Magic Find

Improving Lightning Arrow Champion

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Since I spent some time yesterday talking about my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I figured I would talk this morning about some improvements I have been making to my high survival magic find mapping character, my Lightning Arrow Champion. I had first played a version of Lightning Arrow at the end of Crucible as a test for a league start and then started a Raider variant for Ancestor league. I just did not like how little survival the character had and wound up retooling it late in the league into a Champion variant. When it came to rolling a second character in our private league I went with the Champion variant again because I knew I could make it work on almost no gear and that it would have quite a bit of survival. Since it only really needed two unique items it would be extremely flexible when it came to whatever gear I happened to find. As soon as we found our first Perseverance and a pair of Shadows and Dust I knew I was good to go and just needed to half-ass my way into a tri-element bow.

The biggest change that I needed to make was getting a better bow and more specifically a bow that fired an additional arrow. Similarly, I wanted to get a quiver that also fired an additional arrow… which would then in turn allow me to drop Greater Multiple Projectiles from the support gems and get a significant damage boost as a result of that alone. I found a reasonable 1200 dps bow from trade that had pretty much everything I wanted on it and given the prevalence of folks doing magic find lightning arrow the price was only 10 Divines. The quiver was significantly cheaper but I specifically needed a couple of resistance hits on it to maintain elemental caps. Essentially dropping GMP I still fire 6 arrows and said arrows pierce 4 targets… making the entire process feel pretty great.

The other major thing that I needed was to swap Artillery Ballista into my chest piece and get an actual six link for that. By the time we were swimming in six-links, my appetite for fiddling with gear on this particular character was at a minimum. Basically, I had been running Artillery Ballista as a four-link in my gloves and had a whole series of nonsense Mana Forged Arrows abilities firing off in a five-link chest. In the final form, I moved the rest of my utility abilities to the gloves and used that opportunity to pick up a good corrupt with some additional attack speed, and then added Culling Strike to my Artillery Ballista link since I was losing access to it via Mana Forged Arrows which now only fires Frenzy.

As far as Magic Find goes…. I am really not going too far off the path to make that happen. During my copious amount of farming, I lucked into two relatively well-rolled Ventor’s Gamble rings. Apart from that I just happened to roll a helmet with +19% rarity on it giving me a total of +15% Quantity and +70% Rarity. It is not a ton and nowhere near as much as the folks who are sacrificing damage and defense to stack every last drop of it… but enough to feel like you are sticking your thumb on the scale from time to time. Since my Lightning Arrow Champion is a mapper and does nothing else, it seemed easy enough to integrate this much into the build. The biggest change I would make to the character would be to drop perseverance and pick up a Headhunter… but I doubt that will happen unless I get a windfall.

As far as the character goes, here is what the stats look like. You can also check out my POB over on POE.Ninja. I am pretty happy with the current state of this character. Last league, I attempted to make the Tornado Shot shift and I just did not like it anywhere near as much. I might try that again given it is mostly just swapping some gem links around, but I am not sure I will like it any better than I did previously. For now, this is the character that I use to burn through maps and get sulfite so that I can feed the delving on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. While I can do juiced T16s… the bosses end up taking longer than I would prefer so I am probably going to keep sticking to the t11 Cemetary and t12 Tropical Island sequence that I have been doing up to this point.

Adventures in Magic Find

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Good Morning Folks! We talked a bit about this on the podcast this weekend, but Ancestor League as a whole has had some amazing staying power. More specifically I find myself still extremely engaged and we are just shy of two months into the league at this point. Throughout this league I have built six builds thus far, but only one of them… really did not live up to my expectations. Lightning Arrow Raider felt like it was going to be this amazing experience, but really… the survivability of that class did not live up to my expectations. I think in part I held onto the original configuration of the build for a bit too long and did not lean into the more crit-based build. The problem being that there was really no clear indication of when I should be doing what, but when I hit red maps things started to struggle quite a bit.

Over the course of this league, I had managed to build up quite a nest egg of currency, and I decided to burn through it in a final act of rebellion. I opted to shift my league start Lightning Arrow build into a Magic Find Crit Variant. I sifted through a bunch of options and landed upon largely following the template of Balor Mage from his solo magic find deadeye. This late in the league… everything was overinflated but I managed to cobble together the basic skeleton of this build. In truth, the respec was nowhere near as significant as I thought it would be… but still managed to burn through around 80 Regret Orbs to make it happen. Most of the cost of the build was tied up in a handful of unique jewels including a new Watchers Eye, a large ring Thread of Hope, and then I opted for a more budget option of an Impossible Escape instead of another massive ring Thread of Hope.

You can see some footage of me running through a Crimson Temple map. I am not good at “blasting maps” as it were, and still go way too slowly. However to coin something I said in the earlier Lightning Arrow video “It sure do kill”. It suffers from all of the problems that Lighting Arrow always had, where it does not have great single-target damage… and since I am no longer running an Artillery Ballista link I cannot lean upon that. However, when it comes to clearing entire screens worth of trash it does a phenomenal job and still manages to obliterate all but the tankier rares. Basically, I have been consuming my stockpile of Crimson Temple and City Square maps, and while most of the results have not been dramatic… there is a significant upward trend in the amount of currency that I am pulling from them.

The most dramatic event is that I had a Crimson Temple where I got eight raw Divine Orbs that dropped. Most of it however has been significantly more subtle where I just find single Divine Orbs a bit more commonly and have pulled several Voidborn Reliquary Keys which sell for 3.2 Divines each. I’ve yet to find an Apothecary card or any of the big chase rares, but it has been noticeable enough to know that something changed. I started running Blue Altars mostly because I needed an influx of the Eldritch currency associated with them. I might switch over to Red Altars soon just to build back up that as well, but it has been nice to occasionally hit a Sulphite Scarab Altar and help fuel my delve juice proceedings.

In two days of casually running maps on Magic Find Lightning Arrow, I have essentially repaired most of the dent that getting the gear to set up the build in the first place caused. I am not hitting things anywhere near as hard as I could be. In theory, I should be running a much more strict filter that only flags high-value items in order to maximize the speed at which I am running things. I however enjoy mulling over random small items and hunting for interesting fractures. I also like picking up “bubblegum currency”, which is not a thing that most magic finders do. So while I could improve my gear significantly as I picked up some of the cheapest magic find options available… I am not sure if I could ever really optimize my gameplay patterns in a way to generate mirrors’ worth of currency… nor would I have any real interest in spending that kind of currency in the first place.

This has allowed me to see how the other half lives. I get the appeal… but also I hate being this squishy. I’ve put on a couple of levels since switching over to this build, but I am losing way more experience than I am gaining and have mostly stalled out at level 93. I am missing one of the key defensive mechanisms built into this build that centers around getting stunned often, but recovering a ton of health when you do so. I might see if I can reconfigure my tree in such a way as to pick up these points without losing any other serious benefits. That might let me get back into positive experience territory again.

All in all, this has been interesting… but with us contemplating a private league next time, it means that none of the currency I am attempting to gain will have any value other than for crafting purposes.