guardian

Way Too Many Minions

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Good Morning Folks. The other day I talked about the build that I had been cooking up centered around the new unique staff called The Broken Elegy. When I wrote about it, I was still leveling, but having a great time doing so. Ultimately I went with Guardian, not necessarily because I thought it would be the best option, but more because it would be the most enjoyable leveling path. Essentially, once you get your Sentinel of Radiance online, aka Butter Boy, you can face roll the campaign from that point forward, and you can pick him up in the first lab. It ends up playing like a slightly delayed version of Righteous Fire, because you charge into a pack of mobs, convocate him into the middle, and his burning aura pretty much obliterates everything instantly. Technically, The Broken Elegy would probably have been better served by a Necromancer, and most definitely would be better served by the Servant of Arakaali. However, Guardian puts me in the right corner of the tree for Staff defenses, and also has its own benefits, so I rolled with it.

As is the tradition when I do something dumb… I record one of my dumb little videos. I am not doing anything terribly challenging, but essentially, as soon as I exited the campaign, I rolled straight into t16 maps. Technically, I ran a single T10 just to see how it was going, and after stomping all over that, I ripped the band-aid off. The biggest challenge that I think I am running into is simply having too many minions for any of them to be doing effective damage. You already run into this problem with just Raging Spirits sometimes, but in total, I have 43 minions… and that is before I take into account the Greater Skeletal Shrine belt that I am running. Look… I completely understand that this is a dumb idea, but I am having fun… and quite frankly, that is the most important part of any build. I have noticed that things die faster if I stop summoning Raging Spirits, but when it comes to clearing maps… having so many aggressive minions means that they just sort of spread out and lay waste to everything.

I’ve been using them to farm Legion, because I have been trying to get a bunch of the new honoured incubators so I can stockpile some of the imbuement coins. This is not really working out as I had hoped, but I am still enjoying running something like six legions per map. I have a ton of emblems, and those will ultimately come in handy when it comes to doing some of the league challenges. Maps take way too long right now with the Mirages for me to efficiently do any sort of targeted farm, because I cannot seem to bring myself to ignore mechanics. Effectively, I am sort of this worse version of SSF, where I play in trade… but still feel like I want to farm almost everything myself. I would be so much better off if I just focused on a single mechanic and then used it to make currency, which I then spent on other things. However, that does not bring me joy. Sure, I like being able to buy the items that I cannot be bothered to farm, but if I can farm it… I want to farm it.

Speaking of buying things… I am using name-brand corpses for the very first time. In the past, these have always been super freaking expensive, but for some reason this league, they are all cheap. Perfect Turtles are only around 20 Chaos right now, and in theory, I should probably buy a bunch of them to stockpile for when I eventually kill one of these and cannot get it back somehow. Perfect Forest Warriors were less than 10c, and I am running a 5c Perfect Hulking Miscreation because apparently Raging Spirits count as constructs, and it buffs those nicely. Running the Forest Warrior provides Onslaught, which is going to allow me to rework my tree a bit at some point… because I no longer need the node that gives my minions Onslaught. I might end up rolling a cluster jewel and switching over to that, because there is an entire upper branch of my tree layout that is progressively becoming less optimal.

Speaking of less than optimal, I did zero planning for this build and sort of just winged it as I went. Mostly, I typed “Minion|Life|Block” into the search bar and routed around as many of those nodes as I could make happen easily. At the suggestion of Kodra, I just now pathed down to pick up Divine Shield, and that seems to help out considerably and makes my 2000 energy shield a bit more useful. With the Guardian Turtle, I have around 9000 armor, and around 4500 without it, so I am still going to never run into problems with regenerating my entire energy shield if needed. I realistically probably have more than enough survival… but I have considered doing the terribly dumb thing of going six life masteries for the 10% life boost. I feel like I have plenty of damage for what I want to do with this build. I could stack more minion damage, and probably should… but I am not as motivated by “number goes up” as I am doing dumb things that I find enjoyable.

I have zero doubt that proper minion players will be turning their noses up at what I am doing, and that is okay. I do think at some point, someone terribly more clever than I am… will build around The Broken Elegy and make it really strong. It seems like a crazy item, especially if you could figure out a way to make the minions that it spawns a little more reliable. I believe they are inheriting everything that I am currently doing to buff my Raging Spirits, which should mean they are pretty potent already. I should probably actually drop the whole imbue thing that I am trying and just go with a 21/20 Raging Spirits gem instead. I am not that certain that Imbues have turned out to be as much power as I was hoping they would be. They are also really freaking painful to try and land something useful on, because I am building this graveyard of bricked gems that makes me more than a little sad inside. I know I will be taking a break this week to play the new Last Epoch season, but at some point, once that has run its cours,e I will be returning to grind out more challenges here and having fun doing so.

The Broken Elegy

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was “a lot,” and I have survived, but sleeping was a bit of a mess because of the pain. I’ve been working on a new side project in Path of Exile. It largely started because there is a new belt called the Screams of the Dessicated, and the gimmick is that you lose access to your utility flasks but gain at least one permanent shrine buff. Only some of these shrines have any real value, which means the market is flooded with a bunch of belts that the average player has no interest in. I was curious what a Greater Skeletal Shrine would feel like on a proper minion build, and right now, my favorite minion base is Servant of Arakaali… but you only get to play that during the Phrecia league. My second favorite minion base is Guardian, and as a result, I rolled a brand new character and started leveling so that I could play with the belt.

The other thing that I noticed is there are a limited number of folks building around a brand new Unique called Broken Elegy that drops from Saresh, the new boss of the Mirage league. I’ve completely yolo’d my build in its current state and have pivoted towards going down the staff block path, and running the new staff with Servant of Decay, another chestpiece that spawns a bunch of interesting minions that inflict withered on targets, which should buff my chaos damage. The only realistic way for me to get Envy on my build was to lean into Aul’s Uprising, and since the cheapest one already had Death Attunement on it, it allowed me to respec my tree a bit to free up some points. I went with a screams belt that gives me Greater Skeletal Shrine and Replenishing Shrine, the latter essentially replacing any reliance I might have on Clarity or Vitality. Lastly, I picked up a cheap minion gem helm that I have my utility minions in, like Animate Guardian, Stone Golem, and Carrion Golem.

I have no clue how well this is going to work. I need to hit level 78 and pick up some more dexterity somewhere before I can equip the chestpiece, and I am in Act 10, working through the final bits of the campaign. So far, however, it feels amazing. I am running Leap Slam instead of Shield Charge, and also running a Frost Blink so that I have my comfy two movement abilities setup. I leap into a pack, convocate my Sentinel of Radiance, and then start furiously summoning raging spirits as I also generate shrine skeletons and ceaseless flesh zombies from the staff. The Carrion Golem buffs everything, and minion jewels are making it so that everything has a decent chance to poison on hit… and the various stuff buffing chaos damage output is pretty much melting everything. Bosses especially just sort of evaporate right now, and my AG is running Asenath’s Gentle Touch, so corpses are also exploding, helping with the clear. The entire package feels really dumb, and I am curious how well the transition into maps is going to go.

It has been quite a bit since I last updated anything about Path of Exile, and over the weekend, I finished out my Atlas and got my Four Voidstones. I am still not entirely certain what I think about the current state of the new Atlas. For the most part I like it, but I feel like the fog of war needs to go, so that players can at least see where they want to go. When you start getting maps that you cannot run, because you cannot get to the node on the atlas, it is a bit frustrating. For example, one of my friends needed the six-link bench craft, and I had no clue where the Silo map was located, so I just sort of blindly fumbled around until I found it. Being able to easily swap between maps is pretty great, and I still need to finish doing a “blob” as they are being colloquially called in each of the quadrants for one of the quests. Unfortunately, Astrolabes seem to drop rather infrequently from map bosses, so I am going to have to ultimately buy some to finish out that quest.

The biggest upgrade that I have made to my Righteous Fire character is building out the Foulborn Red Dream setup, which involves buying the rather expensive gem, and then tattooing a bunch of strength nodes in the vicinity to instead be Fire Resistance. This, combined with everything else, really gives you a significant boost in life totals. My maximum life is now sitting at 8219, giving me an active pool of 7734 once you take into account my vitality arrogance setup. Realistically, I probably have enough sources of regeneration to comfortably drop vitality, but I just have not done so. The next big swap would be adding some clusters so that I could run Maelevolence, which would involve dropping vitality finally. I’ve not really felt like I needed to do this, so I have been lazy and not done it. I think I have the cluster jewels in my dump tab and could probably get it up and running without much issue. Maybe when I hit 100, I will do that thing.

Other than the Red Dream setup, the biggest upgrade is swapping my Immortal Flesh out for a Cord Belt. Cord Belts are a new base that drops from the Mirage content, and their big new thing is that it allows an anoint. So instead of using an Elder Stygian Vise, I sought out a Cord Belt with the same sort of rolls you normally look for. Everything else is mostly just getting better versions of things I already had, like I now have a proper Elder Helmet, slightly better corrupt for Cloak of Flames, and a full 10% Nebulis, which gives me 450% increased Elemental Damage. I keep getting slightly better regen gloves from the Breach Tree and swapping those out as I find them, then selling my previous version for some divines. My build can do pretty much anything I would want to do with it, including Nightmare Maps… so obviously the first thing I wanted to do was run up an alt, which gives you the Guardian I spoke about first.

All told, I am pretty happy with where I am in almost everything. My main tree is Niko, Ore, Harvest, and Breach and it feels great. My secondary atlas is Einhar, Ritual, Beyond, and Heist, which also feels great. I am thinking about setting up my third tree to be heavily focused on Legion, because there are incubators specific to the league mechanic that I would love to get, so I could start getting coins more regularly. Delve still provides, and Fossils represent my primary source of income right now. I am hovering around the 200 depth and going horizontal to look for bosses. I still need a Doryani map from the Vaal boss, and I am always down for taking out an Aul for some of the big-ticket items. Mirage league has been a blast, and Ace and I were talking about it last night, and how this is probably the furthest they have gotten. At this point, I am mostly focused on challenges so that I can hopefully get another fancy totem pole.

How has your league been going? Between all of the medical stuff that I have been dealing with, mine has been going a bit slower than I would have liked. Additionally, next week we have the release of the Last Epoch Season 4, and I will be spending a lot of time playing that at least for a week or so. I will also be getting adjusted to the routines of chemotherapy which might throw a monkey wrench in pretty much everything.

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.