mapping

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.

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.

Not A Bosser

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Good Morning Folks! I am losing track of how many days into the build it has been, but things are continuing to progress. I am starting to see the rough edges of this build, namely that it is not great at any sort of a boss encounter. I’ve found myself struggling with bosses that I’ve never struggled with before. For example, the pseudo-Fairgraves at the end of Frozen Cabins are something that I have steamrolled every single time on Righteous Fire, and on this character, I was completely out of potion charges when I downed it last night. Similarly, I struggled with the actual Fairgraves character on Mao Kun way more than I thought I would have because every so often my evasion would fail and he would just hit me for a ton.

By far the hardest encounter so far has been The Infinite Hunger aka “Shrek”. I absolutely got through it on the “six portal defense” and as you can see was down to my very last portal with my bell tower in flames. I’ve never had this much trouble with this boss, not even when I attempted him on my extremely sketchy Storm Brand Inquisitor back in Kalandra. We will see how Black Star goes when I get to that point with Searing Exarch, but I am deeply questioning if I will be able to drop the first two void stones with this character, at least not without significant investment. Like I know at some point I am running up a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but that might be sooner rather than later.

Like there are some obvious weaknesses in the build, but it absolutely excels at just killing all the things on a map. I recorded a video yesterday of me running through a map just to show what the gameplay style feels like. Granted this is only a T5 map, but I’ve now done one red map and for the most part, it felt exactly the same. You just make the entire screen pop with returning projectiles… you end up hitting all sorts of stuff that you didn’t even realize. There was one point last night when I was doing a blight map, and I just stood still and killed two lanes worth of mobs at once because my projectiles would go out and pop the ones in front of me, and then bounce through me and get the ones behind me. It was nonsense honestly, and it makes me wish I had actually anointed Vengeant Cascade before it was nerfed.

As far as progression goes, I am 52 maps into the Atlas out of 115 and have already knocked out two of the unique maps. Neither of them is a particularly rare map, but when Kirac has one available I try and complete it. Essentially I can run all the map types except elemental/physical reflect and even then… I’ve already completed several of those by just not ever firing my bow. I simply run around the map dropping Artillery Ballista and letting it do all the work for me. No Leech maps would be a problem, mostly because a lot of my ability to keep killing revolves around leeching back health and mana. No Regen maps can be a bit of a bummer but once the leech kicks in they provide more than enough health to keep my lifetap going. I just have to be careful not to spam ballistas when I am not actually killing anything.

I’ve spent some more time with the league mechanic and I think I really like it. It definitely feels like playing League of Legends with bots, but I’ve landed on a technique that mostly works for me. Essentially I swoop into enemy territory and drop my Ballistas which keep the other team attacking those while I circle them while firing off lightning arrow. For the most part, this works very well… and the only thing I have struggled a bit with is when there is some mechanic that is just covering the field in bad stuff. I’ve won four tournaments though at this point and kinda have a reasonable strategy for how to build my team. The rewards are sorta meh, but I’ve sold several of the rare tattoos for some decent bank and used one that swapped a Dex node for 80 Evasion. I am so starved for Strength and Intelligence that I could never actually use those tattoos, but I do have some more wiggle room for swapping dex for something else.

All in all, I am exceptionally happy with how things are going. I knew I was not going to be playing an “all arounder” build and so long as I keep that in focus I am exceptionally happy with my progress. At some point, I am going to start leveling an RF Juggernaut so that I can start throwing gear on it as I get it. I’m also helping out Thalen gear his Jugg so I’m hoping I can get some “hand me downs” as he levels out of them. God I love this game… it really gets in your blood sometimes.

First Day of Mapping

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Good Morning Folks! We are on day four of the Trial of the Ancestors League. According to the /played command, I have put in 32 hours so far and that got me through the campaign and up to comfortably doing yellow maps. I dawdled a bit during the campaign but enjoyed the ride. I am on such a different trajectory than I am used to because I am playing what is commonly referred to as a “map blaster” character. This means that I am designed to decimate oncoming packs of mobs before they can touch me… but the trade-off is that I have very little in the way of proper defenses. This sort of flies in the face of everything that I know about building a comfortable character, but somehow it is working. I ran with a friend who needed credit for a map I was just about to run yesterday, and he was laughing at how much nonsense is flying around the screen when I get moving.

My big lucky drop of the weekend was picking up a corrupted six-link bow, that was in the right colors… or at least “right enough” colors. This is going to hold me until I get much deeper into my character and pick up something in the range of a 1000 dps bow. This bow would be awful for the more popular Toxic Rain/Explosive Arrow builds, but it works beautifully for my build as realistically I want flat damage against three elements, and this has two. The bleeding bits on the bow are a bit meh as is the accuracy because I am capped without needing it on my bow. I would have rather had some attack speed but in the realm of corrupted gear this is pretty solid. I need to get some beyond mobs and hopefully get some tainted currency to get some quality on it.

I know I had said that I was going to try and craft my own gear… but at this point, I am fully engaged in the trade economy and have made a few smaller sales. On Sunday night I started poking around looking at prices for six link chest pieces and managed to snatch this one up for 25 Chaos Orbs. This spent the largest chunk of my currency that I have gathered up so far but seemed like a good call. It has really good evasion and decent armor and while there are various elements of this that I would change, again it isn’t bad for a corrupted item. I wish it had more resistance on it, but that is sort of my general problem right now… the fact that I am pretty much capped in only one element.

Another really lucky drop was that I picked up a Poised Prism with some decent resistances on it. This is in theory the suggested quiver for this build and I had hoped that I would see one drop. Truth be told… apart from eventually replacing this with a perfect roll I think this is pretty damned good. I’ve seen all of the common quivers at this point, so it seems like they just drop more often than other uniques. I am hoping to see a Prismweave to replace the Wurm’s Molt that I am currently wearing. Unfortunately at the moment, I can’t really afford to get rid of the Molt, because it is helping to fix some of my attribute problems. I am pretty much starving for Strength and Intelligence, and having to use up a handful of significant suffixes to gain more.

The other purchase that I made was a pair of Shadows and Dust gloves. Namely, this is a way of getting rampage on the build, and it seems to really help my clear. I picked these up I believe for 2 Chaos and then threw some jewelers orbs to add some sockets. I need to recolor these in order to set up a cast when damage taken combo with Immortal Call, just to add another smaller layer of defense. I’ve got my auto snipers hit set up in my boots at the moment and all of my auras are in my helm. I am still running clarity because I still have mana problems. My ballista is at least now running off Lifetap which is fine given I have a decent chunk of life leech. Truth be told when I am killing things, I have no real mana problems… it is only when I am setting up for the next run.

I’ve never played a character before that was this much of a glass cannon and was always riding the edge of falling apart completely. At the moment I have 100% spell suppression which is good, and decent enough evasion though I would like to see that MUCH higher. My armor however is complete shit and my resists… are awful. I’ve contemplated trying to create a Taming ring, but so far I have not seen any of the component Berek rings drop. I could farm Heterochromia cards, but one of the problems I am running into as a mapper… is that without buying maps from the market, you can’t really reliably “Farm” anything over and over. I feel like all of the mapping strategies involve either buying specific maps or buying scarabs in order to set up ideal conditions. I would for example love to be trying to farm Legion, but that requires Legion Scarabs. Delve honestly was just more simple… and quite honestly more rewarding. I ran literally any map until I got Sulphite and then Delved until I ran out, and then repeated the virtuous cycle.

I can’t complain though, I am only one day into mapping and I already have 32 maps completed and have done one of the Maven Challenges. I need to find a zone connection diagram that I can reference because I need to be running connected maps in an attempt to get the maps I am missing. I am not super in a rush to get to red maps, because on my test version of this build… that is where things started to fall apart without being resist capped. What I really want to find is an Ancestral Vision, because it would solve my elemental ailments problem completely. I currently have 50% elemental avoidance and Ancestral Vision would get me the rest of the way to 100%.

As far as my Atlas tree goes… I am sorta all over the place at the moment. I rushed to get Shaping the Skies and Mountains to start getting some free map device unlocks. I’ve picked up a little here and a little there on the essences and picked up Stream of Consciousness since I won’t have a steady supply of scarabs for a while. I am slowly working my way up to the Einhar nodes that unlock access to the beasts that sell for quite a bit of currency. I figure at least until I have unlocked everything I will be doing essence/beasts to hopefully make a little currency. Essences mostly because I want to maybe be able to craft some gear at some point. Beasts mostly to hopefully sell some split beasts and mirror beasts.

I’ve done only the smallest amount of Delve, basically running down my Sulphite supply each time I fill it up. I know that this build is very much not designed for the rigors of the deep, but for the most part, so far it has been “fine”. I mostly just have to keep blowing things up in front of me for fear of anything actually touching me. Mostly I am working on the tedium of setting things up and getting some initial darkness resistance and light radius unlocked. I know at some point I will level another character that is more specifically designed for delving and then be running that in the deep. I will say though… the little bit of Delve that I have done… has felt generally more rewarding than most of the mapping I have done. Heist is still the mixed back it always is, but for the most part, the build has done excellently there.

All told though I am pretty happy with the build and pretty happy with where I am after 32 hours of play. I will continue to chip away at the Atlas, and I am hoping by the time I have unlocked all 115 maps, I will have enough currency to do a massive overhaul of my tree to something more enjoyable. I would really like to focus on Legion, and I have to say… Blight, Legion, and Breach are all awesome on this character. That was really my hope that I would be able to do some of the mechanics that I mostly ignored in the past because they were just not drift-compatible with the Righteous Fire lifestyle. I’ve seen my first Exalted Orb pictured above, but I have yet to see a Divine Orb drop. When I start getting some of those, and a bit more of a liquid position in the currency market… I will feel better about my decisions.

I realize I have not stayed true to the SSF-lite attempt that I originally planned. Truth be told though… I actually have arrived at a point where I enjoy the trade economy in this game. I’ve made several smaller sales and have already set up the infrastructure to be able to sell more stuff as I get access to better items. I am not sure what happened to the person who used to avoid the auction house like the plague. Right now I just don’t have much value that anyone would care about. I have a friend who will probably be willing to knock out the Void Stones for me because I sorta doubt this character is going to be able to do much more than the first two. I have a lot of mapping and farming though before that is even a real concern.

Anyways! I hope you all have a wonderful week. I will be over here in the corner chipping away at this nonsense and completely happy.