mapping

Large Axe Enthusiast

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Good Morning Folks! I think I have arrived at the point with Boneshatter where I am really starting to love it. I mean it kinda feels amazing to swing a big axe and watch things explode around me. I absolutely get why this build has been so popular for as long as it has. That somewhat concerns me however given how stable Righteous Fire was for years… and then was suddenly changed fairly drastically. Yesterday I swapped over to Boneshatter of Complex Trauma and got it raised to 20% quality through the Labyrinth. Essentially this is a Boneshatter that ramps much faster but resets when you hit 10 stacks. So this is probably a DPS loss for bossing, but seems to be a massive boost for mapping as most engagements do not last terribly long. I would imagine it is probably also good for boss fights where you need to move around constantly as you won’t hit the reset point quite as quickly.

I saw a noticeable spike in damage when I swapped gems, so at least for me… it seems to be the right call. I am not sure if that will be the case for everyone, however. I still could use a much better axe and my gear is still quite a bit scuffed. I am not running a six-link and would ultimately like to find a chest so that I can put all of my utility stuff in a six-red-socket axe. There are a lot of gems that I am just not using right now. For example, I have Purity of Elements, Grace, and Pride all vying for my last reservation aura slot. Grace is just silly because it allows me to arrive at some extremely high armor levels. Purity of Elements I was using for a bit when I was not capped, and then Pride seems to be what I use most of the time. Thing is… I’ve never unsocketed the gems I am not using which means there is a lot of room to grow my build. At some point, I will shift Blood Rage to a Cast when Damage Taken setup along with Vaal Molten Shell if I can ever find one.

As far as progress goes, I completed my white and yellow maps yesterday which only leaves some red and unique maps to hit my 115. I am sitting at 84 bonus objectives completed which means between yesterday morning and today I managed to pick up 19 new ones. Something new that I learned is that apparently, Delve can drop maps that you do not have access to otherwise. I always thought the maps form Delve followed the logic of needing to drop connecting to some other map that you had already completed. However yesterday I picked up several red maps that were disconnected from everything else. So I guess maybe that is a point for rushing down into Delve earlier than I would have thought. The rest were picked up through the three to one vendor map crafting recipe especially to fill out the remaining yellow maps that I had not seen.

Another thing that I did not realize… is that apparently you can get Awakened gems while Maven is witnessing a fight. I always knew that you could get them from Maven’s Crucible encounters where you fight things that she had witnessed, but I did not know that the sheer act of her witnessing a fight could drop them. I feel like even then, this is probably a unicorn moment and I will likely never see another one of these. It was already pretty rare to get them from the 8 ways, and I am sure it is even rarer still to get them from a map. I do wonder if the atlas keystone that makes extra bosses show up when doing a witnessed map causes the drop rate to increase. Admittedly I am also running with WAY MORE rarity support than I normally do due to those wild rings I showed off yesterday. I might be seeing things on the drop table that I would not normally see without running a specific Magic Find character.

Speaking of unicorn moments, I also got a Voidborn Reliquary Key to drop down in Delve. Normally speaking I would sell this because I can use the 3 divines that they often are way more than I can the crap unique that is sure to drop. Ace had not seen one of these so I streamed briefly over Discord opening it. Shocking to no one I got a crap unique, but it was at least a reasonably well-rolled Ventor’s Gamble. Were it not for the slight amount of reduced quantity I would probably use it or suggest someone else use it. It would have been hilarious though if I had gotten something like a mageblood given that I am in a private league. Currency and expensive item drops don’t mean quite as much as they normally do since what matters most is the crafting value of an item.

I am legitimately having way more fun than I thought I might playing Boneshatter. I was in pretty heavy mourning for Righteous Fire and while the build is still technically viable it is a bit of a shadow compared to its former self at least for Juggernaut. I spent some time playing around with my well-geared RF Jugg from last league and it is still absolutely viable for mapping and honestly most content… but I kill things noticeably slower. I could probably shift up my build a bit to stack more life, which would then give me much more Righteous Fire damage but would probably mean I would be losing Fire Trap damage in the process. I assume at some point we will let our characters go into Trade League and when that happens I plan on devoting some effort into tweaking my Boneshatter build to see just how good an optimally geared one feels. In the meantime though I am having a freaking blast bashing things and making them explode.

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.

Fire Shield Crush Updates

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Good Morning Folks! I thought I would give a bit of a quick update on the state of my Fire Conversion Shield Crush Chieftain. When I last posted about the build I was sitting at 78 and I have now put on another nine levels and am sitting at 87. Levels have helped quite a bit, as has a bit of gear swapping. The end result feels a bit closer to what I would consider a proper build. There have been a few times in this “Bel makes Videos” adventure where I have recorded a bit of an update because the build has suddenly felt much better to play. All in all, this is probably still not something that I would suggest to anyone because for the amount of effort I have poured into it… it still is not what I would consider a fast mapper or honestly particularly great at any sort of content.

Here is some updated gameplay that I recorded yesterday over my lunch break. If you compare this to the previous video, you can already see that not only am I running a harder map but I am also zipping through the packs much faster. The Achilles heel of the build continues to be bosses and the fact that anything with resistance takes forever to chew through even with flammability, fire penetration, and the Ramako ascendancy. The other glaring problem is that I have negative amounts of chaos resistance, which makes for a pretty quick death on occasion. I am slowly working my way towards the 10% of armor applies to Chaos Resistance mastery which I am hoping will at least help a bit.

To get where I am now, I have swapped out several gear slots so let’s dive into some of those decisions. Firstly I gave up chaos resistance and my rare helmet to go over to the armor stacking staple The Formless Flame. This is something I should have done from the start, but I was honestly more concerned about not having any chaos resistance than I was over the huge benefits of this item. I swapped from Immortal Flesh which I had been using for some life and regeneration, back to Arn’s Anguish the DPS belt that gives me a lot of Armor, Brutality Stacks, and some more Fire Resistance which then converts to at least some regeneration. I swapped out my rare boots with chaos resistance for Legacy of Fury which gives additional explosions and applies scorch to everything for more fire damage. Lastly, I swapped from my previous corrupted Emperor’s Vigilance to one with a bit more Armor and Energy shield since the price of those shields has crashed since I bought mine and I might as well min/max that a bit.

So when my flasks are ticking, which they usually are given they are all “flagellant” meaning I gain stacks while being hit… I am sitting at over 109k armor. This of course gets converted to attack damage which then gets converted to fire damage… which means the more defenses that I pour on the more damage I deal. Additionally, I talked about this in the build, but I did swap my Amethyst Flask for a perfectly rolled Rumi’s Concoction that I had sitting in the bank which gives me a capped block chance for both spells and attacks at 75%. Once I get the 10% of armor applied to chaos damage node, that should give me 10,962 armor being applied to chaos damage which should at least give me a bit of wiggle room even when I have negative resistance.

The challenge that I find myself in is that my next really huge upgrade would be swapping my Brass Dome out for a Grasping Mail. More specifically I need one that has rolled with the “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” prefix which cannot be rolled/crafted and has to drop natively on the item. The biggest challenge with all of this is… even a shitty one sells for around 10 Divine Orbs and for one that is already linked you are talking somewhere in the 25-50 Divine Orb range. I just feel like that is way more currency that I want to spend on this build especially when swapping this out would mean I would be down 4% maximum resistance and lose my crit immunity. Moreover even after swapping this… I would still largely be fucked on Chaos Resistance. While I have the currency to buy one of these, and then link it myself… I just have stayed my hand because I can’t see spending it on a build that I am not even sure about. I would probably rather spend that currency on upgrades for my SRS Guardian or RF Juggernaut as both of them feel worlds better than this character.

I think more than anything, Shield Crush Chieftain has been a fun experiment. It was a costly experiment, but it at least satiated my desire to see what Shield Crush and the new Chieftain changes were all about. I thought I would have put this character to bed long before now, but I continue to dink around with it. I am likely to swap back to either the Jugg or the Guardian however to knock out some of my missing league achievements so I can get another sad little totem pole for my hideout. This would be my third one if I managed to knock out two more achievements before the end of the league. Additionally, I am on the cusp of finishing up Diablo III Season 29, so I will probably be spending some time wrapping that up over the weekend.

That said… I am already contemplating a totally different distraction. Sir Gog is one of my favorite Path of Exile YouTubers, and he will be hosting a private league event starting this weekend. The idea is that it will be a crafting league and that everything is going to be dropping scoured so that you have to craft your own statistics on it. I am contemplating doing another SRS Guardian, largely as a way to test SSF Viability of the build for future leagues. I am not entirely certain this is going to happen, but I believe the league starts sometime around 7 p.m. for me. If you want to give this a shot check out the video above or the league invite page.

Minion Guardian is Phenomenal

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Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s more heavy topic, we are returning to my regularly scheduled Path of Exile nonsense. This morning I am revisiting the Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build because quite honestly… this might be my favorite build of the league. I will always love Righteous Fire for its chill delving potential… but Guardian SRS sorta rips. This has become my swiss army knife character for doing all of the content that is perfectly fine on RF, but just a bit slower because that build is not exactly a damage-dealing powerhouse. When I recorded a video earlier this week I had reached a point where I was mostly staying in T13/T14s because T16s felt a bit rippy. Since then I have learned that after a dozen levels… I can do pretty much even the worst modded T16 map and be able to accept a slew of bad Searing Exarch altar mods to boot.

So this morning I recorded a very quick 9-minute reprisal video showing off what the build looks like doing a simple Rare 5-Mod T16 map. I get stacked with a number of time-consuming league mechanics like Syndicate, Expedition, and Ritual… so I mostly avoid these to keep the video run time short. I promise however that I have zero problem with any league mechanics on this character. Even Legion feels great as my army of tiny skulls can spread out and break out all of the frozen encounters. I still mostly zoom around looking for clusters of boxes, but in the end I will have broken out most of the encounters during the time limit.

Legitimately… pending Grinding Gear Games does nothing to screw up this build by the time 3.23 releases… this might end up being a phenomenal league starter. This is still lagging behind Necromancer significantly with only 519 characters cataloged by POE.Ninja running the combination of Guardian Ascendancy and Summon Raging Spirits. Conversely, almost 3000 characters are running Summon Raging Spirits with the Necromancer Witch Ascendancy. Across the board in the Ancestor Trade league, only 2% of players that have been cataloged are running any form of Guardian. I do sort of wonder when the zeitgeist is going to realize how strong this build really is… and adopt it en masse like they did Poison SRS a few leagues ago. The thing is… this build requires ZERO specialized gear to work. The uniques I am running are all nice to haves and you could run this with trash yellow gear without any issue. This is evidenced by the fact that SRS Guardian is currently the most popular build in Ruthless.

Now that my SRS Guardian is essentially a “solved problem”, I’ve shifted my focus back to my Storm Brand Inquisitor. I am working on this to make it feel better, but honestly… its survival is currently sort of shit. I’ve failed at the second Labyrinth several times now. I have an inventory full of better gear that just needs levels to equip, so this might be one of those characters that I make it all the way to the second Kitava fight without having done any of my ascendancies. The first ascendancy that gave me consecrated ground any time I am stationary has helped, but not enough to make up for the fact that I just get wrecked anytime something makes contact with me.

I remember this build being frustrating the first time I played it, and quite honestly… if I ever get the inkling to play a brand build in the future I think I will likely stick to Wintertide. I remember having a lot of survival issues during Kalandra with this build around the same level range I am in currently. I am shifting what I can for the moment, but essentially I am just death-zerging my way through some of the encounters. I need levels so I can start equipping the correct items for the build, at which point I think my damage output will make up for my tissue paper defenses. The entire purpose of playing this character was to give it a bit of a redemption arc… but I gotta say… I still feel like this build is sorta shit. I am sure it will be fine once I get some proper gear on it and can fix my defenses but ugh… this is a bad build to league start. My assessment of it back then was not super generous and even knowing what I know now… I still feel like it is an awful leveling experience.

All of that said… I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with at least two of my four league characters. Righteous Fire Juggernaut is always a winner, and SRS Guardian is so much better than I thought it would be. Now I have to admit… part of me wants to play something with the Chieftain changes after seeing how big and beautiful those 5% explosions can be. I also want to maybe try Shockwave Totems or something similar to that. If my Storm Brand attempt continues to be shit… I might respec it to Heirophant and embrace the totem lifestyle instead.