Shocking to no one… I’ve found myself back maining a Righteous Fire character. This time, I converted my Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain over to Righteous Fire, and in the grand scheme of things, it is going pretty well. I do not feel anywhere near as strong as my Juggernaut did, but for playing a very tanky Righteous Fire character, this might be a viable alternative to Inquisitor. I am hoping that maybe we will get a new alternate quality gem that restores RF to its former glory, but if not… I think I can be happy enough with Chieftain going forward. My comfy space seems to be alternating between T11 Cemetary and T12 Tropical Island and then trying to stack on as much juice as I can get from the mists.
My focus over the last week or so had been trying to get levels so that I could add a Medium Cluster Jewel with Fan the Flames. This essentially gives you Elemental Proliferation at the cost of SEVERAL passive points. I accomplished this at 95, but I have to be honest… it wasn’t really that big of a bonus. I am already running Berek’s Respite which gives me something akin to Elemental Proliferation any time I kill something that has been ignited. Since Ignites can’t stack… it essentially just didn’t add any significant bonus to the build. I’ve since specced out of this medium cluster and distributed the points around the board into more life which in turn should translate to both more survival and more damage for Righteous Fire.
We’ve also decided to let our Private League lapse into Trade League. There are essentially 8 days left in the league and at that point all of our characters will transition over into Affliction Trade. This is going to open so many doors for making minor tweaks to my characters, the one I am looking forward to the most is Boneshatter. I still feel like I have not given Boneshatter a proper shake, so when the private league collapses I think my first goal will be getting that character some better gear. I would really like to reach 100% spell suppression and have a MUCH higher damage Two-Handed Axe. It will be a challenge dropping into the league so late and being so relatively “poor” as compared to where I usually am at this point in a league. I have enough of a stash of Divines though that I should be able to make some movement on my characters.
Lastly this morning I recorded another one of my dumb videos, this time attempting to explain what I have been talking about regarding the SkyScale versus World of Warcraft Dragon Riding. Mostly after being used to instant mounts having to wait three seconds feels like an eternity. I show off some gameplay of GW2 specifically flying around on the SkyScale and then show some Dragon Riding and talk about its positives and differences. Maybe with some footage, it might finally start to make a bit of sense.
Well friends with the help of my friend Eliyon, we figured out where I fell off the Main Story Quest. It does not in fact end at Valdrakken but instead spins off with a few quests inside of the city, that then lead out into what is the fourth zone of the game Thaldraszus. So I have a bit more questing to go before I can wrap things up and finish out the story… and then proceed onto gearing through World Quests. I remember having this issue as well with Shadowlands where I dinged the new level cap and still had one and a half zones to complete before I could join the open-world “reindeer games”. I remember it was during this chasm that my friend Ace bounced from Shadowlands never to return, so I can’t say this is a super great design decision. It would be nice if World Quests just unlocked whenever you hit level 70 no matter how far you were progressed in the story.
Feeling somewhat deflated I spent most of my evening in Path of Exile. I had converted my attempt at a Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain over to Righteous Fire and so far… I think this might be the closest to the glory that was Juggernaut Righteous Fire. If you are so inclined here is a POB of where I am currently. The thing is the Chieftain comes with a bunch of really nice perks for Righteous Fire, some of which I had overlooked or at least written off as less good than they actually are. Namely Ramako, Sun’s Light is something that I had skipped on my previous attempts at an RF Chieftain during the Blast from the Past league, and this was a mistake. You spend a surprising amount of time “stationary” as Righteous Fire and if you frostblink from pack to pack you can maintain this “stationary” state. All of that time everything just has -20 Fire Resistance which seems to override all other modifiers and while in theory you can get a resistance much lower than that… this just always works.
This allows me to run a curse that isn’t either Flammability or Elemental Weakness and have it feel like I am double cursing without needing to fiddle with the nonsense that is involved in making that happen. Of the other options, I went with Punishment which causes cursed enemies to take more damage when on low life… meaning that things die faster and hopefully proc Hinekora, Death’s Fury and clearing the entire damned screen. I went Primalist with the hope of eventually using charms to get more chance to explode but for the moment I am running two Percent Strength and Life Regeneration Rate modifier charms. In a perfect world, I would find something that gave me explode and life or regen but I will have to keep fishing in the forest to make that happen. I’ve also still never seen the ACTUAL King in the Mists fight so none of my characters have unlocked their final doodads.
My defenses are also extremely solid and quite honestly… now that I have equipped a Lightning Coil I don’t feel that much less tanky than the Juggernaut version did. What I bring to the table is roughly 25k armor, almost 5000 life, 2500 life regeneration, 90% to all elemental resistances, and 50% of all physical damage is taken as lightning damage… as well as 30% crit damage reduction and some things to limit damage over time which I don’t believe the Lightning Coil applies to. Now that I have the lightning coil I am going to try my hand at juicing some T16 maps and see how that goes. Essentially the gameplay is a bit odd in that you are trying to kill enough small stuff so that you proc an explosion and then the entire screen around you evaporates before moving on to the next big pack. It feels better than it sounds.
All told it is fun to map on albeit a bit slower than Lightning Arrow. Lately, I have been alternating between Cemetary and Tropical Island because both are fairly enjoyable maps and relatively open. I should run some of the crappier and less bow-friendly T16s that I have rotting in my bank and see how that goes. Mostly right now I need a good deal more levels. I am working on getting a Fan the Flames gem up and running while trying to roll a slightly better version. If this works like I think it will… my ignites will proliferate among the packs of things that I am killing, and then also “proliferate” again when one of those things dies thanks to Berek’s Respite. If nothing else this should be fun as hell to watch happening. If I could somehow manage to keep my resistance high enough… I would love to have a set of Maven’s boots as well to only further add to the nonsense explosions.
One of the things that has gotten me down in Path of Exile lately is the frustration of trying to link things. Essentially I had a 900 DPS bow that I was working on getting linked, a Lightning Coil in RF colors, and more recently I finally got a Fourth Vow to drop which I am trying to link for my Boneshatter build. After spending about 1000 fusings trying to get the Bow linked, this morning I had gathered up another hundred or so and managed to get both the bow and lightning coil to six links. That alone has helped increase my enjoyment of the league. I still do not love being isolated from the trade environment, but finally getting some of the things I needed up and running is a significant improvement.
If you have followed me over the last few days, you have watched me playing around with one of the new transfigured abilities called Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. My idea behind the build was to go with Chieftain which gives me easy access to lots of resistances as well as Hinekora, Death’s Fury for big explosions, and Tawhoa, Forest’s Strength for what is essentially a form of melee-based spell echo. Instead of leaning into scaling a bunch of physical damage, the idea was to convert all of my physical fire damage and instead scale that, chance to ignite and ignite damage with proliferation. The hope was that I could run around with a mace and shield, which would give me extra defenses, and then paint the room in firey eruptions. Leveling through the campaign this felt excellent and after crafting a few clusters it seemed to solve my problem with single-target damage.
However when I swapped over from the campaign to tier 1 unmodified maps… I had some significant damage problems. Ash urged me to grab one of my spare boneshatter axes and throw it on the character, which meant swapping around a ton of points that I had put into shield defenses and attack damage while holding a shield. This however killed my defenses and meant that I saw the “rip” screen quite a bit more. So I am living in this middle ground between having enough defenses and having enough offensive power to make up for not having said defenses. I am only level 74, and I know that levels could help solve this problem… but I am not really sure it is worth the uphill battle and the constant flow of regrets to try and salvage this character. The only positive is that I didn’t really go out of my way to acquire gear for the character and most everything I am wearing is stuff I had lying around in my bank already.
On top of the ascendancy benefits, I went chieftain because I thought starting on the left-hand side of the screen near all of the fire and physical damage buffs would help me. The problem is… it is sort of hard to scale both physical and fire damage while also adding enough defensive layers to make the whole mess viable. Then there is the problem with the ability Volcanic Fissure of Snaking itself… because using it with a two-hander means that it is almost comically slow. So that adds a whole other thing into the mix, that I would in theory need to blend in a bunch of attack speed to try and make the mess feel a bit better. There are other ascendancies that might be better served for this sort of build, but I fear that they would have to rely on clusters even more than I currently am. I keep thinking that Physical to Fire Melee Ignite is more viable than it might be currently.
Ultimately I wanted to play around with one of the new abilities and I had a lot of fun with it… until I didn’t. I think there is a build here, but I feel like I am maybe not capable of building it. At a minimum, I think this might be one of those things that is a bit harder to build without easy access to some specific uniques that would make the one-handed version viable. Again I am annoyed at the restrictions of SSF, but I might shelve this until I finally do migrate out of the private league. I think I am going to low-key start trying to farm things that I know I can turn into currency when the transfer to trade takes place. It will be very hard coming from behind over a month into the league and trying to gather up the currency needed to finish my builds. I feel so hamstrung by not having access to trade that while I have enjoyed the communal nature of the league… I am not sure how up for this I will be in the future. Maybe as a short-term 10-day league, but never one that goes on this long.
I think I figured out yesterday what it is that I like so much about trade leagues in Path of Exile. In a game like Diablo III, loot is so plentiful and there are truthfully a very limited number of possibilities that it is a foregone conclusion that you will see a given item. Enough time put in and it will absolutely with certainly drop, and often in even an ancient legendary version and maybe if you are super lucky a primal. Path of Exile however has a much wider loot pool and it is absolutely possible that you can spend an entire league grinding away and never actually see something… for example, we’ve yet to see a Profane Proxy for Kodra but in past leagues, I was chucking these into Loreweave recipes because we had spares. Trade League allows me to convert the things I am getting, or even the things I enjoy farming the most… into the items that I am now seeing drop. Everything that I do feels like I am working towards some deterministic goal and I like that a lot.
This is a similar problem I am having in Last Epoch, I have run countless helmet nodes in the Monolith and still have no Herald of the Scurry to show for it. I also have a slew of Necromancer drops that I have never seen and have no real deterministic way of farming them. It makes me question my thoughts about the trade league going into that game, and whether or not I would feel happier playing with access to buy items from other players. Path of Exile and the trade league I think have skewed my feelings about this in ways that I did not expect. I just get frustrated with the inefficiency of waiting around for a specific thing to drop, rather than just converting other items into currency and buying exactly the item you wanted instead.
I didn’t expect to be so vehemently turned into a “trade league enjoyer” but I guess that has happened. I am not sure what I want to do at this point. I might take a bit of a break from Path of Exile and go back to Baldur’s Gate III and try and wrap that up before the end of the year.
So I am nearing the end of the campaign on BelGoesFireSnake my Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Chieftain, and I am of mixed opinions. It is amazing to see the entire screen erupting into fire and it brings me immense joy to see a screen covered in magma like the above screenshot. The problem is that it comes with the fairly extreme price of most of your attacks not actually hitting your target. So when you are trying to fight a boss… it feels really bad against anything with sufficient heft. So for clearing entire screens… this build has you covered and does it in a very fun way but anything that is even the slightest bit tanky will feel like you are dealing negative damage.
Right now this is suffering from some of the same problems that I had with my Shield Crush Chieftain from last league. Avatar of Fire may not be worth it. Between it and the fire mastery I am converting 90% of my physical damage to Fire… at the cost of dealing ONLY fire damage. This is why I have leaned heavily into Ignite damage and elemental proliferation… which I just took out of my main five-link because I was able to craft a Fan the Flames cluster. I think I might have to go more heavily into cluster jewels just to pick up enough damage nodes on the end of the tree where I am sitting. My large cluster has Prismatic Heart and Widespread Destruction which help to scale up the Fire Damage further. I’ve also got another easy-to-reach large cluster that I could expand further, but it always feels like you are brute forcing your will upon the tree when you start using a bunch of clusters.
If I can make this stay as tanky as it currently feels… this honestly might be a fun build-down in Delve. The Volcanic Fissures do a great job of finding mobs so you could just be throwing them out while you go down the tunnel mopping up the easy stuff. In theory, I need to find myself a high-level base for a Mace and then try and craft as much physical damage on it. For the moment I am using Lavianga’s Wisdom mostly because it adds a big chunk of increased physical damage. The build that started me down this path was doing Strength stacking and using a Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler which we have not seen yet in Bel League, but I have enough strength to make that a reasonable option. Another potential is Nycta’s Lantern but I am not sure if I have ever actually seen one of those drop. While it is super cheap in trade… I am not sure I can actually find one in SSF.
I have a feeling that this character is ultimately going to be a dead-end learning experience. I think more than anything I need to spend some time down in Delve and pick up some crafting bases to get the rest of my gear fleshed out. If you are curious this is where I am build-wise.
