Necro Settlers

Goodbye Necro Settlers

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Good Morning Folks! The amount of hype that I have going into Path of Exile II is honestly worrying levels. It reminds me a bit of the way I felt about World of Warcraft going into the launch of that game all those years ago. I now have it sitting in my steam library taunting me. Honestly, at this point, I just hope that the servers do not crater too badly. I fully expect things to be a bit borked because some comments that Jonathan Rogers made on a podcast with Ghazzy and DM yesterday indicate that the access key sales have far exceeded anything they had planned for. The level of excitement Jonathan has for the game is infectious and it is wild that he was just down to record for over two hours. If you do not have two hours… SylverXYZ did a 20-minute recap of everything that was discussed in the interview.

I should be getting a lifetime spend key, but I picked up one of the cosmetic supporter packs just because I loved the appearance. I cobbled together a pretty slick looking appearance setup for my Necro Settlers league RF Chieftain using it. Truth be told I think I am pretty much done with the Necro Settlers Event. The extreme inflation of that league is going to prevent me from really progressing my character much further than it currently is. Basically, all of the next major upgrades are priced out of my range. For example, the next obvious step would be to shift to the life recovery on block setup which has decently rolled shields running around 20 Divines. Annihilation’s Approach boots are around 2 Divines, and a decently rolled Elder pseudo-helm starts around 12 Divines. On top of that, pretty much every rare piece of gear would likely need to be swapped to balance out the stats from shifting items around. I would also realistically need to pick up a cluster gem setup.

All of that said… I am pretty happy with as far as I got on potato gear. I made my way through all 115 maps in the Atlas and unlocked the first two voidstones. In theory, I probably could have struggled my way through the last two but the amount of effort just did not feel worth it. I am far better at Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds than I used to be because I killed both of them deathless. When I hit level 95 and began running juicier t16 maps I started eating a lot of deaths. I think I mostly fixed that by shifting up my tree a bit to pick up 80% reduction in extra critical damage. Were this a normal league, I could have easily pushed this character further but I am pretty happy with how far I got with relatively little investment. Almost all of the gear save for my Cloak of Flames was stuff I picked up off the ground. I feel like the whole event was a rousing success.

This however has caused me to pop back into the normal Settlers league and start chipping away at some of the further challenges. At this point, I have 31 of 40 and I am not entirely certain how much further I am reasonably going to get. Challenging Competitors is probably doable, but I have never seen the boss that highjacks your maprunners and I keep failing to avoid the verisium lasers on the Black Knight encounter. Gear Grinding Goals… mostly is going to require me to hit 100 and then finish out another one of the stupidly painful goals. I’m roughly half of the way through level 99 and am running around with an Omen of Amelioration to blunt the impact of any deaths that I might take. I made an Abyss Atlas tree and probably need to focus on running around with it as that is supposedly a pretty efficient way to gain experience.

I’m also potentially back in Enshrouded for a bit, as my friend Ace has been talking about it lately. I am trying to run up a fresh character and this friends is the majesty of my night one hovel. Yesterday I cleared two Elixir Wells, upgraded the Flame one step, and gathered the Blacksmith, Hunter, Alchemist, and Farmer. Next up would be the lengthy trek out to go find the Carpenter. Most of my sojourns to this point have involved climbing up to the tower I cleared before getting the Blacksmith and then gliding down to near the locations. I am however abusing the hell out of the fact that you can log out in a shrouded area and it will teleport you back to base. So essentially I am playing similar to how I would play Path of Exile where I am bouncing to character select all the time. This has allowed me to go off into the mists and collect what I need and then efficiently pop back to town with my load of goodies.

I am not sure how deep I am going to get into the game, but I would like to experience some of the dungeons that Ace has found as a duo. I could always just grab my previous geared-out character for shenanigans, but it feels better starting from scratch.

Trade but Without Trading

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Hey Folks! I’m getting a bit of a late start this morning on putting up a daily blog post, which is probably bad considering I hard skipped writing anything yesterday. I’ve been continuing to roam around in Path of Exile while I figure out what I want to tackle next, and made some significant progress on chipping away at my final atlas unlocks. One of the big things about this league is that I have to explore other options for obtaining unique maps. We are in a heavy inflation league economy and as a result, I just don’t have the raw resources to buy my way out of holes in quite the same manner that I normally do. Traditionally I would get down to the last 10 maps or so and just buy them from the trade market. This time around I am using Kirac, Scouting Reports, and Beastcrafting in an effort to find my last few maps.

As of this morning, I am sitting at 112 of 115 maps completed which leaves me with three unique maps. I still need to find The Coward’s Trial, Oba’s Cursed Trove, and weirdly enough the Vault of Atziri which normally is something I find pretty early on. The title of this blog post is somewhat misleading because I am heavily engaged with the Currency Exchange, but largely making the decision to avoid buying most things that are not currency outright. So while I will purchase scouting reports, I am trying my best not to purchase maps. Largely because in my experience so far, it is hard to get anyone to respond to requests right now. The league is fairly dead and the prices that are posted, and not that great. My goal for the league I think is to complete the Atlas and it has been interesting trying to solo my way through that.

I got my first upgrade in quite a long while, and it was picking up an Omen of Connections for 2 Divine Orbs. Essentially I had posted a buy request hoping that someone would eventually decide to sell it to me. Buying one immediately would have taken 4 Divines, and I really did not want to pay that price for it. Before resorting to that I did burn through 600+ fusings in a Yolo attempt to link it that ultimately failed. I had not had much luck either finding the Omen through Ritual or the Black Morrigan through Einhar on my own in this league. I fully expect that after going through and buying it… I will probably get one to drop within the next few play sessions. I wish the Omen of Connections worked on Taited Fusings… but alas it does not. Bumping up to a Six Link is a pretty massive improvement in clear speed, and in theory, at some point, I probably need to run a bunch of labs to get some quality on my gems.

Today is the Early Access/Supporter Pack reveal stream at 2 pm CST and with it comes a very questionable Twitch drop. I will of course be farming it just to have it… but I cannot see a case in the future where I would want to wear these Breach hands as a cloak. The community is excited and thinks this cosmetic means that Breach is effectively confirmed for POE2. I am hoping that during this stream they talk a bit about what the endgame for the early access is going to look like. We know that we are only going to have three acts to play through, and in theory a limited set of classes and only one ascendency per class. I am hoping that most of this information will be confirmed during the show. I am still kind of on the fence about how much I feel like POE2 is going to be my sort of game, but I am hopeful because of how much I enjoy Path of Exile in its current state.

Are you going to be tuning into the reveal stream? What league mechanic are you hoping will return in Path of Exile 2? For me it is Delve, but I also feel like Delve, Heist, and Sanctum since they are not mapping mechanics… are going to be a bit before they are introduced.

Missing Delve

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Good Morning Folks! I am still on the Path of Exile NecroSettlers Event nonsense and honestly… I am finding myself missing Delve considerably worse than I thought I would. It is not necessarily that I am missing the activity… I am missing access to common stuff that I am simply not finding in maps. Up until this point I had largely been avoiding Delve since the changes to this event are largely mapping-specific. However there are some ramifications of this decision… namely, I do not have a ready supply of many of the currencies that I would be swimming in at this point. I also do not have an easy supply of high-level flask bases. Essentially I believe I need item level 80 flasks to get the 3 charges when hit trait and more than that… I just do not see that many flasks dropping in maps. By this point I would normally have the right flasks with the right traits and have them automated… but I have none of that.

Essentially as of this morning, I started trying to get set up in Delve, but since I ignored this while leveling I don’t have any progress. “Breaking Delve” is somewhat tedious because there is a requisite amount of Azurite farming that is required before things begin to feel comfortable. Since NecroSettlers is mapping-focused, this also means that selling Resonators is EXTREMELY lucrative on the currency exchange market since no one is doing it. So while I have yet to see any of the chaos bonanza maps that folks have talked about… I can at least start to make a steady income so I might be able to afford some upgrades at some point.

I’ve not really made any significant gear changes from yesterday. I am attempting to get my Eater/Exarch implicit but failing miserably on those. I currently am sitting a 90% all elemental resistances and 75% chaos resistance since I managed to finish my fourth labyrinth. At some point I am going to want to get my hands on a Shaper shield and attempt to roll it for “life recoup on block”, and then shift up my tree significantly to go down the max block path. Essentially everything is super freaking expensive and as such that is probably going to give me an artificial cap on just how high I can fly in this event. Even the most scuffed Elder helms are going for multiple divines, and since those are roughly 400 chaos each… I am so far from being able to afford anything. Similarly, I am going to have to use Brine King for most of this event because it is very unlikely I will be able to pick up Annihilation’s Approach.

The other thing that I have noticed is just how much slower my map progression has been going. Delve Cities produce a silly amount of miscellaneous maps, and they do not respect your atlas tree when it comes to dropping. This means you end up getting a lot of much higher-level maps in bulk so that you can fill out your atlas more quickly. This means I need to rely on the Vendor Recipe and Horizon Orbs far more than I am used to. I am hoping now that I am starting to break Delve I will catch up on map drops a bit more quickly.

I just unlocked my second tree, which I will likely start to build out for delving purposes. However, the first tree I decided to go down a path I did to much success last league. Essentially both Einhar and Ritual are on the same side of the tree and both League mechanics have a pathway to get an item that will Six-Link something for you. Until I build up a war-chest of currency, there is no way I am getting a Six-Link Cloak of Flames any other way. I am also going into beyond which just adds a lot more mobs to your maps, and I went down the path that disables summoning of bosses so that you get to keep the beyond effect the entire map.

Essentially I am in a hole now, and several days behind the curve, and simply need to put my head down and grind my way out of it.

Necro Settlers Event Fun

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Hey Folks! I gotta admit I am still reeling from last week but luckily I am off today… so it means I get an extra day to decompress. Since the world still feels like shit, I needed to retreat into some very familiar comfort gaming, and the Necro Settlers Event league in Path of Exile has fit the bill. This is a bit weird for an event league because there is no fixed end time, so it has effectively turned into a reboot of the Settlers League which I assume will end when that league ends. The league started on the 7th and at this point I am into mapping with a character that can probably get me all the way through t16s. I went RF Chieftain again because it is comfy and familiar and I know how to get it up and running without much deep thought. I am fully expecting to play a fairly scuffed character because event league economies can be a bit weird and limited.

Event leagues always have some gimmick associated with them, and this time around it is all of the normal Settlers of Kalguur mechanics with the addition of the Lantern of Arimor from the Necropolis league. They removed all of the negative modifiers from the pool and additionally since Allflames are no longer dropping… they are just being applied to your maps automatically. What has been interesting is that all maps of a specific tier for a specific timeframe will share the same pool of lantern modifiers. This means that joining a shared global chat is a good idea as folks tend to share when a certain zone is really hot. This creates massive fluctuations in the price of specific maps when they are running a desirable combo, and also creates a situation where Horizon Orbs are more useful than they have ever been in Path of Exile history.

All of this made getting through the campaign rather interesting. I was going much slower than normal, but also having random league mobs showing up in your maps made it a bit more challenging. An example of something that I saw is during Darresso’s Arena in Act 4 is that nothing but Suphite Golems was spawning other than the Dogs that come out of the various gates. The entire place from start to finish was just yellow golems throwing chunks of sulphite at me, which would be great if I were actually messing with Delve right now, but also kind of wild when you get shotgunned by multiple packs at the same time. I think it was Mudflats where I first encountered the Unique Gemling mobs that drop random gems, and there were a few times early on that I just ran from Meatsacks because they took too long to chew through.

The other really weird thing about this league has been its economy. There are certain lantern combinations that print massive amounts of chaos. I’m hearing that some folks with appropriate juicing are seeing upwards of 200 chaos in a single map. There are no real equivalent mods that drop Divine Orbs, which means that the currency conversion between the two is outrageous. For those who do not know normally you trade in the range of 200 Chaos to a Single Divine Orb, but over the weekend at one point it was trading 500 to 1. This has all sorts of trickle-down effects on the economy as a whole meaning that things that would normally be a 5 Chaos item are selling for 60 Chaos or higher. There are a lot of folks who have not caught onto this yet, because there are items priced at 1 Divine that are in no way worth effectively 400-500 Chaos.

Luckily though I have found plenty of raw chaos and items that I can sell easily for chaos, and it has allowed me to outfit myself in the basics of a RF Chieftain build. I’ve not gone life-on-block based yet, so am still rocking the Rise of the Phoenix shield to cap out my Fire Resistances. I’ve not done the last lab so right now I am sitting at 90% Fire Res and 80% Lightning and Cold Res. I am currently using a four-link Cloak of Flame but am outfitting my atlas to do the Einhar/Ritual strategy in hopes of dropping either an Omen of Connections or a Black Morrigan so that I can six-link it. I spent 70 Chaos on the chest specifically because I was looking for one that would be good enough to bother six-linking eventually. Luckily the Cloak is relatively easy to get RF colors on of BBBRRG. You can see the rest of my scuffed gear in this POB link.

Since I am off today, I plan on slowly chipping away at my Atlas and doing everything I can to unlock more points. I got a wildly lucky drop earlier where I opened a Unique map lockbox and got two that I needed. Sadly the third was the damned pvp map which is always a waste of time. I wish you could use Horizon Orbs on Hall of the Grandmasters in an attempt to get other unique maps. I will however happily take a Twilight Temple map since that is often one of the ones that goes for quite a bit later in the league. Path of Exile and honestly any ARPG is comfort gaming for me, and I needed this more than I realized. I was having plenty of fun with Veilguard but was essentially in the “chores” section of the game where I needed to do a bajillion sidequests so that I could comfortably move the main story forward. Essentially I was in the “hinterlands” again, and needed a bit of a break.

Are you playing Necro Settlers Event league? What are your thoughts so far? Would you want to see the Lantern of Arimor go standard? Drop me a note below.