inquisitor

Minion Guardian is Phenomenal

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Day of Blaugust 2023

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Good Morning Folks! As I am sitting here writing it is the dawn of the last day of Blaugust 2023. There was so much content generated, and tomorrow I will likely do a bit of a summary when I talk about the event as a whole. I wanted to start out this morning with a bit of expectation-setting. In an average year, the “tabulation day” as I personally refer to it is a bit of an arduous undertaking. Normally we talk around fifty or so blogs that I have to review and count posts on. This year we have one hundred and three… by far the largest participant pool I’ve ever seen. So please be patient with me as I undertake the task of tabulating everything and calculating the rewards. Tomorrow is the day when I get really grumpy for everyone who has a less standard blog layout without a clear monthly post index. Really it is the more Instagram-like interfaces that fluster me the most with irregular tiling.

I know of at least one blogger who I am going to ask to tabulate their results for me because instead of writing traditional blog posts they created their blog as threads on the Fediverse. It is just too damned hard to track these, and while I want to be super inclusive about this event… we gotta figure out a better way if this is going to be a thing that more people do. I think next year if we have anything even vaguely close to this number of bloggers, I am going to have to write something into the rules for self-submitting your blog post count for the month. I mean the entire event is already largely on the honor system and I am already scared to death that I am going to miss count someone’s posts and dump them into the wrong category. It has happened before. Some blogs are just harder to count than others and when you are doing a ton in a row in as short a time frame as you can… mistakes occasionally get made.

I am still delving around the 150 depth and having a blast doing so. I’ve upgraded my resistance and light radius in order to go much deeper, but for the moment this seems to be my happy place. I am not sure if this league’s RF character is stronger than the last league, but it feels at least as tanky. I know flipping Fire Trap to my chest piece seems to have increased my damage output significantly. I dinged 95 last night and am about a quarter of the way into the next level. I spent my passive tree point last night on some quality of life, and 10% more area of effect for Righteous Fire. I wasn’t entirely certain why, but my radius seemed really small to me… so anything to increase that would be pretty great. I know that I am missing the AOE Gems/Radius bench craft on my Necklace which I have not lucked into unveiling so far this league. I spent a bit of time last night running Jun missions on the Raider in an attempt to get it with no real luck so far.

I spent quite a bit of time on the Storm Brand Templar soon-to-be Inquisitor last night. I am still very much in the “ugly duckling” phase of this build and don’t have much in the way of defensive layers yet. I did pick up a pair of Call of the Brotherhood rings with Lightning to Cold conversion, giving me a grand total of 96% of Lightning Damage converted to cold. I am contemplating trying to work a Heatshiver into the build so that would add some fire damage as well. I still think I want an Inpulsa chest, which is going to be pretty expensive… but thankfully “Delve Provides” to borrow a motto from Jorgen. I already have more than enough currency to pick up whatever I need, but I do like to keep a buffer for more of my bullshit projects. Random comment though… the new Kirac’s Vault outfit is pretty freaking great minus the weird helm. I had this glowing eyes/black hood thing from a random cosmetic box and I think it goes nicely with it… and then matched it with some wings I had from a previous supporter pack and two wand graphics.

Anyways also on the docket this weekend, is Starfield. I preloaded it this morning and play on poking my head in when the early access begins tonight/tomorrow. I am not sure if I will give this a ton of attention, mostly because I am still fairly invested in the Path of Exile league. However, it might surprise me, and grab me in the same way that Skyrim did so many years… when I pretty much disappeared from raiding for a week because I could not stop playing the game. I am hoping for a great experience, but I am also trying to cool my jets when it comes to hype. I know Bethesda games can be a bit buggy, but honestly… I’ve enjoyed all of them. Hell, I even enjoyed Fallout 76 quite a bit at launch and had zero problems with Fallout 4 in spite of so many people lampooning it at the time.

It is weird… I can be super critical of games like Diablo IV, but completely give a pass to other games that people are memeing. I think it mostly depends on how important I consider the genre. For me the ARPG is just such a fundamental part of me as a player, that my disappointment got the best of me with Diablo. However, Bethesda games are just something I play for fun on the side from my more mainline MMO and ARPG games. They are just a fun goof rather than my main course. I think maybe that is also why I didn’t really have any problem with the DC movies that so many people lambasted… because I am just not super invested in them. Investment breeds contempt.

Now time for my second “Anyways” of the post. I hope you all have a great day and a happy last day of Blaugust. Remember… tomorrow will be a stressful day for me. Please give me some space to do the things needed to tabulate the posts.

Scorching Ray and Malignant Hearts

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Good Morning Friends. Yesterday I did not really have the mental fortitude for Baldur’s Gate III, so I largely focused on ARPGs for a quick dose of fun. I’ve continued working on leveling my Righteous Fire Templar and that continues to go swimmingly. The big difference with this test character is that I am focused on Scorching Ray in lieu of the more traditional Fire Trap for single-target-DPS. I am still not sure if I will actually go in this direction in nine days when the league start happens, but there are absolutely aspects of it that I greatly enjoy. Being able to burn things down at range is rather nice as they are heading toward you, but I am not entirely certain this makes up for the complete lack of mobility while doing the damage. I think in order to really get the most from this, you would need to invert your body armor and helmet quickly and get Scorching Ray in the six-link. I feel like for bosses this might have significantly higher damage potential, but for anything else… probably less because it was so easy just to drop fire traps as you were pathing through a map.

We have yet another new Atlas Passive spoiler and once again SirGog does an excellent job diving into its potential. If you don’t follow his channel, I highly suggest you remedy that because I find him one of the more valuable resources that deep dives into specific theory-crafting. There is this trend between the passive reveals so far that I am digging. They all seem to be making it easier for someone who has zero experience to get into specific league mechanics from the “big boom” option for Expedition to the “Tower Defense Only” Blight and “No Timer Delirium” and now “No Timer Legion” there is a clear pattern. It feels like we are going to see a new passive for most of the “on map” League mechanics that somehow simplify them without the need for a lot of atlas tree investment. Making Path of Exile a little more “noob friendly” seems like a great course to me.

Speaking of “Noob Friendly” I recorded another one of my dumb videos the other day where I ramble on about my journey so far in Path of Exile over the last four leagues. I had someone on social media helpfully suggest that I need to follow a script and that I need to talk faster… but that is going to be advice that I ignore. I’m not trying to turn YouTube or this blog for that matter into a business and I don’t much care about optimizing my output. However, if you are interested in listening to a twenty-minute discussion of how I progressed from half-assing my way through a build, following a guide, and now branching out to do some of my own things… this might be something for you. I talk through some of the websites and tools that I use and at least talk a little bit about Path of Building. I get that I am absolutely an acquired taste, but I know there are at least a few people out there that enjoy listening to me ramble.

In the “things I did not expect to do” department, over lunch yesterday I decided to check out Diablo IV Patch 1.1.1 aka the one that supposedly fixes a bunch of things. All told thus far it feels like a better experience, but then again… I am only level sixteen and am far from the end of the game that wound up frustrating me. I am trying a Hammer of the Ancients aka HOTA Barbarian, because really… if Barb does not feel better then I legitimately have no interest in this game going forward. Originally I thought to myself that I was going to play through the campaign again because starting a character without the campaign feels a little directionless. However, I got bored with the campaign quests and all of the times when you are having to wait on NPCs to path… and wound up hitting the “skip campaign” button. Diablo IV still feels prodigiously slow to me, and probably always will.

Skipping the campaign at least allowed me to fiddle around with the seasonal mechanic. Malignant Hearts are in the “aggressively fine” territory. One of the nice things so far is that I don’t exactly feel like I am giving anything up since I would normally run Skulls in all of my jewelry, and thus far all of the hearts I have picked up have added additional armor. The effects that they grant tend to be a bit on the lackluster side… but again I am only level sixteen. They are certainly nice to haves, but nothing so far that I would consider “build defining”. It most definitely does not feel like it allows me to create some “broken builds” as hinted at by the devs. The biggest problem I have noticed is… the increase in renown means that you cap out an area long before you can reasonably unlock World Tier 3… and continue gaining renown. So at least in the short term, I feel like I would need to bounce around a lot.

I’ve not consumed my extra special battle pass nonsense, and unless I suddenly decide this is the best thing ever… I am unlikely to do so. It isn’t so much that the seasonal mechanic is bad… it is more that it feels like it should have been a small part of much larger mechanics. Like if you collected hearts and then could use your excess hearts (side note I am only 16 and I already have more than I can use) to craft some sort of key that allowed you to run a loot-filled dungeon full of nothing but corrupted/infected/whatever monsters… it might be a really fun season. They could have taken a page from Path of Exile and given us a way to use a heart to corrupt a dungeon boss similar to corrupting an Essence Monster, that then has a chance to drop special corrupted versions of their normal loot table. The mechanic just feels half-baked and it should have been saved to combine with other seasonal mechanics to make something cooler.

I think quite possibly the biggest negative that I can see is that even though it is lackluster as a whole… they have already said that it won’t be going to the Eternal realm. Diablo IV already feels like it just doesn’t have enough to do or enough interesting variety in its content. Making it so that there is a random chance of getting a Malignant heart to drop that then allows it to replace a gem socket or something going forward would at least add some interesting random chance that could break up other seasonal mechanics. The biggest thing that Path of Exile has going for it, is just how damned much content it has and how much random chance there is that something really interesting is going to happen when you run even the most boring of maps. There is something like twenty-four different league mechanics that have migrated to Standard and all of them CAN influence your content… adding that delightful layer of unpredictability to everything you do.

Blizzard decided that Nightmare Dungeons would be their pinnacle activity that everyone would want to do over and over. The problem is… they are boring, repetitive, and in spite of having over a hundred dungeons… they feature what is essentially a dozen different bosses. In the infamous David S. Pumpkins SNL skit one of the characters asks “Why did you go all in on David Pumpkins?” and I feel like I find myself asking that about Nightmare Dungeons. Clearly, the designers thought they were going to be the big thing, and that has not really worked into reality. Anyways do I think I will actually level my now seasonal character in Diablo IV? Probably not. I will likely return to more Baldur’s Gate III, until the 18th when the Ancestor League launches in Path of Exile, and rapidly forget that I even have Diablo IV installed again.

Scuffed Arma Brand

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Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s epic blog post, I am going to take it a bit light so I can actually publish it… in the actual morning. Over the weekend I dusted off my Scion character and have been playing it a bit. I don’t exactly know what I am doing but I am having quite a bit of fun screwing around with it. As I have said before, this character was created only as a way to knock out the clear “Act III on a Scion” achievement but wound up trying out a spell gem that I had never played with before. I like brands as a concept and have played a Wintertide Brand and a Stormbrand build to high levels and enjoyed both. Armageddon Brand works a bit differently in that most of the damage it deals, comes from a single massive meteor that falls from the sky and strikes an impact area surrounding the mob it is targeting.

The end result feels so good as you send down projectiles from above to decimate oncoming packs of monsters. I recorded another one of my dumb videos last night showing off some footage from blood aqueducts. The thing is… I am enjoying this enough that I am legitimately considering trying something like this for a league start. I don’t love the fiddly nature of Scion, so if I did this I would be focused on Inquisitor because it comes with a sizeable amount of survival. The biggest problem that I have with the build currently is it has somewhat anemic single-target damage. To be fair… this is traditionally the problem with a brand build, but I think with enough crit this might resolve itself.

Another problem that I am struggling with right now, is trying to figure out where I want to go on my tree. Since I am doing this completely without a map at this point, I am mostly just trying to seek out things that either give me survivability or elemental damage and crit. Right now I have a bunch of points invested in the minion damage setup that gives me a flat damage increase like I would use with Righteous Fire. I am wondering if those points are better spent elsewhere. There is a cluster of fire nodes way up north that might be worth respeccing and pathing towards. While I recorded the video last night, I sort of hem-hawed around about what my second ascension would be… and last night I made the decision to officially go Chieftan. I need to get another labyrinth down so that I can actually make that happen.

As far as a league starter version, I am sorta leaning towards this sort of build from RaizQT. He is a hardcore player so values survival… so when he says it is Tanky, he probably means that it is actually tanky. On POE.Ninja there are a bunch of players working off some version of this build focused around the Rathpith shield. The negative with that shield is you take 10% life damage every time you cast a spell… but you also gain a ton of damage as a result. Essentially to make this work you need lots of life and even more regeneration… given that it also runs Righteous Fire just to buff the fire damage. It feels weird that I am contemplating not starting RF Juggernaut since I have had so much luck with that build, but I also feel like I probably need to branch out a bit.

If I find myself struggling, I can always lean back on the RF Juggernaut again to fund any sort of nonsense that I want to get up to. I might change my mind by the time the 18th of August actually rolls around, but right now… I am very seriously contemplating an Armageddon Brand Inquisitor for my league starter. In the weeks between now and then, I sort of want to map out a bit of a POB for myself based on the elements that I see from the builds on POE.Ninja. In the meantime, I will continue to screw around on the Scion and see if I can make it viable for mapping.