delve

The Broken Elegy

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was “a lot,” and I have survived, but sleeping was a bit of a mess because of the pain. I’ve been working on a new side project in Path of Exile. It largely started because there is a new belt called the Screams of the Dessicated, and the gimmick is that you lose access to your utility flasks but gain at least one permanent shrine buff. Only some of these shrines have any real value, which means the market is flooded with a bunch of belts that the average player has no interest in. I was curious what a Greater Skeletal Shrine would feel like on a proper minion build, and right now, my favorite minion base is Servant of Arakaali… but you only get to play that during the Phrecia league. My second favorite minion base is Guardian, and as a result, I rolled a brand new character and started leveling so that I could play with the belt.

The other thing that I noticed is there are a limited number of folks building around a brand new Unique called Broken Elegy that drops from Saresh, the new boss of the Mirage league. I’ve completely yolo’d my build in its current state and have pivoted towards going down the staff block path, and running the new staff with Servant of Decay, another chestpiece that spawns a bunch of interesting minions that inflict withered on targets, which should buff my chaos damage. The only realistic way for me to get Envy on my build was to lean into Aul’s Uprising, and since the cheapest one already had Death Attunement on it, it allowed me to respec my tree a bit to free up some points. I went with a screams belt that gives me Greater Skeletal Shrine and Replenishing Shrine, the latter essentially replacing any reliance I might have on Clarity or Vitality. Lastly, I picked up a cheap minion gem helm that I have my utility minions in, like Animate Guardian, Stone Golem, and Carrion Golem.

I have no clue how well this is going to work. I need to hit level 78 and pick up some more dexterity somewhere before I can equip the chestpiece, and I am in Act 10, working through the final bits of the campaign. So far, however, it feels amazing. I am running Leap Slam instead of Shield Charge, and also running a Frost Blink so that I have my comfy two movement abilities setup. I leap into a pack, convocate my Sentinel of Radiance, and then start furiously summoning raging spirits as I also generate shrine skeletons and ceaseless flesh zombies from the staff. The Carrion Golem buffs everything, and minion jewels are making it so that everything has a decent chance to poison on hit… and the various stuff buffing chaos damage output is pretty much melting everything. Bosses especially just sort of evaporate right now, and my AG is running Asenath’s Gentle Touch, so corpses are also exploding, helping with the clear. The entire package feels really dumb, and I am curious how well the transition into maps is going to go.

It has been quite a bit since I last updated anything about Path of Exile, and over the weekend, I finished out my Atlas and got my Four Voidstones. I am still not entirely certain what I think about the current state of the new Atlas. For the most part I like it, but I feel like the fog of war needs to go, so that players can at least see where they want to go. When you start getting maps that you cannot run, because you cannot get to the node on the atlas, it is a bit frustrating. For example, one of my friends needed the six-link bench craft, and I had no clue where the Silo map was located, so I just sort of blindly fumbled around until I found it. Being able to easily swap between maps is pretty great, and I still need to finish doing a “blob” as they are being colloquially called in each of the quadrants for one of the quests. Unfortunately, Astrolabes seem to drop rather infrequently from map bosses, so I am going to have to ultimately buy some to finish out that quest.

The biggest upgrade that I have made to my Righteous Fire character is building out the Foulborn Red Dream setup, which involves buying the rather expensive gem, and then tattooing a bunch of strength nodes in the vicinity to instead be Fire Resistance. This, combined with everything else, really gives you a significant boost in life totals. My maximum life is now sitting at 8219, giving me an active pool of 7734 once you take into account my vitality arrogance setup. Realistically, I probably have enough sources of regeneration to comfortably drop vitality, but I just have not done so. The next big swap would be adding some clusters so that I could run Maelevolence, which would involve dropping vitality finally. I’ve not really felt like I needed to do this, so I have been lazy and not done it. I think I have the cluster jewels in my dump tab and could probably get it up and running without much issue. Maybe when I hit 100, I will do that thing.

Other than the Red Dream setup, the biggest upgrade is swapping my Immortal Flesh out for a Cord Belt. Cord Belts are a new base that drops from the Mirage content, and their big new thing is that it allows an anoint. So instead of using an Elder Stygian Vise, I sought out a Cord Belt with the same sort of rolls you normally look for. Everything else is mostly just getting better versions of things I already had, like I now have a proper Elder Helmet, slightly better corrupt for Cloak of Flames, and a full 10% Nebulis, which gives me 450% increased Elemental Damage. I keep getting slightly better regen gloves from the Breach Tree and swapping those out as I find them, then selling my previous version for some divines. My build can do pretty much anything I would want to do with it, including Nightmare Maps… so obviously the first thing I wanted to do was run up an alt, which gives you the Guardian I spoke about first.

All told, I am pretty happy with where I am in almost everything. My main tree is Niko, Ore, Harvest, and Breach and it feels great. My secondary atlas is Einhar, Ritual, Beyond, and Heist, which also feels great. I am thinking about setting up my third tree to be heavily focused on Legion, because there are incubators specific to the league mechanic that I would love to get, so I could start getting coins more regularly. Delve still provides, and Fossils represent my primary source of income right now. I am hovering around the 200 depth and going horizontal to look for bosses. I still need a Doryani map from the Vaal boss, and I am always down for taking out an Aul for some of the big-ticket items. Mirage league has been a blast, and Ace and I were talking about it last night, and how this is probably the furthest they have gotten. At this point, I am mostly focused on challenges so that I can hopefully get another fancy totem pole.

How has your league been going? Between all of the medical stuff that I have been dealing with, mine has been going a bit slower than I would have liked. Additionally, next week we have the release of the Last Epoch Season 4, and I will be spending a lot of time playing that at least for a week or so. I will also be getting adjusted to the routines of chemotherapy which might throw a monkey wrench in pretty much everything.

Illusive Mollie Snuggles

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One of the strange occurrences that I have wanted so bad to message my wife about… is the changed behavior in Mollie our most skittish cat. She can be an extremely sweet cat, but also runs like hell at the slightest unexpected motion. She has been forcefully snuggling with me when I first crawl into bed, and gripes at me when I am not already in place when she expects me to be so. She runs away when Gracie decides it is time to come to bed, but for about thirty minutes at the start of every sleep cycle, she is there with me while I am fiddling around on my phone and doing dailies in the few mobile games that I play. I’ve attempted to get a photo of this, and so far this is the best one not only because I am laying down and attempting to take it… but also because the lights are off and the only light is from the television. It has only taken a decade to get this far… but she will headbutt me so freaking hard before she eventually settles down snuggling up against my side.

I did not join in the reindeer games in Guild Wars 2 last night because I was emotionally exhausted. I had a good therapy session, but it was a tiring one and after finishing that up… and doing the various nightly processes I just was out of it and fighting sleepytime. I stayed up until around 9:30 which is my normal bedtime, but was way too out of it to have joined in on any group activities. Instead I did some Audiobook and Path of Exile time as I started on Dead Country by Max Gladstone which is a new series with the flagship character of the Craft Sequence that I read over the last few years. There were six books in that series and I highly suggest all of them. What is awkward about those books is that they collected the first five into a single volume… then I guess Max decided to write a sixth book, and it makes my eye twitch that the artwork does not match the first five books at all which have a similar theme. Anyways looking forward to this new trilogy of which I think only two books are out.

One of the things that is not really being talked about right now in Path of Exile is how profitable Delve has been this league. It is a combination of the fact that there is no league specific crafting mechanic, and that the return of Kingsmarch has made gold fairly valuable because people want to run those big shipments for a shot at getting back mirror shards. Delve, Heist, and other second any secondary non-mapping content provides a pitiful amount of gold compared to juicy mapping. The common wisdom has been to focus on mapping and as a result… everything that comes from other mechanics has gone up in value. I put up a bunch of rare fossils for sale last night before I logged out to go to bed, and decided to take a screenshot when they had all sold showing you the sort of money I can pull in quickly. Divine Orbs are also really weak right now and only trading for 130 Chaos, meaning that converting up from Chaos is really valuable. I spent a lot of currency kitting out my Toxic Rain character and have made most of it back.

That said I spent a ton of currency this morning buying Awakened gems and 21/20% gems for the things that I could afford. I will likely never buy an Awakened Greater Multiple Projectiles as those go for like 300 Divines, but I did bump up everything that I could. Making this swap is always immediately noticeable in the speed at which you clear, and this was no difference because t16 mapping now feels extremely trivial. Mostly I am still in the process of pouring on levels so that I can get the passive points to finish out with a medium cluster and then unlock all of the jewel sockets that I have available to me so that I can start putting life and chaos damage over time multiplier in all of those slots. I have my health over 4000 which gives me a bit of a buffer and usually enough time to hit my life potion in time to keep from taking a death when my evasion fails me. I am still not great at keeping a life pot running at all times to mimic the effects of leech or regeneration. This is essentially the strength of a Pathfinder but I am bad at hitting the button all of the time.

The Mercs league had already slowed down considerably, but it is about to grind to a halt as Path of Exile II spoiler season has officially started. SirGog released a video this morning about the above spoiler posted on Twitter, and I mostly agree with him that this feels Harbinger Adjacent. I just hope they do not screw the mechanic up and make it worse… like they have for other mechanics implemented in Path of Exile II style. I am still not hugely supportive of the direction this sequel has gone so far, but I also know that large swaths of the community care about it and it will begin to drain attention from Path of Exile. Path of Exile II drops on the 29th, but it will have to wait until I have burned through the content in Last Epoch which drops before that on the 21st.

Fullscreen Frostyboom

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Good Morning Folks! Since I finished the season in Diablo IV, I am now much more focused on Pohx League. I am very only likely to be dipping my toes back into Necromancer fun times when Ace wants to play, and particularly as we work on some of the seasonal objectives for them. In Pohx League I rolled something that was completely new to me, and it has been shockingly fun. I had never really played a Trickster before, or honestly gotten anything based on the Shadow class to maps. I’ve also not played a pure traps build even though Righteous Fire derives a lot of its damage based on Fire Trap. Ultimately I set out wanting to try a Trickster and then found a build that seemed like it might be enjoyable with that Ascendancy and rolled with it.

This build my friends… is ludicrous. I’ve never played anything with this level of full screen coverage. Sure my lightning arrow and later elemental hit of the spectrum builds could off screen enemies, but nothing to this point has ever just blanketed the entire screen in death. Yesterday I made some significant tweaks to the build and migrated to the “final form” and shifted over to Ice Trap of Hollowness. This is an alternate version of Ice Trap that comes from the Labyrinth that essentially scales up the area of effect of the traps, so that there is a dead spot in the center but MUCH wider coverage. It also has a much shorter time to trigger on its own, which makes it prime territory for some shenanigans.

Essentially to exploit the benefits of this alternate version of Ice Trap, we swap so using the Sunblast unique belt that makes it so enemies cannot trigger your traps, but allows you to throw 2 additional traps and explode on their own significantly faster. A perfectly rolled Sunblast is 75% reduced trap duration, but I was only able to afford a 61% one in Pohx league given the limited market. Since Tinkerskin works exclusively based on when traps are triggered, this means we need to move away from that chest and the most common choice is to go with a Carcass Jack for the additional Area of Effect and Area Damage scaling. The end result… is just truly silly for map clear because you essentially hit the entire screen at once.

More important than that, since I can easily have 17 traps up at once there is quite a lot of overlap which leads to shotgunning. The trick however is that you need to dance around the screen to limit the amount of mobs that are in the dead spot in the center that deals no damage. For bossing it is pretty straightforward to swap back to using the normal Ice Trap but it does mean having to take a moment to swap out your primary gem. I’ve never really loved gem swapping, but it does make enough of a difference to be worthwhile and will be even more so if I can get a slightly better roll on my Sunblast belt. What is nice about this build is with the swap it is both an extremely fast mapper and a pretty competent bosser. If you are curious I dumped a POB of the state of my build.

The only thing really lacking with this build is general defenses. I have enough layers to keep me from getting one shot, but I do have to hit my potion way more often than I would care to. There are a lot of things that I ultimately need to do to scale up the defensive layers, but the biggest one would be a load more evasion. Right now I have around 65% evasion and 90% lucky spell suppression combined with around 3500 hit points and 1700 energy shield. The only thing that is really going to one shot me is chaos damage, because I still have negative resistance in that department. Essentially the build is good enough to probably finish out the Atlas and unlock a few of the boss encounters, but would really need to find better versions of almost every rare slot in my build to make it feel a bit more comfy. Were I playing in a normal trade league this would not be a problem at all… but in a limited time event league there just isn’t a ton of stuff available for prices that I can afford.

I think much like it was in NecroSettlers, my first goal is going to be unlocking my full Atlas. When I get my third passive tree I plan on building it out to be Ritual and Einhar for the purpose of trying to farm either a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections to turn my five-link into a six-link. I am pretty happy with the state of my build craft in Path of Exile, where I can make a character function without trade intervention more or less. I still like trading for specific upgrades, and I like selling random stuff as well… but I like knowing that I can mostly get a build off the ground and capable of mapping on my own. I will likely never be a big crafter, nor someone who dives deep into market manipulation… but I do like that I can be fairly self sustaining. That is a pretty huge thing coming from the very rocky starts that I had back in Sentinel and Kalandra leagues to where I am today.

Missing Delve

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Good Morning Folks! I am still on the Path of Exile NecroSettlers Event nonsense and honestly… I am finding myself missing Delve considerably worse than I thought I would. It is not necessarily that I am missing the activity… I am missing access to common stuff that I am simply not finding in maps. Up until this point I had largely been avoiding Delve since the changes to this event are largely mapping-specific. However there are some ramifications of this decision… namely, I do not have a ready supply of many of the currencies that I would be swimming in at this point. I also do not have an easy supply of high-level flask bases. Essentially I believe I need item level 80 flasks to get the 3 charges when hit trait and more than that… I just do not see that many flasks dropping in maps. By this point I would normally have the right flasks with the right traits and have them automated… but I have none of that.

Essentially as of this morning, I started trying to get set up in Delve, but since I ignored this while leveling I don’t have any progress. “Breaking Delve” is somewhat tedious because there is a requisite amount of Azurite farming that is required before things begin to feel comfortable. Since NecroSettlers is mapping-focused, this also means that selling Resonators is EXTREMELY lucrative on the currency exchange market since no one is doing it. So while I have yet to see any of the chaos bonanza maps that folks have talked about… I can at least start to make a steady income so I might be able to afford some upgrades at some point.

I’ve not really made any significant gear changes from yesterday. I am attempting to get my Eater/Exarch implicit but failing miserably on those. I currently am sitting a 90% all elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance since I managed to finish my fourth labyrinth. At some point I am going to want to get my hands on a Shaper shield and attempt to roll it for “life recoup on block”, and then shift up my tree significantly to go down the max block path. Essentially everything is super freaking expensive and as such that is probably going to give me an artificial cap on just how high I can fly in this event. Even the most scuffed Elder helms are going for multiple divines, and since those are roughly 400 chaos each… I am so far from being able to afford anything. Similarly, I am going to have to use Brine King for most of this event because it is very unlikely I will be able to pick up Annihilation’s Approach.

The other thing that I have noticed is just how much slower my map progression has been going. Delve Cities produce a silly amount of miscellaneous maps, and they do not respect your atlas tree when it comes to dropping. This means you end up getting a lot of much higher-level maps in bulk so that you can fill out your atlas more quickly. This means I need to rely on the Vendor Recipe and Horizon Orbs far more than I am used to. I am hoping now that I am starting to break Delve I will catch up on map drops a bit more quickly.

I just unlocked my second tree, which I will likely start to build out for delving purposes. However, the first tree I decided to go down a path I did to much success last league. Essentially both Einhar and Ritual are on the same side of the tree and both League mechanics have a pathway to get an item that will Six-Link something for you. Until I build up a war-chest of currency, there is no way I am getting a Six-Link Cloak of Flames any other way. I am also going into beyond which just adds a lot more mobs to your maps, and I went down the path that disables summoning of bosses so that you get to keep the beyond effect the entire map.

Essentially I am in a hole now, and several days behind the curve, and simply need to put my head down and grind my way out of it.