Chieftain

Lava Snake Fun

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I think I have reached the point with my Boneshatter Juggernaut where I have gotten it about as far as I can without access to the trade economy. My crafting knowledge is good enough to make a character function in a pseudo-ssf environment but not good enough to start fine-tuning my gear. At this point, I really miss being in the trade league because it would probably be straightforward to fix the awkward bits of this build and make it excel like I think it should. After spending two divines and all of my rare crafting materials yesterday trying to make a better chest piece off a defensively enchanted drop from a heist that Kodra got… I think I am done trying to craft anything complicated because I just can’t cope when those crafts ultimately fail. Mostly it just feels like I am throwing away resources that would be better spent just buying the thing I ultimately want.

Conceptually I like the idea of a private league, but I think maybe the default length of one is set to 10 days for a good reason. Now is about the time when I would prefer for the characters to just merge into the normal trade league, and we still have another 30 days left in our private league. It was a really fun way to start the league, and for the most part, I think all of us have been able to get characters “functional” but maybe not “great” as of yet. What I am seeking for gear would just be much easier to get on trade league… for example last night I spent 2 Divines, 1 Exalt, 1 Annul, and 1 Orb of Conflict attempting to craft something that I could buy for 40 Chaos. The same has been true with the copious amounts of crafting materials I have poured into trying to get a halfway decent axe… that still pales in comparison to the most basic thing I could pick up on trade for a single divine. I’ve just reached the point where I would personally be better served in the trade league.

I’ve made it fairly far on my own and am sitting at 105 of 115 maps, with the remaining ones that I need all unique. This is I think another thorn that is jabbing me right now, is because this is the point where I would just buy the maps that I am missing instead of fishing for them through Kirac. Sure Putrid Cloister is always going to be an expensive map, but it is driving me insane that I have not finished my 115 yet. I feel so far behind the curve as compared to where I would normally be at this point. Part of it is that I lost my comfy Righteous Fire playstyle, and another part of it realizing how much of the currency I was acquiring came from trades and not from raw drops. I also did not realize how much focus and purpose I derived from knowing that I was building towards being able to buy whatever thing I needed for my build. Grinding for the purpose of grinding feels hollow without those “stretch goals” that I was working towards.

So instead… I’ve begun creating alts. One of the abilities that amuses me greatly is Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. Essentially it erupts three times and has some basic seeking logic that will cause the fissures to seek out targets nearby when possible. Over the weekend I started a new Marauder with the intent of going toward Chieftain for the easy resistances and Hinekora explosions. I am sort of going towards something like this, which was a character I found on POE.Ninja seemed to be doing what I was trying to do. Essentially the idea will be to focus on Mace/Sceptre and then do whatever I can to scale up the fire damage from the fissures. I was able to switch over to the transfigured gem before the end of Act 1, and now that I am in Act 2 have have access to Shockwave it really is starting to feel great.

The other alt that I have been playing with is good ole tried and true Lightning Arrow Champion. Now I played this towards the end of the last league and had a lot of fun with it. It can get by without much in the way of gear save for a handful of uniques… that I have thankfully already acquired. I’m at the tail end of Act 4 and would probably be further if I did not get distracted yesterday with starting the Lava Snake character. It is a comfy playstyle and a fun way to churn through maps, though honestly… I gotta say I am more enamored with the chieftain currently. I like the idea of trying out something that I have not played before, especially since I can only really get characters so far without better knowledge of the crafting system. I think maybe the SSF gameplay style is just not for me. While I have enjoyed dumping stuff in the bank and seeing other people use it, I feel like I am stuck in a bit of a rut currently without the ability to get upgrades.

All in all, I am still having quite a bit of fun, and I don’t mean this morning’s post to sound like I am super frustrated. I am still finding joy in what I am doing, but I’ve come to know myself a bit more I guess. I know that I miss the trade economy more than I thought I would. It really has been the factor that has kept me engaged with Path of Exile for as long as I have each league. Losing access to it and losing access to my preferred character and playstyle… has been more of an emotional hit than had hoped. Alting is a comfy space for me, so I think I am going to focus on it for a bit. I am really curious to see what this Volcanic Fissure of Snaking character feels like once I get higher levels and gear. I think it might even be a fun character down in Delve if I can get the survival high enough.

Chieftain Waffle Time

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Good Morning Folks. I think I am about to wind down my Blast from the Past league character. The problem is I am left with more indecision than I had hoped I would be at this point. I am still not entirely certain that RF Chieftain is the way to go for the upcoming private league that we are starting with 3.23. Sure it is damned nice to only have to focus on a single elemental resistance… but it seems to come with a price. I just feel way squishier than I would at the same gear level on a Juggernaut. I think the core problem is that Juggernaut is giving you a lot of survivability from the ascendancy, and Chieftain really is not. Sure it is a pain in the butt to have to care about all of your resistances… but I think that pain might be worth it.

This is essentially where I am currently on my Chieftain in the Blast from the Past league. I have 4700 hit points, 1400 regen, 82% on all Elemental Resistances, and just over 24k armor. Looking at that would make me think… that the character probably feels pretty sturdy. Unfortunately, as you play it… it is just constantly taking damage and I have to hit my healing potion to top myself off. Granted I do not have my potions online yet, because I just do not have the currency to reroll my flasks and get them to flaggelant/auto, so that is a whole defensive layer that is lacking. I also do not have anything resembling optimal gear, but I am starting to feel the same problems as I did with my Shield Crush Chieftain. On paper it feels like I should be sturdier than I actually am. It just feels like I am missing something that I am not sure how to resolve on my own.

At this point I am at 44 of 115 on the Atlas and have done a red map… that was admittedly a bit rough but largely manageable. I feel like I could probably complete my Atlas as a Chieftain, but I wonder if I would be better off just starting Juggernaut and dealing with the itemization problems. Maybe this would be the catalyst for me to learn how to actually craft resistance gear. I am so used to being able to go shopping and use the trade site to resolve my issues. I’m really good at buying gear… but significantly less good at crafting it. That is going to be the collective struggle of a private league… that adds a whole layer of challenge that I am not used to. I am hoping that the collaborative nature of the league will bring me more enjoyment than the inefficient floundering frustrates me.

There is always the possibility that I call an audible at the last minute and level Minion Guardian instead. I had a heck of a lot of fun with this build during the Ancestor league, but I have this sneaking suspicion that there is no way this goes unscathed into 3.23. It feels entirely too powerful for the minimal gear investment. I ran up one of these during the Toucan league and I was able to do red maps without any real fuss. It also did a far better job at bossing than Righteous Fire usually does, so I could absolutely see myself playing this happily for the majority of the league. Sure I would probably STILL level an RF Jugg because I like playing one… but I am not sure if I would feel the need to do so.

I had legitimately hoped that the Blast from the Past League would galvanize my path forward. It has not. The transition from leveling a Chieftain to early maps is very nice. I could also be pretty effective and burning my way through the atlas. However, since Delve is my favorite thing… I just felt very weak compared to the extreme amount of damage that mobs down there do. I’ve only made it down to around depth 80, and realistically at a minimum, I need to be able to comfortably do depth 100-150. So this is why I am waffling so hard right now… Chieftain is so close to being the perfect Righteous Fire leveling experience but still so far away. There is no way I can reasonably rely on using Forbidden Flesh/Flame to seal ascendancy traits from Juggernaut given that we will be essentially Guild SSF, and it will be a long time until any of us are capable of farming those bosses.

So I find myself crawling back into the good ole comfortable reliable Juggernaut. This is the character that I always seem to gravitate towards. I like the way it feels and I like grinding delve with it. So maybe I should just stop trying to go in a different direction and accept that like Pohx… I’ve found my niche. I tried to fight against it at the start of this league with a Lighting Arrow Raider… and as soon as I got up the currency I swapped to running up a Juggernaut. This is the character and build that I know the most about, and in theory, should have the easiest time gearing properly in SSF. So maybe I just live with that decision.

I am sorta jealous of Kodra who is entirely determined to play Hexblast Miner and has created intricate plans for how exactly he is going to achieve that. I strive to try new things… and end up building a ton of characters during a league but always end up sitting back down in my comfy recliner.

Blast from the Past League

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Good Morning Folks! This weekend, the “Blast from the Past” short-term league was launched in Path of Exile. Essentially, this league is running off the Standard template but with the additional Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra league mechanics. For me… there is quite a bit of nostalgia wrapped up in these leagues because I got in at the tail end of Sentinel and made my first real attempt at a proper character. Lake of Kalandra was the first league that I started a character at the very beginning of the league and managed to complete my Atlas of Worlds. While this was just last year… I feel like so much has changed in the way that I approach Path of Exile since then. Sentinel was one of the best-received Path of Exile leagues and Lake of Kalandra was one of the worst… so it is interesting to see these mashed together. It has made me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is attempting to give Kalandra a redemption arc since the sandbox state of the game was just in an awful place when that league was running.

Sentinel is a fairly straightforward mechanic. You pick up three different colors of Sentinels and use them while doing other content to empower monsters for a chance at tasty rewards. Stalker Sentinels can empower a bunch of random mobs, Pandemonium a single pack, and Apex are designed to empower rare or unique enemies but a very limited number of them… aka something you pop in a map bosses arena. This is a great mechanic because you can use it while doing other things, which means it doesn’t necessarily force you to align your play habits to any particular patterns. It is very easy to start using this from the first moments of gameplay all the way to your endgame, and quite honestly… I now appreciate this mechanic far more than I did at the time.

The reason why the league was the stuff of legends in Path of Exile circles, is that it also introduced a specific reward type called Recombinators. These items would allow you to essentially combine two items of the same type which destroys one and gives you a new item that is an amalgam of the attributes of the input items. This allowed players to break the rules of crafting and get items that were simply not allowed to ever roll together on the same item. This was very impactful on Standard League as the items coming out of Sentinel essentially replaced all of the previous mirror tier items. I should probably note that I have been using Sentinels since the start of the league and I have yet to see a single recombinator drop, so they appear to be fairly rare.

Kalandra on the other hand was a league that allowed you to essentially build your own map. Each map would present you with a Mirrored Tablet on a pillar, and you could place one or more tiles. Once you had filled the tiles on a given map you could take it as an itemized map to be run in your map device. Various mechanics also allowed you to swap around existing tiles and do things like move where the entrance to your map was or move specific empty tiles to change the layout. Doing this allows you to crank up the difficulty of a given map because tiles increase in difficulty as they move further from the entrance. At the time of Kalandra’s launch… the state of the game was rough and there were a number of truly unkillable affix combinations that could destroy a run. Even now, however… once you get 8 or more tiles form the entrance the fights get pretty damned “rippy”.

I had some fond memories of Kalandra and honestly still think the concept behind it is really cool. However, even coming back and playing it now… it is not terribly rewarding. I think more than anything that was the damning stroke against this league, is that the rewards felt disconnected from the difficulty of the content. It is very easy to create a Lake that is much harder than any map you could run at least early on, and since most of your rewards come from the tile-specific chests… there just isn’t much loot to speak of. I still enjoy running Lakes as they are essentially free content… you are creating them as a byproduct of other things that you are doing in the game. They just don’t really feel that rewarding… at least not compared to things like Sanctums.

There are three events running in November, the first was the Krangled League, the second is this week the Blast from the Past, and the third is a league where every map has some random league type applied to it. Two of the three events feel like random nonsense, but Blast from the Past feels a bit more deliberate. It makes me wonder if Grinding Gear Games is trying to figure out how to remix and bring back both the Sentinel and Kalandra mechanics and merge them into Standard as they have several other past leagues. Maybe they felt like the Lake itself did not really get a fair shake given how wildly unpopular the game state was at that moment with rampant ArchNemesis nonsense going on. I am not entirely certain how these could come back. It feels like for Kalandra, you would almost need to add another new Atlas Master that specifically has maps filled with mirrored tablets similar to how Alva gives you access to three portals per map. Sentinels would blend more easily into existing content and could simply be drops you find in the world.

We saw a pretty good bump on Friday when this league started. Things were so busy that Ash, Kodra, and I ran into issues with creating new zone instances. For example, none of us could seem to zone into the submerged caverns. I pulled up a graph on Steam Charts to show the bump, and while 27k players are not anywhere near what is seen at a league start, this is a pretty significant bump considering we are at the very tail end of an existing league and most players have faded away from the game. I realize that these November events largely exist to buy time as they needed to bump back the start of the next league because it reportedly has some rather elaborate mechanics. That said it feels like Grinding Gear Games may have underestimated the hunger players seem to have for Sentinel specifically. While it hasn’t really been the redemption arc I had hoped for the Lake of Kalandra, it is still an enjoyable mechanic.

On a personal level, I have used this limited event to test out what a league start as a Righteous Fire Chieftain would feel like. Essentially you are trading the stability of a Juggernaut for the convenience of being able to slide straight into maps without needing to worry about your elemental resistances. It is quite a bit squishier than an equivalent Juggernaut would be, but it was very nice to be able to transition into mapping with no time really spent fussing with gearing. Given that our upcoming private league will be more like SSF as we will only be able to trade among ourselves… I feel like it is probably going to be a good call to start out as Chieftain and then transition later into Juggernaut when I have the gear to support it. The cool thing about that swap is it is literally just ascendancies as RF Jugg and RF Chieftain use the same passive tree.

I think part of the squish factor is that I had been leaning on some Armor/ES gear while leveling just to be able to get the right socket colors. As I began swapping out leveling gear for stronger armor bases, the squish factor began to balance out a bit. There really does seem to be a break point around 25k armor that things start to even out and getting over the 4000 Health threshold also helped. Normally RF involves a swap between running Fire Trap in your helm to running it in your body armor six-link and I might start out in this swapped state. It feels like it is going to be much easier to get a good armor base six-link with RRRGGG than it will be to get BBBRRG without access to the trade economy. I know I will not see a Brass Dome in “Bel League” so I am going to need to lean on something like either a Glorious or Astral Plate.

I’ve hit level 82 without much effort in spite of the massive experience penalty applied to these events. When you die… it feels like dying at level 95ish rather than your early 80s. I am not sure how much higher I will end up getting as I have mostly answered the questions that I had originally wanted to answer. Yes RF Chietain is viable and probably a really good idea for SSF play, and yes I still enjoy the two league mechanics from Sentinel and Lake of Kalandra. Anything else that I might accomplish on top of this is basically gravy. Pushing higher in level means you have more chances at the raffle loot, but honestly… I doubt I will win anything considering how many other players are competing in this particular league event. I do need to log into my Krangled character to see if I qualified for anything and probably delete it in order to free up the character slot.

Have you been playing the Blast from the Past limited league event? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.

Fire Shield Crush Updates

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Good Morning Folks! I thought I would give a bit of a quick update on the state of my Fire Conversion Shield Crush Chieftain. When I last posted about the build I was sitting at 78 and I have now put on another nine levels and am sitting at 87. Levels have helped quite a bit, as has a bit of gear swapping. The end result feels a bit closer to what I would consider a proper build. There have been a few times in this “Bel makes Videos” adventure where I have recorded a bit of an update because the build has suddenly felt much better to play. All in all, this is probably still not something that I would suggest to anyone because for the amount of effort I have poured into it… it still is not what I would consider a fast mapper or honestly particularly great at any sort of content.

Here is some updated gameplay that I recorded yesterday over my lunch break. If you compare this to the previous video, you can already see that not only am I running a harder map but I am also zipping through the packs much faster. The Achilles heel of the build continues to be bosses and the fact that anything with resistance takes forever to chew through even with flammability, fire penetration, and the Ramako ascendancy. The other glaring problem is that I have negative amounts of chaos resistance, which makes for a pretty quick death on occasion. I am slowly working my way towards the 10% of armor applies to Chaos Resistance mastery which I am hoping will at least help a bit.

To get where I am now, I have swapped out several gear slots so let’s dive into some of those decisions. Firstly I gave up chaos resistance and my rare helmet to go over to the armor stacking staple The Formless Flame. This is something I should have done from the start, but I was honestly more concerned about not having any chaos resistance than I was over the huge benefits of this item. I swapped from Immortal Flesh which I had been using for some life and regeneration, back to Arn’s Anguish the DPS belt that gives me a lot of Armor, Brutality Stacks, and some more Fire Resistance which then converts to at least some regeneration. I swapped out my rare boots with chaos resistance for Legacy of Fury which gives additional explosions and applies scorch to everything for more fire damage. Lastly, I swapped from my previous corrupted Emperor’s Vigilance to one with a bit more Armor and Energy shield since the price of those shields has crashed since I bought mine and I might as well min/max that a bit.

So when my flasks are ticking, which they usually are given they are all “flagellant” meaning I gain stacks while being hit… I am sitting at over 109k armor. This of course gets converted to attack damage which then gets converted to fire damage… which means the more defenses that I pour on the more damage I deal. Additionally, I talked about this in the build, but I did swap my Amethyst Flask for a perfectly rolled Rumi’s Concoction that I had sitting in the bank which gives me a capped block chance for both spells and attacks at 75%. Once I get the 10% of armor applied to chaos damage node, that should give me 10,962 armor being applied to chaos damage which should at least give me a bit of wiggle room even when I have negative resistance.

The challenge that I find myself in is that my next really huge upgrade would be swapping my Brass Dome out for a Grasping Mail. More specifically I need one that has rolled with the “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” prefix which cannot be rolled/crafted and has to drop natively on the item. The biggest challenge with all of this is… even a shitty one sells for around 10 Divine Orbs and for one that is already linked you are talking somewhere in the 25-50 Divine Orb range. I just feel like that is way more currency that I want to spend on this build especially when swapping this out would mean I would be down 4% maximum resistance and lose my crit immunity. Moreover even after swapping this… I would still largely be fucked on Chaos Resistance. While I have the currency to buy one of these, and then link it myself… I just have stayed my hand because I can’t see spending it on a build that I am not even sure about. I would probably rather spend that currency on upgrades for my SRS Guardian or RF Juggernaut as both of them feel worlds better than this character.

I think more than anything, Shield Crush Chieftain has been a fun experiment. It was a costly experiment, but it at least satiated my desire to see what Shield Crush and the new Chieftain changes were all about. I thought I would have put this character to bed long before now, but I continue to dink around with it. I am likely to swap back to either the Jugg or the Guardian however to knock out some of my missing league achievements so I can get another sad little totem pole for my hideout. This would be my third one if I managed to knock out two more achievements before the end of the league. Additionally, I am on the cusp of finishing up Diablo III Season 29, so I will probably be spending some time wrapping that up over the weekend.

That said… I am already contemplating a totally different distraction. Sir Gog is one of my favorite Path of Exile YouTubers, and he will be hosting a private league event starting this weekend. The idea is that it will be a crafting league and that everything is going to be dropping scoured so that you have to craft your own statistics on it. I am contemplating doing another SRS Guardian, largely as a way to test SSF Viability of the build for future leagues. I am not entirely certain this is going to happen, but I believe the league starts sometime around 7 p.m. for me. If you want to give this a shot check out the video above or the league invite page.