Juggernaut

Crucible League Start

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Good Morning Friends! This weekend was the launch of the new Crucible League in Path of Exile. I had Friday off and as a result, I opted to hop in and attempt to play when it officially launched a 3 pm my time. In the grand scheme of things it honestly went pretty smoothly. At the time I took a screenshot, there were just shy of 68,000 players waiting in the queue, and based on the numbers Grinding Gear Games released they had a new peak concurrent players of 321,180 over the weekend. As far as stability goes, but the time I managed to chew through the queue things seemed pretty solid. I created a Witch and ran her up to level 4 to get some spells, and then started my soon-to-be Righteous Fire Marauder. When I did the character swap there was another very short queue but from that point forward I was able to stay connected and level without any issues.

As stated before I am largely following the tree that Pohx has come up with that you can find over on his website. This meant starting out with the meatball again… aka rolling magma and then rapidly transitioning into a combination of Holy Fire totem with Phantasmal Support and Flame Wall. In theory, I could have continued to use Rolling Magma until I transitioned into Righteous Fire, but honestly, I prefer the albeit slower totem/firewall gameplay. I grossly over-leveled the content so I failed to get access to Armageddon Brand before I could actually convert over to Righteous Fire. That is honestly the wild thing about the changes made to the tree, is that I was able to be running RF before leaving Act 2. Admittedly all that it really took was me getting access to the spell, which I found from a Vaal area which means I am running Vaal RF for now and at some point will swap out to the normal version.

Being able to run Righteous Fire and some semblance of the actual build early, made this quite possibly the most chill leveling experience I have had in Path of Exile. Until I got Firetrap up and running I kept Righteous Fire going while dropping Flame Wall and Holy Fire Totem, and technically still have Flame Wall currently for added damage. As is a habit, here is my very first Chaos Orb drop of the season, found in a level 16 area in Act 2. At that moment I was still running Pohx’s loot filter, which is based on the World of Warcraft coloring scheme. I’ve now swapped back to the standard issue Neversink, but Pohx’s did help a bit to specifically call out some drops that were the ideal gem socket colors for the build early on.

The crucible league mechanic is fairly interesting, but also fairly dangerous. Right now you channel an ability to add experience to the item you are forging. The longer you channel, the harder in theory the mechanics become. The problem is there is no clear way of determining just how hard you are making the encounter because all of the affixes applied to the mobs are obfuscated. This means there are times when I can channel all the way up with impunity, and other times that the encounter will one-shot me, without a clear understanding of why. My hope is that we see some rapid reworks of this system to maybe expose some of the mechanics of what say 20%, 40%, 60%, and 100% would do to the encounter with an ability to just pick a percentage. The nice thing is that these are not one attempt and you fail… you can effectively zerg the encounter until you have killed everything in order to collect your item. Mapping will of course limit you to the six gates problem, but I would imagine that most of the hardcore players are staying the hell away from this league mechanic in general, as it is way too unpredictable.

The other problem with the crucible is it has a way of bricking items. For example, if you are doing some sort of Elemental Equilibrium build and cannot have a specific damage time on your bow… getting that type from a crucible tree means there is little you can do to fix it. The above video shows a process of re-rolling your crucible trees but it seems extremely painful. I could see this as part of some extremely expensive crafting process where you find a good base item… then try and get the perfect crucible tree and THEN craft on the item to try and make the perfect rare item. I mean if you are willing to throw 100 Divines at crafting an item, then in theory you are probably willing to go through this amount of tedium and pain in order to get a sweet crucible tree on it. I figure all of the mirror items in this league will be crucible crafted as well as have the perfect rare stats on them.

I had deep concerns about the sweeping mastery changes and what they would do to the Righteous Fire build, and at least on the surface level it seems to have made things stronger. I guess I was not fully expecting the new fire mastery of “Regenerate 1 life per second for each 1% Uncapped Fire Resistance” to be quite as strong as it actually is. Admittedly this is prior to taking the second resistance hit from Act 10 Kitava, but right now this one node is giving me 305 life regeneration per second. This ends up making Fire Resistance a dump stat that adds a ton of survival with it and also makes it so I can hopefully better survive those map affixes that lower my resists. At this point, I am still in Act 8 and taking things extremely slowly. I spent a bit of time farming Blood Aqueducts trying to get a six link to drop. I have a perfectly colored corrupted six-socket chest but would need to get some tainted bindings in order to make an attempt at linking them.

After rushing around the last league… I think I am going to take things pretty languidly because I figure the longer I wait the cheaper items will get. I did manage to pick up a single decent item for 1c and am now just gathering my resources so I can afford a viable six-link as I start early maps. My goal as always is to knock out my third lab before beating the campaign and taking another resist hit. The first two labs were easy as pie however so I expect the third won’t be too awful either. Having a heck of a lot of fun even if the league mechanic is sort of suspect. I enjoy the forging process itself, but it is way too dangerous to spend a lot of effort on it right now.

Hunting Aul

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Friends… I thought this would be the week that I started to distance myself from Path of Exile. Between adventures in Grim Dawn and starting to fiddle around with Lord of the Rings Online, I expected to dial back my gameplay. Yet last night I was back on my bullshit happily plugging away at the same stuff I have been plugging away at for a while now. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants, and my heart is seemingly not quite done with Path of Exile. My main strategy continues to be running maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… largely because I don’t care about her level… and then once I have filled up my Sulphite going back down into delve and hunting for the last rare thing that I have not seen… Aul. I think maybe once I finally fight the Crystal King this will lose some of its stickiness for me but I really want to see that encounter at least once.

I wish there was a good gauge numerically on how far to the left or right of the main column I have gone, similar to a depth reading. Essentially I seem to be moving around in a band between 150 and 170 in depth and am six or seven screens away from the central column at this point. I found a very tasty Abyssal City last night as well as a nearby Primeval Ruins but sadly no boss nodes in either. I think I have fought the Vaal boss three times, and the Abyssal boss twice… but have yet to see Aul even though I am poking around in the range where it is reported to find those nodes. I need to dive a bit deeper, but you are sorta at the mercy of the map when it comes to how you can travel. As I dive down I keep hitting dead ends and having to backtrack my way up to higher depths.

One thing I have to say about Delve City farming is that you end up with a truly staggering number of maps. You can see for some tiers I am sitting on over 100 maps and a large chunk of these are coming from the cartographer’s chests that I am pretty regularly finding one or more of in each city node. I currently have Primordial Blocks as my favorite map, not necessarily because I love the layout, but because I am trying to get the hideout to spawn in it so I can collect that for my account. For whatever reason, Primordial Blocks seem to have a higher-than-average spawn rate of Metamorph as well, and as such, I can use it to collect parts. Granted this could just be me running this map over and over and my Atlas tree triggering, but even before I specced into Metamorph I seemed to get that mechanic here more often than not.

Speaking of Metamorph, it continues to pay off nicely. I quietly stockpile body parts and then run through several metamorph spawns at once whenever I get a moment. If I stack currency nodes in every body part, it seems to often produce Divine and Exalted Orbs. This isn’t exactly going to win any divines per hour races, but it is a nice residual impact of me doing the things that I was already going to do in order to fuel my delve addiction. At some point, I am going to need to spend some time selling off undesirable body parts in an attempt to get the ones I am missing because a few of the slots in my metamorph tab are filling up rapidly. That is the most annoying thing about this mechanic is that the body parts are heavily skewed toward a few specific slots. For me, at least the most common part is Heart and Brain and the least common are the Lungs and Eyes. You can sell 3 body parts for a random part, so I need to cull Hearts and Brains in an attempt to fill the other slots as I am completely out of eyes at the moment.

Lastly here is a bonus image of sleepy cats. I wasn’t sure where else to fit this one in, and I know it is awful quality. Essentially the other night my wife snapped a quick photo in the dark because she knew I would not believe her. This is Josie snuggling with Gracie, and this is important because we have never really had cats that would actively snuggle with each other. I am not sure if Josie was even aware that Gracie was there or not, but I did what I could to try and enhance the image so you could see more than a blurry mess. Gracie is damned determined that everyone must love her, and she adores her big sister so I am happy to see this. I noticed Gracie grooming Josie the other day, but I figured it was a fluke.

I hope you are having a most excellent week, and we will see if I actually do something other than Path of Exile.

Projects within Projects

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you are ready for another Path of Exile post because that is what you are getting! I realize that when I dive down into the esoterica of a particularly detail-oriented game I lose many readers. It is shocking that anyone reads me to be honest given that you have suffered through a deep dive into Guild Wars 2, New World many times, and a couple of Path of Exile leagues in the same year. I am way more in my element this league and have branched out into a bunch of side projects. I am thinking that is really what I need to start doing rather than beating my head against a particular obstacle until it yields. I encountered a bit of resistance in the Righteous Fire Juggernaut which lead me to run up the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… and resistance there has led me to dust back off the Toxic Rain Trickster. So essentially I have three major projects going at once and seeing an incremental increase in all of them… which makes me way happier than grinding my face against the walls I was hitting the Juggernaut.

At some point, I will get around to updating my Game Tools page for Path of Exile, but I thought I would take a moment this morning and talk about a few things that I am finding useful. The first is Better Trading for Path of Exile, which is a Chrome extension that adds a bunch of functionality, not the least of which is showing a history of things that you have searched for before. You can pin these as favorites if you find yourself going back to the trade website periodically to look for specific items. I use Firefox almost exclusively, but the extension is no longer being updated there so it is useful enough to make me do all of my POE Trading in Chrome. The guide that I followed for SRS even had importable links so you can find the gear that ticks the right boxes rather easily and import those saved items directly.

The other tool that I have been using is a replacement for the Overwolf-based POE Trading overlay called Awakened PoE Trade. This offers a bunch of functionality like the ability to flag specific attributes on maps that you don’t want to run and have it warn you when you mouse over maps with those specific attributes. However, the most useful thing to me personally is that I can hit Ctl+D while hovering over an item and it will pop up a details screen showing me what the current market price for an item like that would be. It was through doing this that I realized I was sitting on a 3 Divine chest piece that I should probably be using instead of my current Righteous Fire chest. If nothing else this is helping me to understand what elements make something valuable and at some point hopefully I can evaluate them myself.

I had been using the chest piece on the left for a while now and picked it up for 15c when I hit mapping and needed six links for Righteous Fire. At some point, I picked up the chest on the right and held onto it, because I knew the Astral Plate base was really good for Righteous Fire and that the colors were very close. It originally dropped as a six-link RRGGBB, whereas I currently need RRGBBB. In my many travels, I acquired a stash of tainted currency which you can use to modify corrupted items. I figured if it was worth 3 Divines with the wrong colors, it would surely be worth more if I fixed the colors and managed to hit it in 3 Tainted Chromatic Orbs. Then I got the quality up to 16% with some tainted armoring orbs… and at that point, I figured… I might as well give it a shot.

What it did for my Righteous Fire build is it took me over 50,000 Armor, which seems to be a significant break point. I went from getting wrecked by The Hydra to being able to largely face tank the fight. It has not fixed ALL of my problems but it has taken me a good step towards progress. It is weird how a single piece of gear that takes you to a specific breakpoint… seems to have that much immediate difference. So Righteous Fire Juggernaut is back on the menu and I spent quite a bit of yesterday just zipping around and clearing maps for fun and profit.

Another project that I need to devote some more time to is Delve and getting further down in progression. It bugs me that I am constantly capped on yellow delve juice and purposefully avoiding Niko missions. Basically, I need to spend a few days doing nothing but Delve because in truth I enjoy the heck out of it. Similarly, I have a massive stash of contracts and blueprints that I need to burn through over in Heist as well. If nothing else that seems to be the name of the game this season is fixing sustain problems. It is rare that I don’t get at least three or four maps out of a single map, and it is similarly rare that I don’t walk away with at least one contract. There is way more that I could be doing that I would enjoy doing… than I actually have time to do of it. This is a far better situation than the beginning of the Kalandra league when it felt like I was running out of every currency and not really able to find ways to get any of it.

Over on my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer, I am in the process of making a number of changes. Currently, as things stand I can pretty comfortably wipe White and Yellow maps but struggle quite a bit with reds. I am not actually using the final configuration of the build and it is going to involve me either muleing a gem or to or just buying level 20 gems from the market. I need to sit down and properly map out what I want gem-wise on each piece of gear and then set forth to recolor as needed. It is shocking how much more comfortable I am with swapping resists, links, and colors on gear than I was in past leagues. Essentially one of the biggest changes that I need to make is to get rid of my Zombies and migrate over to Animate Guardian.

This is a rather big change because Animate Guardian works wildly differently than the other minion summons. Essentially you have to “build” your Guardian like you build a Follower in D3, but with a way more obtuse system behind it. Thankfully Ghazzy did a video on how this works, but essentially you “consume” items while mousing over and hitting Animate Guardian. Then from that point forward, your Animated Guardian is using that item. Luckily there are a bunch of bulk Uniques that I have laying around that apparently make up the suggested “low investment” build for an Animated Guardian and I’ve set these aside at the ready. Essentially you need a two-handed weapon, two one-handed weapons, or a one-hander and a shield combined with a helm, chest, gloves, and boots. This specific combination apparently gives a lot of buffs to both the player and other minions. So I’ve set aside the following items to be consumed once I get a level 20 Animated Guardian:

The challenge is that there is no way to get back any of these items once you have consumed them. However, they do stay “equipped” on your account in a sort of hidden Animated Guardian inventory. This is one of those deeply obtuse systems that could be improved with a UI around it. Similarly, the way that Raise Spectre works is equally dumb and involves me summoning corpses in my hideout and trying to raise one specific corpse… the Carnage Chieftan each time. Thankfully they rarely die so I don’t need to do this super often, but it is still tedious and if for some reason I end up overwriting the corpses available with desecrate… then I have to go back to The Old Fields in Act II and get new apes.

Then you of course have the Toxic Rain Trickster that I dusted off yesterday, set back up, and managed to clear Dominus and get the achievement for Shadow. I think right now I am missing Ranger and Scion and I will have completed the full gamut of classes through Act III. I’ve also got a truly stupidly geared level 6 Shadow sitting in the first map that I am trying to get the Beginner’s Luck achievement with. Seriously you should take a look at “BelginnersLuck” on my character list and how stupidly geared that is for a character that has never made it to Lion’s Arch. I am legitimately curious about what level I will be when Hillock finally drops a unique item. I’m to the point where I can take him down to half health with a single hit, then when he pulls the sword out and regenerates it takes another two hits to finish him off. The energy shield, health regen, and mana regen are overpowered at low levels… just saying.

Tomorrow I will be plumbing the depths of my play history for this year and doing my big round-up post. I hope you are enjoying your break and apologies for being quiet on social media. I tend to ignore the world when I get hyper-fixated on a specific game.

Toxic Rain is Weird

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Good Morning Friends! It is technically correct by the slimmest of margins because I am posting this just before noon. I am very much in vacation mode currently because as of yesterday I am off until the third. We are going through a bit of a cold snap which means we scurried around yesterday in order to get some shopping done and be ready to just stay indoors for the next few days. Our concerns turn to the outside ferals that we feed. I’ve not seen any of them this morning, but they seem to have hidey-holes to go into in order to stay warm. Tripod in the backyard seems to be able to get down into a rabbit burrow when the weather turns frigid and I am hoping Greybie and Tabby out front have something similar. I’m putting food out just in case but I feel like it is unlikely that we are going to see much of them on the camera.

I’ve been playing around on Beltoxrain my fledgling toxic rain trickster and I am not yet certain how I feel about the build. Right now it deals a ton of damage but sort of has shit for survival. The fact that I am using a Tabula Rasa to level doesn’t exactly help that fact because the chest piece is generally a good source of survivability. The killing power is most definitely there but I can very easily run out of mana which means I am running clarity to help try and solve that for the moment. We will see how I fair when it comes to the first Labyrinth that I am getting close to running. I am nearing the end of Act III and still can pretty much shred anything that comes up to me. Toxic Rain feels so freaking weird to use, that I am not entirely certain this is the build for me in the long run. I might try to pivot to building something for Explosive Arrow Balistas instead.

I did get enough porcupine cards to get a six-link short bow and now am using my Righteous Fire main to try and farm some dread essences so that I can hopefully get a good roll with attack power and bonus to bow gems. At this point, I am honestly thinking of this more for Explosive Arrow than I am for Toxic Rain because I have a feeling like I will be starting another character at some point before the end of this league. One of the things that annoy me greatly about builds in this game is that most of the creators tend to consider “50 divines” as a “cheap” build. I’ve yet to see ANY divines drop let alone enough of them to be able to afford something like that. At the moment I tend to focus any currency that I do have on improving Righteous Fire because it seems to be what I am clearing most of the content with.

I’ve struggled a bit on mapping progression, only because I am finding it very hard to get the right maps that I need to drop. I could of course just buy my way to victory but that sorta feels like cheating a bit. For the moment I am running maps in the near vicinity to the ones I need to drop hoping that maybe I will get the ones I actually need for bonuses. The other challenge that I have is trying to get a corrupt that I can actually run. I’m pretty close to dinging 91, which makes me not really want to risk losing progress on a bad map combo. Essentially maps that fuck with my Elemental Resists, Reflect Elemental Damage, or screw with my Life Regeneration is undoable. I get that corruption is supposed to be something unpredictable but I do wish there was a bench recipe to scour a corrupted item that had scouring and Vaal orbs or something, or required a heck of a lot of harvest materials.

It isn’t that I am not seeing a ton of maps dropping… it is just that they are mostly white maps which are significantly less useful currently. I should just burn through a bunch of these hoping for the best honestly because right now I have gathered up a rather large treasure trove of them. I could of course sell them off in bulk, but I try not to engage with the trade league any more than I have to. I know I still have a very long way to go until I start getting t16 versions of everything. I need to kill all of the bosses in order to finish unlocking my atlas. I am still having a heck of a lot of fun, but I am not loving feeling like I stalled out at some point.

The Righteous Fire play style is probably the favorite I have experienced in Path of Exile so far. The problem being in order to move from where I am now to be able to do much higher content it feels like I either need to get lucky or spend an awful lot of currency. A lot of the things that I need now however include price tags that are multiple divines, which I just don’t have yet. I might have to swap up what I am doing in order to figure out a way to make better currency. Essentially I am going to keep plugging away as is hoping that I finish things out the Atlas and then see what it takes to finish up with the bosses. Once I ding 91 and secure that level, I am going to run a map and see how functional I can be just turning off Righteous Fire and leaning entirely on Fire Trap. I have 3 gems for Fire Trap and Righteous fire each leveling currently, and my hope is to do the 20% quality swap and then level them again and attempt to get some corrupts. I know Fire Trap in a level 21/20% quality version sells for a few divines so that might be an option to make some money if I get lucky.

In the meantime, however, I really need to work on catching up on some of my data. I’ve done a poor job of keeping track of the games I have played this year. I normally do a rundown of the games played and I won’t be able to do that normal end-of-the-year stuff if I don’t start tabulations soon.