gameplay

Minion Guardian is Phenomenal

by

Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s more heavy topic, we are returning to my regularly scheduled Path of Exile nonsense. This morning I am revisiting the Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build because quite honestly… this might be my favorite build of the league. I will always love Righteous Fire for its chill delving potential… but Guardian SRS sorta rips. This has become my swiss army knife character for doing all of the content that is perfectly fine on RF, but just a bit slower because that build is not exactly a damage-dealing powerhouse. When I recorded a video earlier this week I had reached a point where I was mostly staying in T13/T14s because T16s felt a bit rippy. Since then I have learned that after a dozen levels… I can do pretty much even the worst modded T16 map and be able to accept a slew of bad Searing Exarch altar mods to boot.

So this morning I recorded a very quick 9-minute reprisal video showing off what the build looks like doing a simple Rare 5-Mod T16 map. I get stacked with a number of time-consuming league mechanics like Syndicate, Expedition, and Ritual… so I mostly avoid these to keep the video run time short. I promise however that I have zero problem with any league mechanics on this character. Even Legion feels great as my army of tiny skulls can spread out and break out all of the frozen encounters. I still mostly zoom around looking for clusters of boxes, but in the end I will have broken out most of the encounters during the time limit.

Legitimately… pending Grinding Gear Games does nothing to screw up this build by the time 3.23 releases… this might end up being a phenomenal league starter. This is still lagging behind Necromancer significantly with only 519 characters cataloged by POE.Ninja running the combination of Guardian Ascendancy and Summon Raging Spirits. Conversely, almost 3000 characters are running Summon Raging Spirits with the Necromancer Witch Ascendancy. Across the board in the Ancestor Trade league, only 2% of players that have been cataloged are running any form of Guardian. I do sort of wonder when the zeitgeist is going to realize how strong this build really is… and adopt it en masse like they did Poison SRS a few leagues ago. The thing is… this build requires ZERO specialized gear to work. The uniques I am running are all nice to haves and you could run this with trash yellow gear without any issue. This is evidenced by the fact that SRS Guardian is currently the most popular build in Ruthless.

Now that my SRS Guardian is essentially a “solved problem”, I’ve shifted my focus back to my Storm Brand Inquisitor. I am working on this to make it feel better, but honestly… its survival is currently sort of shit. I’ve failed at the second Labyrinth several times now. I have an inventory full of better gear that just needs levels to equip, so this might be one of those characters that I make it all the way to the second Kitava fight without having done any of my ascendancies. The first ascendancy that gave me consecrated ground any time I am stationary has helped, but not enough to make up for the fact that I just get wrecked anytime something makes contact with me.

I remember this build being frustrating the first time I played it, and quite honestly… if I ever get the inkling to play a brand build in the future I think I will likely stick to Wintertide. I remember having a lot of survival issues during Kalandra with this build around the same level range I am in currently. I am shifting what I can for the moment, but essentially I am just death-zerging my way through some of the encounters. I need levels so I can start equipping the correct items for the build, at which point I think my damage output will make up for my tissue paper defenses. The entire purpose of playing this character was to give it a bit of a redemption arc… but I gotta say… I still feel like this build is sorta shit. I am sure it will be fine once I get some proper gear on it and can fix my defenses but ugh… this is a bad build to league start. My assessment of it back then was not super generous and even knowing what I know now… I still feel like it is an awful leveling experience.

All of that said… I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with at least two of my four league characters. Righteous Fire Juggernaut is always a winner, and SRS Guardian is so much better than I thought it would be. Now I have to admit… part of me wants to play something with the Chieftain changes after seeing how big and beautiful those 5% explosions can be. I also want to maybe try Shockwave Totems or something similar to that. If my Storm Brand attempt continues to be shit… I might respec it to Heirophant and embrace the totem lifestyle instead.

Summon Raging Spirits Guardian is Great

by

Good Morning Friends! I’ve spent a lot of the weekend fiddling around with my Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build and thought I would talk a bit more about it in-depth this morning. For the uninitiated, Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons low-life minions that ultimately die after a short period of time. While they are alive they deal a lot of fire-based melee damage and auto-target the nearest enemy. Essentially think of them as a sentient fireball or something akin to the Demon Skulls from the Doom FPS series. There are a lot of ways to play this but traditionally this has been done with a Witch using the Necromancer ascendancy, in fact, I have played this a number of times in the past both during the Sanctum league and a very short-lived minion instability version during Crucible league that caused them to explode and deal damage based on their maximum life.

The 3.22 league, brought forth some significant changes to both the Chieftan Marauder Ascendancy and Templar Guardian Ascendancy. Essentially the Guardian now has two unique pets, the first of which is the equivalent of a giant Righteous Fire Juggernaut called the Sentinel of Radiance. It is a temporary minion that moves extremely slowly but blankets roughly half of the map in burning damage for 20 seconds before poofing. In order to combat the EXTREMELY slow movement speed… we use a spell called Convocation to teleport all of your minions to you allowing them to bip around the map. The other unique minon is called the Elemental Relic, and you can have 3 of them up at a given time and they are summoned by your minions hitting targets. If you have all of them up, they will be granting you and your minions Level 27 versions of Anger, Hatred, and Wrath. Raging Spirits hit extremely quickly, so for the most part you are guaranteed almost 100% uptime of these buffs while in combat.

This weekend I recorded one of my dumb little videos showing off running a map. Essentially I have been spending most of my time running tier 14 and 15 maps to farm Maven invitations, but in the above video, I am doing a Tier 13. In the video, I state that 16s were a bit “rippy”, which was true… until I poured on a bunch of levels and swapped out some of my gear. Essentially now I am zip through 16s as quickly as I do a 13 in this video. Mostly the gameplay is me charging to a pack of mobs, using convocation to summon my Fiery Lad on top of the pack which between the Righteous Fire Damage and Carrion Golem Bone Flechettes pretty much explodes everything but the Rares at which point I summon a string of Raging Spirits to burn those down… and then repeat until the map is cleared. One of my problems with SRS builds in the past is that they were pretty slow to map because they revolved around trying to herd a pack of raging spirits around the map. Shield Charge + Convocation takes care of this problem and quite honestly I am not sure if I would play SRS without this combo in the future.

The build in its current state is not exactly what I would consider a budget build. That said… I am uncertain that any of my gear is actually required. I have no clue how much currency I have spent on it, but I would guess in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 Divine Orbs. The build felt good and was completely viable from essentially the point I got my first two ascendancies that gave me my unique minions. You could likely perform well with this in a Solo-Self-Found environment because while all of the uniques are nice-to-haves, I don’t think they are really required to make the build function. You would need to do quite a bit of abyss to farm up Ghastly Eye jewels with minion damage and some survival stats on them, however. At the time of writing this… here are a few price checks for the above items:

In reality, you could run this build without any of this… save for maybe crafting your own minion wand. I picked up my first +1 wand off the ground, so they are common enough that I usually end up seeing several so long as you put Convoking Wand on your loot filter as something you want to stand out. There is nothing in my gear that I am really relying on to make the build work. Sometimes you have a series of uniques that produce a very specific interaction that if you don’t have it… your build is bricked. This is absolutely not the case with Guardian SRS, and in theory, you could run happily with a +2 Minion Gem Tabula Rasa(roughly 20 Chaos) and then just a bunch of decently rolled Armor/Energy Shield items.

If you want to give this a shot, then I would definitely check out the build guide from GhazzyTV. I veered slightly off course to stack up some more defenses, so you can also check out my latest POB if you want to see what my tree and gear look like exactly. Essentially right now I am working on building toward being Spell Block capped and then picking up some more minion survival nodes. I had this problem for a bit where my Spectres would die anytime I attempted to take on a high-end Legion pack, and I was trying to gain some additional health and regen to keep them and my carrion golem alive more often. The spell block thing was an oversight I completely missed that node cluster earlier. I feel plenty tanky as is, but as I talk about in the video the combination of Mind Over Matter and Eldritch Battery put me in a situation where if I start taking damage… it sort of snowballs into a death.

This is what my defenses look like. I have decent enough armor but if I have enough points and manage to get this character a bit higher… I will try and pick up another jewel socket on my tree and attempt to get a bit more armor and health. Health truthfully is probably fine as I am a little over 4000, with an Energy Shield that is a bit over 2000. Most of the time I have 75% chance to block attacks, and hopefully will also have 75% chance to block spells soon… though currently, I am sitting at only 65%. I don’t have much in the way of raised elemental resistances but they are all capped along with Chaos Resistance. I feel way sturdier than either of my two past SRS Necromancer builds. In a perfect world, I would pick up Golem Commander and also run a Stone Golem but I am just not sure I can spare the points and I definitely can’t give up my Testudo anoint.

What I did not expect, is how quickly this has become my mapping character of choice. Essentially I have been working on unlocking an attempt on Maven by using this character to get 10 T14+ witnesses and then hopping over onto my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to complete the 10-way. Whenever I manage to fill up my Sulphite, I shift gears and go delving on the Juggernaut until I run out again… then return to the cycle of SRS Guardian Maven invites. At some point, I will start doing some altars and see how well the Guardian can deal with a lightweight boss like the Black Star or Shrek. In theory, SRS tends to be pretty great at bossing and while I am not entirely certain what my damage looks like… according to Path of Building it should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million. POB is notoriously bad at calculating minion damage however so I have no clue what the realistic damage looks like whether that is higher or lower than that number.

All in all though, if you are looking for a really chill minion character that you can in theory play without any expensive gear… you might give this one a shot. I’ve definitely spent a lot of currency on mine, but I am not really sure I had to. I think I might just be gilding the lily at this point.

Delving the Darkness

by

Yesterday I made it through the campaign on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and by the middle of the night I was back delving which makes me very happy. I burned through a lot of my available currency kitting out my character in gear in order to make my resists work. I purposefully tried to overcap resists by a bit because at some point I hope to swap out to a Brass Dome with +5 to maximum elemental resistances and that will mean losing the resistances that I currently have on my 5-link corrupted chest. Other than that I could probably due for a sceptre upgrade at some point, and then I definitely need to find a pseudo-six-link helm. Those however can wait because for now… I need to get my money printing machine up and running that will fund the rest of my adventures.

I’m very much in the early stages of breaking into Delve and getting my resistances up enough to go down further. I’ve been down to around depth 85 and have done just fine, but my resists are a bit puny for me to go diving down dark tunnels as I am used to doing. Once I get down to around 100 I will finally start seeing a lot of content in the side tunnels and hopefully some cities. There is one already on the map but I have to figure out how to approach it as there is no direct path that I can see. I think that is probably why I enjoy Delve the most, because it offers bite-sized adventures with promised loot at the end. It feels way more stable and reliable than mapping does in general.

When I last talked about my map progress I think I was around 73, and as of this morning, I am sitting at 88 of 115 maps completed. Essentially each time I shift over to run maps for sulphite I am trying to unlock something new. I’ve actually managed to get quite a number of the unique maps out of the way which feels really good. I did miserably fail one of them, but it was a T16 unique map which is always painful. Mapping still feels good on Lightning Arrow Raider, but she is way squishier than the Juggernaut which is to be expected because there is a massive difference in killing power.

Since I am spending way more time in Delve, I am starting to pivot away from Essences and towards Niko missions and Sulphite. I think I think once I finish picking up Niko nodes, I will shift towards picking more Legion on the tree or maybe Blight since the Raider can do those a lot better than my Juggernaut ever could. I think what I dig about having a proper map blaster is that if I decide to dive into mapping a bunch, I can pivot back without much issue. However what I have missed the most is the reliable currency generation of Delve, and the Raider just was not a Delve-friendly character. So much of what comes from Delve comes from careening down dark tunnels looking for treasure, and you really need something sturdy to be able to do that.

I am also still doing the occasional tournament for the league mechanic, and those mostly go smoothly. I’ve not won a tournament outright since crossing the 200 rating barrier, but I am also not really using a mechanic to cheese things. I do well enough to get several rewards though, but last night I saw my first six-link and missed winning it by losing the final match. I did pull a five-link earlier, so it seems like I am starting to get into better rewards territory in general. I feel in this weird place so far in that I have two highly functioning characters but am also mostly broke. Hopefully, a week of focusing on just doing some mechanics to get some stuff will help change that trajectory. Once I have more currency to play with, I will probably start rolling some more side projects.

All told though I am having a lot of fun. I feel much better now that I have my Tankyboi back in the repertoire of characters.

First Day of Mapping

by

Good Morning Folks! We are on day four of the Trial of the Ancestors League. According to the /played command, I have put in 32 hours so far and that got me through the campaign and up to comfortably doing yellow maps. I dawdled a bit during the campaign but enjoyed the ride. I am on such a different trajectory than I am used to because I am playing what is commonly referred to as a “map blaster” character. This means that I am designed to decimate oncoming packs of mobs before they can touch me… but the trade-off is that I have very little in the way of proper defenses. This sort of flies in the face of everything that I know about building a comfortable character, but somehow it is working. I ran with a friend who needed credit for a map I was just about to run yesterday, and he was laughing at how much nonsense is flying around the screen when I get moving.

My big lucky drop of the weekend was picking up a corrupted six-link bow, that was in the right colors… or at least “right enough” colors. This is going to hold me until I get much deeper into my character and pick up something in the range of a 1000 dps bow. This bow would be awful for the more popular Toxic Rain/Explosive Arrow builds, but it works beautifully for my build as realistically I want flat damage against three elements, and this has two. The bleeding bits on the bow are a bit meh as is the accuracy because I am capped without needing it on my bow. I would have rather had some attack speed but in the realm of corrupted gear this is pretty solid. I need to get some beyond mobs and hopefully get some tainted currency to get some quality on it.

I know I had said that I was going to try and craft my own gear… but at this point, I am fully engaged in the trade economy and have made a few smaller sales. On Sunday night I started poking around looking at prices for six link chest pieces and managed to snatch this one up for 25 Chaos Orbs. This spent the largest chunk of my currency that I have gathered up so far but seemed like a good call. It has really good evasion and decent armor and while there are various elements of this that I would change, again it isn’t bad for a corrupted item. I wish it had more resistance on it, but that is sort of my general problem right now… the fact that I am pretty much capped in only one element.

Another really lucky drop was that I picked up a Poised Prism with some decent resistances on it. This is in theory the suggested quiver for this build and I had hoped that I would see one drop. Truth be told… apart from eventually replacing this with a perfect roll I think this is pretty damned good. I’ve seen all of the common quivers at this point, so it seems like they just drop more often than other uniques. I am hoping to see a Prismweave to replace the Wurm’s Molt that I am currently wearing. Unfortunately at the moment, I can’t really afford to get rid of the Molt, because it is helping to fix some of my attribute problems. I am pretty much starving for Strength and Intelligence, and having to use up a handful of significant suffixes to gain more.

The other purchase that I made was a pair of Shadows and Dust gloves. Namely, this is a way of getting rampage on the build, and it seems to really help my clear. I picked these up I believe for 2 Chaos and then threw some jewelers orbs to add some sockets. I need to recolor these in order to set up a cast when damage taken combo with Immortal Call, just to add another smaller layer of defense. I’ve got my auto snipers hit set up in my boots at the moment and all of my auras are in my helm. I am still running clarity because I still have mana problems. My ballista is at least now running off Lifetap which is fine given I have a decent chunk of life leech. Truth be told when I am killing things, I have no real mana problems… it is only when I am setting up for the next run.

I’ve never played a character before that was this much of a glass cannon and was always riding the edge of falling apart completely. At the moment I have 100% spell suppression which is good, and decent enough evasion though I would like to see that MUCH higher. My armor however is complete shit and my resists… are awful. I’ve contemplated trying to create a Taming ring, but so far I have not seen any of the component Berek rings drop. I could farm Heterochromia cards, but one of the problems I am running into as a mapper… is that without buying maps from the market, you can’t really reliably “Farm” anything over and over. I feel like all of the mapping strategies involve either buying specific maps or buying scarabs in order to set up ideal conditions. I would for example love to be trying to farm Legion, but that requires Legion Scarabs. Delve honestly was just more simple… and quite honestly more rewarding. I ran literally any map until I got Sulphite and then Delved until I ran out, and then repeated the virtuous cycle.

I can’t complain though, I am only one day into mapping and I already have 32 maps completed and have done one of the Maven Challenges. I need to find a zone connection diagram that I can reference because I need to be running connected maps in an attempt to get the maps I am missing. I am not super in a rush to get to red maps, because on my test version of this build… that is where things started to fall apart without being resist capped. What I really want to find is an Ancestral Vision, because it would solve my elemental ailments problem completely. I currently have 50% elemental avoidance and Ancestral Vision would get me the rest of the way to 100%.

As far as my Atlas tree goes… I am sorta all over the place at the moment. I rushed to get Shaping the Skies and Mountains to start getting some free map device unlocks. I’ve picked up a little here and a little there on the essences and picked up Stream of Consciousness since I won’t have a steady supply of scarabs for a while. I am slowly working my way up to the Einhar nodes that unlock access to the beasts that sell for quite a bit of currency. I figure at least until I have unlocked everything I will be doing essence/beasts to hopefully make a little currency. Essences mostly because I want to maybe be able to craft some gear at some point. Beasts mostly to hopefully sell some split beasts and mirror beasts.

I’ve done only the smallest amount of Delve, basically running down my Sulphite supply each time I fill it up. I know that this build is very much not designed for the rigors of the deep, but for the most part, so far it has been “fine”. I mostly just have to keep blowing things up in front of me for fear of anything actually touching me. Mostly I am working on the tedium of setting things up and getting some initial darkness resistance and light radius unlocked. I know at some point I will level another character that is more specifically designed for delving and then be running that in the deep. I will say though… the little bit of Delve that I have done… has felt generally more rewarding than most of the mapping I have done. Heist is still the mixed back it always is, but for the most part, the build has done excellently there.

All told though I am pretty happy with the build and pretty happy with where I am after 32 hours of play. I will continue to chip away at the Atlas, and I am hoping by the time I have unlocked all 115 maps, I will have enough currency to do a massive overhaul of my tree to something more enjoyable. I would really like to focus on Legion, and I have to say… Blight, Legion, and Breach are all awesome on this character. That was really my hope that I would be able to do some of the mechanics that I mostly ignored in the past because they were just not drift-compatible with the Righteous Fire lifestyle. I’ve seen my first Exalted Orb pictured above, but I have yet to see a Divine Orb drop. When I start getting some of those, and a bit more of a liquid position in the currency market… I will feel better about my decisions.

I realize I have not stayed true to the SSF-lite attempt that I originally planned. Truth be told though… I actually have arrived at a point where I enjoy the trade economy in this game. I’ve made several smaller sales and have already set up the infrastructure to be able to sell more stuff as I get access to better items. I am not sure what happened to the person who used to avoid the auction house like the plague. Right now I just don’t have much value that anyone would care about. I have a friend who will probably be willing to knock out the Void Stones for me because I sorta doubt this character is going to be able to do much more than the first two. I have a lot of mapping and farming though before that is even a real concern.

Anyways! I hope you all have a wonderful week. I will be over here in the corner chipping away at this nonsense and completely happy.