ice trap of hollowness

Maru Takes the Lead

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Good Morning Folks. I feel pretty miserable. On Tuesday I had several doctors appointments and spent time in several waiting rooms, and am pretty sure I picked up some dire crud. I was a dumbass and did not wear a mask and am now paying the price. I started feeling awful on Thursday, it got considerably worse on Friday, and then has been backing off slowly over the weekend. I am hoping that by tomorrow I will feel functional enough to work again. It started with an outrageously sore throat, a cough, and some intestinal panic… and mostly what is left is the cough. However it has impacted my ability to sleep with me waking up every 30 minutes or so for a good old fashioned coughing fit. However I did manage to move into the new desktop PC that I talked about last week, and have moved my old one downstairs to eventually be used for some living room big screen gaming. Very much a big fan of the Costco pre-built that I talked about, and it was a massive upgrade over my previous 11th gen intel based system with a 3080 in it.

I honestly spent most of the weekend too miserable to care about much of anything, staring blankly at the wall. When I did feel like gaming I largely played Path of Exile. I am alternating between delving on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, and mapping on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, and both are extremely solid. I am getting close to level 99 on the Chieftain and when I hit that, I am probably going to spend a bit more time taking on bloodline and pinnacle bosses to knock out some more credit towards the various challenges. I need to start doing a lot more Tier 16.5 maps because I need to complete a bajillion of them in order to knock out one of the challenges. Right now I am doing Blue altars juiced on my Ice Trapper, and at some point I will swap things up to Red altars and then later Maven Witnesses because there are achievements for doing all of those. I really hate the act of witnessing the Maven because I hate running random map layouts. I wish there was a keystone that gave you random bosses at the end of maps so that you could run a single layout and always be witnessing a new boss.

At this pint I have completed 24 of 40 Achievements and knocked out a few thanks to Betrayal like the one that requires you to use a bunch of rare crafting materials. I eventually got a syndicate crafting bench with a Divine Orb on it, which counts for the achievement requirements. There is another one for using rare currency, but I am not sure any of that stuff actually shows up on the Syndicate benches. At some point I should try and craft a dual influence life gain on block shield to replace my current one, and that will use an awakener orb which is one of the requirements. I am really close to Cross Contamination and just need to figure out which combination of scarabs I need to run to make some of those conditions happen. It took me four maps before I was able to get a Delirious Beyond boss which surprised me a bit. Sinew Swarms is actually closer in progress than the 0 of 3 would indicate but that one will complete in time with me just running enough maps.

Over in Destiny Rising, we had one of our best weekends ever… but I failed to take any screenshots. Essentially we managed to find Three Strongholds as a clan, and then did all of them on Saturday afternoon before I started feeling considerably worse as the day went on. We did not record a podcast this weekend, because I sort of cratered as we got towards evening. That has happened most nights, where I do better in the morning and then feel progressively worse as the day goes on. Morgran’s Prey is also going on again so we knocked a few of those rounds out as a group, and then I have run it a few more times solo. Now that I have every exotic weapon, the enticement of getting a new exotic is not nearly as strong as it once was. However it is still a good source of general resources and materials, and the combat itself is pretty fun.

I finished out the battle pass and got my 4th copy of the exotic grenade launcher, allowing me to max that weapon out. There are still a few minor points that I can upgrade it, but it did bump my Maru over 70k making her my highest character currently. As soon as I settle up from Calamity ops I should be able to max out her relic abilities and bump her score up again. After that I am either going to work on bumping up Ning Fei or Gwynn and I used some of the excess fruit that I had laying around to get artifact gilding requirement done for Tan-2. I’ve upgraded a bunch of my characters somewhat even levels of progress, whereas my friend Ace has mostly focused on one or two. Their method is probably better, but I personally like having a wide stable of characters to play.

I ran two of the three weekly legendary missions this morning, because I needed the components to bump up Maru’s weapon and completed my first three chest run with Gwynn that I have ever done. I need to do another one of these runs as Wolf because the last step that he has between getting another gold medallion is surviving a challenge mode without dying. The push to get more gold characters stopped being anywhere near as interesting when I was not longer gated from upgrades because I was too low level. Now that I am over Ascension 55 I think I can pretty much do anything in the game. I need to spend some time in the coming days trying to get through some more of the challenge content. I am not sure what day of the week Ace and I will get together and do the Grandmaster stuff, but I am sure it will be one of these first few days of the week before Thanksgiving.

Playing Path of Exile on the Livingroom TV was a bit of a wild experience. One of the things that I want to sort out over the holiday weekend is trying to figure out this doodad that I bought which serves as a USB to Bluetooth adapter and should allow me to remote control the device with a normal keyboard and mouse. A lot of the games that I plan on playing in the livingroom will be controller games, but I do still want the ability to play MMORPGs and ARPGs if I so choose it.

Pile of Shame

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Good Morning Folks! I took the day off because I have several doctors appointments stacked up. A few weeks ago I dealt with a medical issue brought on by a change in medication, and that has triggered a bunch of referrals to specialists. The positive is all of the tests have turned up nothing special, and everything being normal… the negative is we still have no clear indication as to what caused me to react to the medication swap so drastically. I don’t want to go into too much detail but essentially I lost 22 lbs in 3 days… on something that was not designed to make you lose weight like that. Essentially threw my body into a state of shock and we are fishing for the reason behind it. We will see how things shake out over the next month or so of going to specialists. Here is hoping I don’t have something tragically wrong with me that can’t be fixed.

So here is where I share some of my shame with you. Over the pandemic the Garage became a dumping ground for everything from boxes that I had yet to break down and take to recycling, to dead electronics, to all of my wife’ stuff from her classroom. I don’t have a proper before and after, because things were far worse than the picture on the left when I started this mission over the last two months… but essentially I have been working on the garage and getting it into a workable state. Essentially when my wife switched schools during the pandemic, she dumped everything from her previous classroom in a pile of boxes on the left side of the garage. When I had to hurriedly move her out of her out of the classroom when she passed away, those boxes got crammed into the right side of the garage. So since September I have been plugging away at improving things… effectively moving everything to the south side and then putting up shelving on the north side, and then doing the opposite. I have a ton of boxes that will need to be gone through and dealt with, but at least most of it is now up on shelving units, and the work table that has not been clear in over a decade is now almost completely clear… allowing me to move forward with the purchase of a 3D Printer that I am going to set up out here. I still need to do a bunch out here, but I was pushing to get to clear enough for me to be able to move all of the furniture in from the backyard before the truly cold weather hit.

In other news I recorded one of my dumb little gameplay videos of my Icetrap build, and have since pushed it up another level. Right now this has become my mapper and I play it while gathering up the sulphite to go back into delve and grind out levels on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. For the moment I am running a bunch of scarabs that just add additional monsters to the map, while also running legion and expedition with the node that gives me a single large explosion. It has been years since I have run either of those mechanics so I am having fun. It also makes for some pretty chill experience loaded mapping. For the moment, the next few points I spend on the tree are going to be adding a couple more power charges to see how things scale from there. If by some miracle I can ever stack all 18 traps on the same target and have them overlap… POB claims it will deal 16 million dps. I do not however believe that is even in the realm of possibility.

I am now sitting at 20 of 40 challenges and have my first tiny totem pole joining the role of totem poles in my hideout. I’ve knocked out most of the simple items and what is left requires quite a bit of grinding. I need to open two more of the currency wombgifts and then I will knock out the achievement for those. After that I need to focus on getting things like the cross contamination achievements, and quite honestly… just grinding a bunch of content to finish out the gear grinding goals objective. My goal is to match the same size totem pole that I have had the last few leagues which I think is 34 of 40. So I have a long ways to go before I accomplish that.

I just dinged 98 on the RF Chieftain and now I plan on knocking out a few more difficult things that I had been putting off, because I did not want to risk backsliding on experience gain. So i will be knocking out Sirius for another map slot, and potentially doing some stuff like Uber Atziri which should be reasonable with the current state of my build. I might even try some of the other proper ubers to see how well I can tackle them. I might do some more T17s and a few T16.5s since it will be awhile before I really care about how far progressed in experience I am again. 98 is really where the experience curve grinds to a halt, and those last two levels are super painful. However I expect to push to 100 again, because it knocks off a component in the last achievement.

Anyways! I need to gather trash and get it out to the curb and then start prepping to go to a doctor appointment. I hope yall are having a great week, and I will see you tomorrow for more nonsense.

Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist

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Good Morning Folks! When last I talked about my second build of the league, I was nearing the end of the campaign and it was still dominating. I had quite possibly the easiest time transitioning into maps that I have ever had, and after running a yellow map to test things out, I jumped straight into T16s. While I have taken a few deaths, largely because I did not have an anti-bleeding flask rolled yet at that point… I can pretty much rip through maps without any issue. I am now level 91 and the build is pretty closed to finished. Right now I am mostly just picking up those window dressing nodes to improve the damage as I go into power charge stacking and beef up my crit a bit more. The build is functional in its current state and will just continue to get better as I am able to spend more points.

If you are playing along at home, you can check out the POB here but I am not entirely certain how genuine its damage number is. I can reliably have up 18 traps at once, and if they ALL overlapped on a single target that would be around 8 million damage. And while that can happen due to the massive amount of area that the build has… it is also not super likely to happen and I am also never going to be standing perfectly still. Defensively I have 64% evasion rating which scales up to 74% when I have my flasks active, 100% spell suppression and in theory since I am hitting that naturally I should reclaim the point that is giving me lucky suppression. I am running Purity of Elements just so that I did not have to fuck with trying to fix elemental ailments and am not doing anything to increase base resistance over 75%. I have cast on damage taken immortal coil, stone stance, wicked ward, and the elementalist aegis all playing a part in keeping me alive and healthy when I do finally take damage. Given how fast I am moving through maps this feels really comfortable, and completely dominates the hive fortress encounters in the new breach league.

I am doing a few screwball things with jewels and pathing. Namely I am using an Unnatural Instinct to pick up a ton of nodes in the top part of the tree that are all mostly useful for what I am doing. I could not afford a version of the jewel that had corrupted blood immunity, but at some point I would love to replace it with one of those. I am also using Light of Meaning in an area of the tree where I am taking a bunch of nodes and it is collectively giving me +132% increased Cold Damage. Unfortunately I do not really have any great sources of MORE Cold Damage… so I am essentially having to rely pretty deeply on increased. I am however running with a level 28 Ice Trap gem which is giving me a ton of flat cold damage, which helps a bit. Occultist sadly is the only easy way to get More Cold, but then I would be losing all of the nice toys that the golems are giving me and my ability to ignite and shock with cold damage.

There are a lot of elements about this build that would be really cheap to assemble. Most of the gear I am wearing, could be crafted with the Tree Tree. However there is one element that is hard carrying how good it feels. I just happened into a dual explode Foulborn Berek’s Respite and have played with what happens to the build when I take it off. Essentially the Single Target damage is just fine, but the clear no longer feels anywhere near as good. This ring alone pushes the price point of the build up by a lot… this is essentially a headhunter level item as they are currently going for around 50 Divines. Even dropping down to a single explode version of this ring is noticeable, because I have an ignite only variant sitting in my bank and I could immediately tell the difference. I hate that this is what makes it feel so good while mapping, because this is going to push my variant of the build out of a lot of peoples price range. It works fine, and you can still clear pretty well… but it is like the difference between playing Righteous Fire with and without the Hinekora Chieftain node.

As far as gearing changes, I largely went with strong evasion and energy shield in every single slot. I swapped the Carcass Jack out for a well rolled rare chestpiece like I talked about in my last post. Sadly I need the chaos resistance from the Fugitive Boots or I would pick up eldritch implicits on that item as well. I did swap the Kongming out for a Jaws of Agony, because the whole blind thing did not really seem to be making that much difference. Jaws gives me quite a bit of trap damage, a decent chunk of life, and since it is a unique I was still able to keep my +2 minion gems corruption. The AOE gems does not do anything for this item, it just happened to be the cheapest +2 minions corrupt that I could buy. I need to spend some time rethinking this item slot however because I am sure there is something else that I could be using that would be more valuable. At the moment the 25% chance to gain a power charge on Jaws is making it so that I am pretty much always at max power charges.

I am extremely happy with this build right now. For the moment I am running a Freezing Tulgraft and a Flamecaller Xophgraft, the later mostly because it has +12 strength on it and I am needing more strength. I shield charge around the map quite a bit and Call of the Pyre itself has quite a lot of clear, which is pretty nice. I am totally open on these however and probably should optimize them a bit better. In theory I should probably swap over to a Hardening Uulgraft for Tender Embrace, which could come in handy when something does hit me. Unfortunately it cannot roll with strength on it, so I will need to figure out some other way of solving my strength problem. I basically need at least 100 Strength to run max level versions of Stone and Flame Golems… which I need for the buffs that they provide me, and also to keep them alive while mapping. Elementalist Golems self rez, but it is really noticeable when one of them dies and I would like to prevent that if at all possible.

At some point I am probably going to record some gameplay of the build so that yall can see it in action, but I would definitely all Freezy Boom 2.0 a rousing success. This is honestly good enough that I would be shocked if someone else does not realize its potential.

Snowblind

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Good Morning Folks. For a short week… it was one hell of a long week. I did not post yesterday because I was not really sure I had much of anything to say. I’ve shifted my focus over to leveling my now Elementalist that is attempting to retrace the steps that I made previously with my BelFreezyBoom character. That time I played it on a Trickster, and this time around I am leaning into Elementalist for the golem buffs and the ability to be shocking, igniting, and freezing everything with my ice damage. So far… I am still in the campaign but there is not a single fight that I have not instant phased. The sheer amount of damage that I am dealing seems crazy, and I think I am going to end up shifting up some of the build further because the golems are solving a lot of problems for me. In the previous incarnation I went Eldritch Battery, and I would really love not to have to do that here so that I could keep Energy Shield as a proper defensive layer. I also would really love to drop Clarity, so I have some mana fixing that needs to happen so that I can keep spamming traps without running empty.

One of the toys that I am specifically building around this time is the new Foulborn Berek’s Respite. Originally I had planned on using the cheap version of this that had explosion for ignited enemies, and then propagated shocks. However I pulled the 50 divine version of the ring that has both explosions on shocked or ignited mobs and I am running with this. That means that I need to make sure I am shocking and igniting with my cold damage. A big part of why I am playing Elementalist on top of the golem buffs, is the fact that Shaper of Flames and Shaper of Storms make it so that ALL damage that I deal regardless of element can Ignite and can Shock. While leveling I had been using some items to force lightning and fire damage, but in theory I can drop these going forward and just pour all of my effort into cold damage.

This is the current state of the build as exported this morning. I’ve completed three labs and picked up the golem node, and then shaper of storms, and shaper of flames, and then I am probably going to pick up the elemental bastion node as my final choice just for an additional defensive layer. After that I am mostly picking up all of the trap damage and cold damage nodes that are easy to get to, and then picking up energy shield, life, and evasion nodes. I’ve grabbed the entire spell suppression wheel and taken the spell suppression is lucky mastery. Since I am getting so much general problem fixing from the golems, I am hoping I can go way more tanky with the build as a whole. I got the last build to a pretty comfortable spot, but I am hoping that I can improve upon pretty much everything with this version.

For Uniques I am running Sunblast which is really the only thing that is absolutely required to make this work. It essentially makes it so that enemies do not trigger traps, but they trigger on their own quickly after laying them down. I spent a div on a corrupted version that gives me 10% increased Area of Effect scaling, because the goal of this build is to make really large traps. Previously I had been using a Carcass Jack to accomplish this, but in truth… the Fire Golem scaling seems to be enough that I might end up dropping the Jack in order to get a well rolled rare instead. New things that I am playing with is a Kongming’s Stratagem which blinds everything that gets hit by my traps, and I am slotting 3 of my 4 golems in it to get +2 levels, and then the 4th golem is being scaled by the other new unique which is a Foulborn Tulborn which gives +4 levels to cold gems.

This is what the AOE coverage of my traps looked like before throwing on a Carcass Jack, and I think this is MORE than enough for good clearing. So once I throw on a few more levels I will probably sell the Jack and pick up a really well rolled chest-piece with suppression and resists on it. The problem with playing with this many uniques is that I only have a handful of slots to fix my stats with. Essentially I will have gloves, boots, helm, and a ring if I use the Jack, so having another rare in that chest slot should really help spread things out a bit. I am going to need spell suppression on pretty much every slot I can get it, and I need to find good movement speed boots because at the moment I feel extremely sluggish. Once I get this geared enough I will probably start mapping on it, and then using the RF Chieftain almost exclusively for Delve. That said I remember having a pretty good time in Delve with the previous incarnation of this build.

The main reason why I am so focused on trying to build it tanky, is just that I have zero visual clarity while playing the character. The entire screen is white explosions, and there are not even any mtx that you can throw on that improve this. There is a single option but it looks just as much of a whiteout, potentially worse. It is a heck of a lot of fun though to watch everything essentially get wiped out by the traps. The big thing that I need to fix though is my mana, and in theory I probably need to incorporate minus mana cost on my one available rare ring. I might see what I can annoint on my Dragonfang Amulet to resolve my mana woes, since I think I have already picked up all of the trap and cold damage nodes. The only damage node that would make sense is Divine Judgement since I can’t path over to it.

The biggest challenge with this build is the fact that I am flying completely blind. I am having to exclusively lean on my knowledge of the game to solve the problems that it encounters. This is honestly pretty cool, and if nothing else I should earn a tiny bit of hipster cred if it works. If it fails miserably… then I already have one stable character this league that I can fall back on. A lot of the reason why I play Righteous Fire is that it is so predictable, and it can then in turn fund the bad ideas builds that I occasionally come up with. Today I should finish out the campaign and start mapping and we will see if this continues to roll along as smoothly as it does. If so… I might have come up with something really interesting here. If not… I can always fall back on mapping with my existing successful character. This is at least part of the fun for me, trying something different.