Lighting Arrow

Build Test Time

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Morning Folks! One of the weirdest laments of this league has been the forever sliding state of my Lightning Arrow build. Last weekend I shifted it into a magic find setup, which was enjoyable… but I still struggle with the fact that the character is squishy as heck. My general tolerance for random deaths is extremely low, and as a result, I end up trying to build most of my characters with a boatload of defensive layers. As for my Lightning Arrow character… the only real defensive layer is being able to kill things extremely quickly. While getting bucketloads of loot has been enjoyable… I still do not really love the constant chain of deaths that set back any progress I have made level-wise.

A good deal of our focus of late has shifted to planning for the private league idea that I threw out on the podcast a few weeks back. This immediately got labeled as “Bel League” by the AggroChat crew… which is a little self-referential and egotistical for my tastes… but I get blamed for most dumb ideas. While we don’t exactly know when 3.23 is going to land, we do know that it should be sometime in either late November or early December. This has shifted my focus to thinking about builds that I could cobble together with little to no gear. Really the perfect answer to this is SRS Guardian, but I have no confidence that it is not going to eat some pretty significant nerfs prior to the next league. Lightning Arrow was also a build that I was able to get up and running on four links and start progressing into mapping. It was not however a build that I could run delve on… and given that I love delve… I am not sure if it would be a good fit for another league start.

So I am doing the extremely dumb thing of running up a new character as a test of what Lightning Arrow would feel like on a Champion. Champion has so many different defensive layers and can be built in a way to feel exceptionally tanky. I am wondering if I can somehow manage to split the difference and make a character that has the effective killing power of Lighting Arrow Deadeye, without feeling like I am going to die if a monster looks in my direction. Permanent Fortify is pretty huge, and the fact that I can throw on a specific belt to give me permanent Onslaught because I have Fortify should also help. Also being able to scale my attack damage slightly off whichever is lower between Evasion and Armor, allows me to focus on those defenses and still get some sort of damage from them.

The only negative about starting Duelist, is that it has to travel quite a long way to get to the bow nodes that I need. This has ended up with an extended ugly duckling period where the build just felt awkward for quite a while as I pathed through a bunch of nodes that did not really bestow much in the way of power. I am also sorta “half-assing” this build by looking at my Lightning Arrow build, and a few of the folks who are playing it on Champion and trying to split the difference between the two. Unless this build just knocks my socks off… it is highly unlikely that I play this as a league starter. However if I can make it work with minimal gear… it might be fun to throw together as a mapper for some magic find to help get good stuff for the rest of the AggroChat crew.

I think more than anything, that is going to be the most enjoyable aspect of a “GuildSF” gameplay experience. I like dumping things in the bank and finding items that my friends need. That is the biggest part that keeps me from ever going true SSF, is that I want to be able to pool resources among my friends. SSF or Solo Self Found means what it says… you cannot interact or group with other players in any way. Having a private trade league however gives us all of the benefits of trade, but limiting it to a much smaller pool of players. Granted it is going to cost us about $60 to keep the league going for the entire time, but that seems reasonable especially when diluted amongst the handful of us that are going to be playing.

More than likely I will go with the tried and true Righteous Fire, mostly because it allows me to get into Delve pretty early. Delve generates a ton of useful things, and for crafting gear it will benefit the entire group as a whole if we can farm up a ton of Fossils and Resonators early. Additionally, it will give me a stockpile of Goddess Offerings and Divine Vessels which can be really hard to find through mapping. I also know the gear needs of Righteous Fire really well at this point and can make it work on limited gear well enough to get down at least to the 100 depth in Delve. I also know that I can complete at least two void stones and finish all of the maps with the build.

Maybe Lighting Arrow Champion will surprise me… but for the moment I mostly just want to test this theory out and see how stable I can make it feel before losing access to the trade market.

Cresting the Chasm

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Good Morning Folks. I am not entirely certain that Magic Find as a concept is for me. Running the same two maps over and over is exceedingly repetitive. I guess the good news is that I am “over-sustaining” maps, meaning that if I hop back and forth between a Crimson Temple and a City Square, I am always walking away with more of those two maps than I went into the process with. The bad news is… I have the layouts of both zones and most of the variants memorized at this point. It feels to me that magic find as a concept involves trying to sand down all of the rough edges on the map running process and then speeding through them as fast as humanly possible in the hopes of winning the jackpot.

When you DO win the jackpot it feels absolutely phenomenal. I hit yet another Divine Orb dropping map last night and it was only tarnished slightly by the fact had I gone down the right path first instead of the left path… I would have also hit a duplication altar to go with my Divine Orb dropping one. However, any map you walk away with eight Divine Orbs feels phenomenal. The only negative is thus far I have yet to really see anything exceptionally rare. I still have zero Apothecary cards, and while I have gotten a couple of copies of The Fortunate… I’ve not really seen more than I did previously. I guess I expected to start seeing better uniques than what I have gotten to this point but that hasn’t really worked out. I am not expecting to see a Headhunter or a Mageblood drop, but I did expect to start seeing more tier-three uniques and maybe a few tier-two ones.

There is no denying however that it has made a sizeable difference. If you look at my PoeStack this morning, I have officially dug myself out of the hole created by pouring forty Divines into this build. Granted a lot of currency is locked up in pools that are a bit harder to liquidate, but still, I am almost back to the same amount of raw Divine Orbs that I was previously and have enough Chaos to comfortably cash it into Divines as well as a haul of Delve merch that I could sell quickly. It isn’t so much that Magic Find… at least doing so outside of a party who is also magic finding… is that dramatically different from other methods, it is more than it adds up over time. I am consistently getting more of everything which also means that I am seeing more rarer items as a result.

I still greatly prefer Delve to Mapping, but I’ve always had to at least rely somewhat on maps to fill back up the Sulphite tank. Now instead of just running a bunch of random maps, I am approaching the sulphite refill process a bit more methodical as I burn through the maps quickly on my Magic Find Lightning Arrow character. I do somewhat wonder how viable it would be to try and build a Magic Find character in the Guild SSF private league we are considering. The core magic find items are common enough, that I would just need to devote a tab to collecting them for the three to one recipe until I wound up with something good. I do wonder if Deadeye and Lighting Arrow are going to eat a bit of a nerf considering just how wildly popular that one build was in this league.

In other news, I ran my first Trial of the Ancestors in well over a week and was rewarded with a Divine Orb in the next to the last round. I guess that means I might be getting up high enough to start seeing good rewards. Kodra has managed to run a Sanctum all the way through, and that is one thing Magic Find has produced more Sanctum Tomes. I am contemplating trying one out with the state of my Lighting Arrow character to see just how fast I can burn through it. It is really good at making things explode and is also VERY fast moving. I feel like my POB is probably underestimating how much damage I am dealing because other than tanky bosses… I am pretty much making entire screens evaporate.

Anyways! Tuesdays are hard. I hope you all have a great day and are having a pretty great week. The weekend seems so far away at the moment.