mapping

Raider on Red Maps

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Hey Folks! We did not record an episode of AggroChat last night, and as a result, I don’t have the usual Sunday post. Instead, I am going to talk some more about Lightning Arrow Raider. Last night I finished leveling through the campaign and then started running some maps to test the build further. I am still very much wearing the same SSF gear that I picked up through the campaign, with some minor crafting in order to try and fix my resistances a bit. As it stands I have woefully negative Chaos Resistance, very low Cold resistance, and then capped Fire and Lightning. If you want to check out the current state of my build, I dumped a fresh POB or you can check out my character on Path of Exile website.

I also recorded a video of me running a T11 Red Map, where I took a single death from a random rare. I had no clue what hit me, but after the fact while editing I noticed that it was an Innocence Touched monster, which is one of the more annoying god-touched mobs. All told I am pretty happy with where this build ended up with only some assorted bench and essence crafting. It gives me a lot of hope for a smooth transition into maps as I do this all “for real” on Friday evening. I’ve always liked leveling a Ranger because generally speaking all of the tools you need you have easy access to. I will likely run Lesser Multiple Projectiles/Mirage Archer/Caustic Arrow until I can get Lightning Arrow from the quests. I also plan on muleing a bunch of Lightning Arrow gems as I can so that I can hopefully corrupt my way into a Vaal version if I don’t get one to drop.

My goal with the build is for it to be a fast mapper that I can hopefully use to progress my Atlas quickly. At some point, I am likely going to create a Righteous Fire Juggernaut again to have something that I can do Heist and Delve with. I have to say though I am looking forward to playing something with big screen-clearing potential because there are a lot of league mechanics that I have never really explored very much. Legion, Blight, and Breach all really want you to be able to kill lots of the screen quickly in order to get the best possible rewards, and Righteous Fire has always sort of sucked at this. I am legitimately wondering how well this build will do with Heist as well, and I’ve spent a tiny bit of time in Delve and it seemed mostly fine so long as I did not press out into the darkness too much.

If nothing else there is a satisfying explosion of lights whenever I fire my Lightning Arrows, and that will be fun to map around on. I am not necessarily trying to race or anything, but it will be fun to wreck maps for a change. Don’t get me wrong, Righteous Fire is plenty good at mapping but it never felt anywhere near as satisfying as some of the videos I have watched of dedicated mapping builds. I think my early strategy will be Essences, Expedition, and maybe some Lockboxes in order to get a stash of crafting materials to help fix my own gear. I am also going to try and lean as little on buying from trade this league as I can. The main reason why I am not rolling SSF however is so that I can start selling things that I might find along the way that could be worth some change. I am definitely a trade enjoyer, but it was also refreshing to level the Lightning Arrow Raider on mostly found gear.

Anyways… I feel like I am probably annoying everyone with talk of Trial of the Ancestor league. I am excited I guess, and just can’t stop talking about it.

Explosive Arrow Champion

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Good Morning Friends! I seem to have made yet another character in Path of Exile, this time I went down the rabbit hole of the Explosive Arrow Champion. I created a brand new duelist after work on Friday evening and by Sunday mid-day I had finished the storyline, assembled some gear, and was actively farming Tier 16 maps. It was a bit of a whirlwind leveling process, but in truth, I could have gone much faster if I actually wanted to. I spent a few hours putting on levels during Blood Aqueducts in Act 9 largely to allow me to sort out my gearing before making the final push for Kitava. This is yet another one of my thought experiments and serves largely as a way of testing my knowledge of the game to this point. During my Ghosts of Leagues Past post from last month, I talked about struggling in the Sentinel league with this build and then going back in this league and realizing that I had no clue how to layer defenses.

I know I have talked about POE.Ninja before in the context of it being the neutral arbiter of prices in the Path of Exile economy. However, I do not think I have talked about it as being a central clearing house for high-end player profiles. You can go out there and see exactly how active players are building their characters so for example if I wanted to look at a Champion playing Explosive Arrow I can easily narrow my search to that. It is very clear that the Champion variant of this build is not exactly “in meta” given that only 11% of Champions are using that ability and only 34% of players using Explosive Arrow are Champions. The vast majority currently seem to be playing Occultist as their ascendency, but for this thought experiment, I wanted to recreate the conditions of my very first attempt at playing a league character.

I can’t say that I followed any single guide in its entirety. I largely leveled my Champion as Caustic Rain and then shifted to Toxic Rain when that became available, and then finally around act four shifted my ballista totems over to explosive arrow. There are a handful of guides out there that I sifted through over on the official forums and poe vault but this one is probably the one I drew the most inspiration from. Even then I spent a good deal of time sifting through builds on POE.Ninja to see what players were actually using as their final setup at level 100. At this point “Belsplosions” is only level 78, so still missing a number of easy points but feels extremely good. I remember balking at Zizaran calling this build “tanky” but now I realize that I just did not understand enough of the fundamentals of Path of Exile to be able to build it in that manner.

While leveling I held off on a few key notables until I had assembled something resembling my final gear state. Essentially I did not want to mess with Elemental Equilibrium until I was finished gearing and could guarantee that I was dealing no fire damage with my totems other than the explosion. Essentially now my totems deal Cold, Lightning, and Chaos damage and then the explosion of course deals Fire Damage after having been debuffed against it. For defenses I am sitting at 79% Evasion, 82% damage reduction from armor, and 100% spell suppression chance which when combined with the Cheat Death mechanic built into Champion “First To Strike, Last to Fall” which heals me 25% of my life anytime I reach “low life” and my cast on damage taken setup for Immortal Call… it takes an awful lot to kill me. My major weakness however is the fact that I currently only have roughly 3200 life, which I need to solve at some point.

As far as gameplay goes it feels extremely smooth. I have a hextouch setup with mirage archer, frenzy, and greater multiple projectiles that keeps up my fenzy stacks while cursing enemies with flammability while also running around and constantly dropping my six Explosive Arrow totems. If things seem to be taking a while to die I drop an Arcanist’s Brand with Flame Surge and Infernal Cry which covers them in ash and blankets them in burning ground. This is mostly a bossing and metamorph thing but I occasionally also throw it into a large pack just to help whittle it down a bit faster. While the time delay of the explosive arrow doesn’t feel as good as say Toxic Rain for full screen clears it still feels good. I am not sure how many maps I ran last night, but I turned on my auto screenshots while doing a Crimson Temple to snag some screenshots.

As far as the gear I am wearing… it is a mix of a bunch of exceptionally cheap items and a handful of items that cost me over a divine. Firstly there was the Rain of Splinters Gem, which for a pretty nicely rolled one was 1 Divine Orb by itself. Then there was my crafted bow… which cost 1 Divine Orb as part of the crafting process… and then roughly another Divine trying to get it six-linked and in the correct colors. I didn’t get EXACTLY the colors I wanted… but I decided to call it good enough because I was tired of trying to buy Chromatic Orbs through the Bulk Trade site. In a perfect world I would have not done this out of order… and gotten the colors correctly by bench crafting sockets on the item rather than trying to brute force it at the end with Chromatics. Other than the Bow and the Unique Jewel… I have maybe 80 Chaos in the entire character. I had the Dyadian Dawn laying around but you can pick up one at least as good as the one I am using for 1-2 Chaos Orbs.

Basically, this little thought experiment worked. It proved to me that I understand enough about defensive layers at this point to be able to revisit a character of mine from past leagues that absolutely did not work… and make it fully functional. I feel like my days of questioning whether or not I was choosing poorly when it came to a league start are behind me now. I feel like I should be able to make ANY character in the future work knowing what I know now. I am not sure how to fully express how good that feels. Path of Exile is this insurmountable climb when you are at the bottom staring up at the summit filled with people zooming through maps seemingly immortal. While I still have quite the climb ahead of me… I at least see the path and am confident that I am not going to go over the edge and plummet into the valley below.

This of course means I am contemplating doing other dumb things. Wintertide Brand is an ability that I have loved in the past, and would really like to see if I can make a build work for it. The play of choice seems to be Occultist as most of the folks playing a pure Wintertide Brand build seem to be going with that ascendency. The big challenge will be to see if I can reverse engineer something resembling a viable POB from the various profiles I have access to. I am contemplating turning my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer into a Cold Dot Wintertide Occultist, and then liquidating the gear that I no longer need for that build. This could force me down a path of a side project I had already been working on… which is to find a Champion Kite Shield with the node that allows you to sell it for a Unique… aka Aegis Aurora. I am not sure if I am going down this path of madness yet.. but knowing me… this is probably a thing that I am going to do at some point.

As for why I am still seemingly so easily amused by Path of Exile Crucible league… even when I don’t really love the league mechanic itself? Who knows! I am going with it until my brain decides that it is no longer getting enjoyment from this process. I hope you all have a most wonderful week and for me… I am hoping mine is more tolerable than the last few.

Ugly Baby Build Phase

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you all had a most excellent weekend. Mine was a blend of doing stuff around the house, running errands, and then devoting as much time as I could to playing some Path of Exile. I’m very much in the “ugly baby” phase with the Toxic Rain Self-Cast/Balista combo. Right now I am leaning on my quiver for a good number of resists… and I would like to NOT do that. This means I either need to get a new amulet, ring, or a combination of both… so that I can drop the resists from the quiver and pick up better damage bonuses. I picked up a reasonable Devouring Diadem which allowed me to reclaim a number of points on the tree by removing the branch that was going off to pick up Eldritch Battery. The proc of Feast of Flesh every 5 seconds also provides some additional healing which is nice.

I recorded another one of my dumb videos showing off what doing Red Maps looks like on this build. It is fairly comfortable, to be honest, but nowhere near the mind-blowing damage that I was essentially led to believe. I think the challenge is that I am still playing what would be considered a “budget” build and if I wanted the big numbers… I would have to pour a lot more currency into the build and ultimately swap up my tree considerably to add more socketed and legendary jewels. I feel like I am doing this juggling act of trying to balance survival since I am used to having that with the Righteous Fire Juggernaut and pushing more damage. Since at this point, I can very comfortably do T16 maps, then I am starting to wonder if I have reached as far as I want to take this class.

The defenses on this build are nowhere near where I would like to see them honestly. I want to see way more evasion, but in order to keep that and keep my resists it would involve me completely changing out almost every single piece of gear I am wearing. I am at least spell suppression capped at the moment, which is adding quite a bit of survival against being shotgunned to death by spells. I think basically I am at the point of being able to do maps fast enough, especially if I am doing white and yellows… which in truth was the entire point of having a build like this in order to funnel suphite into Delve. Maybe I have reached the point where I am done futzing with it and should move on to my dumb ideas build of the Explosive Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer that I started working towards last week.

I mean ultimately the fun in running maps once when you see huge loot explosions, and I do from time to time see dumb loot explosions. I’m also able to fill up my sulphite through mapping relatively quickly so I think maybe Toxic Rain Pathfinder is at its logical conclusion. I don’t think ANY class is going to feel as good to me personally as Righteous Fire Juggernaut. Essentially that tanky gameplay is what I have always craved and still to this day my favorite Diablo III build is Invoker Thorns Crusader, which more or less functions just like Righteous Fire. I think Tornado Shot is probably the closest Path of Exile has to something that feels like the Multishot Demon Hunter, but I’ve always heard that build is rather expensive to get rolling.

As far as Delve goes I am slowly working my way lower. Essentially I am hunting cities and I have had a harder time this league finding them. When not actively popping city nodes I am looking for resonators and fossils, but have yet to find any of the fractured fossils that are so in demand with the crucible mechanic. I think I largely get more joy out of playing the RF Jugg, so if I am going to pour more resources into a build it might be that one. Though again I am very much in a place with that build where in order to increase my damage, I need to significantly restructure how the entire build is working currently. I have set aside a few good crafting bases for spell caster shields, so I might try chasing one of those with a good crucible tree. I’m still looking for a great tree for Sceptre but have yet to find anything better than the meager mess that I am currently using.

I am still very much having fun with the moment-to-moment gameplay, but I do think I am going to focus a lot more of my effort in the coming week to finish leveling the Necromancer and try and bring that Explosive Summon Raging Spirits build online. The big concern I have for that build is how expensive Skin of the Lords is this season. Normally that is what I would go for as my six-link chest. I have a +2 minion gems Tabula Rasa, and might just have to limp along with that until I find something better. The builds that are going for explosive SRS seem to be favoring a Cloak of Flames for the chest but a lot of those also seem to be using Formless Inferno and I was planning on doing my pseudo-eight-link with the helmet. Which makes me think I am going out into some undiscovered territory at the moment. It should be interesting to see if I can make this build functional at all. For the moment I am loosely following this POB.

Atlas Progress Stalled

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My friend has this tradition where the day after Christmas is “Super Xmas” and it is a holiday devoted to self-care and doing the fun things that you can’t while you are rushing around to see family. Apparently large swaths of the world call this “Boxing Day”. I like Super Xmas better though and apparently, the world is heralding its arrival with a rainbow. Granted moments after hopping in my car it started raining so the rainbow could just be telling me that instead. We are defrosting and outside it is a balmy 34 degrees, which admittedly is much better than the 2 degrees that it was Christmas Eve. The gift I got for my parents requires us to be outside and mount some hardware so I am largely putting off a trip up to see them until it warms up a bit. I did talk to them yesterday, however.

The scary news from yesterday is that my cousin about ten years my junior had a stroke. He had just fixed breakfast for his family and talked to my mom, and then shortly after that, he was getting rushed to the hospital. We still don’t know a ton but they think it was a blood clot in his brain that caused it. I think they caught it in time though and he still has speech and movement and seems to mostly be okay. Again though he isn’t local so we are getting news in bits and pieces from his wife as she has time to update us. So if you’d keep our family in your thoughts, it would be lovely.

In gaming terms, I have largely stalled out on completing my atlas in Path of Exile. I am sitting at 112 or 115 maps and the three remaining maps are all unique. Basically, I have done all of the white, yellow, and red maps which are the easier ones to get, and now I need to fish Atlas missions from Kirac hoping that maybe just maybe one of the three maps that I need will show up. I am running out of the currency used to re-roll the missions he is offering however so I am not nearly as hopeful as I was about completing the atlas this league.

Normally I would just buy my way out of this problem but one map goes for around 30 chaos, another around 40 chaos, and another around 50 chaos. While I do have the 110 chaos… I don’t really want to spend it on maps and would far rather put that toward gear upgrades. Unfortunately, there isn’t really a great way to farm these maps individually, and the “favorite maps” system only works if you have actually run the map before and does not work at all for unique maps. In theory, I guess I could run the maps that are adjacent to the unique hoping that maybe just maybe I will see one drop. I am not even sure if that works because every time I have seen a unique drop I have been nowhere near where it is on the actual atlas.

For my Atlas, I am running what is known as a Wandering Path build. Essentially what it does is make it so that none of the notable nodes on the tree give you any benefits, but in doing so it doubles the effectiveness of all of the small nodes. The end result is you get a ton of maps dropping and oftentimes duplicating when they do drop. I’ve paired this with Essence and Harvest to limited results. In theory, I should be selling off my harvest currency in order to fund other things. I am not really doing much in the way of harvest crafting and am sitting on around 4000 red, 1000 yellow, and 2000 blue currency. Looking it up on POE.Ninja that is only around 100 chaos worth of currency though.

What I am spending most of my time doing lately however is running around on a Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer. I am more or less following this guide, and I have to tell you this is a truly dumb build but in a good way. Mostly I was looking for something that was a little more easy mode when it came to the Sanctum, and this build is definitely that. I went from not being able to clear a single floor on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to making it all the way to the fourth floor on my second attempt as the SRS Necromancer. Essentially Raging Spirits are for lack of a better explanation, the Lost Souls from Doom and they run around randomly attacking baddies. They have an extremely short lifespan so you have to keep summoning them but they just straight up wreck anything in their path.

As of last night, I am entering Act 8 and trucking along happily. What is complete nonsense about this build is just how fast it decimates bosses. I had heard of SRS builds before now but had never tried them. Essentially I have this dumb desire to knock out the kill Dominus achievement in every class and have purposefully been looking for a Witch build to play. I have to be honest I was just not feeling the Toxic Rain Shadow character, so I have largely abandoned it for the time being. I might pick something else up at some point in the future for Shadow. I have no doubt that I could get through Dominus as Toxic Rain, but I liked the build better when I was using Caustic Arrow before swapping over to Rain fully. That is honestly the problem with builds that have you swap things up in flight, because often… I liked the gameplay of the earlier mechanics. This was me with my attempt at a Righteous Fire Inquisitor… I liked Wintertide Brand and didn’t want to give that up.

I honestly expected that I would have lost steam by now, but I keep trucking along happily in Path of Exile. I need to sort out a proper strategy for farming Divines because the prices of everything seem to be going through the roof right now. I have a bunch of things that have value but are just too painful to sell slowly one at a time. I need to venture forth into the discord communities because surely there is someone out there engaging in arbitrage buying a bunch of random currencies and then bundling them into packages that move more easily. I would happily sell someone a bunch of crap at a loss if it meant I got it all over within a single transaction. The finance side of Path of Exile is absolutely intriguing but also somewhat maddening at the same time. I engage with the Trade economy largely as a way of getting items that I want, but there are absolutely people out there who consider it to be the real game.

Anyways I will wrap up this morning’s post and wish you all a Happy Super Xmas or a good Boxing day if that is more your thing.