mapping

The Difference A Week Makes

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Good Morning Folks! What a difference a week makes. My opinions of Path of Exile II have improved considerably as my build has more or less come online. I largely yolo’d my way into a functional build because I wanted one thing… to be able to run around with a two-hander and a shield. I also really like explosions and fire… so whatever of that I could work into the build was a bonus. On Friday I took the day off to work on some stuff around the house, and when I finished all of that I started plugging away at making progress through Act III, and putting some of the final pieces in place for the build. The hardest part was being able to meet 3 times the strength requirement for a two-hander in order to use the Giant’s Blood notable. Early on I bought a two-hander with reduced attribute requirements that managed to get me over the hump.

It is shocking how much faster the Cruel Acts go after having completed the first three acts on normal mode. There are a bunch of factors here, firstly you know the boss fights and you know how to progress through the quests. Secondly, there is the fact that by the time you reach Cruel difficulty, your build is more or less reaching its final form and it is largely just an optimization game after that point. While i did not set out following a build, I accidentally wound up in a very similar place that Connor Converse/OneManaLeft did with his Titan Ignite build. If you want to follow in my footsteps I would suggest following his guide. A lot of the struggles of the first act were trying out all of the Warrior abilities and figuring out which ones felt pretty decent.

What I have landed upon is using Stampede to charge at a pack and then trigger explosions on it. The more points that I get and the more AOE support that I get, the better this will ultimately work. I need to get through my 3rd ascendancy so I can try out adding Crushing Blows to the mix, which supposedly really helps with the exploding. The only negative of this is that Stampede’s pathing is pretty bad. It often veers off to Albuquerque at the worst possible moments. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a backup plan, because if mobs did not get primed for a heavy stun… then I can’t explode with Boneshatter as a follow-up. I’ve contemplated working Sunder into the build just so I would have something that could deal reasonable clear damage to packs, but then the problem ends up being… what would I even use for support gems since the good stuff is currently buffing Perfect Strike and Hammer of the Gods.

Yesterday afternoon I wrapped up Act III on Cruel difficulty and proceeded into mapping and the endgame. There is the same quirk that happens when you progress to maps in POE1, where you have to do your very first map in the endgame hub or the game does not realize you have progressed that far. Unfortunately this time around there is not a specific quest telling you this, and you end up with this weird scenario where you can access the mapping device, but it will not work because it keeps telling you that you have to finish the campaign. Generally speaking, when you drop into mapping, somewhere in the near vicinity should be a hideout that you can conquer. I wish I had taken a screenshot prior to clearing it but these are mapped with the familiar blue and silver Fleur-De-Lis symbol hideouts have in Path of Exile. I got access to my hideout early due to the $100 supporter pack coming with a hideout, but generally speaking, this is going to be what you want to go for first.

Mechanically speaking I was not sure how maps were going to work exactly, but essentially you need Waystones, which for me started dropping toward the end of the campaign. You click on a node on the map and it opens an inventory and you place the tier of waystone that you want to run, which turns that map into that tier. This is honestly a cleaner system than the whole maps dropping at specific levels, but it still means that you are going to need copious amounts of way stones to progress your way through the content. The mapping NPC (not naming names for spoilers) will sell you a limited quantity of waystones similar to how Kirac and earlier Zana did in Path of Exile. I’ve not interacted with the Atlas passives yet, because I believe I have to complete the quest to do 10 T1 maps before I get any points to spend.

This is what my tree currently looks like at level 70. I am slowly making my way toward a cluster that is going to give additional close melee damage and area of effect. I am contemplating taking a bit of a detour at some point and picking up the 3% life node, which has a few 7-strength nodes on the way to it. I will also probably want to pick up the max resistance nodes, but given that I am nowhere close to capped, I figure this is a future-me problem. I’ve been stacking percentage block on the jewels on my tree and have managed to get up to 51% which means if I find a better shield I will be really close to the block cap. I am going to have to spend most of my exalts in an attempt to get better gear and resistance capped, but my long-term project is to find The Surrender which drops from Breach bosses but should make me way more tanky with its life recoup. I might start banking Stone Tower Shields in an effort to chance gamble on trying to hit one.

All in all, though, my opinions of Path of Exile have improved significantly since last week. I still feel like this game is overturned, especially in the early game, and that a lot of those bosses have about a third to a half too many hitpoints for when you encounter them. That said though, once my build started to come together I have been enjoying myself considerably more. I think Warrior probably just has a really weak start, and it takes forever to start to get abilities that I would consider good. You are forced into the Rolling Slam and Boneshatter combo for way too long and it feels bad for killing bosses. I feel like if they swapped Sunder to a second-tier ability instead of a third-tier ability, that would greatly improve the playstyle as Sunder can absolutely carry you even into the endgame.

Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Champion

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Good Morning Folks! Necropolis is quite possibly the most enjoyable mapping league yet. Affliction offered outrageous juicing options, but what Necropolis offers is flexibility and the ability to easily tailor the content to fit your whims. This is in large part due to the fact that we have three different atlas trees at our disposal, but on top of that, we have the freedom to add a bunch of interesting scarabs that wildly change your map-to-map experience. More important than that, the scarabs have been plentiful allowing me to constantly shift what I want to focus on without needing to buy them from the market. That is not to say that if you want to chain run the same strategy over and over… you will probably need to buy scarabs in bulk like in past leagues, but if you are a bit more open to your mapping options you should be relatively self-sustaining.

For the last several leagues I have built some form of a Righteous Fire character for Delving and getting through the bosses and some form of a Bow-based character for pure mapping fun. Over the years I have played Toxic Rain, Explosive Arrow, Lightning Arrow, and Vaal Lightning Arrow to various degrees of success. Last league I had landed on what I felt was the ultimate version of this in the form of a champion. In this league, I am elevating it a bit further by diving into the new transfigured gem Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. Essentially it deals all three elements worth of damage at the same time and then scales based on the number of unique ailments you have on a target. This means you only have to account for elemental reflect damage which can be taken care of with a Level 5 Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks Support gem.

Here is the POB if you want to follow along as I talk through gearing choices.

What makes this build so potent is that we are living in “interesting times”. Grave crafting has created this weird situation where so many mirror-tier perfect bows have been created, that anything that is slightly imperfect in any way… but still extremely good… is dirt cheap. This is a 1500 DPS bow with an additional arrow, triple tier 1 elemental damage, and attack speed and I gave I believe 9 Divine Orbs for it. I am pretty sure that I paid way more than that for a 1200 DPS bow that I was EXCEPTIONALLY proud of last league. I’ve had this bow for a few weeks now and when I was shopping yesterday for gear after trying to convince Ace that now was the time to give a mapper lighting arrow/elemental hit character a try… they were considerably cheaper. Weird things exist… like quadruple fractured items, which this bow is. I finished off the item by changing the quality to attack speed and corrupting it to 30% with a beast craft.

The other reason why this build is so potent is that I am getting to play around with Headhunter again. When I bought this belt it was I believe 8 Divines, but as of yesterday when I was shopping for a second that price had dropped to around 4 Divines. Note… I thought 50 Divines for a headhunter last league was a “bargain” that I could not pass up. If you have ever wanted to play a bow-build map-blaster that runs around with a stupid amount of headhunter buffs… this is your league. There is basically no reason to NOT run this belt on any build that is clearing rares quickly. Having played with a Mageblood and a Headhunter I have to say that the Headhunter mechanic is significantly more enjoyable. Mageblood is just sort of cheating at flasks, which can allow you to do some dumb things… but isn’t in itself interesting.

Another thing that is just stupidly cheap right now is the Defiance of Destiny amulet. I am legitimately using this just to add some additional layers of survival to my build while at the same time providing a bunch of elemental resistance on a single item. I am using the anoint Disciple of Slaughter so that I do not have to run Frenzy in a Manaforged Arrows setup. If you did want to go into Manaforged Arrows I would probably consider Frenzy of Onslaught which would then allow you to move some points around a bit because I am spending three points to get Graceful Assault instead of running a Silver Flask to guarantee reasonably close to permanent Onslaught. Ultimately these are decisions you reach after having played a build a bunch of times and wanting to tweak it slightly to do something specific.

One of my favorite things that I added to the build the last time I played it, was performing some pathing Jenga in order to use an Unnatural Instinct over by Avatar of the Hunt. I got the jewel that I am using as a drop, but generally speaking these are not terribly expensive and you gain a ton of value from that one socket. I mean sure I wish that Unnatural Instinct also gave you the notables, but I can live without Avatar of the Hunt. This is a late-game pathing thing, and while leveling I absolutely path into that notable and take it… then modify my pathing later to add in the jewel.

Another piece of tech that I am playing around with is the new Perandus Pact jewel that comes from Grave Crafting. Essentially you collect all of the corpses of the Perandus family and then can influence which jewel stat roll you get based on the other corpses you add with it. At the moment the Evasion version of this jewel is dirt cheap and adds 7% Evasion for every passive allocated in the large radius of where you place it. For me it is hitting 32 different nodes and giving me a grand total of +224% Increased Evasion… which essentially is giving me “Grace” without needing to sort out the reservation of that aura. There are a bunch of other viable options and if you didn’t care about the survival you could stack a specific elemental damage instead. I’m using the Fire Damage version on my Righteous Fire Chieftain to give me around +120% Increased Fire Damage.

The last thing that I added most recently, was to pick up another Jewel socket and put a Watcher’s Eye in it. In truth the only thing I really cared about here was trying to get permanent phasing while running haste. Cannot Be Blinded While Affected by Precision is solid and basically is a net win, but the reduced physical reflection from Determination is largely useless. Essentially I was looking for two things here… more life, more mana, and permanent haste giving me more ease of movement in mapping. I am not going to lie this is good enough that I have contemplated trying to figure out a way to mix in haste and a watcher’s eye into my RF Chieftain because it would be SUPER handy for Delving.

The character feels so good for mapping purposes and I cannot remember the last time I died. Not dying is a big thing for me, but your comfort levels might be completely different. If you wanted to play a less defensive version of this build that has significantly higher damage output, then I would look at the various folks running this Deadeye. They specifically favor the critical variant of the build whereas I am running Precise Technique and do not care about crit. It would be easy enough to transition over with a few gear swaps though if I were so inclined. My kink though is never the damage output I am doing, and more so that I am nigh immortal. So long as I can rip through maps comfortably I am happy with my damage output.

Anyways! I had not talked about this build that I have been running on the side and figured today I would do a deep dive and share some footage. I hope you all are doing well out there, and that you have a great and safe weekend. We have more danger weather rolling in, so I will likely be watching the skies.

Pumped for Necropolis

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Morning Friends! I have to say I am getting pretty freaking pumped for the Necropolis League start on Friday. I’m off work on that day due to the Good Friday holiday and plan on starting things up when the servers go live. I will probably talk a bit about my league plans tomorrow, but I am way more excited about this league than I expected to be honest. I think part of that excitement comes from the sweeping changes that are happening in the end game, which are something that the average player may not fully understand. This morning I am going to talk a bit about these changes and how they are going to drastically shift how we interact with maps in general.

Good or bad, a large chunk of your end game in Path of Exile is going to involve running maps. By default without manipulation, a given map has the chance of containing content from some forty different leagues. However, not all builds are designed in a manner to support all league content efficiently. For example if you want to run Legion or Breach efficiently you want the ability to blow up entire screens worth of enemies at a time, so you might favor something along the lines of a Lightning Arrow build or previously a Tornado Shot build in order to clear lots of targets at once. If you instead want to focus on Delve you will need a character with strong defenses as things down in the depths hit rather hard. So much of ARPG gameplay centers around optimization and efficiency, so it becomes more efficient to try and run the content that works best for your builds.

You can utilize the Atlas Passive tree in order to stick your thumb on the scale, but the only truly efficient way of guaranteeing specific content appears on a specific map has been with Scarabs. Right now in their current state they have felt like a mandatory evil, and if you want to run a lot of a specific kind of content you are forced to engage with the trade economy because they simply do not drop often enough for you to be able to sustain them. For example I greatly enjoy Delve, which requires me to run missions for Niko to get sulphite in order to maintain my missions into the darkness. This has always required that I at a minimum buy large stacks of Rusted Sulphite Scarabs in order to guarantee that Niko appears on my maps. There were other techniques like the All Hands Atlas Notable, but the only 100% method was to make sure I was running a Sulphite scarab with every map.

All of this is changing with Necropolis. Essentially they have redesigned the entire Atlas Passive Tree along with all of the Scarabs and have completely removed another system that involved putting enchants on the four voidstones that you unlock with sextants. Previously points invested in Delve nodes on the passive tree increased the chance of Niko, but never let you modify the exact percentage chance of him appearing directly. Now by investing in every Niko chance node, I can reach a point where Niko will appear 104% of the time, making it guaranteed that every map that I run with this talent tree will produce sulphite. More than that we are now going to be able to unlock three different passive trees so that we can swap between different scenarios more easily. So you can set up several trees with complimentary league mechanics and swap between them based on what you need to run.

Removing the requirement of Scarabs being the only methodology of reliably influencing map content has freed up some design space to shift them into doing “interesting things”. Some of these are going to be really wild when it comes to running them and will be the sort of thing that you want to stack a bunch of interesting scarabs together to handcraft a pretty intense map. I am super interested in seeing how these interactions play out, and Scarabs as a whole have shifted from being something that can only drop under certain circumstances to being available from the general loot pool. So we should have way more access to scarabs in general and then they will also provide more interesting interactions when we use them. They also added a “Limit” that indicates that you can use more than one of the same scarab at a time. So for example, if you just really want a lot of strongboxes you can stack 4 Ambush Scarabs and get 20 additional strong boxes in a map. You can see the full list of all 109 Scarabs in this post on the GGG site.

More than that… it feels like there has been a changing of the guard when it comes to the future of Path of Exile 1. I don’t want this to come across as a Chris Wilson bad, Mark Roberts good tirade… but things certainly feel different. The above video is an interview that Mark Roberts did with Zizaran and included some pretty serious philosophical deep dives about changes that he would like to see in the future. Specifically towards the end of the discussion, Mark said “this is the age of questioning original philosophies”, and it certainly feels like a lot of the quality of life changes we are getting this league are a result of this. It is going to take awhile to remove some systems that have just been accepted as “good enough” but it seems like maybe there is the will to make Path of Exile at least in small measures a more approachable experience. There is a brilliant clip at the very end of this presentation assuring us all that Mark really does “give a shit”.

Mapping for maximum profit has never really been my jam. So part of why I am damned interested in this league is that it feels like I am going to have a lot more interesting options to run with maps. I like playing makes as they are rolled in an “alch and go” strategy, and I like that I will be able to use more scarabs more freely in order to just make the entire experience a bit more novel. All the while being able to run an Atlas that makes sure I am getting the maximum amount of sulphite with whatever the heck I am doing. Having three atlases also means I will be able to switch to doing other things when I am full on sulphite and am not quite in the mood to go burn it down again in Devle without feeling like I am wasting resources quite so much. Very much looking forward to seeing how all of these changes shake out in the end, and how they interact with the actual League mechanic for Necropolis which I have spent almost zero time thinking about.

Anyways! I realize I ramble on about things that very few people actually care about, but I thank you greatly if you have survived this long in the post. I am contemplating streaming my league start tomorrow, so we will see if that actually happens.

Third Time More Burny

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Friends… sometimes I get something stuck in my head that I cannot seem to forcibly dislodge. I’ve also been sick the last few days so apologies for the lack of any semblance of a post yesterday. Anyways… a while back I wrote a post talking about my attempt at creating something that feels like Righteous Fire in Last Epoch and it was great… up until the point that it was not. The build sort of just fell apart when I entered the level 100 Empowered Monoliths because I was not dealing enough damage and did not have enough survival… so basically could not keep moving forward with it. I attempted to resurrect the build and got it to a point where it felt “aggressively fine” but also not exactly what I was going for in the first place.

I had this entirely different plan and created a Paladin that I was going to do some Healing Hands nonsense with… but before long found myself leveling again with a Firestarter’s Torch and Warpath. Which led me down the path of trying to figure out how Paladin was better suited to the burnination of my dreams. It turns out yes… yes it is. However, I held off on talking about the build until I reached empowered monoliths because I did not want to prematurely share my nonsense before I knew if the wheels were going to stay on the bus this time. Today despite my generally lousy “sickboy” status… I wanted to share what I had been up to. Apologies for the thrashed state of my voice in the above video where I talk about the build and show off some empowered monolith gameplay.

So the idea is not at all dissimilar from the previous build… where I went all in on making Warpath do the fire damage things. I’m trying to do a few new things, namely since I am throwing in Judgment occasionally for more damage which causes me to stop spinning… I’ve taken Giant Splitter which does a bit AOE attack each time I stop channeling. I will likely shift around these points a bit before I land on the final configuration of the build. However, the concept is straight forward… convert all bleed to ignite and convert Warpath to fire damage so that I can scale it and the ignite damage at the same time. Also, this is what makes the build feel thematically like Righteous Fire so it is a hill I am willing to die on.

The big thing that is making the build function a little better… and is the reason why I care about it being Paladin is Holy Aura. This is the unique ability for the Paladin mastery and is just sort of a build-your-own-buff aura system. I’ve found nowhere in the game that properly shows all of the buffs that the aura is granting me so I pasted the above list from the build planner. Largely I am throwing points in fire damage, attack speed, and an ability that will proc a fire explosion whenever I have hit something 6 times in a row. I am not entirely certain if that last bit is worth it because it currently costs me 7 points to get there… and I am wondering if I would not be better off just taking flat damage scaling instead. This also serves as a burn button because when I activate the ability it increases how much of these buffs it is providing.

The thing I dig about the Last Epoch Tools Build Planner is that it collates all of the stats and gives you nice numerical rollups that don’t really exist in the game. Based on the stats in the planner I just linked it shows that I am dealing 832% increased fire damage and have 204% chance to ignite on hit… not factoring in that I have other abilities that Judgement that also have their own baked-in 200% additional chance to ignite on hit with that ability. On top of that for survival purposes, I have 18% melee leech and 7% leech off the additional damage that I am dealing over time with ignite. If I can swap some of my gear around and get more void resistance, I can throw on a shield that will generate a good deal more fire damage over time and ignite chance.

All things considered, I am pretty happy with the state of the build currently. There are a number of levers that I could pull to keep tweaking the damage while leveling the rest of the way to 100. Am I happier with it than I am with my Void Knight? Honestly, I am not sure. However, I am very happy that I did not give up on this concept and was finally able to see it the rest of the way to something viable for empowered monoliths. Would I suggest playing this build? Sure if you like burning things and want to track down either the items I am using or something that gives a similar amount of ignite chance and fire damage scaling. It is a heck of a lot of fun and offers a fairly chill playstyle which is ultimately the aspect of Righteous Fire that I loved so much. Throw on a movie or like I have recently… an audio book… and just grind out some chill monoliths for tasty loot. That really is my happy place.