Good Morning Friends! It is another morning and another post about assorted Path of Exile nonsense. Last night I managed to get up to the point of fighting the Searing Exarch and the Eater of Worlds, which means I am effectively at the same point I closed out the last league with two void stones collected. I made attempts at Uber Elder but failed miserably in the last league. Effectively to get the next two void stones I will need to beat Uber Elder and then take down Maven with her memory game. I remember limping across the finish line in both Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds last league, but I defeated both without taking any deaths this time around.
I think the key difference is that my defenses are just much stronger this league than they were last. I am sitting at 90% fire resistance which combined with the rest of my defensive layers allowed me to just stand in most of the mechanics during the Searing Exarch. There is a phase in the fight where you have to dodge a bunch of incoming fireballs. I was too busy paying attention to the fight to take a screenshot, but here is one that I found online. In my current defensive posture… I could just stand there and ignore the fireballs entirely letting them hit me and explode without taking anywhere close to fatal damage. I figure if enough of them had hit me directly at the same time it might have knocked me out, but I at least dodged around enough to make sure I was only getting hit by one or two at a time.
The best-laid plans sometimes fail miserably… and for me, it was the fact that I thought I would be able to use the “no life modifiers” passive with my Brass Dome. It turns out that the negative life modifier of losing health from strength… knocks that chest piece out of the running. This means in order to use it… I am just going to lose some regeneration and total life. Here is what my defenses look like after the swap of some gear around losing some overcap fire res, some raw regeneration, and some raw health… but gaining permanent 90% physical damage reduction and crit immunity. In truth it isn’t really something that I notice so long as I am not eating some sort of degeneration effect, and across the board I just feel like my health bar almost never moves.
While making some gear swaps, I decided to get myself a budget pseudo-six-link helm. Traditionally for this play, you want level 20 Burning Damage and Concentrated Effect, but those helms are a bit out of my price range with the worst options sitting around 2 Divine Orbs and the best option available at 50. What I did instead is go for the arguably worse but still valid Less Duration, and I was able to pick up the helm shown above for 5 Chaos Orbs. I had to adjust sockets, chrome, and link it but I did so easily with the bench craft socket recipe. This gear swap takes the damage calculation in POB for my Fire Trap from just under 500 DPS to right at 1 million DPS. This was immediately noticeable and since I only really use Fire Trap during burn phases or while circle-strafing a boss… the spammy nature of less duration doesn’t really bother me.
One of the things I do each league is set aside the first white socketed weapons that I get for the purpose of “muling” gems in my secondary weapon slots. Last league I found a six-socketed white staff which was nice, and this time around I happened upon a pair of 3 socketed one-handed maces. It doesn’t really matter what you use, but I find white sockets handy for swapping up whatever gems I happen to want to level. Yesterday I finished my first project which was leveling 6 Righteous Fire gems to 20… doing the vendor recipe to swap them for 20% quality level 1 gems… and then level them again and corrupt them. I lucked out and managed to get 2 of the level 21 20% quality gems that I was seeking, and now have started “muling” some Fire Trap gems to hopefully do the same. I could in theory just buy the damned things, but this is simple enough and I kill more than enough mobs to level the gems pretty efficiently.
I think the next big project for me is to try and find a Sceptre base with a good Crucible tree… and then attempt to craft myself something with +1 gems and all of the assorted fire stats that I care about. Before then I might be shopping for some slightly better resist rings and attempting to use those to gain some more health and regeneration. Now that I understand the basics of a build, I am finding I enjoy the little project aspect of the game as I try and improve various weaknesses of my build. Right now I am trying to figure out how to deal more damage without giving up the tanky nature that I crave so much.