Explosive Arrow

Crucible in Review

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Good Morning Friends! The Crucible Challenge league is coming to a close in Path of Exile and I thought I would spend some time this morning talking about the various builds I played. The crucible mechanic itself was a bit cumbersome and lackluster unless you were willing to go extremely deep into the system and attempt to craft the perfect tree. I was not willing to do this, but I did interact with it at a very surface level. This was the league of completely insane builds that we will likely never see again, in part due to the crucible weapon tree allowing for some complete nonsense. The fact that there were nodes that allowed an item to vendor for a unique version of that item base, led to drops in prices of things like the Aegis Aurora selling at one point for as cheap as 60 Chaos instead of the usual 1-2 Divines.

What this did do was cause me to set up several tabs where I just chucked bases that I cared about into them… and then when I was bored or looking for something to do I would run maps and reveal trees. The problem with this plan however is that it was EXTREMELY rare that I went through a map and did not get one of the bases that I cared about to drop… so my supply never seemed to deplete. I should probably spend the next few days unlocking the trees that I already have revealed that sell for currency. Essentially I spent a lot of time fishing for a better tree to them try and merge with my assorted weapons… and never really had much luck. I think this was probably better for map blasters than someone like me who tended to favor Heist and Delve… two league mechanics without Crucible forges.

Crucible was easily my most active League and during it, I completed a large number of builds. I have to be honest… this is maybe my favorite part of Path of Exile. I like trying different things, given that there are so many years worth of content and so many skill gems that I have never really explored. More than anything this league was a bit of a redemption arc for characters that I had tried in the past and never really managed to get working. The only problem with trying out a bunch of different builds is that I never really elevated any of them as far as they could really go… before shifting gears and trying something else. I guess let’s review some of the builds that I played in this league.

Righteous Fire Juggernaut

Another relatively new thing about this league is that I recorded a lot of short videos talking about various builds. I’ve recorded several with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but here is one where I did some delving which is honestly how I spent most of my time on this build. Righteous Fire and more specifically the Juggernaut variant is just one of those comfy builds. You end up being super tanky and can mostly laugh off most incoming damage. I managed to clear 3 of the 4 Void Stones on this character and make it all of the way through mapping without much issue. I never really took this build as far as it could go because I essentially needed to complete the swap from Fire Trap on the pseudo-six-link helm to my six-link body armor and I never really wanted to mess with recoloring my Brass Dome. Additionally in a true endgame variant, I would have figured out a way to make myself ailment immune without Purity of Elements.

That said the version that I ended up with felt extremely good and served as my pillar for pretty much all of the rest of my shenanigans last league. I love this so much that even though I am not planning on starting Righteous Fire… it is pretty much a given that I will end up building one for delving. Here are the details behind the build.

Toxic Rain Ballista Pathfinder

This is the first build in what I call my redemption arc of past builds. I had tried a few versions of Toxic Rain during the Sanctum league, and never really landed on something that I enjoyed. Mostly what I landed on was that I had been trying to convert to Toxic Rain a bit early for my tastes and that in past iterations I was not running both Toxic Rain as a self-cast ability and on Totems. Additionally, I have learned that I really hate Focused Totem Support, because I do not want to be responsible for triggering my totems. Sure Focused Totems are a clear dps win, but you also lose the quality of life of not having to constantly aim them in order to get anything from them. I had a lot of fun with this character, but the negative with a Pathfinder is the reliance on constantly hitting your life flask to keep your regeneration rolling.

I am not sure if I specifically followed any single build guide, but probably the most comprehensive version available is the one that Zizaran produces for each league. This is really the build where I discovered POE.Ninja and their Builds section and I was able to compare and contrast a bunch of successful Toxic Rain builds in order to land on something that felt good to me. Admittedly this is sort of a more advanced process, but learning that I could adapt builds to fit my needs was a real game changer for me.

Explosive Summon Raging Spirits

One of the things that I love about Diablo-style ARPGs is how getting a specific item that drops… often generates a desire to build around it. In my travels on my RF Juggernaut, I stumbled across a helmet with four gems on it… Burning Damage, Concentrated Effect, Minion Damage, and Minion Life. After spending a chunk of the Sanctum league playing a Summon Raging Spirits build… I had this desire to build around this helm and more specifically pivot into Minion Instability with a Fire Explosive Raging Spirits build. For the most part, this worked well, but as is the case with many of my builds… I was unwilling to focus on it enough to really sand off some of the rough edges. This could have been a great build on its own and would have been perfect cromulent as a main build. Its critical flaw… is that Toxic Rain and Righteous Fire were just better. Unfortunately, this character no longer exists in this state, because I recycled it into a later build.

There really is not a direct guide that I followed, but again spent a lot of time on POE.Ninja looking at other Summon Raging Spirits builds that utilized Minion Instability. If you want to go down this path, I did find a decent enough guide you could follow.

Explosive Arrow Ballista Champion

This is another build in my redemption arc because the very first time I attempted to follow a guide was back in the Sentinel League and attempting to play Explosive Arrow. I had no idea what I was doing, and going back earlier this league and looking at my old characters… it was painfully obvious. I had no real defensive strategy and made zero effort in attempting to cap my resistances. So knowing what I know now… I wanted to make an attempt at creating a better version of this character. Originally I thought maybe Zizaran’s definition of “Tanky” just did not match my definition of that word. Turns out no… Explosive Arrow Champion is EXCEPTIONALLY Tanky… almost to the point of being similar in feel to my RF Juggernaut. I had so much fun with this character, and unfortunately… it RAPIDLY eclipsed my Toxic Rain Pathfinder in the amount of time I spent on it. This is the build that I most associate with Zizaran, so of course I would suggest someone following his guides. If you have any questions however with this build or any of the other ones I have talked about… my comms are always open.

Wintertide Brand Occultist

On the ultimate redemption arc build… we have Wintertide Brand Occultist. Back during the Sentinel League, I made an attempt at following Pohx’s guide for the Righteous Fire Inquisitor. However, I stopped short… and pivoted into undiscovered territory when I decided that I really liked Wintertide Brand. This led me to try Storm Brand for my Kalandra league starter, to mixed experiences but it also started a mental obsession with wondering what a proper Wintertide Brand build would feel like. So this League I decided to repurpose my Explosive SRS Necromancer and respec it into a Wintertide Brand Occultist. The only negative about this build is that I tried to do it on the most shoestring budget ever… which meant that I reused as much gear as I thought I could get away with from the previous build. The end result… works shockingly well and quite honestly in the time that has passed since I recorded the above video… I have gotten much better at playing it. I spent a good chunk of last night zipping through Tier 16 Red Maps with a decent amount of juice applied and it performs like a champ.

I honestly considered just league starting this build for Ancestor League, it is that stable. With enough attention and focus, I think I could resolve any of the existing survival issues. Namely, I need a lot more block but levels and investing in some good jewels for my passive tree would solve that. Sadly I don’t really have a guide for you to follow. The only thing I can truly provide is my POB. I pieced this build together on my own by looking at a bunch of folks who were doing something similar on POE.Ninja. Wintertide Brand is sort of an offshoot of the much more popular Cold Dot Elementalist.

Armageddon Brand Scion

My Sixth build of the league was extremely haphazard and a bit of a mess. I normally do not care about Achievements in video games but for some reason… I do in Path of Exile. There is an achievement for killing Dominus in Act 3 with every base class in the game, and the fact I had never done this with a Scion was bugging me. So I rolled a Holy Flame Totem/Flame Wall Scion entirely with the purpose of killing Dominus, and after doing this… I mostly felt fine with walking away from that character. As the league wore on, and I was feeling the itch to play some more Path of Exile I dusted this character off and made a pivot from Totems to Brands, and decided to roll with an Armageddon Brand setup. I successfully got it up to maps, and with enough time and investment, I could have probably made this an enjoyable character.

However one of the lessons I have learned… is it is okay to walk away from a character because it is relatively trivial to run up another character. I actually enjoy leveling through the contents and I find the process of “building” a character to be extremely therapeutic. Unfortunately, again there is ZERO guide here, and mostly just a lot of me winging it as I went and searching the passive tree for anything that I thought might be useful that I could path to easily. Do I suggest anyone follow my character? Hell no. Do I really like Armageddon Brand and want to give that ability a proper redemption arc in the future? Hell yes.

Lightning Arrow Raider

Now we get to what is technically my eighth build of the league. There is a Righteous Fire Inquisitor that I never finished because I decided that I really do not love the Inquisitor variant of that build and will probably always choose Juggernaut. Essentially this was my first time doing a “league start test” where I tried out a build to determine if I wanted to play it at the launch of the Ancestor League on Friday. I had noticed over the last few leagues that there are a lot of folks who play some variant of Lighting Arrow as a league starter, because reportedly it requires no gear to function. After playing it I can in fact verify that it does not require much in the way of gear and can map on four-links. The most popular variant of this is played with a Deadeye and is exceptionally squishy. I opted to go for a way less common variant that uses a Raider that is significantly less squishy… but also is nowhere near anything I would consider “tanky”.

I am league-starting this because I really enjoy leveling on a Ranger, and also… I really want to do some of the content that is facilitated by having a character that can explode an entire screen at once. I know at some point I will crave a tanky character to do some delve or similar meaty content… but I am looking forward to seeing how the mapping phase goes with this character. I managed to survive low-tier red maps without any investment and only some minimal bench crafting to at least partially solve my resistances. My goal is to see how far I can get without touching the trade league to help solve my problems, and mostly turn this into my mapper for the league. The nice thing about Ranger is that I will be able to pivot into a bunch of popular builds if I decide I get tired of Lightning Arrow.

Final Thoughts

While Crucible as a league mechanic was a bit “bleh” in that it didn’t really give me a fun repeatable activity that made currency… the “sandbox” state of the game was phenomenal. It is easily my favorite league of the four I have played thus far, but largely because this is the league where I felt like I finally grasped some of the nuances of this game. Of the builds that I tried this league… I would absolutely play RF Jugg, some form of Toxic Rain, Explosive Arrow, Wintertide Brand, and some form of Armageddon Brand build again. Probably my favorite build would be the Wintertide Brand Occultist because as time has gone on in the league I have played it more and more as my “not RF Jugg” build. Wintertide Brand just feels cool and adding in all the other cold dot mechanics feels super satisfying.

As we go into the Ancestor league I have a handful of builds that I want to try a make happen:

  • Poison Summon Raging Spirits Juggernaut – This is a staple of hardcore and I am curious if I can make a version that feels tanky enough to do delve. It is simple enough to pivot into Righteous Fire if it doesn’t work out.
  • Shockwave Totems – I still want to find a totem build that I enjoy, and since Shockwave Totems wrecked Sanctum the first time around… I am curious about this one as maybe a Hierophant build.
  • Exsanguinate/Reap – I played seismic totems for a bit during Sanctum, and I really liked Exsanguinate far more than I liked the actual Seismic totems. I know there are versions of this build that use Juggernaut for Hardcore, and others that use Scion for Softcore. I want to research this and try and make one that feels good.
  • Something with Cyclone – I love Whirlwind and its spin-to-win play style. Righteous Fire sort of scratches a bit of this itch of being able to just roll over the top of your enemies. I do however want to try and figure out a way to build around Cyclone and make it feel enjoyable… maybe a cold conversion.
  • Armageddon Brand – I enjoyed Arma Brand enough with the Scion to try and give it a redemption arc. I figure this is probably going to be best played with either Hierophant or Elementalist, but will need to do some research.

This is one of the things that I love about Path of Exile is that I always have projects within projects. I know for example that I will likely create stash tabs devoted to each of these ideas so that as I find gear that might be useful I can start gathering it up while I am playing my league starter. I sincerely doubt that many of you are going to make it down to this point in the blog post because this one is pretty massive. If you have, however, thanks for sticking around even though I tend to get hyper-focused and obsessed with a single game at a time. This has become more of a thing the older I have gotten.

Anyways I hope you have a most excellent day and I will see you tomorrow for more nonsense.

Forever Winging It

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Good Morning Friends. Yesterday in the AggroChat Slack there was this whole thread about growing up in the gifted and talented program, but also being just “gifted” enough to fully understand your own inadequacies. I felt this so damned hard because this is essentially the story of my life. I was on the mediocre end of the gifted pool and while I participated in all of the elevated events, and was actually good enough at the academic bowl to place in the district banquet and force the horrible football coach to have to accept an award on my behalf… I never really felt good enough to actually be recognized as such. For most of my life, I have been “winging it” and bumblefucked my way into the occasional success. Take for example this cosmetic outfit that I am wearing on my Explosive Arrow Champion. There was no real planning here, just me clicking on a few random cosmetics because I hate the default look of low-level gear in Path of Exile. By sheer accident, I came up with something that I really love, which is this whole microcosm of my life as a whole. Any real success that I have had… has been purely by accident.

I know yesterday I released this entire blog post talking about my experiences from the Diablo IV Server Slam weekend. Yesterday I decided that I wanted to refine those thoughts a bit and opted to do so in a video of me playing around on my Scion in Path of Exile. Something that I have noticed about myself is that often when I sit down to write about something, it causes me to re-evaluate that topic in my head. This video is largely the place I arrived at after writing an entire blog post about the experience. It allowed me to really refine my thoughts into a sharper point and get to the crux of what my primary problem with the game is. I decided to skip the clever title card and just go with something way more honest. If you want to hear me ramble on for fifteen minutes about the core of my frustrations feel free. But I will skip to the chase and tell you that ultimately it boils down to the level scaling feeling really bad.

In the video, I am poking around at a new character that I have been leveling that I called BelGlamrock mostly because the default Scion appearance looks like an outfit straight out of the hair metal band era. The weird thing about this character is that I honestly have no real intention of ever gearing it fully or turning it into a real character for playing the game. Truth be told, I am not sure if I really like the Scion as a starter class at all. It feels kind of directionless, but I guess that makes sense given it doesn’t have a fixed starter location on the passive tree. The benefit of the class is that you can mix and match the ascendency style of the other classes and build a sort of hybrid to do very specific things. This also feels like the weakness of the class because it doesn’t really have an identity of its own.

Ultimately I have accomplished what I set out to accomplish with the character. It was a means to an end and the fact that I had never gotten the achievement for killing Dominus on the Scion bugged me for some reason. I don’t fully understand why I have been motivated to get specific achievements in Path of Exile given that I have never really been an achievement-focused person in any other games. Generally speaking, the only achievements that I spend time on, are the ones that give me something tangible as a reward. This is in part why I have enjoyed the Achievement structure of Guild Wars 2 because almost always they end in some sort of interesting tangible reward. My drive to get achievements in Path of Exile however completely flies in the face of my well-established patterns. I get nothing from having knocked these out other than the sense of checking something off a long list of achievements that I have yet to complete. Similarly, I have this irrational desire to run two characters through Act 2, just to side with the Bandits I have never sided with before in order to knock that achievement as well.

Speaking of achievements, I am nearing 19 league challenges which will give me another sad little totem pole for my hideout. In order to finish this off I respeccced my Atlas Passive tree to drop support for incursion and pile on some of the Abyss nodes. I realize that Abyss is not exactly great in this league, but I am pretty close to knocking out the challenge associated with it. Essentially I need to find several more 4 pit Abysses and I think by trying to force the chance of seeing an Abyssal Depths… it will cause this to happen. In the grand scheme of things I really like Abyss as a mechanic, but it does feel way less rewarding than it did before their most recent revamp. I am going to be running maps anyways to build up sulphite for delving so I might as well be getting the mechanics I need for challenges in the process. I also have a stockpile of abyss scarabs that I can use to force it as well.

I am not entirely certain what my exit strategy is for this league. I’ve still not earned my last two void stones, so given the state my Explosive Arrow Champion is in, I might lend some focus to that. I’ve tried to accumulate the fragments needed for shaper and ultimately uber elder organically, but that is really slow going. I am wondering if I should just use some of my war chest of resources and buy the fragments that I need outright. I still find Delve deeply relaxing but also I am starting to feel a little listless there. I’ve taken down three crystal kings in recent days and failed to get a good amulet, but even if I did get a good one… what exactly would I do with it? I am not sure there are other builds that I really want to spend time doing given that in this league I have made four completely functional builds for doing the various content that I really want to be doing.

I think maybe when I finish up this 19th challenge for the league I might take a bit of a break. I can do so happy that I accomplished pretty much everything that I really wanted to accomplish save for the Uber bosses. I might take a run at those, but to be honest… I don’t really love bossing in the first place. I like the big loot explosions that come from lower tiers of activities and I can’t really bring myself to buy an endless supply of fragments from the trade league in order to chain-run bosses. I might want to do some more heist and burn down my contracts a bit, but other than that… I think I can maybe put the Crucible league to bed for awhile.

Deeply Enjoying Explosions

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Good Morning Friends! Welcome back to more of my Path of Exile nonsense. Hopefully, you enjoyed the brief intermission of cats, but unfortunately, I am still knee-deep in this season and have more things to say about it. Crucible as a whole has been a bit of a weird experience because the season mechanic is a bit of a dud. Sure you can do some wild things with the talent trees on weapons and shields, but you either need deep pockets to outright buy finished weapons from the trade league or an unlimited amount of time and patience to sift through the piles of utter crap trees to craft one that is even halfway decent.

This is a video from Spicy Sushi… which is an hour and six-minute long highlight reel of an over ten-hour long stream where he attempted to craft a mirror tier Elemental Bow by combining various Crucible Trees to get a perfect path of five nodes. Of note… a good chunk of this stream features someone else leveling bows looking for the nodes he needs and then feeding them to him directly… and then later outright buying bows from the trade league that has the stats he is needing when that person goes to bed. The sheer amount of work required to force your way into a perfect crucible tree is completely unfathomable and during ALL of that time… there is still no real loot to speak of associated with the Crucible mechanic encounters. So it is not shocking that most players are just hard “hoping” out of the content and instead focusing on what is maybe the best “standard” league state that the game has had so far.

For my part, I am loving where things are going with my Explosive Arrow Champion build. I’ve said this a few times in various conversations, but had I experienced the level of enjoyment that I am having now back in Sentinel League, it might have been this class that I bonded with as the best league starter rather than Righteous Fire Juggernaut. Nothing will ever be as “tanky” as my Juggernaut, but that strength comes with the weakness of being relatively slow to progress through similarly tanky content. I now fully understand why Zizaran was such a huge fan of this build, because once crafted correctly it really is an extremely tanky feeling character… with the caveat being tanky for DPS purposes and not the Juggernaut style of “I can just stand in everything”. I still need to be cautious and dodge mechanics that I don’t need to take. I also need to spend some time sorting out what I want as my pantheon tree… because I’ve not even devoted any effort to that. I would also like to figure out a way to become ailment immune at some point… but for now, I can rip through T16 maps and happily farm up sulphite for my delving expeditions on the Juggernaut.

When I recorded the last video with my EA Champion, there were some heavy caveats to that video. Firstly the character was effectively three days old and as such was only level 78 and had not a single gem leveled all the way to 20 or higher. Secondly being 78 means I was missing a ton of passive nodes, and when I built the character I tended to lean more heavily toward defensive ability rather than DPS ability just to make the leveling process easier. The end result was a competent character at T16 maps but a bit of a slow one. Last night I recorded an update video showing off what it feels like today now that I have recolored my bow, swapped out for some awakened gems, and also put on thirteen levels worth of passive points. The difference is quite remarkable and as I invest more points into a cluster jewel setup I think it is only going to get better over time.

More specifically the Large and Medium Clusters that I am going for should provide me the following traits.

  • Tempered Arrowheads
    • Bow Skills have +6% to Damage Over Time Multiplier
    • Bow Skills have 10% increased Skill Effect Duration
    • 10% increased Duration of Ailments inflicted while wielding a Bow
  • Calamitous
    • 10% chance to Freeze, Shock, and Ignite
    • 30% increased Elemental Damage with Attack Skills
    • 15% increased Effect of Non-Damaging Ailments
  • Martial Prowess
    • 20% increased Attack Damage
    • 6% increased Attack Speed
    • 15% increased Global Accuracy Rating
    • 20% increased Damage with Ailments from Attack Skills
  • Blowback
    • 10% chance to Ignite
    • Ignites you inflict deal Damage 8% faster
  • Cooked Alive
    • 15% chance to Ignite
    • Enemies Ignited by you have -5% to Fire Resistance

Currently, I have the first three online in my build and they are active in the video above. The next passive point will allow me to slot my medium cluster jewel and then the next several after that should give me Blowback and Cooked Alive. I have no clue if I am reading Path of Building correctly, but it seems like this is easily my highest-damage build so far. In the grand scheme of things, EA Champ seems to be a happy medium between the feel of my Toxic Rain Pathfinder and my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. If I devoted the resources to scaling either of those they could easily do a good deal more damage than they currently do… but I am able to deal that level of damage while also feeling extremely sturdy.

As happy as I am with the current state of the Path of Exile sandbox… I think I still want to see where exactly Diablo IV is at. This weekend there is a big “Sever Slam” event where they are trying to stress test the servers and show off some of the changes that they made in the game since the last round of beta. For me… this is going to essentially be the last chance of this game to really grab me. I did not really enjoy my time playing the open beta, and my hope is that the gameplay feels a bit more punchy and fast-paced than it did the last time around. I am not holding my breath, but this weekend I am going to be at least giving it a shot. Since I played Barbarian and Necromancer last go-round, I will probably play the same two classes so I can compare and contrast how it feels.

Tomorrow I am taking the day off, not necessarily for D4 but because my wife has the day off. I am still not sure if I will feel the desire to blog in the morning… so if this is the last you hear from me this week I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and a wonderful mothers day.

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.