delve

Aul the Crystal King

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The Forbidden Sanctum league has apparently had the highest player retention of any league in the last three years. One of the things that concern me a bit is I am afraid that maybe Grinding Gear Games assumes this is because of the Sanctum mechanic itself. I hate Sanctum, but the “sandbox” state of the game to borrow a term from the Destiny community is the best it has been since I started reliably playing Path of Exile. Granted you have to have lucked into a successful build, but once you have… every bit of content feels good. I’m mostly spending my time doing Delve and Heist with enough mapping in between to fill up the Sulfite for another journey into the depths. I am pretty safely doing T16 maps on my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and largely unkillable at this point in Delve or Heist on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. You would think I would run out of enjoyment in the game, but for whatever reason, I am in this super zen place and enjoying myself greatly.

A good deal of my focus has been on trying to find Aul the Crystal King. This is a boss node shown above that appears in the Primeval Ruins biome within Delve. The encounter has a chance of dropping a really sought-after necklace that can roll with a mod that effectively gives you no mana reservation costs on one of the auras in the game. If you are lucky, this would allow you to add an additional aura… and with it a significant amount of power or survivability without the worry of trying to maintain your mana. While I would love to have a big beefy reservation for free, I mostly wanted to find Aul because I had not seen him yet. Over the weekend I found it, and in the previous screenshot, I am fighting the encounter, but all fights are largely unintelligible when you have a righteous fire aura around you..

I did not get the prized necklace, and the fight is just as tanky as I had heard… but I made it through and have now cleared all of the possible bosses encounters for Delve. I’ve also capped my sulfite capacity which stops at I believe 65,000. Essentially my jam right now is to fill up my sulfite as fast as I can and then spend the evening listening to an audiobook while chilling out in delve and farming up as many nodes as I can before running out of juice again. I’ve been farming Primordial Blocks maps in the faint hope of trying to get the hideout which seems to be an extremely rare spawn. If I need to buy maps, I’ve noticed that it isn’t an extremely sought-after map either. I like it because it has a good number of spawns, and at this point, I can pretty much do the boss fight in my sleep.

The other mechanic I am spending a lot of time engaging with is Metamorph, and most maps that I run on the Atlas end up having either a Rogue Metamorph or allowing me to collect parts and spawn Two Metamorphs at the end. This means that I am gathering up a significant number of body parts, that I let stack up and feed into the metamorph mechanic for tasty loot. It is not unusual at all that I end up walking away with several divines when I have collected enough bits to spawn several monsters. I’ve also put a lot of use into the various catalysts that allow me to add variant degrees of quality to my jewelry and belt slots.

I have no clue when Path of Exile will end up playing out for me, but for now, I am enjoying myself greatly still. I am sure you all are tired of reading about it, but as I have said before… the heart wants what the heart wants.

Hunting Aul

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Friends… I thought this would be the week that I started to distance myself from Path of Exile. Between adventures in Grim Dawn and starting to fiddle around with Lord of the Rings Online, I expected to dial back my gameplay. Yet last night I was back on my bullshit happily plugging away at the same stuff I have been plugging away at for a while now. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants, and my heart is seemingly not quite done with Path of Exile. My main strategy continues to be running maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… largely because I don’t care about her level… and then once I have filled up my Sulphite going back down into delve and hunting for the last rare thing that I have not seen… Aul. I think maybe once I finally fight the Crystal King this will lose some of its stickiness for me but I really want to see that encounter at least once.

I wish there was a good gauge numerically on how far to the left or right of the main column I have gone, similar to a depth reading. Essentially I seem to be moving around in a band between 150 and 170 in depth and am six or seven screens away from the central column at this point. I found a very tasty Abyssal City last night as well as a nearby Primeval Ruins but sadly no boss nodes in either. I think I have fought the Vaal boss three times, and the Abyssal boss twice… but have yet to see Aul even though I am poking around in the range where it is reported to find those nodes. I need to dive a bit deeper, but you are sorta at the mercy of the map when it comes to how you can travel. As I dive down I keep hitting dead ends and having to backtrack my way up to higher depths.

One thing I have to say about Delve City farming is that you end up with a truly staggering number of maps. You can see for some tiers I am sitting on over 100 maps and a large chunk of these are coming from the cartographer’s chests that I am pretty regularly finding one or more of in each city node. I currently have Primordial Blocks as my favorite map, not necessarily because I love the layout, but because I am trying to get the hideout to spawn in it so I can collect that for my account. For whatever reason, Primordial Blocks seem to have a higher-than-average spawn rate of Metamorph as well, and as such, I can use it to collect parts. Granted this could just be me running this map over and over and my Atlas tree triggering, but even before I specced into Metamorph I seemed to get that mechanic here more often than not.

Speaking of Metamorph, it continues to pay off nicely. I quietly stockpile body parts and then run through several metamorph spawns at once whenever I get a moment. If I stack currency nodes in every body part, it seems to often produce Divine and Exalted Orbs. This isn’t exactly going to win any divines per hour races, but it is a nice residual impact of me doing the things that I was already going to do in order to fuel my delve addiction. At some point, I am going to need to spend some time selling off undesirable body parts in an attempt to get the ones I am missing because a few of the slots in my metamorph tab are filling up rapidly. That is the most annoying thing about this mechanic is that the body parts are heavily skewed toward a few specific slots. For me, at least the most common part is Heart and Brain and the least common are the Lungs and Eyes. You can sell 3 body parts for a random part, so I need to cull Hearts and Brains in an attempt to fill the other slots as I am completely out of eyes at the moment.

Lastly here is a bonus image of sleepy cats. I wasn’t sure where else to fit this one in, and I know it is awful quality. Essentially the other night my wife snapped a quick photo in the dark because she knew I would not believe her. This is Josie snuggling with Gracie, and this is important because we have never really had cats that would actively snuggle with each other. I am not sure if Josie was even aware that Gracie was there or not, but I did what I could to try and enhance the image so you could see more than a blurry mess. Gracie is damned determined that everyone must love her, and she adores her big sister so I am happy to see this. I noticed Gracie grooming Josie the other day, but I figured it was a fluke.

I hope you are having a most excellent week, and we will see if I actually do something other than Path of Exile.

The Abyss Stares Back

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Good Morning Friends! I am going to apologize ahead of time, but you are going to get another post completely full of Path of Exile nonsense. We are continuing my descent into madness… literally as I keep going deeper into Delve game mode systems. Last night I discovered Abyssal Cities and I am now on the lookout for as many of these as I can find. Since I missed the launch of the Delve league some four years ago, it floors me just how complete this game mode really is. While you do have to keep running maps periodically to build up a stockpile of Voltaxic Suphite to power your crawler friend and light the way, other than that you can pretty much get anything you could in almost any other game mode down in the darkness. I’ve gotten roughly a dozen Divine Vessels and a couple of dozen Offering to the Goddess that just drop randomly from stuff down in the depths rather than having to hope and pray you to see any of them above ground.

From what I understand there are three kinds of cities that can be found underground. The first is the Vaal ruins that I had been exploring previously and these supposedly start showing up somewhere around a depth of 30. I found my first Vaal city in the 70s, so your mileage may vary of course. Abyssal cities that I found last night and that are highlighted on my Subterranean Chart above in a yellowish outline start showing up in the low 100s. Primeval Ruins are the third kind that I have not seen yet, and those appear around 170 depth. Each City type can have a boss node, and I’ve yet to encounter any of those… and ultimately that is really what I have been searching for. I have a tunnel system around 70-80 depth that has produced five or six Vaal Cities, and last night I opted to dive down deeper and start expanding out around 100ish and almost immediately stumbled onto this first Abyssal City.

Because I got distracted by doing other things… I did not get nearly as much time underground. However, in my limited time, I managed to pull out all of those resonators sitting in my bank. Pending those resonators sell at least as quickly as my previous batches and for the same prices that is roughly 110 chaos worth of items that I pulled out, not counting a few nice pieces of gear that I am selling individually. I tend to price my items just high enough that I am not going to get instant sales which would interrupt the flow of my evening. Instead, I expect to throw items up cheaper when I am more in the mood to field trade requests. If someone wants to pay my inflated prices though, I am willing to stop what I am doing… waste a portal, and go make the trade. I will never be an auction house oligarch but I am making more than enough currency to keep fielding my nonsense plans.

Speaking of currency, I saw my first raw divine orb drop in the depths. This is only the second Divine Orb that I have seen in this league. I’ve seen an Exalted Orb or two in the dark below which keeps building onto my theory that almost anything can drop off node encounters. So far I’ve yet to see anything that is influenced by Elder, Eater, or Exarch so I am guessing that those items are probably limited to bossing or bossing adjacent activities. I have however seen a number of Synthesized and Fractured items below as well as more than a fair number of delve-specific explicit modifiers on items. I only know this because I continue to keep using Awakened POE Trade to price-check anything that looks like it might hold value, which tells me how good the rolls are on a given item and will call out league-specific mechanics.

I am absolutely certain that from this point forward… I want to go into Delve earlier than I did in this league. I am having a freaking ball with my time down there and getting enough currency to be able to fund upgrades to my builds. This is far from a high-yield currency strategy, but it seems reliable and also something that I already enjoy doing. The wide variety of items that I can see is honestly what keeps pushing me forward. I love seeing things that I have yet to see drop, and that happens way more often in Path of Exile than it does in a game like Diablo III. By midseason in D3 I have seen literally everything but Primal Ancient versions of things, and it all sort of blurs into this giant haze of orange text. Sure most of everything that drops is ignorable, but in every round, there is at least one thing that is worth hovering over to check the roll.

The last big thing that I did yesterday was spent some time respeccing my Atlas tree. I was already leaning into Delve a bit, but I removed “Wandering Path” and took all of the notable nodes associated with Niko as well. Basically, in Path of Exile the “trees” are comprised of small nodes often referred to as travel nodes, and big nodes which are referred to as “notables”. Wandering Path is a specific strategy for the Atlas tree which the effectiveness of all of your small travel nodes, but makes it so you get zero benefits from any of the notable nodes. This is great for when you are finishing your Atlas because every map you run will shower you with new maps to fuel your further exploration. However I am getting more than enough “map sustain” through Delve, and I no longer really need it from mapping as such I opted to focus on Strongboxes, Smuggler’s Caches, Ritual Altars, and Delve. I might whittle further into the atlas tree to try and pick back up Essences but for now, I am happy enough.

So essentially I am maining Righteous Fire and focused with it on progression in Delve. I have no clue what I am doing with Summon Raging Spirits in the least, or what I can really do to that build other than shift it to poison. I just am not sure if I care enough about it to fix the problems I am currently having with it. I am getting that old familiar itch of wanting to start something else to play with. I really want to see what the Seismic Trap life is all about, so I might be going down that path at some point soon. I am still periodically playing “BelginnersLuck” as I attempt to get Hillock to drop a unique and am to the point where if I am fast enough I can kill him before he can do the regeneration phase. I am so completely consumed with Path of Exile and all of its deep systems. I have no clue when I will climb back out of this chasm I have dug for myself, but for the moment I am happy.

Digging Too Deep

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Well, my friends, it is far from the morning, and I am finally doing my first proper blog post of the year. Technically, I could have just called this a loss because of the holiday, as this is the day I actually got off officially in lieu of New Year’s day. I guess I should start things off by wishing you all a Happy New Year. My morning was less than fun because I spent it dealing with technical difficulties in my main machine. I finally sorted it out and it was thoroughly dumb, but not before I uninstalled Steam… without remembering to back up all of my games that were on my C drive. This isn’t the end of the world because most of my games were actually on another drive, but it will require me to reinstall a few things. I went completely down the wrong path because the Xbox Game Pass app apparently mounts a bunch of virtual drives and I got super confused sifting through event viewer thinking it was a hard drive failure.

I am still deeply enthralled in Path of Exile and more specifically the Delve mechanic. In past leagues, I had spent a few minutes exploring the dark depths, but never really engaged with it fully. I knew enough that I liked it, but was largely focused on mapping as my key progression path. Instead, I poured my heart and soul this weekend into Delve and made pretty solid currency for me at least. More than enough to fund several key set pieces to improve problems with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. All told since diving into Delve I have produced somewhere in the neighborhood of five divines worth of currency. Granted I have also spent about two divines worth of that same currency righting the ship on my build as well as funding a few upgrades for one of my friends. Suffice it to say I am shocked at just how well it has worked, and I have a feeling in future leagues I will dig down into the ground well before this point if for no reason other than it seems to be a stable source of funds.

For those who have no clue what I am talking about, Delve was a league mechanic from roughly four years ago which involves exploring the depths under Wraeclast for fun and profit. Essentially the cycle involves running maps for Niko to collect Voltaxic Sulphite which you then use to power The Crawler which is essentially an automated tractor-like thing that plods along fixed courses stringing lighting along behind it. Each “camp” presents you with a series of monster spawns and gives you some sort of rewards like gear, divination cards, raw currency, and azurite that is used to upgrade how far you can delve safely and the radius of your light. The light is key because the monsters in the depths take no damage if they are not in some light source, and you eventually take significant damage yourself if you stay in the darkness too long.

Sometimes the rewards are significant, like this node that dropped a who slew of maps including one that was unique and a unique hybrid flask. Other times it might be a few dozen chromatic orbs, but the sheer volume of “bubble gum” currency is large enough that it is very likely you would never run out. Thanks to my adventures in the deep I have recolored several items for folks and even managed to six-link a few things. While it isn’t always going to be exalted orbs or divine orbs… you end up getting enough raw chaos to make the entire journey feel worthwhile. Where the real money that can be made however is selling the delve-specific items like resonators and fossils, though the later you really need to find someone wanting to purchase them in bulk.

Deep down veiled in darkness are a number of interesting things. The only ones that I have really found yet are Vaal Cities, and I have found I think five of them so far. Each node in a Vaal City involves opening up a chamber filled with corrupted monsters and a dozen or so chests full of loot. The above example is from my completing a single Vaal Chamber. All of the mechanics that can spawn in maps, seem to have nodes down in delve as well and I have taken down a number of Harbingers, Beyond spawns, and even some Breach and Abyss nodes. From what I understand as long as I keep expanding the network of tunnels it will keep spawning new nodes to explore off to either the right or left of the central column. In the second screenshot of this blog post, I did some cut/paste work and pieced together a ton of individual screenshots to show how far I have explored one side so far.

All of the currency that I am generating is allowing me to resolve some of the problems I had with my resists and survivability. At this point, I have upgraded most pieces of gear so my next target is likely to go find better quality versions of each unique that I am using. When I cobbled together the build in the first place I bought the cheapest versions of each that I could afford, and now that currency is a little freer and that Poison SRS is the flavor of the week taking some of the pressure of RF Juggernaut prices I might be able to pick up some deals. I had some moments with the build where I doubted if it was my jam, which is ultimately what led me to roll my own SRS-flavored build. Now that I have invested some more currency in the build I am enjoying myself again.

The real question I have though is if I am going to spend any more time investing in the SRS build that I currently have. There are some significant survival problems with my current build-out. My resists are not in a horrible state, so really I think the problem is that I either don’t have enough spell suppression/block or really need some more regeneration and armor. I could pivot my build into the Poison SRS variant, but that would involve a pretty significant investment at this point. I am just not sure if it is worth it considering that I would probably rather be spending currency on Righteous Fire. Summon Raging Spirits however is a much better bossing build, so if I could solve my mapping survival I could probably use it to catapult progress into finishing the major bosses. I guess I need to make a concerted effort to explore my POB and compare it to what I would need to change to pivot over into the Poison variation.

There are other games that I am interested in… but right now Path of Exile is tweaking all of the dopamine centers in my brain. I am going to stay with this ride until it eventually drops me off somewhere a spent husk of a human.