Crucible League

Uber Elder Down and Wintertide Occultist

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Hey Folks! Yesterday I went down yet another rabbit hole of trying to figure out what exactly I wanted my exit condition to be for the Crucible League. The problem with Path of Exile is there is a nigh endless amount of goals that you can have, and at the same time it is perfectly reasonable to complete none of them. A Diablo III season is far more clear-cut in that you have a single seasonal journey with fixed rewards at the end of it, and a clear “finished” point where it is pretty safe to walk away from. With Path of Exile it all depends upon your core activities, and this league for better or worse has been a league of me revisiting old builds and trying to make them work. I did this with Toxic Rain Pathfinder and then again with Explosive Arrow Champion. Then there was the somewhat meme build of Explosive Raging Spirits where I largely created the build entirely around a single pseudo-eight-link that I found in my travels. It worked well enough, but I also didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep the build around for long.

So yesterday I set my sights on completely changing this character up and revisiting one of my first builds that I fell in love with… Wintertide Brand. Now my first Wintertide character was actually a botched attempt at Righteous Fire. I really enjoyed the brand gameplay and I leaned into that rather than actually transitioning to RF when I should have. More modern Wintertide brands tend to focus around the Occultist ascendency, and it is easy enough to respec my Necromancer into that as a result I set out doing just that yesterday with increasingly misnamed BelNecroSrsly. I did not necessarily follow a guide for this transformation but instead went out to my favorite source for the research of builds that are actually being played… POE.ninja. If you set the search parameters to Occultist and the main skill to Wintertide brand, you can see a rundown of what is actively being played.

Now the highest dps version of the build had a Mageblood and a corrupted Loreweave… so I decided that I needed to set my sights a little lower than that. The next one was running Chaos Innoculation which again… not exactly something that I wanted to mess with for the time being. Eventually, I decided to go with the level 90 build for a character called Frosty_Lady. I figured that I could tweak that to my tastes which gives you a POB that looks a little something like this for my current path forward. ultimately I was trying to make as few changes as possible so essentially I needed to swap out my gloves because they were minion damage based, but there really was nothing else special about those. I needed to pick up the remaining resists that I needed off my Necklace since I would be dropping the unique I had been using for SRS. The key unique to make the build feel good was a corrupted Rime Gaze with a Labyrinth Enchant on it giving Wintertide Brand +4 Maximum Stages. Lastly, I swapped out and sold my expensive SRS shield for a more standard Spirit Shield with +1 levels to all Cold Spell Gems. Technically I spent probably 3 Divine Orbs assembling the specific components of the build but then made back way more than 3 Divine Orbs selling the gear that I was using for Summon Raging Spirits.

I have some problems to work through but for the most part, it feels really good clearing maps… considerably less good clearing bosses. I’ve gotten very used to the Juggernaut and Champion that can largely laugh off most incoming damage. This is absolutely a squishier build as a whole, and there are some tweaks that I would probably do to make it feel better. Firstly I would like to get my Armor and Regen up considerably higher. Next, I would love to figure out a way to stack some blocks considering that is not yet a really viable means of defense. The only reason why it feels as good as it does is because cold damage is in itself a defensive layer. Wintertide Brand slows and ultimately freezes mobs around you making it so that they are either not dealing damage to you… or are moving slow enough that you can easily avoid them.

My defenses are honestly pretty puny at the moment. I only have roughly 3500 health and a little over 600 regeneration which combined with only 69% physical damage reduction from armor and a measly 24% block chance… and all of my Energy Shield going to Eldritch Battery… means that when I get hit I get hit it lands extremely hard. My resists are also not amazing… because while capped I don’t have much that is increasing my maximum resistances. So essentially I need to evaluate my tree a bit to see where I can drop some damage and gain some additional life and defensive layers. This will never be a bossing character for me, so in theory I mostly just want to make it feel good for mapping purposes, and as it stands Wintertide Brand already decimates trash mobs so I can afford to lose some damage to gain some a bit of comfort level. I am sure I will probably record one of my dumb videos showing the current state of the build.

After fiddling around with the Wintertide build and getting functional, I decided to spend some time clearing out influenced maps that I had sitting in my bank. This ultimately led me to acquire another set of Shaper Fragments. So I decided to test my mettle against Shaper on my Explosive Arrow Champion, and much to my surprise, it was way easier to do the fight than on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. I managed to get through the fight without any deaths and acquired the last Uber Elder fragment that I was missing. So here we are… organically arriving at being able to potentially attempt defeating the memory of The Elder in the Shaper’s Realm that has been haunting my sidebar for a month.

For this fight I opted to go back to my Juggernaut, and took a few deaths in the process but ultimately defeated “Uber Elder” which means I acquired my third void stone… and now all of my maps drop significantly higher. I think the lowest level map can drop for me now is 14, giving me a much wider range of things for farming purposes. I have to say that mechanically on some levels the fight was easier than doing The Shaper or The Elder by themselves. I took deaths in part because I was not prepared to dodge specific mechanics happening at the same time. I think given enough iterations of this fight, I could probably go deathless once I got used to everything. Mostly my key problem with boss encounters in Path of Exile is that they take so much effort to be able to even attempt. If I could run them back to back I would ultimately memorize the patterns and get really good at them. However, doing these once every few weeks… means I lose a lot of progress each time I drop into the encounter because I am going to be rusty each time.

Ultimately though I guess I now know what I have to do to get through this league. I am going to set my sights on beating The Maven encounter, which admittedly feels much easier to get to than Uber Elder given that you just have to chain-run invitations until you get enough fragments to face her. At this point, I am at 8 of 10 fragments so I should be able to burn through this pretty quickly if I actually set my sights on accomplishing it. My hope is that I can take her down by exercising the fact that I have six portals… because I sincerely doubt I will successfully complete a memory game phase. Having three void stones means I am officially further along in this league than I have ever been before. It just feels like Uber Elder was such a pain in the ass that I have to get through Maven now just to finish the job.

I also plan on devoting some time to making Wintertide feel a bit better. Feeling confident enough to tackle this mission is its own accomplishment in my progression through Path of Exile as a whole. I guess the next major achievement would be to go after a build of my own design, without specifically following anything active in the meta. I still feel like I am years away from that accomplishment even though I am well over a thousand hours into this game now. I have no real clue WHY Path of Exile is so engaging for me, but it feels like it is this puzzle that I must solve and each time I clear something new… it uncovers a whole series of other puzzles to be solved just beneath that surface. I will probably spend some more time researching various Wintertide builds on POE.Ninja in order to see how they are solving the survival challenges so that I can devise my own path forward.

Clearing Delve Cities

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Hey Folks! I have been recording a series of videos of me playing various games as part of a larger “Bel Bungles” series. I have no clue why but I find some modicum of enjoyment to record short videos of me talking about a thing from a game. Today I am experimenting a bit because normally speaking I do not make a specific blog post when I do one of these. I occasionally reference a video and embed it in another post, but I’ve never really made a post exclusively for one of these uploads. So I am shifting things up a bit and doing just that thing.

Today I figured it had been a bit since I had recorded one of these dumb Bel Bungles videos talking about my Righteous Fire Juggernaut in Path of Exile. So since I mostly do Delve on that character, I decided to post a video of me clearing out a few city nodes down in the mines and talk through some of my thought processes. I have no clue why anyone watches these, but I enjoy making them… and will likely keep making them until I stop enjoying them. Thanks to everyone who is just along for the ride, and hopefully they don’t get too terribly annoying.

My ARPG Hours Played

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Good Morning Friends! I was not entirely certain I would be doing a blog post this morning because technically this is the beginning of my “weekend”. However last night I embarked upon some madness and this morning I am sharing the fruits of it. I think I’ve been a little dishonest with myself when it comes to the extent to which Path of Exile has become my new gaming “main squeeze” over the last two years. This is part of a larger evolution that I did understand considerably better, but I was not fully aware of the sheer extent to which I have been choosing to play Path of Exile over other games. For the last decade, I have been on this transition from playing MMORPGs as my primary gaming vehicle to ARPGs in part because ARPGs feel much better to play solo.

Playing MMORPGs like I often do… completely alone… with only very rare human interaction… feels like I am misunderstanding the purpose of that genre. There are just so many activities that I can’t realistically participate in without also building the social infrastructure required and committing to the regular play schedule required for them. Playing a Diablo-style Action RPG however… is a largely solo endeavor that occasionally benefits from friends, but features a rich series of activities that you can engage with entirely on your own. Part of why I have come to love Guild Wars 2 so much is that it allows me to FEEL like I am part of a larger group experience, without actually having to do any of the social maintenance required to truly be part of a group. In the ARPG genre, however… solo is the norm and as a result, most of the mechanics are designed to be completed without the need of any other players. In an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay… the humble ARPG stands as somewhat of a beacon in the storm.

Now we scan forward to yesterday where on Gamepad.club I was commenting about being somewhat gobsmacked that a month into the Crucible league and I have already found seven Tabula Rasas. For those who are uninitiated in the nonsense that is Path of Exile, the Tabula Rasa is essentially the ultimate starter item. It gives you access to six sockets of any color at level 1, and this is really the basis of most “second characters” because it allows you to stack powerful support gems on an ability long before you can realistically get that many sockets on a single item. During this league, I have found six Corrupted Tabulas (+2 Minion Gems, +2 AOE Gems, and +2 Aura Gems) and four vanilla ones. Now one of these corrupted Tabulas came from the Vanity Divination card set, and two of the normal ones came Humility set. The weird thing about it however is that I have spent ZERO hours purposefully farming for one like I did last league in Blood Aqueducts.

To this entire exchange, my friend Carth innocently commented that he could not imagine how much time I’ve put in this league to see that many. Now I know that number is large because when Steam tried to shame me into leaving a review for the game, it shows that I have now played over 1100 hours in total. I’ve honestly contemplated giving the game a review, but quite honestly… how does one leave a review for a game as complicated as Path of Exile? Over 1100 hours into the game, I still feel very much like a “new” player. There are so many aspects of the game that I legitimately have no understanding of yet. Knowing that Steam was tracking my time played, I assumed that Grinding Gear Games was as well… which led me down the path of the /played command. If you have followed this blog for any length of time you will know that I am an aficionado of the spreadsheet, so I decided to try and get some better data on HOW my time was played.

So unfortunately last league I decided to delete all of my characters that pre-date the Sentinel league, in part because none of them made any sense and were also using names I might want to recycle. So I can only really go back as far as May of 2022 but you can see total hours spent in each of the four most recent Path of Exile leagues. Forbidden Sanctum was the league in which the game really made sense to me, and I started to fully understand a lot of the key mechanics of how to make a character “feel good” to play. It was also the league in which I discovered how much I loved Delve. My main of that league represents 276 of those 647 hours… with likely MOST of that being time in Delve. With the latest Crucible League, I have already eclipsed the time spent playing both Sentinel and Kalandra combined. Since we are only one month into the league and I have already almost reached the halfway point of time spent in Sanctum… I might even eclipse that league as well.

This led me down another rabbit hole of being curious about how Path of Exile stacks up against other ARPGs that I have played. As far as I am aware there is no really good way to get hours spent playing early pre-steam ARPGs. For example, a lot of my time spent playing TorchLight II was not through Steam, and I repurchased that game at some point just to make it easier to play. Not included are Diablo and Diablo II, because while those hours probably exist somewhere in the bowels of battle.net I am not entirely sure how to retrieve them. Essentially what I have learned is that I have now played more Path of Exile than literally any other ARPG I have played… and by a decent margin. Last Epoch is still gaining time played but we are not even close to the order of magnitude.

The one that surprised me heavily was Diablo III, which has roughly a decade-long headstart on Path of Exile when it comes to my interacting with it. I’ve played a lot of Diablo III, but the challenge comes from HOW I actually play it. A Diablo III Season essentially can be compressed within a weekend at this point, and by Monday morning if I am taking the season seriously I have completed all of the accomplishments and walked away with my seasonal “Kitch” and then rarely spend much time after said season playing at all. Whereas with Path of Exile, there are just more sliders and each and every step in the journey requires more effort to achieve. After a week I had what felt like a reasonable “starter” character and then spent most of the first month refining that character and progressing through maps and ultimately getting into a comfortable place where I could farm delve.

I’ve now branched out heavily into additional characters, but each of them requires way more effort from me than gearing out a second character in Diablo III. Additionally, if I have played a Multishot Demon Hunter once, I’ve played every Multishot Demon Hunter. There is no real nuance to individual character building because every Multishot Demon Hunter is going to look essentially the same because there are only so many sliders you have access to in order to differentiate your character. While I played a Righteous Fire Juggernaut last league and I am playing one again this league… in both cases enough fundamental changes took place between the leagues that they both look significantly different in both gearing and how they mechanically feel. I played around with a Toxic Rain character last league, but the one this league just works better because I now understand so much more about that style of character. Path of Exile is just more of a “living game” whereas Diablo III has largely felt like it was in maintenance mode for the last half dozen years.

I think at some point down the line Last Epoch is going to feel just as good to me as Path of Exile does today. It definitely has a lower barrier of entry, but features some of the same deeply nuanced character-building. Additionally while more deterministic, the gear grind feels way less templated than it does in Diablo III, where in that game I need these eight items to make my build work and once I have collected them I am essentially “done”. Diablo III is a solved problem and while I still enjoy playing it, my periods of interacting with it have become significantly shorter each season as I am now better at solving those problems. Of note, I’ve also gotten significantly faster at solving problems in Path of Exile, but once solved… there is just a wider variety of interesting things to engage in. My hope is that Last Epoch will build out some of those extremely interesting things to engage in as well because for the moment the Monolith feels somewhat stale.

This morning’s post was an interesting exercise because while I already knew I played an excessive amount of ARPGs… I did not necessarily understand the full extent. Prior to this morning’s post I would have told you that I had played “way more” hours of Diablo III than I have of Path of Exile as well. Sometimes numbers are interesting and deeply satisfying to investigate. Does anyone actually care about this sort of post? Very likely not. However yall are stuck following my whims if you are a regular reader, so you should probably be used to it by now.

Forbidden Flame and Flesh

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Good Morning Friends! I entirely blame Ashgar for pointing out that this stash tab MTX existed… which I then had to pick up because it looks hilarious. Essentially as the video shows, the dragon’s hoard grows in size based on how much currency you have in whatever tab you have currency affinity turned on for. My guess is it is based on TOTAL currency and not actually the currencies that are actively used in trading… aka Chaos Orbs, Exalted Orbs, and Divine Orbs. From what I can tell my stash has now reached whatever has been deemed as the “maximum size”. This will be interesting to see in future leagues as it grows. We don’t really have much in the way of currency in the guild stash, so that tab is relatively small by comparison to my personal stash.

Yesterday I decided to record another one of my dumb videos showing off generally what it looks like to run content on my latest build, the Explosive Arrow Champion. However after last night, and several rounds of tweaks… namely in my skill gem setup… things go MUCH faster. I’m extremely impressed at just how tanky a Champion feels. Like when I was going through the Sentinel League with my poorly built version… I just assumed my definition of tanky was not quite what Zizaran’s definition of tanky was. However now that I’ve played a properly crafted EA Champion… I have to say it is not terribly far off the general survivability of my Juggernaut. I could absolutely see building a version of this that can do all of the content in the game, including deeper delve. Now I am just trying to increase my damage numbers.

This led me to spend a stupid amount of Chromatic Orbs last night trying to get my bow successfully recolored to RRRRGG. Best as I can tell… the way I have my bow built puts it somewhere in the 10 to 20 Divine Orb range… would absolutely be the latter if I put a decent crucible tree on it. I could have however gotten something workable in the correct colors for about 1 Divine Orb and saved myself a lot of heartache and frustration. Instead, my stubbornness kicked in and I burned through roughly 3000 Chromatic Orbs last night. The hardest part about this… is finding anyone willing to actually sell you Chromatic Orbs. This is true with any of the smaller currencies to be honest because most players don’t want to mess with trying to sell you an entire inventory worth of crap.

In truth, if you factor in my earlier coloring phase with this damned bow, I’ve probably spent about 4500 Chromatics on it in total. Originally my intent was to go for a RRRBBG bow, and I ultimately settled for RRRBGG because that is what I landed after burning through about 1500 Chromatics. However, in its final form, I really wanted RRRRGG, to which I went to the trusty Vorici Chromatic Calculator. This morning unfortunately I realized that I was using it wrong last night. The numbers that I was typing into the calculator were based on what the CURRENT requirements of the bow were with gems slotted into it. What the calculator expects however is for you to input the base requirements… so there is a massive difference between trying to color 106 Str 179 Dex 55 Int bow… and trying to color one with nothing but 179 Dex on it. I burned through about 1600 Chromatics before I got fed up and started doing yolo 3R crafts… which is apparently what I should have been doing all along.

There are a lot of parts of Path of Exile that I have noped out of entirely because of information overload. One of these is the common practice of using Forbidden Flame and Forbidden Flesh jewels in your passive tree. Effectively what this does is give you an extra ascendency point, and in order for it to work both jewels have to contain the same ascendency notable. Basically, when choosing my last points I went back and forth between the one I chose that effectively gives me a cheat death mechanic and the one I am allocating through these two jewels. Two points for what seems to be at least on paper a significant damage increase seems like a good trade-off. The other major tweak that I made last night is that I picked up a few Awakened Skill Gems for my bow Explosive Arrow Configuration. This is what that six-link looks like now.

  • Explosive Arrow – Level 21 – 20% Quality
  • Lifetap – Level 19 – I will finish leveling and quality it up at some point
  • Awakened Burning Damage – Level 5 (Max) – 20% Quality
  • Elemental Damage with Attacks – Level 21 – 20% Quality
  • Ballista Totem – Level 19 – I will finish leveling and quality it up at some point
  • Awakened Deadly Ailments – Level 4 – 20% Quality – Still needs one more level

I would have liked to have gone for an Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks… but those were in the 20 Divine Orb range so we will settle for this and hope maybe I get one to drop through Maven invitations.

So while I realize currency exists in the league to be spent on improving your gear… after my recent round of upgrades to my three main builds of the league… and the dumb Explosive SRS side project… I probably need to chill out for a bit. I’ve not run the numbers through Exilence in a while but just eyeballing my currency tab in the last six days I’ve spent roughly 1086 Chaos Orbs, 2 Exalted Orbs (spent on crafting slams), and 2 Divine Orbs (1 spent on crafting a bow)… for a grand total of just shy of 5 Divine Orbs. So other than the dumb amount of currency I spent buying Chromatic Orbs… I have to say overall every bit of it was spent in a way that made the builds more functional so I can’t say I am disappointed. However, it is weird to definitely be in a phase of “investing” in builds rather than generating currency. That said I took almost 10,000 Chaos Orbs into Standard when the last league ended, and I am fine not being in that situation again.