champion

3.26 Build Thoughts

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Good Morning Friends. The Settlers of Kalguur league is finally over… and I have never been so happy to see a league go. Don’t get me wrong… I loved the Settlers league, but also did not expect it to last over 300 days. It also had some really hype league events like the Phrecia league, which honestly should have been its own thing. During this one league I competed in two different Pohx leagues, a Sir Gog league, and the Phrecia league… so when I just attempted to wrangle my stash it was pure madness. I did the traditional thing of just shoving all of those remove-only tabs into a tab labelled “Settlers” but even that felt insufficient given that there were four different event leagues that got lumped into that same banner. I’ve been out of Path of Exile just long enough… to now be feening to get back into it and tackle a brand new league when it launches on Friday.

The new league looks amazing, and while it is very much focused on additional pinnacle content… there is more than enough other things going on that someone like myself who is traditionally not bossing motivated can enjoy. I will miss Atlas Memories a bit, but honestly… unless I needed a specific resource I never ran them. My favorite one was the one that made Alva spawn adds in the map instead of forcing you to dip into her incursions. I’ve always wished that was an Atlas keystone, that then just caused Alva to drop random temples. Traditionally I skip that mechanic entirely in most leagues because I hate the time pressure aspect of having to dip into the temples. What we are getting instead looks even more interesting and hopefully the new gear that comes with it will be worth the effort. Let’s not get it twisted however… I am more than likely going to be running Delve like normal, and the fact that we no longer need Betrayal to get crafts means I can start with a comfortable crafting Niko and Harvest Atlas.

There has been enough of a shake up in the meta that I am interested in looking at some other builds. I am doubtful I will actually league start anything but my beloved Righteous Fire… but I do feel like this is probably going to be a league where I have a bunch of alternate builds. The first one that seems interesting is Explosive Trap Trickster. During the first Pohx League I started an Ice Trap of Hollowness Trickster and had a heck of a lot of fun with it. In truth it was a damned good build and while the Trickster ate some minor nerfs it should be just fine. It did however make me interested in exploring some of the other Traps on Trickster concepts and Explosive Trap is already fun on its own. The original Ice Trap Trickster build was from Aero and if you are interested in it I suggest checking out his video. This is where I ended up with my POB on that build if you are curious.

Wintertide Brand got some buffs with the patch notes, and it has once again made me consider playing something around that skill. I love the Brand gameplay and Wintertide is probably my favorite of all of the available options. Storm Brand of Indecision is pretty fun, but there is nothing more comfortable than the chill and freeze lifestyle. This morning I saw the above build concept float across my feed on bluesky, and it seems like a reasonable option for a Wintertide start. The concept here is to use the new major buffs to golems and Elementalist node to pick up some survival and damage output for cold dot. I am not really sure if this is the sort of thing that I would want to league start, but I can absolutely see myself trying to make something around Wintertide brand work during this league as an alt build.

Champion got some massive buffs and I have been trying to sort out what I would want to play with it. There are a few options floating about, but this one from Woolie is basically just a true Cyclone build… not a cast on channeling Cyclone. I’ve never actually played Cyclone in any form, and I have always loved spin to win builds in other games… specifically Whirlwind in Diablo III and Warpath in Last Epoch. On some level I feel like I might owe it to myself to go down this rabbit hole and see what it feels like. Champion is already an ascendancy that I have built many different characters on over the years and they switched it away from generic damage to focused more on banners and melee hit damage… so with Lightning Strike eating a massive nerf you have to figure out a better vehicle for that. This is probably the closest thing to getting me to start something other than Righteous Fire. The only thing keeping me from doing it… is this is not a resolute technique build and I hate fucking around with accuracy bullshit.

Another thing that I am really interested in is some of the reworks for Saboteur. Essentially they can now get an ascendancy node that is effectively a weakened version of the Nimis Ring. Shrapnel Specialist causes projectiles to have a 50% chance to return to you, and projectiles to be fired in random directions. So essentially you need a mine or a trap that throws out projectiles… but that you would not care about them firing in unpredictable directions. From the Trap side of things I am thinking Lightning Trap might work well. From the mine side I am thinking either Rolling Magma converted to a mine as seen above or potentially Pyroclast Mine of Sabotage. This is a little too fringe for me to ever consider starting it, because quite honestly… I want to be able to look at POE.Ninja and see how well this is working and what sort of concoctions folks end up doing with it. It is still an interesting concept that I can’t seem to dislodge from my brain. The biggest problem that I have is that I have never really liked the Mines play style.

Being perfectly honest with myself… I am 99.9% likely to just start Righteous Fire again because it is comfortable and reliable. I’ve done it in trade and in an SSF environment and can pretty much get up and running without any issues and be capable of doing around 200 depth in Delve quickly. The main thing that I will be doing differently is that I hate muling a witch to get Rolling Magma as Pohx suggests, and am just going to do slams until I can turn on Righteous Fire in Act 2. During the SirGog Gauntlet league I went with a strength stacking slam character and my early tree was almost indistinguishable from the general RF tree up until the point you can take it. It felt way more comfortable to slam and shield charge my way around the zones than trying to get perfect bounces from rolling magma and fire wall. So instead I will do Ground Slam to Sunder and then use Crushing Fist with retaliation procs for single target damage. I will have to be on the look out for the correct colors on bases for the swap to Righteous Fire in early Act 2, but that should not really be much of an issue. My first pick ups will be an Cloak of Flame and Immortal Flesh and then hopefully I get some good fire resistance drops to see me cruising into maps and delve depths.

I am soooo ready to be back in Path of Exile and excited for a new league. I’ve missed this and I am pretty amped if Grinding Gear Games can really hit the target schedule that they have planned. Essentially every four months a Path of Exile league and the between months… will be a new Path of Exile II league. Hopefully given enough time POE2 will turn into something that I actually enjoy. Right now it just isn’t there for me, but given enough time cooking there might be an enjoyable game there. I think the challenge for me is that I am a mapper and delver… and just do not care about boss fights. POE2 is a game for people who care about boss fights. I like playing near immortal characters that can steam roll content and collect the shiny loot. I will always optimize the difficulty out of whatever games I play… and I am hoping that at some point there is a path for me in that game. For now though… I am looking forward to getting back into Path of Exile and grinding.

I have a whole slew of audiobooks lined up to listen to while I grind. Are you going to be checking out Path of Exile 3.26? If so what are you looking towards playing? Drop me a line below. Kodra if you are reading this… I really think you need to go down the projectile mines path with Saboteur so I can see how that works.

Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Champion

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Good Morning Folks! Necropolis is quite possibly the most enjoyable mapping league yet. Affliction offered outrageous juicing options, but what Necropolis offers is flexibility and the ability to easily tailor the content to fit your whims. This is in large part due to the fact that we have three different atlas trees at our disposal, but on top of that, we have the freedom to add a bunch of interesting scarabs that wildly change your map-to-map experience. More important than that, the scarabs have been plentiful allowing me to constantly shift what I want to focus on without needing to buy them from the market. That is not to say that if you want to chain run the same strategy over and over… you will probably need to buy scarabs in bulk like in past leagues, but if you are a bit more open to your mapping options you should be relatively self-sustaining.

For the last several leagues I have built some form of a Righteous Fire character for Delving and getting through the bosses and some form of a Bow-based character for pure mapping fun. Over the years I have played Toxic Rain, Explosive Arrow, Lightning Arrow, and Vaal Lightning Arrow to various degrees of success. Last league I had landed on what I felt was the ultimate version of this in the form of a champion. In this league, I am elevating it a bit further by diving into the new transfigured gem Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. Essentially it deals all three elements worth of damage at the same time and then scales based on the number of unique ailments you have on a target. This means you only have to account for elemental reflect damage which can be taken care of with a Level 5 Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks Support gem.

Here is the POB if you want to follow along as I talk through gearing choices.

What makes this build so potent is that we are living in “interesting times”. Grave crafting has created this weird situation where so many mirror-tier perfect bows have been created, that anything that is slightly imperfect in any way… but still extremely good… is dirt cheap. This is a 1500 DPS bow with an additional arrow, triple tier 1 elemental damage, and attack speed and I gave I believe 9 Divine Orbs for it. I am pretty sure that I paid way more than that for a 1200 DPS bow that I was EXCEPTIONALLY proud of last league. I’ve had this bow for a few weeks now and when I was shopping yesterday for gear after trying to convince Ace that now was the time to give a mapper lighting arrow/elemental hit character a try… they were considerably cheaper. Weird things exist… like quadruple fractured items, which this bow is. I finished off the item by changing the quality to attack speed and corrupting it to 30% with a beast craft.

The other reason why this build is so potent is that I am getting to play around with Headhunter again. When I bought this belt it was I believe 8 Divines, but as of yesterday when I was shopping for a second that price had dropped to around 4 Divines. Note… I thought 50 Divines for a headhunter last league was a “bargain” that I could not pass up. If you have ever wanted to play a bow-build map-blaster that runs around with a stupid amount of headhunter buffs… this is your league. There is basically no reason to NOT run this belt on any build that is clearing rares quickly. Having played with a Mageblood and a Headhunter I have to say that the Headhunter mechanic is significantly more enjoyable. Mageblood is just sort of cheating at flasks, which can allow you to do some dumb things… but isn’t in itself interesting.

Another thing that is just stupidly cheap right now is the Defiance of Destiny amulet. I am legitimately using this just to add some additional layers of survival to my build while at the same time providing a bunch of elemental resistance on a single item. I am using the anoint Disciple of Slaughter so that I do not have to run Frenzy in a Manaforged Arrows setup. If you did want to go into Manaforged Arrows I would probably consider Frenzy of Onslaught which would then allow you to move some points around a bit because I am spending three points to get Graceful Assault instead of running a Silver Flask to guarantee reasonably close to permanent Onslaught. Ultimately these are decisions you reach after having played a build a bunch of times and wanting to tweak it slightly to do something specific.

One of my favorite things that I added to the build the last time I played it, was performing some pathing Jenga in order to use an Unnatural Instinct over by Avatar of the Hunt. I got the jewel that I am using as a drop, but generally speaking these are not terribly expensive and you gain a ton of value from that one socket. I mean sure I wish that Unnatural Instinct also gave you the notables, but I can live without Avatar of the Hunt. This is a late-game pathing thing, and while leveling I absolutely path into that notable and take it… then modify my pathing later to add in the jewel.

Another piece of tech that I am playing around with is the new Perandus Pact jewel that comes from Grave Crafting. Essentially you collect all of the corpses of the Perandus family and then can influence which jewel stat roll you get based on the other corpses you add with it. At the moment the Evasion version of this jewel is dirt cheap and adds 7% Evasion for every passive allocated in the large radius of where you place it. For me it is hitting 32 different nodes and giving me a grand total of +224% Increased Evasion… which essentially is giving me “Grace” without needing to sort out the reservation of that aura. There are a bunch of other viable options and if you didn’t care about the survival you could stack a specific elemental damage instead. I’m using the Fire Damage version on my Righteous Fire Chieftain to give me around +120% Increased Fire Damage.

The last thing that I added most recently, was to pick up another Jewel socket and put a Watcher’s Eye in it. In truth the only thing I really cared about here was trying to get permanent phasing while running haste. Cannot Be Blinded While Affected by Precision is solid and basically is a net win, but the reduced physical reflection from Determination is largely useless. Essentially I was looking for two things here… more life, more mana, and permanent haste giving me more ease of movement in mapping. I am not going to lie this is good enough that I have contemplated trying to figure out a way to mix in haste and a watcher’s eye into my RF Chieftain because it would be SUPER handy for Delving.

The character feels so good for mapping purposes and I cannot remember the last time I died. Not dying is a big thing for me, but your comfort levels might be completely different. If you wanted to play a less defensive version of this build that has significantly higher damage output, then I would look at the various folks running this Deadeye. They specifically favor the critical variant of the build whereas I am running Precise Technique and do not care about crit. It would be easy enough to transition over with a few gear swaps though if I were so inclined. My kink though is never the damage output I am doing, and more so that I am nigh immortal. So long as I can rip through maps comfortably I am happy with my damage output.

Anyways! I had not talked about this build that I have been running on the side and figured today I would do a deep dive and share some footage. I hope you all are doing well out there, and that you have a great and safe weekend. We have more danger weather rolling in, so I will likely be watching the skies.

Toxic Rain Champion

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Good Morning Folks. One of the side projects that I have been working on is a Toxic Rain Champion. I’ve played Toxic Rain before and I have played so many Champion builds… but I have never played Toxic Rain ON Champion. Mostly I am going down this path because I am somewhat tired of Lightning Arrow, yet I also seem to be drawn to creating at least one bow character each league. Clearly, I am doing this wrong because I should be playing my normal Lightning Arrow set up with the new Elemental Hit of the Spectrum instead. I may respec at some point and do this because so many perfect elemental bows are being crafted with the league mechanic that nearly perfect bows… are dirt cheap. However, I am a weirdo and seem to crave doing a thing in spite of it not necessarily being the optimal scenario.

I am loosely following some templating with the tree that ends up creating a wildly different structure than I am used to. I have plenty of regrets to respec this later, but for now, I am going with it so that I can learn the whys of this particular pathing structure. Specifically, I think it is due to this weird snaking column of nodes that do damage over time instead of the normal pathing which puts you down a path of scaling additional arrows and crit. There is a lot of devoting nodes to flasks… and I might remove all of that because I am not sure it is actually worth it. My goal in life is to never have to hit my flasks… and a lot of the scaling is specific to life and mana flasks which I hope to reach a point of never actually having to hit.

I am already off the path because one of the things I have always hated about Toxic Rain is managing wither stacks. I hate withering step full stop. So instead of running toxic rain in both a Mirage Archer setup and a totem setup… I am shifting things up a bit and mixing in Toxic Rain of Withering which went in as a transfigured gem last league. The idea is that the totems debuff while dealing damage and then my Mirage Archer setup deals the bulk of the damage output. Alternatively, I could swap my main link to Withering and then swap over to a Manaforged Arrows setup instead of running totems. Similarly, I have seen folks play this as a full totem build with a link devoted to manaforged arrows to apply culling strikes and withering.

One piece of tech that I am playing with that I have never done before is using Despair as a Blasphemy support aura. I am only going down this rabbit hole because I picked up this necklace and wanted to play around with it. Essentially it gives me some damage over time, chaos damage scaling, decent life, and makes it so that Despair has no reservation if cast as an aura. Since I run around a lot dropping totems and proccing Mirage Archer I am often touching pretty much every mob with this aura. Which means I am stacking withered easily and also rebuffing them with despair… causing a significant escalation of the chaos damage I am dealing.

I am also playing around with a chestpiece that I have contemplated using a few times in the past, but never actually used. Basically it has really high armor and evasion, increased flat chaos damage, decent life, and some buffs to life leech. Unfortunately that last bit is going to require a rework of my tree to make functional, but I feel like it is going to be worth it. I am also desperately needing some mana leech so that I can drop clarity at the moment. I am in a very raw state with this build because I just finished off the second Kitava last night and have yet to do anything to fix my gearing woes. Basically I am going in a direction but it is going to take a lot of fiddling to see if this direction is going to pay off.

I have a number of issues to resolve before I really figure out how well this is going to work. Right now I am running Purity of Elements and I would like to stop doing that at some point. This means I am going to need to cap my resistances through another means as well as figure out a way to deal with elemental ailments. I am too low-level to swap over to the onslaught belt, and am wearing Tanu Ahi to make up for not having that at the moment. I would love to use a Death Rush, but I am not sure if I can make the gearing work out as I need to make up for a lot of resistances and spell suppression and might need that ring slot. Anyways… it is going to be a bit of fiddling around before I can get this build into a workable and stable state.

3.23 Builds in Review

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday was the official end of the Affliction League in Path of Exile and with it comes the quarterly job of shoving all of those “Remove Only” tabs under the bed. My strategy for the end of each league is to group all of those tabs into a folder named after that league so that I never have to deal with them again unless I am specifically fishing for an item. I do the same for the Guild Stash but unfortunately, it does not prevent me from having to log in on the day of a new league and set everything back up again. During Sanctum I started this tradition of talking about the various things that I built during a given league, and I have finally coalesced this into a blog feature that I will probably start doing for Last Epoch Cycles as well. This morning I will talk a bit about the happenings of the Affliction League.

Innaugural Bel League

With the start of the Affliction League, we decided to try something different. Up until this point I had participated in a few private league events, but had never really considered starting our own. Kodra and I were able to drum up enough support for the notion that we managed to have nine different people participating in the league, most of whom made it well into mapping before calling it quits. Quite honestly this is probably the ideal way to play this game. It allowed us to completely bypass what was apparently a pretty rough start to the league with bugs surrounding the goblin band mtx. We already are known for pooling our resources in the guild stash, but this took it to an entirely new level with folks actively hunting for build-required uniques for other folks.

Unfortunately with the launch of the Necropolis League on Friday, it does not look like we have much support. It might even just be me playing, so we won’t be attempting another “Bel League” this time around but it was still a lot of fun. There were a few negatives, however. The first is that we made the league last 40 days… which was honestly way too long. The default 10-day time limit for a private league is probably ideal if we were to do this again. The second negative is that without access to trade, it really negatively impacted the power level we could realistically achieve in this “Semi-SSF” gameplay mode. I was however surprised at just how functional all of my builds were that I created during this league and that was a bit of a pride moment for me personally. I would absolutely do this again but most of the AggroChat crew is down on Path of Exile post launch of Last Epoch 1.0.

Boneshatter Juggernaut

Would you believe that this was my very first time playing Boneshatter in any form? With the severe damage to Righteous Fire that 3.23 caused… it left me reeling a bit trying to figure out a new build to main. Boneshatter has traditionally been one of the most tanky Juggernaut builds, and as such I decided to give it a spin after both Ash and Kodra seriously suggested I try it. I enjoyed it quite a bit but it also didn’t feel quite as sturdy as Righteous Fire did. This was especially true for Delve, my favorite game mode. I am sure there are things that I could have done to build this differently for Delve but without access to trade, I had to basically wing it with what I had access to at the time. Sadly I didn’t dump a POB at the time I recorded the above video, but when we merged the private league into trade, I ended up reworking the character and even putting on a Mageblood for shits and giggles since I could afford one.

Personal Rating: S Tier

Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain

3.23 was the birth of the Transfigured Gem, and with it came a bunch of interesting-sounding options to play existing skills. The one that stood out the most for me was Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, which causes fissures to form in the ground and cause explosions that heat seal targets. As soon as I saw this… I had a MIGHTY NEED to try and create something with it. Sometimes… a build just does not work out the way you want it to. I really wanted to focus on Mace and Shield for some assorted defensive and offensive layers of “while shield is equipped” passive nodes, but in truth this seemed to either need some sort of stacking that I could not provide on SSF or a switch to a well-rolled Two-Handed Weapon. It was one heck of a fun build to level, and honestly, I wish I had recorded a video of the state of the build before pivoting away from it. Truth be told I just did not record anywhere near as many videos this league as I did during Ancestor League. It did a really good job of clearing maps but was painful to kill anything even slightly tanky like a boss.

If I were to do this again I would probably pivot into armor stacking and go with some sort of setup that would allow me to convert that to damage. This just wasn’t something I could realistically do in the limited access environment of Bel League. If you are curious this is the state of the build before I tore it down to become something else.

Personal Rating: C Tier

Lightning Arrow Champion

Originally this was going to be my second build of the league, but Snaking got in the way. I like having some sort of a map blaster to play around with and for the last two leagues that has been some sort of Lightning Arrow build. I’ve played this as Raider and Deadeye before, but by far my ascendancy of choice is Champion because it feels significantly more sturdy. I really do not like to die. Lightning Arrow just feels comfy and playing it with as many defensive layers as Champion feels even more comfy. This is the state of the build that I managed to get during Bel League, but once we merged into the trade league I upgraded it significantly even eventually taking it to a Magic Find build with a Headhunter. I never found a mirror like Kodra did, but had a lot of fun blowing up maps while juicing them.

Personal Rating: A Tier

Righteous Fire Chieftain

Since Snaking was not working like intended, I wound up pivoting my Chieftain into Righteous Fire. I had given this build a few attempts during some of the limited-time events from last November and never really could get it into a comfortable place. The problem I think was that I kept trying to gear it like I was going to gear the Juggernaut variant. This time around I pivoted into 90% all res combined with converting as much physical damage to elemental damage as I could. Because of the juicing level of this league, we were getting Lightning Coils to drop like candy, so I colored and linked one of those to get RF up and running on it. I had to wildly overstack Fire Resistance to make up for the -60% Lightning Resistance penalty but it was worth it because damage conversion was the piece I had been missing in previous attempts. This is the state at which I got the build during the semi-SSF Bel League, but I later on upgraded pretty much every slot once we moved into trade. It was comfortable enough that I am very likely going to start this for Necropolis league on Friday. That said it is still nowhere near as good as the previous incarnation of Righteous Fire Juggernaut felt so I am downgrading my rating a bit. This time I am going to build with a Cloak of Flames and see if that improves my opinion at all.

Personal Rating: A Tier

Penance Brand of Dissipation Inquisitor

Penance Brand of Inquisitor was absolutely cracked this league. There have been other wildly overpowered builds in other leagues, that I never really threw my hat in the ring on… and then ultimately later wished I had. I remember the broken state of the totem explode builds during Crucible and wished I had made an attempt at creating one while the “getting was good” as it were. I love brand builds, so when a brand build was wildly overpowered… you know I had to at least try it out. I had so much fun playing this build and I will mourn its loss, because it was just stupid amounts of fun to watch things evaporate. We all knew however that there was no way this build could last any longer than one league. This is the state of the build at which I recorded the above video, and this is the state I got it to at the end of the league. Penance Brand of Dissipation you will be missed.

Personal Rating: S Tier +++

Cold Blade Vortex Elementalist

There are a handful of builds that I have always wanted to try, but never quite got around to building. Blade Vortex is one of these abilities and this wound up being the very last build I made during the league. By the time I set down this path I was already losing steam and as such I never really made it very far with this build, only managing to get to level 76 which for me is barely past the campaign. The playstyle was enjoyable with you essentially freezing entire chunks of the screen at once while your blade vortex rips them to pieces. The problem that I have with the gameplay style is it requires you to maintain stacks of Blade Vortex to be effective, which means every few seconds you are hitting a button to keep a buff up. While not necessarily a bad thing, and no different than repeatedly casting a primary attack… knowing that it was a buff that I was maintaining made it mentally feel like more of a chore. If I had given it the love and care of some of my other builds… and if they had not been quite as fun as they were… this might have been something. I would consider revisiting at a later date, but for the moment it satiated most of my curiosity.

Personal Rating: B Tier

Affliction League

I feel like Affliction League is going to go down as one of the player-favorite leagues, in part just for the sheer amount of loot that it generated. I thought the forest mechanic was really interesting, but more than that I really enjoyed the three new meta ascendancies… though in the end I wound up swapping all of my characters over to the same one because it was very clearly the best option. I will greatly miss my Rucksack because having that little extra bit of swap space was just too damned good. Weirdly though it feels like I was nowhere near as active in this league as I have in previous ones. For Trial of the Ancestors I wound up building nine different characters, and in Crucible I played six different builds. During the entire league, I only recorded three videos which is also a bit off-pace for me. While this was the most manic league for most players… it felt like I checked out a bit earlier than I would have expected.

I am really hyped about the Necropolis league, but also a bit bummed because it seems like I am going to be going into it largely solo. Not that I really played much with my friends, but it was fun to be feeding them gear during the guild bank. Ultimately this will probably mean I just go harder on the trade league since I won’t be specifically saving anything for folks. I am also really interested in the scarab changes and the new crafting mechanic. I feel like combined those are going to lead to a wild league… but admittedly probably one a bit more austere than the previous few have been. I am legitimately okay with that because in truth I don’t really love magic find strategies that much. I would rather quietly toil away in the Delve mines to get my currency.

Anyways! That is the last league and its builds in review. Did you enjoy Affliction league? Are you going to be playing Necropolis league? Drop me a line below.