MMORPG

Spending Some Chaos

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Good Morning Friends! It has been a few days since I last updated my progress in Path of Exile, so this morning is going to be one of those posts. At this point, I am finishing up white maps and well into yellow maps. Initially, my first goal is to finish out my Atlas so that I can get all of my passives for mapping purposes. After that, if I still have solid momentum, my goal is going to be to finish each of the “uber” fights. All told I am enjoying this league a heck of a lot more than Lake of Kalandra, though I did enjoy the “Lake” Mechanic more than I enjoy the Sanctum Mechanic. It feels like the base game is just in a better state than it was during the lake, but I do want to spend some time testing out the feel on my old Stormbrand build over in Standard to see if this is more a case of Righteous Fire just being extremely strong or if the game itself is less punitive.

It has been three days since I last posted a screenshot of my currency tab, so you can see a lot of progress on various currencies. At face value, it doesn’t look like I have gained a lot in the liquid currency department aka Chaos, Exalts, and Divines. However, I’ve made 27 Chaos worth of purchases which would take that the liquid assets that I have found up to 2 Exalts and 49 Chaos which isn’t too bad. I’ve yet to find a Divine, which at this point in the last league I had… but it dropped in the Lake so I am not sure if that counts. I am however seen a much more steady trickle of Chaos getting at least one in almost every map that I run.

One of the biggest complaints from the last league was how hard it was in general to “sustain” the “alch and go” style of mapping. What that means is getting enough raw map drops, alchemy drops to turn them into rare maps, and scouring orbs to reset the maps you can’t run with your build. The biggest improvement this league has brought is access to rusted scarabs almost immediately. It took a long time last league before I started seeing scarabs of any sort, and earlier I lucked into a single mob that dropped ten gilded scarabs which I chock up to a kooky algorithm that went in with Kalandra. However, I have seen way more alchemy and way more raw maps than I did the last league which means I can really never stop running maps. If anything this is the “alch and go” league which is extremely enjoyable.

I guess let’s talk a little bit about some of my Chaos expenditures. The first thing of course is trying to get a six-link in the correct colors. I had been searching for a while for pure armor base, that had relevant stats for my build and the prices ranged pretty wildly from 10c to 1 divine depending on how good the rolls. I managed to snag this one for 15c which seems entirely reasonable for having pretty much everything on it be useful to a Righteous Fire build. I would have loved to have had it not be corrupted just to open up some wiggle room for later crafting, but for the price tag, I am willing to take having it set in stone and potentially upgrading again later in the season.

The next thing I picked up was an Immortal Flesh belt, which adds on a ton of life and regen at the cost of elemental resistances. The thing with Immortal Flesh is it is a search to try and find the belt with the best benefits and the least negatives. The hard pill to swallow is the hit to your resists on top of the already 60% hit you take from defeating Kitava twice. So essentially my goal was to get as close to the -15% minimum as I could, and I jumped on -16% as “good enough”. The other thing I was specifically looking for was a minimum of 250 Life per Second regeneration, so when I found this belt for 2 Chaos I figured it was about as good as I could get for the time being.

This last pickup is probably my least needed of the items, but after many attempts to get one of these myself and picking up every Void Sceptre I came across… I decided to just buy my way out of the frustration. Essentially I was looking for 40% Elemental Damage, a minimum of 30% Spell Damage, and a minimum of 15% Fire Damage over Time Multiplier. The rest of the stats are mostly useful except for 10% Attack Speed, but I can live with an almost perfect item for awhile. This cost me 10 Chaos, which seemed like a deal considering other sceptres I had been watching were considerably more and would have required me to get a 3 link.

At some point, I need to probably look at my boots and gloves and maybe try and pour on some more chaos resistance. I have a good chaos ring but it, unfortunately, drops some of my other resists to the point of not having any wiggle room. As far as the atlas goes I’ve completed 43 of the 115 bonus objectives which put me absolutely completed with the first three tiers of maps and missing a map each in tiers four and five. I am not doing great in yellow progression mostly because I have not hit a mass influx of yellow maps but that will probably be coming soon. For anyone who is interested, I use a spreadsheet to keep track of my map progress and I have created a blank copy that you can clone here.

All told I am having a blast this league but I did run into a rather nasty bug last night. Essentially I put in a map, that thankfully I had two of… and hit a hard stall bug that is unrecoverable. This is apparently a known problem and I’ve found evidence of this dating back to at least last year. Anecdotal evidence from one thread makes it seem that maybe it takes place more often with adding Betrayal to your maps, but that isn’t necessarily certain. I know when it happened to me last night I was running a map and trying to add Betrayal to it, but I’ve also seen signs of folks encountering this with Delve. I am probably going to land on the side of only adding mechanics to maps that I can afford to lose and don’t need for completion purposes. Once my atlas is complete though, all bets are off.

All in all, this is probably my favorite league so far and has really sold me on being a permanent player of Path of Exile. Sentinel was a good league and Lake was a little shaky, but Sanctum so far has restored my faith. I am hoping with the addition of Ruthless mode, that GGG will stop trying to make the base game more difficult and leave it more or less as is. Are you playing in this league? What build are you running? What are your experiences so far? Drop me a line below.

Enter the Atlas

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Good Morning Friends! As of last night, I am officially in maps. So far they are honestly going pretty smoothly with a few moments of press potion panic but otherwise manageable. Essentially yesterday I finished up the rest of Act Nine and all of Act Ten, then did my third Labyrinth, and finally killed Kitava for the second time. The transition into early maps for Righteous Fire is far smoother than any build I have played so far. I now understand why Pohx has so many devotees because this build is awesome for just sorta kicking back and doing content. Granted I am only in white maps so far, and who knows what the transition into yellows is going to look like.

So far I have only swapped out a single piece of gear, but my resists seem to be solid. I am shocked that my gear is as seemingly good still as was. This is the kooky thing about Path of Exile is that gear level seems to not matter even one little bit but instead how lucky you were on the random rolls that it came with. Obviously, the higher the gear the better the possible rolls that can be, but I am still using some items that show equipable levels in the teens. At this point, I am probably going to start shopping for something that I can use as a six-link chest piece so that I can migrate over to using all of the appropriate gems for righteous fire. I think everything else should be relatively correct. I had to move frostblink over to lifetap finally so that I could start running skitterbots.

I had some exceptional luck in my last few acts of the game, and due to over-leveling as heavily as I did… started seeing tier-one maps dropping left and right. I now have fourteen T1, one T2, three T3, and one T4 ready to run. In total, I have unlocked six points on the Atlas Passive tree and have several more that I can run that I have not gotten the bonus from. For the moment I am going hard into Betrayal and Expedition since I seem to be getting some cool things from there. Now that I finally understand Betrayal a bit more, I am way more willing to engage with it. Every map mechanic just seems to work better with RF, and I even managed to wreck Blight on one of the maps. I am looking forward to trying Breach since that seemed to be my personal nemesis before. Speaking of Nemesis… ArchNemesis still mostly sucks and I encountered my first proper mob in the middle of a map yesterday. It took forever but was mostly doable.

One of my goals in this league is to spend more time in other game modes. I noticed that I was almost capped on the Delve currency so I finished out my evening burning through some of that and shocking no one… Righteous Fire is also good at this game mode. I started at a rather conservative level, but I expect in the coming days to be cranking this up a bit as I upgrade the various sliders for Delve. All told I am having a lot of freaking fun and it feels like RF opens a lot more doors than the builds I had been previously playing. I am now however looking forward to bossing because this video of Pohx against Maven seems like nonsense. I found out that he is running a “quenching” flask to turn off his Righteous Fire during the degeneration phases but that also means that he can do it only so many times before falling over. This is probably the downside of this build, but considering most of what I enjoy is mapping, heist, and delve… I am probably okay with this. I could always afford to build a bossing character from the currency I am likely to gain doing that content.

I am having a heck of a lot of fun right now, and my current goal is to improve my gear and knock out more of the Atlas Passive tree. Coming from having completed this last league, it feels a little meager but it is progress nonetheless. I guess I will spend some time today and create another spreadsheet like I had last time to track my map progress. Games like this… really suit me. It gives me a bunch of goals that I can chip away at solo and feel like I am making forward momentum. At some point, I need to dust off Guild Wars 2 as well because it similarly has a bunch of solo-friendly micro goals that I can make progress on.

Hopefully, your week is going pretty swimmingly. Mine is largely tolerable but at some point, I am going to have to actually care about Christmas… because we have done next to nothing planning-wise.

Nearing maps with Aging Gear

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Good Morning Friends! I will warn you when I am on an ARPG kick… the posts are not going to all be winners. You have to somewhat really care about ARPGs and the loot that they can drop to fully enjoy these. That said I am not really playing anything other than Path of Exile so that is what you are going to get for a while. As of last night, I am knee-deep in Act Nine and sitting at level 73… which feels like I am a bit higher level than I was in this same place during the last league. After some rifling through my past posts for the Kalandra league I remarked that I was level 70 at the beginning of Act Ten, so I am making a bit more XP overall and it could just be that Righteous Fire is better at fully clearing a zone. I am doing really well on various resists but I am not sure how that will hold up once I get the debuff applied after killing Kitava the second time.

One thing that ultimately concerns me a bit, is that most of the gear that I am currently wearing… I have had it for a very long time. One of my rings for example is really nice but has an equipment level of eight. That means in order to transition into mapping I am likely going to have to go through a lot of socket pressure and upgrading in a very short period of time. If my resists were going to be good, then I could probably honestly start maps in the current state I am right now. However, once Kitava nerfs my resists again I am going to be hurting, especially in the fire resistance department. Not that resists are all that important but I do plan on finishing Cruel Labyrinth before I kill Kitava.

One game mode that I hated with my last build, but don’t mind at all this time around… is Incursion. Essentially for those not familiar with the various hold-over league mechanics in Path of Exile, the NPC named Alva sends you back into history and you can impact various rooms in the Temple. Essentially the overarching goal is to open up doors, which can be done by killing NPCs and getting a key to drop. You are trying to link up all of the rooms so you can run the entire Temple as a giant contorted map. Last night I managed to get my very first incursion ever where I could reach every single room in the instance. More impressive is that I took zero deaths and only had scant few close calls while trying to run the map once completed.

The rewards were not phenomenal. My loot filters seem to really be impressed by them, but in truth, most of it was vendor fodder. I held onto the unique and the belt because someone might find them useful, but everything else wasn’t of any use to me. There was also the problem that by the time I reached the end of my run, my bags were pretty full of other interesting drops that I left a lot of this to rot on the floor. Sure I could have dropped a portal because I still had five doors left… but running an entire temple with every room unlocked… is “a lot”. By the time I finished, I was very much ready to be free of that place and move on to something else.

I am still seeing my fair share of kooky kalandra-style loot drops, like this time when apparently a rare thought I needed a unique amulet and a bajillion ivory spirit shields. I am honestly kinda happy that they managed to keep some of this weirdness because it brings a smile to my face every time a dozen of the same item drops… even if said item is mostly worthless. I think more than anything that is one of the aspects of Path of Exile that I enjoy the most… the always confusing and surprising loot drops. Most of it is junk, even using an item filter… but every now and then there is a jewel in the rough that feels amazing to get. In chasing that unicorn you end up with enough raw currency that you can buy your way out of most holes.

Now for something a bit fun, because I had not really compared it myself yet either. I took some screenshots of my currency tab six days into the Kalandra league on 8/25/2022 and we can compare that with this morning’s screenshot some 4 days into the Sanctum league. At this point in the league, I feel like I am seeing way more Alchemy Orbs which is a good thing, because that is a positive for “Alch and Go” map sustain. I also have way more alterations overall which I had noticed them dropping a lot. I am down a bit on raw chaos and at this point in Kalandra I had already found a Divine Orb, but I’ve found two Exalted Orbs so while it doesn’t exactly shake out as an even it feels like I had similar tier 1 currency drops. I felt like I have had way less smithing currency, but really the difference is mostly negligible I think it was just that in Kalandra league it tended to drop 10 at a time in the lake.

All told I think I am doing pretty solidly at the moment. We will see what the next few days bring as I transition over to white maps.

Burninating the Countryside

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Good Morning Friends! Friday saw the launch of a brand league in Path of Exile and I finally landed on playing Pohx’s Righteous Fire Juggernaut build. Mostly I think I wanted a fairly cozy and low-stress league start and Pohx is maybe one of the best guide builders in the community. Ash and I have talked a bit about this, but various guide makers have various risk margins that they are willing to live with. Velyna seems super chill as a human being, but she is willing to live with way more stress than I want in my life and as a result, I am not super likely to be following any more of her builds in the future. Ash commented that really what we are looking for… builds from people who are willing to take that build to Solo Self Found Hardcore… where they can’t realistically rely on the market for items and need sufficient survival to keep from dying to a random one-shot.

A few leagues ago I had attempted to go down the Righteous Fire path but ultimately stalled out because I loved the play style of Wintertide Brand. In the Inquisitor RF path, this is supposed to be just a jumping-off point, but I leaned into the gameplay so heavily that I never really made the conversion to RF and started going off in my own direction trying to make Wintertide a viable endgame build. In the last league, I took my love of brand gameplay and went down the Storm Brand path, and it was largely fine other than the fact that again I had to deviate to pack on survival. This time around however I committed early on mentally to following the path and trusting in Pohx and so far it has been awesome. I made the switch around level 40 to running Righteous Fire over Rolling Magma, and am now 63 and still trucking along happily.

This has been without a doubt my easiest league start so far, and I am not sure how much is chalked up to following Pohx’s guidance and how much is the fact that this is effectively my third league. The big thing I have noticed is that I’ve yet to die to any of the act bosses. Starting with Hillock I have one-shot every boss encounter so far and the only deaths I have taken… were due to some lag spikes on particularly nasty trash. Since so much of the build relies on health regeneration, you have to be deeply cautious around anything that might impair your regeneration rate. I can’t survive terribly long due to the damage I am dealing myself constantly from Righteous Fire so I have to make sure and disengage or potion to get through the rough spots.

As far as the Forbidden Sanctum league mechanic itself, I am not necessarily the biggest fan. It is a mechanic that greatly favors glass cannon builds because your health bar is not actually your health bar. You instead have this bar called “Resolve” that goes down every time you get hit by anything, and if you are not dodging literally everything you are failing. Ultimately the highest rewards are gained by letting the reward from each floor ride until the end of the map… but that also means you are at risk of losing everything. So my personal preference is to take the reward that effectively cashes out at the end of every floor. That way I at least got something for my time, and so long as I keep that perspective the experience is not too bad. It ends up just being a way to get some supplemental crafting currency which is usually worth my time.

As far as currency goes… this league seems to be way more generous than Lake of Kalandra was at the start. I am in act seven currently and have six raw chaos orbs and one exalted orb. That in theory should give me a good start toward buying some end-game gear at some point. I saw my first Chaos Orb drop in Act III, and my first Exalted Orb in Act V. I am hoping this trend continues and that I see a Divine Orb or maybe my first ever Mirror before too much longer. Normally speaking I have not seen much in the way of raw Chaos drops until maps. I’ve seen a number of the kooky loot types where a single mob will drop like six of an item so it really does feel like we have arrived at a happy place after the wild mood swings of Lake of Kalandra loot. Here is hoping they don’t screw anything up!

I am having a freaking blast… but so far my friend Ace is not. They tried another Minion build and it seems like maybe those are not quite back to normal. I hope either the build improves or they can figure out another build because it is going to suck not to be fucking around in the endgame without them. I want everyone to be happy and engaged in the league because it will make my long-term experience more enjoyable to see everyone having fun. It has been interesting to see how my opinion of different mechanics has shifted now that I have this wildly survivable killing machine. I hated Incursion previously and now… it is super easy and just a case of how fast can I move around the map and soak up more kills. I am looking forward to encountering my first Breach because that was also a mechanic that I loathed but I have a feeling it is now going to be my jam.

Are you playing Forbidden Sanctum in Path of Exile? How has your league start gone? What are your thoughts about the seasonal mechanic? Drop me a line below!