Duelist

Belghast Bleed Bro

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Good Morning Everyone! Yesterday I was off from work, and wound up starting a character that I had been meaning to start. During the Settlers of Kalguur league, they completely reworked the Gladiator Ascendency along with a number of changes that improved melee. As a result, Bleed Gladiator is really freaking good and I’ve been wanting to create one with maxed block chance and recovery on block for a while. I upgraded the shaper shield I had been using on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and plan on using that hand-me-down on this character paired for the time being with a maxrolled Jack, The Axe. If I really love the build I might look at picking up a better itemized Rare weapon but for now the Unique slots in nicely and does not require much in the way of thought.

I’m level 51 and just a little bit of the way into Act 6. I’ve already completed my second Lab, which means that I have a 100% chance to inflict bleeding on hit, all of my bleeds are treated as aggravated damage, and when something dies that has been bleeding it causes a nice explosion. While I am a bit on the squishy side for now, at least until I go block-based… I am dealing stupid amounts of damage. Pretty much everything gets one shot. For now, I am largely a Bleed Sunder build following the tree from Zizaran’s league starter video, but at some point, I am going to pivot into something more along the lines of this. Zizaran is really focused on right-side builds and right-side defenses, and I am personally way more comfortable on the left side of the tree and as such I plan on pivoting in that direction. I will likely wear a lot of Armor/Evasion gear but plan on taking Iron Reflexes to convert all of that to Armor. I’ve personally never found Spell Suppression to be that amazing of a defensive layer but I know Ziz loves it and as such his build goes for 100%.

In other news, I have now maxed out my town and have upgraded everything that can be upgraded. This means I will no longer be draining large chunks of gold at once for upgrade purposes. I did another one of my Photoshop jobs showing everything sitting at rank 11. The only thing that is not ranked to 11 is the recombinator but it caps out at a much lower level. The big thing that I need to do still is go shopping for workers and upgrade some of the options I currently have available to me. I also need stupid amounts of ore, and I kind of wish there was some atlas support to increase the amount of ore you get from mapping. I am growing crops at a good rate, but I always feel like I am out of ore.

They released a patch on the 13th and it has been a bit on the controversial side. Namely this specific block:

Reworked how shipping Thaumaturgic Dust affects Shipping Risk and Rewards. Previously, it was multiplying the shipment value and having a disproportionately high impact on risk compared to rewards. Now, it simply adds to Shipment Value and scales the amount of rewards based on the other goods being shipped. This means the way Thaumaturgic Dust affects Shipment Value/Risk now directly correlates with the amount of rewards you will receive, and in almost all cases this is a buff from before.

In my experience, this has been true. Folks who had previously worked out some system other than what I have been doing… it is apparently not true. This seems to negatively impact folks who were shipping massive shipments. For the most part, I have shipped some items that were requested… maybe 1000 of each, then 55 of each other crop, and 8300 Thaumaturgic Dust. So far this seems to bring reasonable rewards and over the last few days, I have pulled four Divine Orbs doing this. It is very much not an every shipment sort of thing, but maybe one in three or one in four shipments. I might simply have hit a lucky streak of “Bel Luck” as my friends call it, but whatever the case it seems to be good.

The thing that I have noticed however is a massive increase in interdictions. During the entirety of this league until the patch, I had only seen a single instance where the Pirate Admiral waylayed my crews. Since the patch, I have fought him five more times. Don’t get me wrong I largely consider this to be a huge net positive because it is a fairly easy fight, and worth a huge chunk of gold. However, there are a lot of folks who are not terribly amused by this. The biggest problem is that if for some reason you disconnect in the middle of one of these interdiction fights, you lose your entire crew. You only get a single portal and when you disconnect it counts the encounter as failing and the fail condition is always that it is 100% wipe of the team that was abducted. This is especially tragic for folks who have a maxed-out crew of map runners. For me… none of my workers are terribly min-maxed so it would suck but not that much.

A lot of my focus right now is knocking out the low-hanging fruit when it comes to League Challenges. At the moment I am sitting at 21 of 40, and there are a number that would not be terribly awful to complete. Just mapping will eventually finish Overwhelming Opposition and Peddler’s Produce requires me to either craft a Grasping Mail or a Loreweave… both of which I have a tab full of rings for and it is only a matter of time before I complete one or the other. I am still missing a Doryani’s Machinarium map, but when one drops I can finish off Remarkable Realms. Sublime Starlight is doable but requires me to craft a bunch of enchants that are largely going to be throwaways, the hardest being Power Runes which are currently going for almost 4 Divine Orbs each. The cheapest enchants take at least three of them as well as a bunch of other runes. So for shipping purposes, I am probably going to focus on running things back and forth between Kalguurian ports for the chance at getting runes.

All told I am still having a lot of fun with the league, but I definitely feel like I am in the mindset of trying to wrap things up and get as far as I can before I lose steam. I want to push up the Gladiator today and see how fun of a build it ends up being. I am looking forward to the shift over to Lacerate of Haemoragging, which honestly I should chuck into a spare gear slot to start leveling now.

Explosive Arrow Champion

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Good Morning Friends! I seem to have made yet another character in Path of Exile, this time I went down the rabbit hole of the Explosive Arrow Champion. I created a brand new duelist after work on Friday evening and by Sunday mid-day I had finished the storyline, assembled some gear, and was actively farming Tier 16 maps. It was a bit of a whirlwind leveling process, but in truth, I could have gone much faster if I actually wanted to. I spent a few hours putting on levels during Blood Aqueducts in Act 9 largely to allow me to sort out my gearing before making the final push for Kitava. This is yet another one of my thought experiments and serves largely as a way of testing my knowledge of the game to this point. During my Ghosts of Leagues Past post from last month, I talked about struggling in the Sentinel league with this build and then going back in this league and realizing that I had no clue how to layer defenses.

I know I have talked about POE.Ninja before in the context of it being the neutral arbiter of prices in the Path of Exile economy. However, I do not think I have talked about it as being a central clearing house for high-end player profiles. You can go out there and see exactly how active players are building their characters so for example if I wanted to look at a Champion playing Explosive Arrow I can easily narrow my search to that. It is very clear that the Champion variant of this build is not exactly “in meta” given that only 11% of Champions are using that ability and only 34% of players using Explosive Arrow are Champions. The vast majority currently seem to be playing Occultist as their ascendency, but for this thought experiment, I wanted to recreate the conditions of my very first attempt at playing a league character.

I can’t say that I followed any single guide in its entirety. I largely leveled my Champion as Caustic Rain and then shifted to Toxic Rain when that became available, and then finally around act four shifted my ballista totems over to explosive arrow. There are a handful of guides out there that I sifted through over on the official forums and poe vault but this one is probably the one I drew the most inspiration from. Even then I spent a good deal of time sifting through builds on POE.Ninja to see what players were actually using as their final setup at level 100. At this point “Belsplosions” is only level 78, so still missing a number of easy points but feels extremely good. I remember balking at Zizaran calling this build “tanky” but now I realize that I just did not understand enough of the fundamentals of Path of Exile to be able to build it in that manner.

While leveling I held off on a few key notables until I had assembled something resembling my final gear state. Essentially I did not want to mess with Elemental Equilibrium until I was finished gearing and could guarantee that I was dealing no fire damage with my totems other than the explosion. Essentially now my totems deal Cold, Lightning, and Chaos damage and then the explosion of course deals Fire Damage after having been debuffed against it. For defenses I am sitting at 79% Evasion, 82% damage reduction from armor, and 100% spell suppression chance which when combined with the Cheat Death mechanic built into Champion “First To Strike, Last to Fall” which heals me 25% of my life anytime I reach “low life” and my cast on damage taken setup for Immortal Call… it takes an awful lot to kill me. My major weakness however is the fact that I currently only have roughly 3200 life, which I need to solve at some point.

As far as gameplay goes it feels extremely smooth. I have a hextouch setup with mirage archer, frenzy, and greater multiple projectiles that keeps up my fenzy stacks while cursing enemies with flammability while also running around and constantly dropping my six Explosive Arrow totems. If things seem to be taking a while to die I drop an Arcanist’s Brand with Flame Surge and Infernal Cry which covers them in ash and blankets them in burning ground. This is mostly a bossing and metamorph thing but I occasionally also throw it into a large pack just to help whittle it down a bit faster. While the time delay of the explosive arrow doesn’t feel as good as say Toxic Rain for full screen clears it still feels good. I am not sure how many maps I ran last night, but I turned on my auto screenshots while doing a Crimson Temple to snag some screenshots.

As far as the gear I am wearing… it is a mix of a bunch of exceptionally cheap items and a handful of items that cost me over a divine. Firstly there was the Rain of Splinters Gem, which for a pretty nicely rolled one was 1 Divine Orb by itself. Then there was my crafted bow… which cost 1 Divine Orb as part of the crafting process… and then roughly another Divine trying to get it six-linked and in the correct colors. I didn’t get EXACTLY the colors I wanted… but I decided to call it good enough because I was tired of trying to buy Chromatic Orbs through the Bulk Trade site. In a perfect world I would have not done this out of order… and gotten the colors correctly by bench crafting sockets on the item rather than trying to brute force it at the end with Chromatics. Other than the Bow and the Unique Jewel… I have maybe 80 Chaos in the entire character. I had the Dyadian Dawn laying around but you can pick up one at least as good as the one I am using for 1-2 Chaos Orbs.

Basically, this little thought experiment worked. It proved to me that I understand enough about defensive layers at this point to be able to revisit a character of mine from past leagues that absolutely did not work… and make it fully functional. I feel like my days of questioning whether or not I was choosing poorly when it came to a league start are behind me now. I feel like I should be able to make ANY character in the future work knowing what I know now. I am not sure how to fully express how good that feels. Path of Exile is this insurmountable climb when you are at the bottom staring up at the summit filled with people zooming through maps seemingly immortal. While I still have quite the climb ahead of me… I at least see the path and am confident that I am not going to go over the edge and plummet into the valley below.

This of course means I am contemplating doing other dumb things. Wintertide Brand is an ability that I have loved in the past, and would really like to see if I can make a build work for it. The play of choice seems to be Occultist as most of the folks playing a pure Wintertide Brand build seem to be going with that ascendency. The big challenge will be to see if I can reverse engineer something resembling a viable POB from the various profiles I have access to. I am contemplating turning my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer into a Cold Dot Wintertide Occultist, and then liquidating the gear that I no longer need for that build. This could force me down a path of a side project I had already been working on… which is to find a Champion Kite Shield with the node that allows you to sell it for a Unique… aka Aegis Aurora. I am not sure if I am going down this path of madness yet.. but knowing me… this is probably a thing that I am going to do at some point.

As for why I am still seemingly so easily amused by Path of Exile Crucible league… even when I don’t really love the league mechanic itself? Who knows! I am going with it until my brain decides that it is no longer getting enjoyment from this process. I hope you all have a most wonderful week and for me… I am hoping mine is more tolerable than the last few.