Good Morning Folks! Something happens in Path of Exile when you get past around level 95… you start trying your best never to die because a single death can cause an experience loss that sets you back multiple hours worth of experience gain. As a result I tend to go through periods where if I am very very close to leveling up… I only want to tackle content that I am not likely to take a death on. I had been in this mode for several days, but last night I hit level 97 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and as a result… I am now shifting into the other phase… where I try more tricky content while taking a death doesn’t feel quite as bad.
So last night I did a lot of things… I took down my first Elder and am working up to another one. I burned through several guardian maps to try and get fragments to try some of those fights. I took down two breach lords that I had saved up. What I am working towards now is getting enough fragments to try Shaper, Maven, and Uber Elder aka Elder in the Shapers realm. I was kinda shocked at how “facerolly” Elder went last night. Normally speaking this is a fight that I have at least struggled a bit on in past leagues, but I was able to take him down without even coming close to using a health potion. I picked up a decent enough Grace/Purity of Elements Watcher’s Eye as well. Essentially now I need to do a lot of Maven witnessed maps in an attempt to build up a stockpile of Guardian maps… that I can then run to get more fragments. The irony is… that likely all of this activity will once again put me close to dinging a new level… which means I will slow down again until I push through and hit the next plateau.
I had been working on a Storm Brand Inquisitor, and I have to say… I am just not feeling the character so far. I’ve only made it to Act 5, but it already feels a little sluggish for my tastes. I am certain that I could push through and eventually reach a point where I have enough crit to make this feel good… but for now I just am not in the mood for it. Rather than rerolling to something else… I am just going to park this character for awhile and see if maybe I am in the mood for it later. Mostly Storm Brand is way slower than I remember it being, and I think it is because I just don’t have enough crit support yet in my passive tree. The problem with lightning damage is that it has a VERY large range of damage values… and in order for it to feel good you have to throw your thumb on the scale and try and make sure that it is ALWAYS rolling at the top end of the damage curve. I think maybe I switched to Storm Brand a bit too fast, so I might flip over to Armageddon Brand or Wintertide Brand to finish leveling.
What I am working on at the moment… as in I just literally started this character last night… is an Elemental SRS Guardian. This is apparently the new hotness and I remember SRS being extremely good at Sanctum. Essentially I would like to have SOME character that makes Sanctum easymode so that I can at the very least knock out some of the achievements. There are an awful lot of them this league that are gating my progress towards unlocking yet another sad little totem pole. I am also curious to see how an SRS build aka Summon Raging Spirits… feels with something other than the Necromancer. I feel like it is probably much easier to make this feel tanky than it was with the witch.
I’m not terribly far along but have swapped over to a three link Summon Raging Spirits with Melee Splash and Minion Damage support, and am already zipping through the content. It is hillarious that last league I saw I think 8 raw Tabula Rasa drops, and so far this league I have seen zero. I picked up a +2 minion gems Tabula last night and it is sitting there waiting for me to hit level 16 so I can equip it. Mostly I am wanting to focus on making this a Sanctum runner, but it would not be bad if this was good at bossing either. Supposedly the elemental variant with Guardian can hit the peaks that Poison did with Necromancer. It is also apparently much cheaper to gear because the required items for poison have trickled up in price after having four leagues of that being a phenomenal build.
Other than that, today the Runes of Power patch drops in Last Epoch, so I am certain I will be poking my head into that game to check out the changes. They have apparently done quite a bit to add some random encounters in the Monoliths, which ultimately is the part of the game that needed the most improvement. Running Monoliths gets stale way faster than running Maps in Path of Exile. There are apparently rogue mages that are a cross between a Diablo Loot Goblin and a Path of Exile Essence monster. I am curious to see how these work and I am hoping that their drop tables are generous and give you a bit of a way to target farm some uniques.
Anyways! I hope you are having an excellent week and I hope we can all slide into the weekend without much hassle.