Good Morning Folks! I don’t have a massive blog post this morning as I am sort of just trucking along in the league and grinding things out on my Righteous Fire Chieftain. I hit 90% to all resistances by leveling my Purity of Fire the rest of the way to 20 and have been slowly upgrading things as I get currency. This morning I upgraded Burning Damage and Elemental Focus to Level 21/20% Quality gems for a bit of a damage boost. Since I am still running on a 4-Link chest, my Righteous Fire is starting to finally be noticeable how little damage it is doing. I have the final chest piece that I am trying to link but have not won the RNG game against Fusings. I bought some of the loot boxes from this league and picked up this amazing crab backpack, which was the item I was hoping to get. I had to hide my defiance banner so I could see the beady little eyes.
As far as Atlas progress goes, I am sitting at 87 out of 115 but largely because I am not entirely pushing maps. When I fill up on Sulphite I shift gears and work on Delve a bit and have cleared out a few more cities as well as taken out my first Vaal Delve boss. I’ve also taken down the Blackstar and “Shrek” and am now working towards unlocking Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch for my first two voidstones. In theory I should be able to finish up both of those today, at which point I will shift gears back to finishing out the Maven unlocks. I tend to stall out on Maven because they give me less than unlocking the two altars end up doing for mapping. I need a lot of Eldritch currency in order to finish out the implicits on my gear. I am not exactly swimming in currency and everything seems wildly overpriced as I think there was a big loss of players when the league turned up not being that great.
That said I am hoping the patch that dropped over night is enough to bring folks back. While it greatly upgraded the crafting and lowered the difficulty of the negative mods, it did nothing for the existing corpses that we had clogging our morgue. As a result this morning I tried crafting a new Sceptre and simply by being able to choose my base of choice it was already an improved experience. I threw almost all of the corpses that I had sitting around at this and wound up with something that was actually an upgrade over what I had been using. Essentially I stacked a bunch of corpses for improved chance of Fire Modifiers and Elemental Modifiers, and then stacked corpses that reduced my chance of pretty much everything else. The final result is a sceptre with five mods that are “workable” and two that are actually pretty solid… one of which is the 30% Fire Multi which was actually damned good.
Yesterday I got my first Exalted drop. I have no clue why I take screenshots of these “firsts” but I find it interesting. Other than linking my chest, my other active crafting project is attempting to throw “reforge fire” juice from harvest at a sceptre that I got with 38% burning damage as a fractured mod. I am hoping to get +1 all fire gems on it and maybe a few other useful mods. However, it is going to be hard to compete with that 30% fire multi that I just crafted this morning. I also plan on saving up a bunch of the “better” versions of corpses from Necropolis to make another run at an upgraded sceptre if I don’t hit something soon on the fractured base. I do hope folks come back because right now trade feels a bit dead. The only thing that has not been fixed… is the ability to just nope out of the league content. We will see if Kripparian ends up trying it again given that he was probably the most public person to quit the league.
Good Morning Folks! Happy Monday after the starting weekend of the Necropolis League in Path of Exile. I figured this morning I would talk a bit about my impressions of the league so far. I will warn you there is going to be a heck of a lot of negatives in this discussion. I feel like I should throw out as a disclaimer that I am enjoying myself despite the negatives, but that there are a fair number of them. This is probably the worst-designed league I have played so far, full stop. I’ve been active for Sentinel, Lake of Kalandra, Forbidden Sanctum, Crucible, Trial of the Ancestors, Affliction, and now Necropolis. It is also important to separate the sandbox state of the game from the league mechanic because during Kalandra the thing that everyone was complaining about was the sandbox state of the game not necessarily the league mechanic itself. Necropolis has a fairly good sandbox state of the game, but a pretty shit league mechanic.
The Bad – The League Mechanic
I think the core problem with Necropolis is that you cannot skip the league mechanic. During Affliction League you could create some downright unplayable maps by juicing with wisps too hard… but that was a choice that you specifically made not something that was forced upon you. If you really cared about map completion you could just ignore the mechanic and the game played as though the league mechanic did not exist. For Necropolis, starting with the second map, you are having certain downsides thrust upon you that there is no real viable way of getting rid (at least not without investment in another league mechanic). This is what is causing Ruthless players and some Hardcore players to outright quit the league already.
I personally just don’t really engage in the mechanic at all. I never take a look at what the modifiers are or engage in the ability to swap them around… because the mechanic itself is largely uninteresting. It feels like there are downsides but I have not really seen equivalent “juicing” of my content in order to make up for it. In theory, you should be using these items that dropped called Allflames that replace or augment monsters on your maps in order to remove the modifiers that you don’t want to run. A lot of these add specific loot pools to the monsters, but these rarely if ever seem to pay out. I’ve added many of the “Pack Can Drop Omens” allflames and have yet to see a single Omen in this league. The side effect of doing this means I have to fight those awful chaos cultists from Affliction that cast the ability with the purple chaos flowers. I would say 99.9% of the time I don’t even notice that I have made a change to the map, but then that 0.1% something one-shots me from off-screen.
In theory, we are running all of these maps and fighting all of these haunted monsters in the chance of collecting bodies for our morgue, which we will then use for crafting “epic” items. What I was not expecting going into this league is how often bodies would drop, and how generally uninteresting the entire experience of collecting them feels. We can store 64 corpses in our morgue before needing to either incinerate, bury them for crafting, or extract the monster for external storage in our stash via an empty coffin. Empty Coffins can be purchased from Arimor the Gravekeeper for 1 Chaos Orb. Nothing about this crafting system so far makes me think it will ever be worth spending a chaos to itemize a corpse for sale on the market. So instead I spend a lot of time incinerating corpses when they fill up.
You are probably thinking “Bel, why are you even picking them up if they are not interesting”… that is another problem with this league. When a corpse drops it creates this giant UI element that blocks whatever might have dropped under it. There is no way to hide these corpse identifiers and as a result, you basically have to loot them if there is something that dropped and is being hidden underneath said UI element. This feels awful. I have no clue why these did not just drop as items for you to pick up. The whole mechanic of waiting for an animation to play out in zone as Arimor comes to collect the corpse looks cool the first time you see it… but after a point just needless animation cycles. By the time you have completed the campaign in an ARPG… the gameplay is about efficiency and not immersion. I feel bad that someone spent so much time lovingly animating this nonsense only to be the source of ire for players as it ubiquitously “gets in our way”.
So then you are thinking… but Bel, why don’t you just use the corpses to craft? The problem is that the crafting system feels bad too. My expectation was that corpse crafting would be something akin to Fossils where you choose the types of modifiers that you want on an item, and then craft the item with a heavy bias towards generating those affixes. Per Lolcohol which is a POE community crafting channel, you need to stack something akin over 2000% increased chance to come even close to guaranteeing a specific affix family. This morning I threw away some corpses on an example where I stacked 200% chance for cold damage and 500% chance for lightning, thinking I might at least create a baby tri-elemental bow for an alt. What I got instead was a corrupted bleed bow with cold damage on it, that I would not have even picked up had it dropped on the ground. The system feels “fine” while you are leveling because it is a rare item instead of a normal or magic item. However, it seems like you are better off just doing crafts off a single stat because the end result is going to likely be unusable so no point in investing much time in each craft.
The big problem with the entire system is that you can’t really choose your crafting base. You can assemble some corpses and say you are going to craft something for a specific slot, but you don’t really have much more control than that. For example, if you were going to play Explosive Arrow Ballista… you would specifically want a Short Bow or Thicket Bow for the attack speed. You could arrange twenty-some corpses with the ideal stat combinations for your bow… but wind up with an Ivory Bow instead and have a completely bricked craft as a result. Instead it feels like the best results are just throwing random shit at the wall and hoping something sticks. For example, these three items that I photoshopped over the crafting UI… were single corpse crafts, none of which actually got the stats that I included in the craft. It is chaos spam, but generating an item to go along with the random stats. The entire process is worse than having a random rare drop on a map, because at least then you can decide to pick it up based on the item base.
The Good – Sandbox Changes
So all of my complaints aside about the league mechanic… I am having a heck of a lot of fun and in large part, it is due to the Atlas and Scarab changes. Right now with my Atlas passives configured as I have them, I have an 80% chance to see Niko on every map and an 80% chance to see Jun. In practice, this feels like 100% of the time I have both Niko and Jun allowing me to progress Delve while also farming Betrayal enchants. There are one or two more Betrayal enchants that I want before I ultimately drop Jun entirely and start investing in some other league mechanic.
Because I have had such reliable access to Niko and as a result Sulphite, I’ve had the easiest progression into Delve that I have had in any league. Normally “breaking delve” is a bit of a pain in the ass as you keep farming little chunks of sulphite and making small amounts of progress over the course of many maps… because without a huge infusion of currency, you could not afford to buy Sulphite Scarabs in bulk. Instead of needing to rely on Scarabs the Atlas passives are all but guaranteeing that every map I am going to be filling my coffers so that I can get back down into the mines faster. I am currently sitting down around 100 Depth and found my first city last night before running out of juice. The whole map awhile, delve awhile cadence has been super enjoyable because it feels like I am making equal progress down both paths.
Similarly, the Scarabs themselves no longer feel like unobtainium. Generally speaking, I would not see large amounts of scarab drops until I had reached the point in the tree where I could start speccing into seeing Operative Strongboxes. Now instead Scarabs are just on the general loot pool and I started seeing them before I even finished the campaign. They feel fluid enough that I am spending them way more often because I know they are a relatively renewable resource. I’ve not seen a ton of the super rare scarabs, but I have picked up a few juicy ones like one that gives you a decent chance of duplicating drops. Right now I am mostly focused on map objective completion to build out my Atlas but as soon as I start running maps for fun and profit… I will likely be using way more scarabs than I did previously.
I’ve also had a fairly lucky league as a whole so that has helped with my mindset significantly in spite of the lackluster mechanic. I got my very first Divine Orb drop in Act 4, and then followed that up with another drop in Act 8, and another in Act 9. I was able to cash one of those in for an infusion of chaos orbs in order to buy some of the needed items to get my build up and running. Having some sort of liquid drop like that helps a ton when you are in a trade league economy. I am mostly sitting on the other two because the price of Divine Orbs to Chaos is still pretty low right now. Now that I am down at Delve I am generating enough raw Chaos drops to keep up with my assorted early needs. When Delve prices spike as crafting projects start to come online… I should be able to liquidate my resonators to get the rest of the things I need to finish out my build.
I am still running a four-link chest and just got a four-link helm and four-link gloves up and running. I am not even vaguely close to the final configuration of this build but it is humming along nicely. I made it through the campaign during the podcast on Saturday night, and then spent yesterday largely working on progressing my atlas and delve simultaneously. At this point, I have made it through 39 of 115 maps which seems like solid progress. I am a little bit behind where I was last league start as on the Monday after the start I was apparently sitting at 44 maps. However, I struggled to get engaged with Delve at all in the beginning so I was probably a bit more focused on mapping than I am right now with my attention being equally split between the two game modes. All in all, though I am much happier with where I am currently than where I was at that point with Boneshatter.
Even though the league mechanic is a bit of a shit show I am pretty happy with how things are going. I am hoping that we see some early patches that may tweak how things work a bit. I would love to see them make the mechanic optional and then change the way corpses drop and maybe change the weighting a bit for crafting purposes. There are still some interesting things that can happen during this league, namely with the “haunted modifiers”. While roaming around I crafted a low-level chest that wound up rolling “Gems Can Be Socketed In This Item Ignoring Socket Colour” which seemed really freaking strong. Basically, I am not giving up hope that after some tweaks this won’t be one of the better league mechanics at least for crafting purposes.
So here I ask you. Did you start something for the Necropolis League? What are you playing? What are you thinking about the league mechanic so far? Was I overly harsh in my criticism? Drop me your thoughts below.
Featuring: AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Since this episode will be coming out on Easter, Happy Easter to all who celebrate. Last night we talked about Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs for that more approachable Gloomhaven experience. We took a trip over to the Switch and discussed Mario vs Donkey Kong and Princess Peach Showtime. Bel talks a bit about his experiences with World of Warcraft Plunderstorm. Then we dive into a discussion about the Hugo Award Nominees and how hopefully 2024 will be a more reasonable year. This week the Necropolis League started in Path of Exile and Bel and Kodra talk a bit about their experiences with the league mechanic. Finally, we wrap things up with some discussion of Age of Sigmar 4.0.
Good Morning Folks! At the time if writing this, the Necropolis League for Path of Exile is roughly six hours away. The start will happen at roughly 2 pm CDT and since I have the day off I plan on being there attempting to get in at the very beginning. The only question is whether or not I go through the hassle of trying to download the standalone client which always updates faster than Steam. I’ve not actually run the standalone client in previous leagues but this is the only true way to be in the queue before most of the folks are there. That said I honestly don’t care quite so much about starting exactly when the servers open as I am not planning on racing through the campaign. I thought I would talk a bit this morning about my plans for starting the league.
Shocking to no one who has read this blog for any length of time… I will be starting a Righteous Fire character, more specifically the chieftain variant that I played last league. Truth be told the leagues where I start Righteous Fire… are better experiences for me personally. I like the predictable nature of this build how it comes online, and how well it does at farming lower-level content and working my way through the Atlas of Worlds. Boneshatter last league was great, but it never felt quite as comfortable in Delve as Righteous Fire does. Lightning Arrow saw me zipping through the early maps super well, but struggling a bit when it came to the first two voidstone bosses. Ultimately even in its nerfed state, Righteous Fire feels reliable and stable and that is what I mostly crave for my first character of the league.
The first chaos that I spend in the league is likely going to be on acquiring these four uniques. Immortal Flesh is pretty much irreplaceable given how much value you get on a single belt. I will likely see one drop but what I am looking for specifically is one with high regeneration and -15% to all resistances which is the best roll you can get on that item. Rise of the Phoenix is equally important as it will give me +5 to maximum resistances, so I will be attempting to snipe one of those pretty early if I don’t see one drop. Berek’s Respite worked out extremely well last league and allows me to get some pseudo-proliferation before I can get a Fan the Flames cluster. Truth be told I just kept using the ring long after I replaced other items. For my chestpiece I am going to drop the Lightning Coil and try the more suggested Cloak of Flame this go around. I hate the idea of running an item without armor but the lack of the negative resistance penalty is pretty great as well as the lack of a life roll allowing me to use the 15% life mastery.
As far as later game items… I would love to figure out a way to work in a Defiance of Destiny amulet but I always wind up so dexterity-starved that I can never seem to make that happen. We will have to see if I can figure out a way to make it work. The one I took a screenshot of was the one I was using on my Boneshatter Juggernaut from last league and it added a ton of survival. I would also love to try and work in Legacy of Fury boots but I already have quite a few uniques which will make it a bit hard to make sure I am hitting maximum chaos resistance. I could see maybe swapping to these when I switch over to a Fan the Flames cluster. We also have no clue if these are going to be on the normal Maven drop pool or the Uber Maven drop pool… which will greatly impact their price.
Affliction League did some really screwball things with pricing on items making a number of previously really expensive things… dirt cheap. One of these was the Taste of Hate flask and depending upon the price this is going to be something that I pick up as one of my later acquisitions. It adds more defensive layers as I am converting additional physical damage to elemental where I will have 90% resistance. Last league I got to play with a Headhunter and a Mageblood and both were fine… but the chase item that I want to play with this time is Oriath’s End. This is going to be something that I stockpile divines in order to pick up this league, and I am hoping the changes in uber bosses make me hope the drop rates for this went up a bit. I would also love to pick up a Vaal Breach gem for bossing but that is probably unrealistic given how rare they are.
If you are wanting to follow in my footsteps with Righteous Fire Chieftain, I cannot recommend the guide from Pohx enough. He does a great service to the community by making sure there are viable versions of RF for Chieftain, Juggernaut, and Templar. In truth, ALL Marauder-based RF builds have essentially the same base tree with some tweaks here or there. I plan on mostly following what I did last league with some subtle changes from what Pohx suggests. Mostly Pohx does not go after Explosive Impact and I tend to path down into that area to pick it up. The more area of effect you can have with Righteous Fire, the more comfortable it feels but I tend to play a much slower RF than Pohx does. If you are just starting out though I would absolutely say follow his guide to the letter until you develop your own preferences for the build.
I look forward to getting my “burny boi” up and running today and starting the league back in trade. I think for the moment it looks like it is just going to be me and Kodra from the AggroChat podcast that are going to be playing. So I will like always be looking for things to make Hexblast work for him. I think most of the folks are going to give this league a skip which is a bit of a bummer, but won’t directly impact my enjoyment. I think I was pretty much the only person who really played much Crucible and that is maybe the league that I had the most fun with. I have a few other friends who are going to be either trying the game for the first time or coming back after a long absence, so it will be interesting to see how that all shakes out. As always there is a Path of Exile channel on my Super Dungeon Friends discord that we will likely be hanging out in.
