gift of Mastery and the Gift of Magic/Might that you did not receive, along with 77 Mystic Clovers, and 250 Globs of Ecotoplasm to craft a Gift of Fortune.

I had already been chipping away at some of the legendary weapon requirements because I have been working towards Twilight… which I stalled out on when it came to crafting the precursor. I should have just sucked it up and bought the precursor and would have likely already completed that weapon before now had I done so. This however meant that I had already done the legwork to craft a Gift of Mastery, and had been stockpiling resources that got me at least part of the way towards the missing Gift of Magic since my package gave me Might instead. I took the easy way out and spent roughly 200 gold to finish gathering the Tier 6 materials needed to craft the Gift of Fortune and then threw all of the expensive bits in the mystical commode to get my very first Legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2.

To be fair… I said “sorta” in the title because it doesn’t feel like I really put in all of the effort required to craft a Legendary weapon. I would probably feel more accomplished had I done so, but given that gathering Legendary gear is the true endgame of Guild Wars 2, it does seem a bit brilliant to give players an onramp to demystify the process a bit. According to GW2 Efficiency, the price right now to craft a Bolt from scratch would require about 1300 gold. This is greatly shortcutting that process giving you the Gift of Bolt (~200 Gold), Gift of Might (~150 Gold), and the precursor (~70 Gold) all for the low price of a month’s worth of dailies. It also encourages players to complete that Gift of Mastery on their own which requires getting full Tyria exploration completion and farming up a Gift of Battle. The more players engage with Legendary crafting, the more they become entwined into the flow of the game… and likely the longer they will stick around. While this essentially handed me 450 Gold… it did so in a way that meant I had to have poured a good deal of my time into the project to make anything of it.

The only annoyance is that I will have to craft a second legendary sword at some point for the characters that would want to dual-wield them. Now that I have broken the seal on this system, however… I sorta want to focus some time on wrapping up Twilight and getting a Greatsword for all of my alts to use as well. I see what you did there Wizard Vault…