As we get closer to Friday, I think I have finally come to terms with the fact that I will be going Boneshatter for the league start. After sifting through many different guides and POBs, I think I honestly prefer the one that Zizaran released for 3.22. This is mostly because the gear seems pretty straightforward and craftable and it features some of the things that I knew that I wanted to lean into like double-dipping evasion for armor with Iron Reflexes. We have a Trello for all of the folks doing league starts in the private league we are running and I have highlighted some of the uniques that I am looking out for, but in theory, this should be able to be done with nothing but rares at least for a while. If this can get me down into Delve at around 150 depth I will be very happy.
Additionally, since yesterday was the official stop of the Trial of the Ancestors league, it meant that they opened up the ability to create private leagues for Affliction. So we now officially have the “Bel League Affliction” set up and running and most of the participants have joined. Ash and Kodra helped split the cost of the league three ways with us each chipping in 100 coins, with more folks willing to chip in if we decide to expand it past the initial 40 days. I figure at the 40-day mark we will either allow the characters to drop down into the trade league or if folks are still going hot and heavy, expand it out by another 30 days.
The other big thing that I did in Path of Exile last night was to get both my personal and the guild’s stash set up in standard the way I want it to look in Affliction. Essentially the state of your standard stash is what gets imported into the next league, and for the guild, I mostly wanted to get the tabs named and affinities set properly so that hopefully I don’t have to do this on the first day of the new league. Similarly, I did a bunch of rearranging things in my personal stash to go ahead and set up some of the common folders that I used in Ancestor League. As far as all of those “Remove-Only” tabs I tend to shove them into a folder named after the league they were created during. Not that I spend much time in Standard, but I figure this will make this a bit easier at a later date when I might be looking for something.
In other news, I have been playing a not-insignificant amount of Guild Wars 2 lately. I’ve talked about this a bit, but I have been popping in at least once each day to chip away at my “wizard chores” which is a humorous term that I picked up from my friend Ace regarding World of Warcraft Dailies. Given that I am actually doing them for a tower full of wizards… and the reward system is called the Wizard’s Vault… it is finally the perfect term for what I am doing. Doing various daily, weekly, and period objectives gives you a currency called Astral Acclaim which can then be used to buy all manner of things from cosmetics, to pieces of usable gear… to probably the most valuable item which amounts to a massive boost in crafting your choice of a legendary from four different options.
Astral Acclaim stacks to 1300 points, and I was nearing the cap where I could not earn anymore and needed to spend down some of it. So I opted to pick up the Legendary Weapon Starter Kit – Set 2. This gave me access to shortcutting the crafting process for Bolt, The Moot, Quip, or The Predator. Since I use Sword on a few of my characters and am looking forward to playing around with Sword on my Necromancer soonish… I opted to go with Bolt. I don’t really love the appearance of any of these weapons, but the other one I was considering for a bit was Quip just to give me access to a pistol as that seems to be a weapon archetype I also enjoy. What this box does is give you the precursor weapon, the “gift of” for the specific weapon shortcutting the need to level a profession to 400, and either a Gift of Magic or Gift of Might. This then requires you to supply your own Gift of Mastery and the Gift of Magic/Might that you did not receive, along with 77 Mystic Clovers, and 250 Globs of Ecotoplasm to craft a Gift of Fortune.
I had already been chipping away at some of the legendary weapon requirements because I have been working towards Twilight… which I stalled out on when it came to crafting the precursor. I should have just sucked it up and bought the precursor and would have likely already completed that weapon before now had I done so. This however meant that I had already done the legwork to craft a Gift of Mastery, and had been stockpiling resources that got me at least part of the way towards the missing Gift of Magic since my package gave me Might instead. I took the easy way out and spent roughly 200 gold to finish gathering the Tier 6 materials needed to craft the Gift of Fortune and then threw all of the expensive bits in the mystical commode to get my very first Legendary weapon in Guild Wars 2.
To be fair… I said “sorta” in the title because it doesn’t feel like I really put in all of the effort required to craft a Legendary weapon. I would probably feel more accomplished had I done so, but given that gathering Legendary gear is the true endgame of Guild Wars 2, it does seem a bit brilliant to give players an onramp to demystify the process a bit. According to GW2 Efficiency, the price right now to craft a Bolt from scratch would require about 1300 gold. This is greatly shortcutting that process giving you the Gift of Bolt (~200 Gold), Gift of Might (~150 Gold), and the precursor (~70 Gold) all for the low price of a month’s worth of dailies. It also encourages players to complete that Gift of Mastery on their own which requires getting full Tyria exploration completion and farming up a Gift of Battle. The more players engage with Legendary crafting, the more they become entwined into the flow of the game… and likely the longer they will stick around. While this essentially handed me 450 Gold… it did so in a way that meant I had to have poured a good deal of my time into the project to make anything of it.
The only annoyance is that I will have to craft a second legendary sword at some point for the characters that would want to dual-wield them. Now that I have broken the seal on this system, however… I sorta want to focus some time on wrapping up Twilight and getting a Greatsword for all of my alts to use as well. I see what you did there Wizard Vault…
Friends… I am essentially giving up on Righteous Fire for the time being. I was holding out some hope that maybe an alt-quality version of the gem would be released that works more or less like the previous version. Yesterday we got a dump of 39 transfigured gems, and given that Righteous Fire has caused more strife than probably any other change… if they were going to let us down easily yesterday would have been the ideal time to do it. It is somewhat sad, given that I went so far as to get my Righteous Fire Juggernaut drawn by Ammo and included in my site header. It won’t be the first time that a dead character ends up in the banner, and I still love the look of this character and will remember my three different RF Juggernauts fondly. I could migrate over to playing the Inquisitor version that Pohx has been cooking up… but honestly, I did not really like the feel of an Inquisitor. It was too squishy for my tastes.
What seems to be happening instead is that Ash and Kodra have come very close to talking me into trying out Boneshatter Juggernaut as a league starter. I like Juggernaut and being unkillable and apparently this build fits those requirements. It is unfortunately not a shield charge build… which will feel a bit bad given how much I enjoy zooming around with my shield. The only problem is… there are a lot of versions of Boneshatter requiring some wildly different levels of investment. Jorgen for example has shown off several different variants including one designed for fairly deep levels of delving that uses a shield and an axe. I am probably instead going to follow a more standard league starter two-handed axe variant and then pivot from there into some of the other build options.
I did see a version of Boneshatter that piqued my interest this morning. Smokie is a YouTuber/Streamer that I stumbled onto when I was looking at Chieftain RF builds and honestly… I dig their vibe. This version seems to pivot into Iron Reflexes and instead of going with a Glorious Plate, going with a high Evasion/Armor chest which abuses the order of operations to double the converted evasion in addition to the armor. The only challenge is… I don’t know that I want to follow this POB entirely because they value defense far less than I do. So if I am going to go down this path… I guess I need to spend the next few days trying to whittle down the various versions into a build that I actually want to follow. I always felt that Boneshatter was way too fiddly, but I guess without the Divergent version it will be less so.
In another league I might spend the next couple of days doing a test run… but instead, I am spending my evenings in Baldur’s Gate III, trying to wrap up a play-through before I dive into Affliction league. So at this point… I am legitimately considering going Boneshatter, but I could of course make an audible at the last moment and shift to Explosive Arrow Champion, or if there DOES end up being an alt-quality viable Righteous Fire going back to good ole comfy main. What is stressing me out more than ALL of this however is the fact that they have yet to open up private league signups for the new affliction league. Everything feels like it is really underprepared for this league, and I don’t know how much of it is the sheer number of changes they decided to take on, or the loss of their veteran community manager. Whatever the case… Affliction is going to be by the seat of our pants.
Morning Folks! I am so damned close to 100. I ended the night with roughly two pips to go which equates to around 37 million experience. Progress is so damned slow at level 99 and I am constantly on edge that something that I might do will set me back. I’m carrying around an Omen of Amelioration which will prevent 75% of the normal XP loss from taking a death. On one hand, I hoped that simply having that in my inventory would keep me from needing it, but if I do take a death it would be well worth the 40 Chaos that I spent on it. For reference, all evening I ground delve and it only got me two pips worth of experience, so essentially it will take another full evening of delve to push across the finish line.
The positive is that I am currently completely full on sulphite and my Lightning Arrow Champion can seemingly refill me much faster and safer than my other options have been. For refilling purposes, I have been running rusted scarabs and slowly chipping away at the Ritual challenge. I ran around ten maps last night with a full complement of blue altars and did not take a single death, which feels miraculous to have something that strong. I also swapped over some gear from my Lightning Arrow Deadeye allowing me to at least have some measure of magic find. Essentially I swapped over the rings which takes me to around +30% quant and +80% rarity which while not super extreme should make a bit of a difference in the long run.
One of the things that I have learned is that I value different things from other Path of Exile players. If you watch any of my videos you will mostly hear me talking about my defensive layers and how I am planning on surviving things… and very little about how I have stacked the deck to be able to kill things. Last night my friend Kodra uploaded a video of his Hexblast Miner since he considered my kill speed “very slow” for bosses. Compared to a boss killer I am exceptionally slow… but even during this video all of the close calls he had where he “almost” died would have driven me up a wall. I’ve played builds that are much much more “killy” but ride the edge of death, and they are very much NOT FOR ME. At some point, I should build something like this Hexblast build just so I have a boss nuker.
Today is also the release of Diablo IV Season 2, and I know I am going to spend some time checking that out. Right now I plan on rolling another Barbarian largely to use it as a point of reference. I played a Barbarian at launch, and in Season 1, and want to at least play one a bit so I can see how the differences in the class feel between the three. I’ve heard that necromancers have a number of significant buffs, namely that the minions can actually stay alive now… so I am probably going to spend some time playing one of those as well. I am honestly not sure how seriously I am going to play D4, because I still have some goals that I want to accomplish in Path of Exile namely that once XP no longer matters I want to beat my head against Maven until I learn that fight.
Anyways! If you are going to be playing some D4 hit me up. I am not even sure if I have room on my B.Net Friends list but I’m Belghast #1752 over there.
Good Morning Folks! While I still have quite a few things that I want to tick off before I am completed with it, I feel like the 3.22 Trials of the Ancestor League is starting to wind down a bit. You can see this in the community as the various streamers detach from the game and start playing other things. I know personally I plan on giving Diablo IV Season 2 a shot tomorrow, and seeing how I feel about that game. As far as objectives go, I have 4 pips of experience to go from level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut which will be a first for me in a season. Apart from that, I want to knock out at least one more objective so I can get a sad little totem pole for my third league in a row. So I know that I will still be playing quite a bit, but I am finding my desire to build new builds waning.
As a result, I thought I would spend this morning reviewing my builds for this league and talking a bit about them. This is mostly going to be me posting links to videos that I have recorded throughout the current league, and talking about my feelings regarding the build and how successful it was. This grading will be governed by my own personal feelings about how best to approach Path of Exile. I like tanky builds and I am learning that even when I play a successful build… if it feels too squishy it ruins the experience for me.
Vaal Lightning Arrow Raider
Toward the end of last league I did a brief test to see how it would feel to league start Lightning Arrow, and honestly, the leveling process and early maps felt extremely solid. This prompted me to commit to league starting this build for Trail of the Ancestors and for the most part it went smoothly… until I hit a wall around red maps. Knowing what I know now… this is the point where I should converted my tree over to the critical strike variant, but I did not… and floundered greatly. This built felt amazing when it came to clearing maps… and then struggled significantly with map and atlas bosses. I thought that Raider would give me some additional defensive layers that would make it feel better… but it just was not enough.
The positive of the build is that it allowed me to farm up enough currency to pay for my swap over to Righteous Fire. The negative is… I could have easily just league-started Righteous Fire. This build would essentially color my league experience because I spent a lot of time frustrated that this did not feel good to me. I am not a map blaster and I do not love playing builds that feel like they have paper-thin defensive layers. For those who are curious, this is what the POB looked like at the time of recording this video.
Personal Rating: C Tier
Righteous Fire Juggernaut
So after the feelings of failure regarding Lightning Arrow Raider, I rolled right back to the old familiar and comfortable in the form of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. With this build it is a cakewalk to finish your atlas and get your first two voidstones, and it also allowed me to set up shop in delve and start producing raw materials in bulk. I think I have come to the realization that I am going to want an RF Jugg in every league given how much I have bonded with the playstyle, and given that it enables me to spend a large amount of time down in Delve. I did not record a video on this build until fairly late in the league and after I spent some currency on getting a Hinekora, Death’s Fury setup with Forbidden Flesh and Flame jewels. Once I ding 100 hopefully this week… I am going to shift over to trying to knock out all of the bosses with this character. I get into this pattern of not wanting to risk a death when I am gaining experience given that it slows down so much after level 95.
You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.
Personal Rating: S Tier Plus
Summon Raging Spirits Guardian
The Trial of the Ancestors League saw significant reworks of two Acendancies, the Templar Guardian and the Marauder Chieftain. In a desire to play with these, I decided to roll a Summon Raging Spirits build as I have often done in past leagues, but play it instead with the new Guardian Ascendancy. This build… is a miraculous powerhouse. This entirely rests upon the shoulders of the fact that the Guardian unique minions are so damned strong. From the very first Labyrinth, you end up getting something with the relative power of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and it can essentially carry you from that point forward. There is a reason why Guardian is the most popular Ascendancy in Ruthless League, making up over 14% of the player base and even higher if you get into the hardcore modes.
What I was not expecting necessarily is how good this felt mapping, because essentially you are using Convocation to keep dragging your pet RF Juggernaut as you shield charge through the map. Summon Raging Spirits always feels great when it comes to killing bosses, but the Sentinel of Radiance pet really makes the map clear in general feel so good. If this does not get nerfed… it is a strong contender for starting “Bel League” because after playing this in the Toucan Treasure Hunt, it can be functional with zero gear.
You can find my POB over on the POE.Ninja page for this character.
Personal Rating: S Tier
Storm Brand Inquisitor
It took me a few leagues before I reached a point where I truly understood how to build a character in this game. During Kalandra League I tried Storm Brand Inquisitor, and apparently thought that things like capping your resistances were a suggestion rather than a requirement. Last league, I gave the Explosive Arrow Champion a bit of a redemption arc, as I revisited the character I attempted to play in the Sentinel League and made it feel amazing. So this league I really wanted to do the same for Storm Brand Inquisitor to see what that build could do if I actually built it correctly. The end result… was pretty disappointing. Can it do a T16? Technically yes. Does it feel good doing a T16? Absolutely not.
There is admittedly part of me that wants to poke this with a stick until I figure out how to make it work. I might revisit it in future leagues and try and build it out to be a bit more viable. That said… doing what I did with Explosive Arrow and taking the same build, but just fixing my resistances… did not solve the problems with this build. The disturbing thing about it is that I actually did spend quite a bit on the build to get it to the sorry state that it is in currently. I’m sure given enough time I could get it feeling better, but I am just not sure it would ever feel the way I want it to feel.
For those curious you can see the POB at the time I recorded the above video.
Personal Rating: D Tier
Fire Shield Crush Chieftain
Since there were two ascendancies that changed with this league, and Guardian was so freaking amazing… I decided that I wanted to create something with a Chieftain. The obvious choice would have been Righteous Fire, but I did not really want to recreate that and eventually, I just stole the best node with forbidden flame/flesh for my main RF build. Another build that I have been wanting to play for some time is something built around Shield Crush, so I crudely banged these two build concepts together until something emerged. The end result was an armor-stacking fire damage conversion build that focused on igniting things with Shield Crush and waiting for them to explode with Hinekora, Death’s Fury.
In truth… it is a pretty fun build hampered a bit by the fact that I refused to spend the currency to take it to the next level. The best armor stackers tend to be built around the Duelist class because they can double dip in both Armor and then also convert Evasion over to armor which produces bigger numbers. Stacking armor directly relates to additional damage. The other problem is that the ideal chest piece for this build starts around 20 Divine and has the ability “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance”. As it stands my armor is over 100k with my flasks up, but with a chest like that, I could probably double that. All in all, it is a fun build, with a good map clear… but completely falls apart when it comes to killing bosses. If I were going to change anything, I would find a way to work in Vaal Breach as it would give me waves of fodder which would then hopefully proc Death’s Fury explosions helping me take down bosses faster.
During the Toucan Treasure Hunt private league, I opted to level up a SRS Guardian, just because that seemed so strong without needing to rely on any gear. There was a period while leveling where I was messing around with the Absolution skill, which while technically a minion ability is mostly just a big lightning strike that spawns minions that do similar lightning strikes. This prompted me to want to give the build a shot so I rolled a Witch and leveled it with Vaal Absolution eventually turning it into a Necromancer. First comment… I played a Necro because after playing two Guardians… I was reluctant to roll another one. That said… I feel like Absolution would be so much stronger if played with a Guardian mostly for the free elemental buffs and the chonky tanky fiery boi. That said the Necromancer version is quite a bit of fun and felt extremely comfortable clearing maps. If I were willing to put the same level of investment in this build that I had in other builds in this league, then I am sure it would be quite solid.
That said… the playstyle of standing still while you cast Absolution with Spell Echo left something to be desired. I didn’t really have any problems with taking Deaths while I was casting, but it did feel a little awkward and went afoul of my “always stay moving” sensibilities. I am not sure if I would ever play this again, but I certainly found it interesting.
Sometimes I get something stuck in my head, and this league… it was a general sense of frustration over my league starter not feeling amazing. As the league was beginning to wind down I decided to go big instead of going home… and poured roughly 40 Divine Orbs into converting my build into the Magic Find variant that so many players were having good luck with this league. The end result has been an interesting experience. Deadeye is in fact the best choice for this sort of build with the Ranger class… but it is way the hell squishier than I am comfortable playing. Sure I can do pretty much all of the content and stack as many eldritch altars as I want… but if I fail to kill something before it looks at me… I fall over rather spectacularly.
Magic Find is also way more subtle than I would have expected. While I managed to make back a ton of currency largely in the form of Blue Altars that handed out Divine Orbs like candy… I didn’t really manage to find any big-ticket items apart from enough copies of The Fortunate to turn in for a couple of Divine Orbs. While I have run many Crimson Temples… I have yet to see a single Apothecary and I’ve not pulled four Headhunters or Magebloods like the magic find YouTubers would lead you to believe. Is it worth running Magic Find with this sort of build? That is highly likely because I made back the 40 Divines Spent on the build in roughly a week. Is playing a squishy glass cannon character doing it for me? Not really.
You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Vaal Lightning Arrow Champion
You would think that the whole magic find exercise would finally push Lightning Arrow out of my brain, but you would also be wrong. When I started my Raider version of this character, I thought long and hard about going with Champion. Champion is the “tanky” class for building a bow character, and I really loved my Explosive Arrow Champion last league. As the AggroChat crew is talking more and more about “Bel League” I decided I wanted to test a theory… that theory being that Champion would have made a much more drift-compatible version of Lightning Arrow than anything I had tried to date. So last week in a day and a half I leveled a new Champion character with Vaal Lightning Arrow and by Friday evening I had it geared and mapping.
This is a great character. It has all of the tankyness of a Champion with all of the killing power of the traditional Lightning Arrow builds. It suffers from the same challenge taking down bosses, but the sturdy nature of the build gives you plenty of time to dance around while waiting on your Artillery Ballista to burn the boss. Over the weekend I mapped with basically nothing but this character, and there were several times when I managed to run enough T16 maps to completely refill my sulphite without taking a single death. That in itself is huge, and I’m already sitting at level 90 and fully expect to be able to smoothly ascend past that level as though I were playing one of my Righteous Fire Juggernaut characters. I will absolutely build another one of these in “Bel League” pending there are no major nerfs to either Lightning Arrow or the Champion Class itself. I’ve also played this with Tornado Shot and Ice Shot… and while both are strong I just don’t enjoy them anywhere near as much.
As I said at the start of this post, I think I am probably done rolling new characters for the rest of this league. I have a solid stable of characters and at least three of them that I enjoy greatly. I want to finish out level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and I want to knock out a few more achievements toward the league challenges. I’m currently specced heavily into Ritual on my Atlas, so it should not take terribly long to reroll 25 more favors or get 4 more Blood-Filled Vessels. I could just buy the latter from the market, but I never really like doing that. I know starting tomorrow I want to spend some time playing Diablo IV Season 2 and giving it a fair shake. After that, I still want to pop into New World and see what the expansion is all about, and mostly level the new Flail weapon. Combined, these will likely take me all the way until December when the next league starts and we properly begin the “Bel League” private league thing. If there is a lull in the middle somewhere I might pick back up Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield… or potentially even start a new Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough to see all of the changes.
This morning however I wanted to give a proper rundown of my thoughts on all of the builds of the league. If I end up doing anything further, I might steal the Magic Find gear from my Deadeye and see if I can make something that still feels sturdy with the Champion. Anyways! I hope this week is great for you all. If you have made it this far in the post, I thank you for reading because I am certain there are folks out there who get very very sick of my nonsense.
