Gaming

Gaming post

Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Champion

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Good Morning Folks! Necropolis is quite possibly the most enjoyable mapping league yet. Affliction offered outrageous juicing options, but what Necropolis offers is flexibility and the ability to easily tailor the content to fit your whims. This is in large part due to the fact that we have three different atlas trees at our disposal, but on top of that, we have the freedom to add a bunch of interesting scarabs that wildly change your map-to-map experience. More important than that, the scarabs have been plentiful allowing me to constantly shift what I want to focus on without needing to buy them from the market. That is not to say that if you want to chain run the same strategy over and over… you will probably need to buy scarabs in bulk like in past leagues, but if you are a bit more open to your mapping options you should be relatively self-sustaining.

For the last several leagues I have built some form of a Righteous Fire character for Delving and getting through the bosses and some form of a Bow-based character for pure mapping fun. Over the years I have played Toxic Rain, Explosive Arrow, Lightning Arrow, and Vaal Lightning Arrow to various degrees of success. Last league I had landed on what I felt was the ultimate version of this in the form of a champion. In this league, I am elevating it a bit further by diving into the new transfigured gem Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. Essentially it deals all three elements worth of damage at the same time and then scales based on the number of unique ailments you have on a target. This means you only have to account for elemental reflect damage which can be taken care of with a Level 5 Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks Support gem.

Here is the POB if you want to follow along as I talk through gearing choices.

What makes this build so potent is that we are living in “interesting times”. Grave crafting has created this weird situation where so many mirror-tier perfect bows have been created, that anything that is slightly imperfect in any way… but still extremely good… is dirt cheap. This is a 1500 DPS bow with an additional arrow, triple tier 1 elemental damage, and attack speed and I gave I believe 9 Divine Orbs for it. I am pretty sure that I paid way more than that for a 1200 DPS bow that I was EXCEPTIONALLY proud of last league. I’ve had this bow for a few weeks now and when I was shopping yesterday for gear after trying to convince Ace that now was the time to give a mapper lighting arrow/elemental hit character a try… they were considerably cheaper. Weird things exist… like quadruple fractured items, which this bow is. I finished off the item by changing the quality to attack speed and corrupting it to 30% with a beast craft.

The other reason why this build is so potent is that I am getting to play around with Headhunter again. When I bought this belt it was I believe 8 Divines, but as of yesterday when I was shopping for a second that price had dropped to around 4 Divines. Note… I thought 50 Divines for a headhunter last league was a “bargain” that I could not pass up. If you have ever wanted to play a bow-build map-blaster that runs around with a stupid amount of headhunter buffs… this is your league. There is basically no reason to NOT run this belt on any build that is clearing rares quickly. Having played with a Mageblood and a Headhunter I have to say that the Headhunter mechanic is significantly more enjoyable. Mageblood is just sort of cheating at flasks, which can allow you to do some dumb things… but isn’t in itself interesting.

Another thing that is just stupidly cheap right now is the Defiance of Destiny amulet. I am legitimately using this just to add some additional layers of survival to my build while at the same time providing a bunch of elemental resistance on a single item. I am using the anoint Disciple of Slaughter so that I do not have to run Frenzy in a Manaforged Arrows setup. If you did want to go into Manaforged Arrows I would probably consider Frenzy of Onslaught which would then allow you to move some points around a bit because I am spending three points to get Graceful Assault instead of running a Silver Flask to guarantee reasonably close to permanent Onslaught. Ultimately these are decisions you reach after having played a build a bunch of times and wanting to tweak it slightly to do something specific.

One of my favorite things that I added to the build the last time I played it, was performing some pathing Jenga in order to use an Unnatural Instinct over by Avatar of the Hunt. I got the jewel that I am using as a drop, but generally speaking these are not terribly expensive and you gain a ton of value from that one socket. I mean sure I wish that Unnatural Instinct also gave you the notables, but I can live without Avatar of the Hunt. This is a late-game pathing thing, and while leveling I absolutely path into that notable and take it… then modify my pathing later to add in the jewel.

Another piece of tech that I am playing around with is the new Perandus Pact jewel that comes from Grave Crafting. Essentially you collect all of the corpses of the Perandus family and then can influence which jewel stat roll you get based on the other corpses you add with it. At the moment the Evasion version of this jewel is dirt cheap and adds 7% Evasion for every passive allocated in the large radius of where you place it. For me it is hitting 32 different nodes and giving me a grand total of +224% Increased Evasion… which essentially is giving me “Grace” without needing to sort out the reservation of that aura. There are a bunch of other viable options and if you didn’t care about the survival you could stack a specific elemental damage instead. I’m using the Fire Damage version on my Righteous Fire Chieftain to give me around +120% Increased Fire Damage.

The last thing that I added most recently, was to pick up another Jewel socket and put a Watcher’s Eye in it. In truth the only thing I really cared about here was trying to get permanent phasing while running haste. Cannot Be Blinded While Affected by Precision is solid and basically is a net win, but the reduced physical reflection from Determination is largely useless. Essentially I was looking for two things here… more life, more mana, and permanent haste giving me more ease of movement in mapping. I am not going to lie this is good enough that I have contemplated trying to figure out a way to mix in haste and a watcher’s eye into my RF Chieftain because it would be SUPER handy for Delving.

The character feels so good for mapping purposes and I cannot remember the last time I died. Not dying is a big thing for me, but your comfort levels might be completely different. If you wanted to play a less defensive version of this build that has significantly higher damage output, then I would look at the various folks running this Deadeye. They specifically favor the critical variant of the build whereas I am running Precise Technique and do not care about crit. It would be easy enough to transition over with a few gear swaps though if I were so inclined. My kink though is never the damage output I am doing, and more so that I am nigh immortal. So long as I can rip through maps comfortably I am happy with my damage output.

Anyways! I had not talked about this build that I have been running on the side and figured today I would do a deep dive and share some footage. I hope you all are doing well out there, and that you have a great and safe weekend. We have more danger weather rolling in, so I will likely be watching the skies.

Monsters Mastered

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Good Morning Folks! I spent a good chunk of my evening hanging out in Path of Exile down in Delve hunting for bosses. I finished up the Masterful Monsters challenge last night which involved defeating 50 Delve, Syndicate, Bestiary, or Incursion bosses aka the endgame bosses from the original “Master Missions” that went away this league. I would say the vast majority of those 50 bosses came from Delve since I spent most of my time down there, but I did pick up a number of beast spawns to knock out some of those as well. It seems like Curiosity Vaal Aspects have slowed down in sales, so I decided to go ahead and turn one of them into an Adorned Jewel. I didn’t get a high roll but I at least got one that is over 100% increased buff so usable. I am contemplating swapping over to the Adorned version of the Righteous Fire build so might create a few more if sales don’t pick up.

I am still not certain how many of these achievements I am going to go for, but in theory I should be able to knock out the Heist one called Tactful Thievery easily enough given the stockpile of contracts I have. Sanctified Scarabs will also be pretty easy given napkin math I will need to run 9 more maps with four scarabs to hit the goal. Map Magnificence is a much longer stretch… but also doable if I just put my head down and grind maps. Once again per napkin math that should take me around 260 t16 maps to finish that one off. In theory, I could just burn through all of my corrupted maps on my Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Champion and not worry much about the rewards. After that, the objectives become significantly harder. If I can do The Feared… I will wrap up another one but given how hard Atziri was in that fight… I am not sure I will be able to survive long enough to take her down.

I also spent some time leveling my Witch, who for the moment is not yet ascended and leveling through abuse of Storm Brand of Indecision. Like I remember folks complaining heavily about how much this skill was nerfed into the ground, but it still feels phenomenal for leveling purposes. Basically, once I can equip most of the uniques I have sitting in the bank I will respec the character entirely to go down the Tornado of Elemental Turbulence path. I managed to fish for a level 1/20% quality one so I will begin muling it at level 34. I am going to be extremely slow leveling this character because at the moment I think I care more about knocking out “acheesements” than I do leveling yet another character.

In another piece of news… Maxroll has thrown their hat in the Path of Exile Bulk Trading game. On top of this, they have also created their own TFT competitor Discord that will eventually connect up with the new website. Recently Zizaran partnered with Maxroll, and he appears to now be the owner of this new Discord. On top of that streamers Subtractem, Crouching Tuna, and Tenkiei have joined in to moderate the moderators and make sure things stay transparent and on the up and up. So I wish them luck and I hope they continue to expand the functionality of this new site. So far it seems pretty solid for bulk trading and I might try and liquidate my coffins at some point over the weekend. I am still picking them up but I think I am mostly not going to engage with graveyard crafting any further. It just isn’t really my jam.

I don’t love that it is “Yet Another Discord” and I’ve only minimally interacted with TFT, but I do like Maxroll quite a bit and think that they are doing a good job of trying to create “best in breed” applications to support the games that they cover. I can’t see that anything they have done so far cannot be a positive in the grand scheme of things. Partnering with Zizaran was a good move as the official host of his guides. Pohx would be someone else I would love to see them work with, but he has invested a lot of time in his own website. Anyways I know that these posts are only useful for folks who are already engaged in Path of Exile, but given that it is already a struggle to keep posting this is kind of what you are going to get.

Masterful Monsters

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Good Morning Folks! Between yesterday’s post and this morning, I finished off two more league challenges. Namely, I knocked out the challenge involving killing a bunch of specific league boss encounters, and I finished the one that was focused around Essences and corrupting them. I am three kills away from taking out Masterful Monsters which I am largely getting down in Delve by hunting Abyssal, Vaal, or Primal bosses. I have a few Incursion temples that I could run to knock out Vaal Omnitect which would count as well. I chain-ran a bunch of Bestiary bosses to knock out a good chunk of these as I was sitting on a bunch of the portal crafts to spawn them. I think the next one I will start chipping away at is the Heist-related one where I am pretty close to finishing up a few of the meta steps, but largely I have not even finished unlocking all of the rogues.

I am to the point of Righteous Fire where it would benefit me to swap Fire Trap to my chestpiece, but I have a tricky coloring situation there. Essentially I picked up this excellent Cloak of Flames cheaply… and have been throwing tainted chromatic orbs at it when I get them. Basically, I need RRRGGG and there is no easy way to get that on a pure Intelligence base. I could throw 1000 Tainted Chromes at this or I could get it in my next drop. In theory, I should probably focus on farming tainted currency for a bit and try and knock this out given that tainted chromes are a bit painful right now to buy in bulk. I tried the bench craft for red and green sockets a few times and burned through some of my excess vaal orbs to no real luck.

There is a skill I have been interested in this league called Tornado of Elemental Turbulence that allows you to throw out three Tornadoes at a time, but they deal damage with a random element. It just so happened that this morning Mathil published a video showing off his wonky build for this ability and it looks interesting. It would be a way squishier character than I am used to playing, but I do kinda want to play an “offense is the best defense” character to see if I could get used to it. The positive of his particular build is it is mostly uniques… and mostly things I already have sitting in my bank. I also have a Witch character that I created at the start of the league to mule some abilities that I had planned on originally making into something Detonate Dead related. I might level it up and see what this build feels like.

That will however require me to do some transfigured gem fishing in the Labyrinth. Lately I have been using Doppelganger card sets to do this which turns in for a 20% Quality level 1 Mirror Arrow card. When you use the basic lab ability to swap a gem for a transfigured gem of that same color, it will respect the level and quality making it an easy way to get 20% quality green gems to level. I was doing this to get copies of Elemental Hit of the Spectrum for attempting to corrupt it into a level 21 version. I figure in the coming days I will do the same fishing for Tornado of Elemental Turbulence. This is one of those rare cases where I think I am actually corrupting for a 20/23% gem instead of a 21/20% gem given that Quality increases movement speed giving the attack better quality of life.

Anyways! We will see what comes out of this. I know Diablo IV dropped some information on Season 4 yesterday and that we will get more info after the campfire chat. I figure I will give that game another shot, but my hopes are not high. I kinda feel like the folks working on that game don’t really understand how to make an ARPG that ARPG players actually enjoy. There was a whole sound clip from one of the earlier campfire chats where one of the devs indicated that he thought Elden Ring, Hades, Hollow Knight, and Diablo IV were all in the same genre of “Action RPG”. While I think the itemization updates are good, I still have zero faith that the folks steering that project have a clue what the folks who will stick around and keep playing season after season actually want.

Anyways! I hope you are having a most excellent week. I am still struggling to focus and fighting off a massive “turtle mode” but trying to brute force my way out of it.

Hundred Again

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Good Morning Friends… which admittedly feels odd to say given how much I have failed this past week to say it. I am not entirely certain what I am going through right now, but it has been harder and harder to sit down and actually write something. I think mostly it has felt like I didn’t really have anything worth saying. I’ve been quietly plugging away at Path of Exile while listening my way through the Brandon Sanderson Cosmere books… and none of that seemed terribly interesting. When every blog post feels the same… I struggle a bit to find the desire to go through the motions. We’ve also had wild weather here in Oklahoma which led me to not even have a podcast this week.

Yesterday I dinged level 100 which makes for the second time I have done this in Path of Exile. I feel like I could walk away from this league happy with my progress. I am not sure why exactly I wanted to hit 100 this time around, but it was one of those nagging feelings in the back of my head. The first time I did so was largely to prove that I could, and after that, it felt like the novelty had worn off. This time around though I had reached a point where I was thoroughly happy with my character and mostly just wanted to ding as a bit of a victory lap. I am contemplating completely reworking a chunk of my character in order to fully switch it to the more powerful version of the build including cluster jewels. I have a good stockpile of currency and given that I have available to me all of the talent points… I could tweak my build to see what that version of Righteous Fire feels like.

Most of my currency is still coming from Delve, but the strategies have shifted a bit. In previous leagues, I made my currency a nickel and dime at a time through Resonator sales. With the graveyard crafting and some changes to the atlas making it so folks are printing azurite… the resonator market has crashed. Though ironically there are still folks occasionally buying my wares in bulk. Most of my currency is coming from Curiosity Vaal Apsects which sell for around 16 Divine Orbs each. There is a slightly lesser trade in Doryani’s Machinarium, Aul’s Uprising, and the various rings that go into Precurors. Basically, this means I am hunting for bosses above all else… which has the positive side effect of progressing one of the league challenges.

Generally speaking, my goal for every league is to get enough of the challenges completed in order to get the sad little totem pole which I think comes at 19. This is the second league in a row where I have gotten at least the first upgraded version. It is highly unlikely that I will ever hit 40 of 40 unless there is a mighty force behind me wanting something that comes from the end of that journey. I will say though that the changes in how Scarabs work, have made focusing in on specific mechanics far easier than they would have been in previous leagues. Running a full complement of scarabs for a single-league mechanic is almost as good as having your tree specced for it. I am slowly collecting Fortunate cards so that I can turn in and complete Divined Destiny. Maybe I can complete the full set of the upgraded armor appearances, but that is probably as far as I will be able to make it in this league before I run out of steam.

I went on a bit of a tear yesterday completing different Maven witnesses. I’ve admittedly never attempted any of these in previous leagues though I probably could have without much issue. At this point, I have completed The Formed, The Forgotten, The Twisted, The Hidden, The Elder Slayers, and am working on getting my witnesses for The Feared. I had no clue that when I took down Cortex it was a Witnessed version. I am just about done with a Chayula Breach stone so I should be able to get that witness pretty quickly then it just leaves Elder, Shaper, and Sirus. Sirus is the one that probably worries me the most because that fight is annoying enough on its own.

Delve is still my happy place, but mostly chasing The Feared is an attempt to prove it to myself that I could do it if I chose to do so. I don’t love bossing. It feels like a lot of effort for a very minimal payoff. Especially given how much the prices of everything has crashed this league, there just isn’t near the chase that there might have been previously. I sincerely doubt I will ever really chase Uber bosses because given that I don’t love the amount of faffing about required to fight normal bosses… I certainly don’t love the thought of grinding out the already painful t17s to get emblems in order to fight Uber bosses. My hope is that in 3.25 they make some significant changes to T17s which will hopefully make them less egregious.

Past that I have been helping my friend get started who is also playing a Righteous Fire Chieftain. I helped my friend Ric through a bunch of the gear acquisition and now I am helping my friend Lethbridge with some similar gaps in gearing. That is probably my favorite part of Path of Exile when I can help friends get the stuff they need. Acquiring something for a friend who is also playing is way more enjoyable than chasing my own goals. Anyways hopefully I will be a bit more regular this week with my blog posts but honestly… who knows!