Juggernaut

Broke and Flipped

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I had a rather busy day of significant progress and changes to my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. First off I took out The Searing Exarch and while I took a few deaths, I managed to get my void stone well within the six portals. I don’t fight these bosses often enough to be terribly good at them, so there are always things that I forget will kill me. I can tank a single ball at a time during the ball phase, but never two at once for example. Shortly after taking down the Searing Exarch, I went after the Eater of Worlds and the same essential story. I also downed it with portals left but took a few deaths re-learning what I could take and what I could not take.

So that leaves me at 106 maps out of 115 with the “easy” two voidstones slotted into my Atlas. I am not entirely certain how hard I will go after Elder and Maven, or if I will eventually just buy a carry for both to get it over with. Having access to voidstones however, fixed the problem I was having with the scarab market. Essentially it is roughly 2-3 Chaos per Rusted Sulphite Scarab which allows me to force Niko on a map so that I can restock my Delve coffers. There is a specific Charged Compass that has “your maps contain Niko” which lasts for 3 maps and seems to cost in the neighborhood of 1 Chaos each. So while these are a bigger pain in the ass to buy, because no one wants to stop what they are doing for a 1 Chaos sale… it essentially gives me similar results for a minimum of 5 Chaos less. I suppose I should go through the hassle of snapping up a pile of these. Unfortunately, they don’t really stack so I would have to dump them in my “Alt Maps” tab along with my Sanctum books, Temple maps, and Memories.

One of the things that I have been watching the market for is a Brass Dome. This is essentially my chest of choice when it comes to gearing out an RF Juggernaut because you can get over 4000 Armor, up to 5% additional maximum elemental resistance, and crit immunity. However these are always pricey, and since I had four Divine Orbs to play with, and a stash of Chaos Orbs from selling a round of Delve items… yesterday I actually began seriously shopping for something. Essentially what I wanted was a chest with a combination of White sockets and colored sockets that would allow me to flip it back and forth between Righteous Fire in the chest and eventually do the swap to Fire Trap in my Chest and Righteous Fire in my Helm.

What I found was a six-socket Brass Dome with over 4000 Armor, and +5% to all maximum resists that had WWWRRG giving me access to run both the common BBBRRG Righteous Fire setup and the GGGRRR or in my case GGGRRB setup for Fire Trap. It was not linked, so essentially I had to spend another 400 Chaos Orbs to buy the Orb of Bindings to do the benchcraft recipe. I did not really want to fuck around and try and manually link this for fear of spending way more than 1500 Bindings to accomplish the job. This happened to me last league when I was trying to link a chest and burned through 2000 Bindings without ever actually getting a six link. So essentially I wound up spending 5 Divines in total on the chest, but yesterday the cheapest equivalent already linked was 16 Divines. This morning there are two options at 9 Divines so I still feel like I came out ahead.

With my remaining currency or at least part of it, I picked up an Elder Influenced pure armor helm with level 20 Burning Damage and level 20 Concentrated Effect support that happened to be in the right colors to run Righteous Fire. I originally had intended to run the new Brass Dome with Righteous Fire for a bit while I saved up the currency for a helm, but I managed to snag this one for around a Divine and figured no time like the present to complete the swap. Of note… I’ve never actually done this one before and always ran the traditional RF in Chest and Fire Trap in helm setup. The difference is immediately clear when it comes to taking anything down that requires me to drop a Fire Trap. The only negative in this process is that I had an Area of Effect implicit on my previous helmet, so I am getting used to a slightly smaller Righteous Fire aura.

So I am fairly broke… I went into the day with 4 Divines and around 800 Chaos and I exited the day with somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 Chaos. That said… I have another load of resonators to sell and if they sell as quickly as the last batch that will be a significant boost to my vault. Essentially the next few upgrades will be more difficult because I have to be very wary of my resistance, dexterity, and intelligence. Ultimately in a perfect world, I would go after a +1 or +2 if that is even possible Amulet and a +2 Sceptre. I also need to swap out my gems for either 21/20 gems or the Awakened equivalent which will take a chunk of currency to do. Then after that, I am contemplating picking up the Forbidden Flesh and Forbidden Flame jewels to allocate Unrelenting which is the other side of the Endurance stacking tree that gives me physical reduction, elemental damage reduction, and chaos resistance.

All in all a pretty great day, and one that both increased my survivability and my damage output. Currency gain in Path of Exile is always a means to an end for me. I farm currency so that I can do the things I like… which often generates more currency… so that I can buy upgrades to do the things I like more efficiently. At some point, I will start working on some more alt characters when my coffers have filled again so that I have money to play with. Ash continues to push me in the direction of a Cyclone build, and I still want to do a bit of a redemption arc for Storm Brand. Both of these will need things purchased or farmed, and both of which are probably going to happen before the league is up. Essentially right now… I am very “in my element” and enjoying my time greatly.

Frightening Scarab Market

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Good Morning Folks! Well, this is the weekend where I officially switched mains it seems as if my Juggernaut has now eclipsed the level of my Lightning Arrow Raider. I gotta say that I enjoyed the Raider quite a bit, but it hit a bit of a hard plateau around red maps. I knew the class was going to have some survival issues, which was pretty understandable… but what I did not expect was just how much harder boss fights would be than I am used to. Essentially so long as the Raider is killing small mobs it can keep its dance of death ongoing forever. However, when I am just fighting a single target, I am not getting near enough life and mana leech to keep everything going and I start harming myself with lifetap. The RF Juggernaut however… is just stable all the time which is I guess what I had been missing.

I am in the awkward part of mapping where I only have a few maps left to go… and they are becoming increasingly more difficult to get to drop. I am sitting at 103 of 115 with a number of those remaining maps being uniques. I am abusing Kirac missions and Scouting reports to try and roll my way into the maps that I am missing, but I have a feeling at some point I will resort to just buying the ones I am missing. I tried the strategy of going ahead and running red maps from Kirac even though they are not corrupted in the hopes of getting raw maps that I can corrupt to drop. However, that really has not worked out terribly well so far even though I have one of those maps I completed but did not get the bonus for in my favorite slot.

It could also be that I have just not been running enough maps lately, because as I have gotten my Juggernaut online, I have spent more time underground. I’m continuing the veer slightly deeper and am comfortably trucking along around 130 depth. Mostly I am chasing cities and will go to whatever depth I need to in order to intercept them. I’ve finished off one full Abyss City, and two Vaal cities including a Vaal boss, and am currently winding my way down to a four-node Vaal City. After finishing that I will backtrack and pick up the Abyss City that I can see on my map. I’ve over-upgraded my Resistance and Light Radius and am beginning to knock out some of the other upgrades as I get the Azurite to unlock them.

I would probably spend ALL of my time down in Delve were it not for the fact that Scarab prices right now are a bit bonkers. I am not sure if Delve is more popular in this league, or if there is some mechanic that used to produce a lot of Scarabs that is not currently being run. Whatever the case right now the humble Rusted Suphite Scarab is going for over 1 Chaos Each, which is a little too rich for my blood. I can still fill my Suphite Meter thanks to the Atlas Passives and getting a bonus from completing maps, but it is fairly slow going. I wish there was some sort of Scarab vendor or something in the game that you could trade bubble gum currency for Scarabs. It does make me wonder if more people are playing Trials than I expected, and since Scarabs are a relatively uncommon reward not as many are making it to the market.

Now that I have the Juggernaut up and running, I have been trying a bit of heisting as well since the Righteous Fire character does really well at Delve and Heist both. I vaguely remember blueprints rewarding quite a few scarabs, so that might be an alternate method for refilling my coffers. I might try rerolling scarabs because I think there is a Harvest recipe. Heist though is fun on its own merits and I still need to go through the process of unlocking all of the thieves and leveling them. There is an awful lot of minutiae when it comes to getting set up in a new league and unlocking everything that you need to really be viable. The good bit is that I have goals plenty to focus on.

In other news, I am finally back on my reading nonsense… as a couple of books had broken me a bit. I tried very hard to get through Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I am not sure if it was the extremely brutal, violent, and oftentimes racist content… or the general lack of punctuation or any sort of scaffolding to better explain who the fuck was talking. Whatever the case that book beat me, and while I figure it is probably an important read to understand the brutality against the Native tribes that lies behind the Cowboy mythos… it was just too bleak for me to continue trudging through. It knocked me out of commission for several months and I am finally getting back on the horse again with finally reading Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. So far this is a much more comfortable read, even though it has its own bleak content… just not quite as brutal.

I’ve also been struggling a bit with feeling generally out of it. Over the weekend my wife started coming down with something, and I am wondering if I too am catching whatever she brought home from the hellions that she teaches. I’m in a bit of a funk on top of that though. I’m having one of those ” would anyone miss me if I was gone” malaises that washes over me from time to time. I will pull through the other side I am sure because I know it is nonsense. If you made it this far in my blog post I know that you would probably miss me. I think part of it has also been brought on by the fact that it has been way the hell too hot to do anything outside of stay sequestered inside in the air conditioning. Hopefully, that too will pass.

Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful beginning of the week.

Delving the Darkness

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Yesterday I made it through the campaign on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and by the middle of the night I was back delving which makes me very happy. I burned through a lot of my available currency kitting out my character in gear in order to make my resists work. I purposefully tried to overcap resists by a bit because at some point I hope to swap out to a Brass Dome with +5 to maximum elemental resistances and that will mean losing the resistances that I currently have on my 5-link corrupted chest. Other than that I could probably due for a sceptre upgrade at some point, and then I definitely need to find a pseudo-six-link helm. Those however can wait because for now… I need to get my money printing machine up and running that will fund the rest of my adventures.

I’m very much in the early stages of breaking into Delve and getting my resistances up enough to go down further. I’ve been down to around depth 85 and have done just fine, but my resists are a bit puny for me to go diving down dark tunnels as I am used to doing. Once I get down to around 100 I will finally start seeing a lot of content in the side tunnels and hopefully some cities. There is one already on the map but I have to figure out how to approach it as there is no direct path that I can see. I think that is probably why I enjoy Delve the most, because it offers bite-sized adventures with promised loot at the end. It feels way more stable and reliable than mapping does in general.

When I last talked about my map progress I think I was around 73, and as of this morning, I am sitting at 88 of 115 maps completed. Essentially each time I shift over to run maps for sulphite I am trying to unlock something new. I’ve actually managed to get quite a number of the unique maps out of the way which feels really good. I did miserably fail one of them, but it was a T16 unique map which is always painful. Mapping still feels good on Lightning Arrow Raider, but she is way squishier than the Juggernaut which is to be expected because there is a massive difference in killing power.

Since I am spending way more time in Delve, I am starting to pivot away from Essences and towards Niko missions and Sulphite. I think I think once I finish picking up Niko nodes, I will shift towards picking more Legion on the tree or maybe Blight since the Raider can do those a lot better than my Juggernaut ever could. I think what I dig about having a proper map blaster is that if I decide to dive into mapping a bunch, I can pivot back without much issue. However what I have missed the most is the reliable currency generation of Delve, and the Raider just was not a Delve-friendly character. So much of what comes from Delve comes from careening down dark tunnels looking for treasure, and you really need something sturdy to be able to do that.

I am also still doing the occasional tournament for the league mechanic, and those mostly go smoothly. I’ve not won a tournament outright since crossing the 200 rating barrier, but I am also not really using a mechanic to cheese things. I do well enough to get several rewards though, but last night I saw my first six-link and missed winning it by losing the final match. I did pull a five-link earlier, so it seems like I am starting to get into better rewards territory in general. I feel in this weird place so far in that I have two highly functioning characters but am also mostly broke. Hopefully, a week of focusing on just doing some mechanics to get some stuff will help change that trajectory. Once I have more currency to play with, I will probably start rolling some more side projects.

All told though I am having a lot of fun. I feel much better now that I have my Tankyboi back in the repertoire of characters.

Gracie’s New Trick

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This is Big Boy… though technically, his name is Tigger, but we did not know that then and can’t seem to shift gears. Big Boy doesn’t really know where he belongs, so this morning when my spouse went outside, he was on the roof of her car. We’ve seen cat prints for years on our vehicles but never really knew who it was. Part of Big Boy’s confusion is that his original family moved away and while our next-door neighbors have officially adopted him, he still spends much time in our front yard. He is a sweet baby and will headbutt your hand, but he can also be a bit of a bully to the other outdoor cats so I’m not nearly as fond of him as I used to be. He still has a home, but it just isn’t the same home… and he still comes and goes as he pleases which I question if that is the best idea. However, there are times when he acts like he wants us to be his family.

In other Cat-related breaking news… Gracie has learned a new thing. When she figures out how to do something, she obsesses over that new thing until she gets bored and moves on. This particular new thing is that she has learned that she can easily jump up on top of the fridge in the kitchen, and since yesterday has just spent a decent amount of time up there chilling. She of course figured out she could knock magnets off the fridge door from this vantage point… so they have all been redistributed to a position slightly lower than her paws can reach. She is terribly proud of herself and feels like you should be proud of her too. I am dreading when she figures out how to get on top of the entertainment center, as we have tended to use that as a “Gracie-free zone” for anything she needs not to play with.

In Path of Exile news they have buffed the Trial of the Ancestors significantly. For example in the above image, that shows my opening round rewards and there is one opponent who would give me nine raw Chaos Orbs for winning that round. Unfortunately, the stacking seems to be that the best rewards offer the least favor with the various opponents, so you can take some short-term gains… but at the cost of overall progress in the tournament as a whole. If you are playing to win, you would take the 19 Jewelers Orbs as that option gives you the most favor with the individual factions, which would in turn allow you to buy more units. I’ve won enough matches that I have pushed up my ranking over 200, which in theory means I should start seeing even better rewards… but also the combat has become rather brutal.

There had been a degenerate strategy centered around Empire’s Grasp and Quill Rain, and involved creating totems that would indefinitely knock back the guards allowing you to just walk around and capture the totems. This briefly saw the price of Empire’s Grasp shoot up from a 1 Chaos Orb item to over 50 Chaos Orbs. I managed to monopolize on this and sold the pair I had sitting in my vault for 50 Chaos Orbs yesterday before the price started to come back down… and thanks to the emergency patch fixing this interaction has plummeted back down to the expected 1 Chaos Orb territory. If you are curious about what this looked like, Zizaran released a video explaining the strategy yesterday that has now been fixed. GGG has come out and said that they are not going to claw back any of the loot that was gained through this exploitative interaction, so as is often the case… the answer is to exploit early and exploit often. I opted not to chase this because I figured it would get patched out quickly, and would prefer to learn how to do the tournament correctly.

Most of my effort has been towards trying to set up and prepare my Righteous Fire Juggernaut for the endgame. I’m now in Act 9 and should wrap up the character today. I had been holding onto a reasonable Opal Sceptre base and performed some quick essence crafting and landed a +1 to all fire spell skill gems which will benefit both my Righteous Fire main link and my Fire Trap helmet link. As for helmets I held onto a good fractured base and then threw some essences at it until I wound up with something that had some decent resistances. The other interesting item that I am using currently, and will likely need to toss aside is a Pyre ring that I picked up on my journeys. I am not really using much in the way of cold damage other than Frost Blink, and mostly I am using it for the bonus burning damage and pretty solid resistances. Honestly, I will likely end up using this Sceptre for quite a while given that I am just realizing while writing this that I can bench-craft on Minion damage to get even more of a boost.

I did have to spend a bit of time running maps yesterday in order to gain some more currency, as I bankrupted myself trying to help Thalen get the same items I talked about picking up yesterday for his Righteous Fire build. In my travels, I managed to pick up my first Divine Orb of the league so that was exciting. My happy place I think is going to be using my Lightning Arrow Raider for mapping and then swapping over to my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to spend all that sweet sweet sulphite to Delve up some goodies. I’ve probably missed Delve the most and while technically the Lightning Arrow Raider can do some of that… the second a mob down there looks at me crosswise I evaporate. The Raider is amazing for brute forcing a lot of AOE damage all over the place… but not that great at anything that requires survival or scenarios where I can’t leech a lot of life and mana. However, occasionally swapping in a totem support for my Lighting Arrow has opened up the ability to run reflection maps with impunity which is nice.

Anyways! Time to wrap this up. I had a power outage in the middle of writing this which caused me to have to re-write quite a bit after the “blink” was over. I hope you all are having a wonderful week and I am hoping to wrap up my Juggernaut today.