Good Morning Folks! I took quite possibly the longest break I have ever taken with my blog over the break. It was good, and honestly I should allow myself to do this a bit more often. It isn’t necessarily that I did not want to blog, but more that I did not want to have to summon forth something worth talking about. I spent a lot of the break listening to audiobooks and grinding away in Path of Exile II, which is an extremely comfortable existence for me. This morning I am going to talk about a few things that I have landed on. I’m still mostly playing my Minions Infernalist and am enjoying the largely chill methodology of mapping. I can go days without taking a death, which makes it feel pretty similar to my experiences with Righteous Fire characters in the baseline game.
Even in the baseline game I am not what you would call a “Juicer” aka someone who buys optimized maps or optimized scarabs in order to run the most content dense and optimal mapping experiences. I am instead what would be referred to as an “alch and go andy”, where I greatly prefer running whatever maps happen to roll when I throw an Alchemy Orb at a white map, and then utilize whatever scarabs happen to drop. This is also the way that I have been playing Path of Exile II, where I am relying entirely upon drops in order to keep “map sustain” going. The thing that I have learned is that in order to do this, you really need to target Boss maps, because they seem to have a much higher density of T15 map drops. Bosses seem to be guaranteed to drop two T15 maps, and then during the course of the map you will often see one or two more T15 maps meaning that a single boss map can sustain four or five other maps worth of content. I am also getting enough Precursor Tablets in order to essentially cram one of them into every single Tower that I come across.
One of the things that I loved about Path of Exile, is the Delve alternate game mode where you spent your time spelunking through the mines looking for treasure. The Path of Exile II endgame atlas borrows a lot from this concept with everything being a bit more exploration based than the traditional Atlas progression. Delve for me was a game mode about finding the best possible nodes, and more specifically chasing the three Cities and the boss fights that could spawn in them which were capable of dropping some of the specific items that came from that game mode. As such my POE2 Atlas strategy has been about trying to find the three Citadels that can spawn, each of which containing a boss fight, as well as keeping a look out for any interesting unique maps that happen to spawn along the way.
Essentially Iron Citadels contain the boss fight from Act 1, and spawn in segmented off plots of farmland. You will often see the worked fields appearing on your map and the gothic buildings well before you actually arrive at the Citadel. Weird quirk of this specific Citadel is that they often spawn in clusters where I have seen three of them within a few towers distance of each other. Stone Citadels contain the boss of Act III and seem to spawn often butting up against mountain ranges. You will usually see a number of steppe pyramids and ziggurats in the near vicinity. The Copper Citadel spawns exclusively in the desert and contains the boss of Act II, and it will be in a larger swath of desert as opposed to sandy coastal regions. In this case you will see grayish green tents surrounding the few nodes closest to the Citadel.
Why am I chasing these Citadels? Well for one they drop specific fragments that are required to summon the Uber boss. However given the current one portal state of the game, I have zero interest in attempting the boss. Instead I am using these Citadels as a way of making pretty decent spikes of currency. The Copper Citadel seems to be the rarest, which is vetted by how much more these fragments go for as compared to the others. The most common seems to be Iron Citadels in part due to the fact that they often spawn in clusters. However I am guessing that the Stone Citadel can do the same thing given its fragment is just as cheap. Essentially running around 150% Rarity, I am pulling 5 to 10 Exalts per map run and then when I find a Citadel I get a rather large payday with the bosses often dropping two fragments each given that I can run them with my Atlas tree that buffs up their level.
Essentially I am running an Atlas that adds +3 levels to every single map boss that I encounter, as well as trying to stack as much rarity from the tree. I am specifically also adding some pack size nodes and ones that cause one rare in my map to duplicate. Basically I am trying to add as many rares to the map as I can, which is why I am also dipping into the Essence nodes just a bit, which means that I usually have one of those on each map. The only things in a map that drop any loot worth mentioning are Rares and Uniques, and as such trying to stack as many of those as possible really helps out. One of the interesting things about the node that doubles one of the rares, is that it occasionally also triggers on bosses giving me two copies of the same boss to fight at once. This can get a bit dicey at times, especially for bosses like the Miller which often like to time their attacks so you are essentially having to dodge from two different things at the same time.
Other than that I have leveled up an Invoker and now have it in maps as well, which makes my third character capable of mapping. I am trying to fix some of the survival issues with this character, namely that it is so much squishier than my Infernalist. I am probably going to respec the entire tree at some point and follow one of the other build paths that I have seen. I am running the Polcirkeln ring which means I do not necessarily have to run both Heralds to make big pops happen. This allowed me to pick up another defensive aura which helped, but also… given that I am having to charge into packs of mobs there is just a higher likelihood of taking random deaths. I’ve gotten used to my fart boots on the Witch consuming corpses and effectively making me immune to on death effects. I am pretty sure that all of the deaths I have taken on the Monk thus far have probably been triggered by something happening after I exploded a pack of mobs.
I am really interested to see what happens this week as GGG comes back into the office. I fully expect there to be some significant patches happening. We are essentially interesting a period of time which is the battle for the soul of the game. Either they are going to claw back the power that players have found dragging the game back down into its Ruthless roots, or they are going to lean into the play style that players seem to want. Ruthless is the least played game mode for a reason, and I for one am hoping that we see significant buffs to the under-performing classes and only the lightest of nerfs to the classes and abilities that are performing well. If they nerf my minions character, I am probably done with the game because quite honestly… nothing else feels good enough to keep me around.
