guardian

Mirage Reveal Stream

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the launch of World of Warcraft Midnight, and given that I have been talking about WoW in general for several days, it probably seems likely that I would be talking about it this morning. However, you would be wrong, because yesterday was something way more important to me. We got the full reveal stream for Path of Exile 3.28, the Mirage League, and holy crap was it a banger of a league announcement. I highly suggest you watch the 40+ minute content reveal trailer yourself, but this morning, I am going to talk about some of the highlights and lowlights. Much like last league, this is a league where we are filling some of the gaps in lore between Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. I am fully on board with this, and I feel like this is happening in part because, apparently, Kitten Cat Noodle is how working for GGG as a Narrative Designer. For those not aware of her work, she was essentially the maintainer of the best lore resources that we had for the game, as she went act by act and league mechanic by league mechanic, explaining the lore behind them.

The league mechanic itself is pretty wild. Essentially, you will be able to enter imperfect copies of sections of the current map, and in them, every single mechanic will be duplicated in one form or another. It might not be the exact same strongbox, but there will be a strongbox in the mirage. When entering, you will be asked to choose one of three wishes that will mutate the results of the miraged area and stack with the existing map modifiers that you already have in place. Some of the ones that they showed off were the ability to have it so that all wisdom and portal scrolls dropped as some other form of currency, or that you gain the Souleater buff for the entire time you are in the miraged area. This should lead to some weird and wild juicing strategies, but since I am mostly an alch and go andy… this is just going to mean I have more mechanics on my map, which will be a welcome addition for certain.

The miraged areas can drop a currency that allows you to corrupt your gems to add an additional modifier to them. This is probably the piece of the league that I am the most excited about, and honestly, part of why I am contemplating going Righteous Fire again. I am curious what having a seven-link fire trap and a seven-link righteous fire are going to feel like. That applies to pretty much anything, though. It seems like the extra support is only going to be level one, so you are going to need to make sure you get specific supports instead of just anything viable. For example, with Righteous Fire, I will probably want Efficacy support if at all possible, because that is one of those gems that levels matter less than others. The only thing that concerns me is if the list of available supports is going to be pretty limited based on the combinations that GGG thinks should go together, not necessarily what players actually use together. I am thinking about the POE2 suggestion system, for example, where a lot of the links that you want on your build are not suggested by the UI.

The Atlas is also being entirely reworked. I was a Sentinel League baby, since that was the first time I got through the campaign and saw maps. As a result, I have never known anything other than the current Atlas, and while I know some other things existed before… I have never played with them. Essentially, the Atlas is being divided up into quadrants and then we will be able to apply influence regions within that quadrant. Each influenced map you complete increases the juiciness of the next in the cluster, all of which seems really cool. More importantly, though, they are splitting map tiers from maps on the atlas, meaning you can run any map at any tier at any moment. This feels essentially like a much better version of the POE2 waystone situation, but instead of relying on random maps on a Delve like endless atlas… we get to run whatever maps we want. The voidstones no longer elevate tiers of the map, and instead apply buffs to the map. The voidstones themselves are changing, and it seems like you will be able to get to three pretty easily, with the fourth still being the maven grind. I will likely continue to pay for a carry there because I hate having to do that many witnessed maps when I could be running altars instead.

So let’s talk about some of the bad things… nerfs. Some of my go-to builds have been Storm Brand of Indecision, Penance Brand of Dissipation, and Ice Trap of Hollowness… and all three of those ate some pretty significant nerfs. First off, Elementalist, which is the base that I would have built around, lost its increase to the Golem buff effect, meaning that every single Golem buff is just a little bit weaker now. Next up, Storm Brand and Penance Brand ate some pretty massive top-end nerfs across the board, making them way less viable to play. My most recent Ice Trapper build was a Golem Elementalist and relied on two Foulborn uniques… both of which ate significant nerfs. Double explode Berek’s Respite rings are no longer a thing… and Foulborn Tulborn can no longer roll with +4 cold gem levels… so I am losing a single gem level there. My other go-to build is Righteous Fire, and Chieftain explodes now deals less damage but procs twice as often… which Pohx thinks is going to be a net positive. Foulborn Red Dream, however, is going to provde 25% less life gain per Fire Resistance node… but still it is probably one of the best options we can slot into the tree. The total health levels of a Chieftain, though, are going to be a bit lower as a result.

There are a whole bunch of new Holy Skills going into the game, which I honestly think is probably a beta test for the Paladin class going into Path of Exile 2. I have to admit a lot of these look really interesting, and it is highly likely that I am going to roll some form of a Guardian before the end of this league and dive deep into maybe the Holy Slam skill. Kodra, right now, is eyeing some sort of Holy Damage minions build since one of the new abilities spawns temporary minions that he can then buff, and also run Herald of Purity for more holy minions. Since it ate zero nerfs, I still feel like Poison SRS is going to be strong, but unfortunately, Servant of Arakaali did not go core as I had hoped. Per Ghazzy, Minions apparently were buffed in general, so it might be a really good league for minions. If you can get level 30 Raise Spectres, they now become level 85 instead of level 81. To get there, though, you have to rely on a bunch of probably expensive corrupts.

While I am exceptionally pumped about the league in general… I am torn as to what I want to play. A couple of the things I considered starting ate nerfs, so essentially I will either go Minions or lean back on good old familiar Righteous Fire. I honestly kind of want to see what the Hinekora procs feel like and if they really do make mapping feel better. That means I am more than likely going to roll an RF Chieftain again and then branch out from there and make a Holy Slam Guardian and maybe a Poison Minions character. Sentinel of Radiance got some significant buffs, so Fire Damage Guardian SRS might be the play as well. In theory, once you get your first lab… You will be a monster and be able to face roll the rest of the campaign. That is mighty freaking tempting, especially now that I know how to build a proper block character and make them feel really damned tanky. I am sure I will be indecisive right up until the point that I roll a character late Friday evening… at which point I will probably just make a gut choice and run with something.

Are you excited about 3.28 Mirage League? What are you looking at playing? Drop me a line below.

Celestial Spearbender

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Good Morning Folks! Happy first day back from a long holiday weekend for my fellow United States friends. I took Friday off so as a result… today is going to be rough to get through. I am also still fighting whatever generic crud my wife brought home to me, and neither of us is in great shape. However, I am going to push through it and get shit done today. I spent most of my weekend casually leveling my new Guardian in Guild Wars 2. I am really glad that I did this experiment because Guardian had always been one of those classes that I thought I could really like… but never spent much time playing because I just was not feeling the Asura that I chose to level back in the day. As a Norn however, I have had a freaking blast and last night I pushed through to level 70 and then decided to go ahead and boost the last ten levels so that I would get a full set of gear. We’ve had friends find out the hard way that if you wait until level 80, you don’t get the gear from taking the character boost, and given that I had several sitting around… I did not want to get busy and make that mistake.

On Saturday I ground out another Gift of Battle because the anniversary buff was in place, making it got considerably faster. I am sure there were ways that I could have made it more efficient, but I started around 10 am and wrapped up around 2 pm, taking me about four hours of focused gameplay to get through it. During most of that time, I was in the Eternal Battlegrounds either capturing objectives or defending Stonemist Castle when our group held it. I am still not entirely certain why I enjoy WvW so much, but there is just something about being a ranger and harassing enemy armies at range that I enjoy. More specifically I really enjoy defending objectives and getting up on the wall and raining down arrows on the entire mass of players.

The good thing about grinding out that Gift of Battle was that I ended up with a ton of Jade Heroics as a result. So when I boosted to level 80, I popped over into one of the borderlands and bought seventeen Maguuma Scrolls giving me a huge boost in Hero Points. I then zoned out from the Guild Hall into Seitung Province and after running around and collecting all of the Hero Points there, I was able to unlock Willbender completely. I’ve been super curious about the Hammer Heal Alac Bender for awhile, but based on what I saw from Snowcrows it seems like the ideal version currently is with a spear which makes it even better. I’ve really enjoyed Guardian Spear and as a result, now I am running around with a scuffed version of the build while wearing Celestial Gear since that can kind of do everything… while also not being necessarily the best at anything.

Right now my goal is to complete the original storyline this evening, and then from there, I am not sure if I will keep pushing up through the Living World content or take a break from Guardian and go back to my Ranger main. Based on what I heard from Thalen this weekend, it seems like maybe the Janthir meta is starting to get a bit easier and as such I would probably like to start farming it nightly. I also need to get better at catching the other key metas as they are spawning, because I really should be doing some of the Heart of Thorns content weekly. I really need to build back up my stockpile of Mystic Coins and as such I need to start hitting the leyline event each day for a while. I am getting really close to being able to craft the Juggernaut legendary and mostly at this point it is just a matter of deciding that I am willing to buy the rest of the trophies that I need.

In other weekend news, I pushed across the finish line and picked up my ridiculous pvp mount in Final Fantasy XIV. I am now way less under pressure to do PVP each day, and feel considerably better about that… but would have been super sad had I not picked up this monstrosity. PVP Roulette is still a really good way to get a quick experience boost on characters and as a result, I will still probably keep doing it whenever I am in the mood to play some FFXIV. We did not do our weekly raid nonsense in part because we were down an Ash but more so because I was feeling like complete crap. It is a bit of a bummer as I really do enjoy the Arcadion raid. I’m in a bit of a weird place with FFXIV at the moment, because I feel like I have accomplished everything I wanted to do in Dawntrail. I cleared the normal raid and completed a set of gear from it… and am mostly okay with just muddling about aimlessly until the next content drop whenever that happens.

Last week we got news that Last Epoch was going to be doing a cycle reset with some updates, and I figure I will hop on this train on the 19th. I did not really play Last Epoch much this cycle in part because Dawntrail was a thing… and then once that wound down a bit the new Path of Exile League was a thing. Bad timing on both parts meant that while technically I got a character to empowered monoliths I didn’t really play that much. A cycle reset will mean that I can go through the experience of a fresh start mid-cycle and hopefully feel better about the current state of the game because I will be in the mood for it. I am not sure if I am going to go down the same path I did for leveling, but the whole fire warpath smite thing was pretty fun. Any other builds that I am interested in feel like they are way more gear-dependent and while there are a few key items for the build I was playing… it worked just fine without them.

Until then however I seem to be in a Guild Wars 2 frame of mind, and I am going to ride this until it peters out. I am not sure if I will be playing the new Guardian a ton, shift back to my Ranger… or even maybe revisit my Warrior or Necromancer which I still enjoy playing. Ranger is still probably the most fun to do group content on, but he is also one of the more selfish characters that I have given that I am not really providing much to a party setting. That was in large part why I wanted to play around with Heal Alacrity Willbender on the Guardian because it is way more group-centric, but also seems to be a really good solo experience. Anyways that was my extended weekend… hopefully yours was also pretty great minus the whole being sick thing.

Toucan Treasure Hunt

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Good Morning Folks! I did something silly this weekend. In Path of Exile, there is the concept of a private league, where you can pay to essentially play the game in a bubble with your friends. I’ve contemplated trying to do a small private league amongst my handful of friends who play the game regularly, mostly as a way of creating a sort of “Guild Self Found”. The idea is where you can still trade items freely but only amongst a smaller group of people giving you that Solo-Self-Found type experience of needing to actually find things, but also being able to rely on and help out your friends. There are a handful of streamers who run events throughout the year that are specifically associated with private leagues. The most popular of these is probably The Gauntlet, which is very much a much harder mode experience. There is another event called the Badger Private League where folks compete as teams with other teams of players.

SirGog one of my favorite POE information sources, also has one of these leagues that he has run a few times now called the Toucan Treasure Hunt. The idea is fairly straightforward, private leagues expand the lifecycle of a given Path of Exile league by allowing players a renewed focus on the fundamentals and an alternate way to play the game. There is a simple rule when it comes to private leagues, they cannot make the game easier and if you change the rules it can only be to make the base game more difficult. Toucan League for example is focused on crafting and the challenges that it provides. On Friday the league started at 7 p.m. my time and I decided to give it a shot. Specifically, the Toucan League had the following rules associated with it.

  • All Items Drop Scoured, so everything is essentially “white” quality and all you are really looking at is item bases and sockets.
  • All Players Start with -20% Resistance across the board, so you immediately need to try and dig yourself out of that hole.
  • Acts 1-3 have increased difficulty.

I decided to use this opportunity as a way of testing the SSF viability of Guardian SRS. When I was playing my Ancestor League version of this build, I noticed that for the most part, the uniques weren’t really “enabling” that build. They were buffing the strength of it, but they were not doing anything that a set of basic rare gear wouldn’t. Sure enough that has largely worked out as expected and now that I am level 81, I am mapping exceptionally smoothly. With only using some Alchemy Orbs and some Chaos Orbs to re-roll items I was able to land at over-capped elemental resistances thanks to Purity of Elements, but have thus far had no real hope of solving my Chaos Resistance problem. However, as I have learned several times… you can map pretty well with no Chaos Resistance at all. I managed to take my character up through early yellow maps yesterday afternoon and I think I took a single death doing so.

In the Discord associated with the event, there have been daily stretch goals that involve all sorts of things. I’ve largely been ignoring these, but I will say that more than anything I want to at least achieve the bronze-tier goal for the entire event. I’ve already passed level 80, and now I just need to complete my fourth ascendancy and I will feel fine with my progress for the league as a whole. I sincerely doubt that I will accomplish any of the further goals because more than anything this league has taught me a few things about my enjoyment of this game. Firstly I am not really that into the crafting system. I will use it when I need to in order to make serviceable gear, but I just don’t enjoy crafting as an endgame in itself. Secondly, I really hate that items being dropped scoured bricks an entire system that I have leaned on heavily for early gear. Essentially you cannot get crafting patterns from Betrayal as when the items drop, they drop scoured without veiled mods on them.

More than anything else… I am a loot-driven player. I like seeing loot. I like checking loot to see if it might be useful. Sure I can freely admit that 99.9% of rare items that drop on the ground are useless… but in Ancestor League I have made a pretty brisk trade in selling the items that I found in my travels that were NOT useless. For example, I spend a lot of time checking rings and amulets for resistances, and now my only real option is to attempt to brute force craft the resists that I need. Because everything drops scoured… mapping just feels bland and meaningless. I’ve run over a dozen maps, and I am largely just running them for completion sake. I know going into them that the only worth anything that I am going to walk away with, is maybe a few chaos orbs or other assorted bubblegum crafting materials.

I think easily the most interesting aspect of the event though, is it gave me a way of testing to see just how strong Guardian is on its own with absolute dumpster-tier gear. If you want to check out my POB, you can see the level of gear that I currently have. I am still using a level 20 helmet because I just happened to randomly chance my way into a +1 to all minion skills. I am using The Anvil as a necklace, mostly because it was the only unique that I got that actually halfway made sense for my build. I rolled a decent enough Convening Minion damage wand, and am now pretty much stuck with it because I don’t have the base Intelligence to move up to a Convoking wand. The lack of Betrayal crafts means I can never get my auto cursing/offering setup off the ground which means I am losing a lot of efficiency with the build.

Still, however… the build is perfectly playable and I am having little to no resistance progressing through maps. A lot of this is due to the fact that Radiant Crusade and more importantly the Sentinel of Radiance is so damned overpowered. I feel like there is no way that this build survives into 3.23 without at least taking a significant nerf to the amount of damage that the sentinel deals. We talked about this a bit on the podcast and Ash suggested that they might flip the order in which you get Radiant Crusade and Unwavering Crusade so you are at least getting it a bit later in the game. As it stands… Guardian SRS has been the best feeling Minion build I have played in Path of Exile. The fact that I have been able to get it up and running and feeling great with garbage gear only serves to underline this fact.

Alternately, I think I have learned that while I find the concept of the Toucan Treasure Hunt very interesting… I just did not enjoy myself nearly as much as I hoped I might. The lack of good loot really hampered my enjoyment. I’ve known for a while that the only reason why I ever raided in MMORPGs is because I wanted the shiny loot that was exclusive to it. It seems that I am only really into ARPGs because of the constant rain of potentially interesting loot. Don’t get me wrong I absolutely enjoy them mechanically, but mechanics alone are not enough to keep me engaged. Do I regret trying out the Toucan League? Nope! It was worthy of a shot, and I greatly appreciate Sir Gog for running the event. However, I think I will probably take a hard pass going forward because it just did not flip the right switches in my brain.

A Shiny Tabby

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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bit of a mixed bag of activities. I was back in Path of Exile and spent some time on my SRS Guardian. After playing a lot of my Storm Brand Build and Shield Crush Build… it honestly felt amazing to be back on this character. The strength levels of that build are just so much higher and honestly for so much less investment. I fear that this is going to mean that Guardian eats a few swings from the nerf bat before 3.23. If it remains intact, however, I am contemplating this as a league starter for the next go-around. You would have thought I had learned my lesson to stop trying to start something other than Righteous Fire, but legitimately… SRS Guardian feels equally as good and it reached a point of power way faster than RF usually does.

I spent a bit of the evening cleaning out monster parts from my stash tab. One of the things that I like about having Metamorph on my Atlas tree is that I am somewhat passively gaining monster bits and then can have an hour or so of constant fights in Tane’s chambers. Mostly I shifted to running Metamorph because the prices of catalysts are outrageous in this league. 20 Prismatic Catalysts to quality up a single resistance ring has been around 400 Chaos Orbs, which feels way too rich for my blood. There is also the side benefit that I have had pretty decent luck in getting raw Divine Orbs to drop from stomping monsters.

Another thing that I had some exceptional luck with, is that last night I saw three Voidborn Reliquary Keys. I sold two of these and decided to open one because it is always fun to gamble a little bit. While most folks seem to open these chasing a Mageblood or a Headhunter, I am honestly fine with anything else interesting that just happens to be shiny. Last night I pulled what I had honestly wanted all of this time… a Shiny Tabula Rasa. This will let me twink characters in style going forward… though honestly I am not sure how many more builds I am going to make this league.

I spent most of my evening down in Delve, slowly crawling my way across the randomized map. This really is my happy place when it comes to Path of Exile. I was chilled out sitting on the sofa with my laptop, a cat to my side, and listening to an audiobook. I found all three reliquary keys down in Delve last night, and to be truthful… most of them that I have found for the last few leagues all came from Delve. That makes sense because statistically, I am doing way more delve than I am doing any other content. I’m loosely looking for Fire-themed nodes because while I have a decent enough Flammability On Hit ring for the Shield Crush Chieftain, I could always use a slightly better itemized one. I’m also hunting for the parts for precursor rings because those are selling extremely well in this league.

Speaking of sales… the reliquary keys and a few other divine orb drops have helped me recover from the significant outlay of currency that I spent kitting out the Shield Crush Chieftain. I’ve started using POEStack to track my currency since Exilience Next appears to be toast at the moment. In truth, I think I like having a web app way more than a stand-alone desktop client. Additionally, if I ever do start selling on TFT, I will at least be very familiar with the interface. I know that I will probably spend most of that before I gather much more, because I seem to always be funding the next idea that I want to play. I still want to try something with cyclone, but that seems to be always on the far horizon and not something that I am actively doing.

The last thing I guess I will talk a bit about this morning is that I finished up The Final Empire the first book in the initial Mistborn Trilogy. It took me forever to read anything by Brandon Sanderson, but now that I have… I understand what all the hype has been about. The world that he built and the characters in it were deeply enjoyable. I know without a doubt that I am going to be consuming the next two books in rapid order. I really enjoyed the way magic worked in this world and I look forward to seeing how the character of Vin continues to evolve. There is this whole part Shinobi part Jedi thing going on that I dig and I genuinely like a lot of the background characters as well.

I think tonight I will probably be back in Diablo III, working on chipping away at some more of the seasonal achievements. While I am enjoying myself there, I don’t find the gameplay anywhere near as compelling as Path of Exile. It is a heck of a lot of fun, but the dopamine hits are nowhere near as potent.