path of exile

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.

Obnoxiously Incandescent

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Good Morning Friends! Again I am leaning on a technicality here because I seem to be getting around considerably later each day than I did the last. I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening running maps and attempting to complete chunks of my remaining atlas. At this point, I am 95 done out of 115 with 8 of those being unique maps that it is highly likely I will have to buy off the traders. I have 8 maps left that require me to run them in a corrupted state, which always yields unpredictable results. What yesterday and probably today have led to is me running maps in the vicinity of the ones that I am missing in hopes of getting the ones I still need to drop. I dinged 92 yesterday which puts me two levels higher than I have ever gotten in a league.

Every build has one or two things that can show that will absolutely brick the map. For me, the absolute “I cannot handle this” is “players cannot regenerate health”. My build is entirely about regenerating a ridiculous amount of health and as such, I just can’t mitigate a map where I can’t do that. That is really my primary line of defense, and as a result, I also had been avoiding “players have 60% less recovery rate”. However, I’ve tried this a few times now to great success, where I basically just don’t use Righteous Fire. That is the primary reason why this build needs so much regeneration is that I am constantly dealing a ton of damage to myself. The single target damage of Fire Trap however is apparently enough to successfully move around a map and kill things, and as a result, I can simply forgo the self-immolation and debuff with Frostblink while killing things albeit slower.

I’ve also been slowly chipping away at collecting kills for Maven, Eater of Worlds, and Searing Exarch as I have not completed any of those quest chains before. Yesterday I took out the Black Star and the Infinite Hunger, and I think I am ramping up to another series of boss fights. The hardest part about Infinite Hunger was finding the way out when I got digested because I was regenerating more than enough health to deal with the incoming damage, but the lack of a mini-map meant that I was completely lost in the process. I eventually fumbled my way to the exit and got the hell out of there. I did die once on Black Star just because something hit me for a truly overwhelming amount of damage… which probably means there was a mechanic I failed at noticing.

Other than that I am contemplating farming up enough Atlas respec currency in order to switch over to a Wandering Path build. This essentially makes it so that your notables aka the biggest nodes give you nothing, and you get double the benefit from all of the smaller passive nodes. This means you can stack a lot of map farming functionality and focus on one or two mechanics and then farm that. I actually do pretty damned well with Harvest this league and could always just sell the excess lifeforce directly. There are enough people trying to gamble for the big ticket items at 1500 lifeforce per pull that someone is always willing to buy the Vivid Crystalized Lifeforce. I personally like using the cheaper 75 skill to reroll some of my shittiest divination cards into something better. This is how I pulled the one I sold for 1.5 divines and the one I sold for .75 divines.

Other than that, I will leave you with this video of Tripod leaving her box this morning. It has been 2 degrees Fahrenheit outside and we’ve been concerned about the safety of our outdoor ferals. I’ve been putting food out to make sure they have something to munch on when they crawl out of wherever they have been hiding. I know when it gets too cold Tripod our three-legged calico that lives in the backyard will crawl down in an old rabbit burrow. Hopefully today it will warm up a bit and then, in theory, we are out of the woods. It likely means though that it will still be sketchy to travel on Christmas day so we might be giving our parents a raincheck once the weather improves significantly.

I hope you are all having a safe time and if you too are getting weather you are bundled up and safe. Here is a bonus picture of Gracie who has taken to sleeping under my monitors and then reaching out to swipe at me from time to time.

Toxic Rain is Weird

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Good Morning Friends! It is technically correct by the slimmest of margins because I am posting this just before noon. I am very much in vacation mode currently because as of yesterday I am off until the third. We are going through a bit of a cold snap which means we scurried around yesterday in order to get some shopping done and be ready to just stay indoors for the next few days. Our concerns turn to the outside ferals that we feed. I’ve not seen any of them this morning, but they seem to have hidey-holes to go into in order to stay warm. Tripod in the backyard seems to be able to get down into a rabbit burrow when the weather turns frigid and I am hoping Greybie and Tabby out front have something similar. I’m putting food out just in case but I feel like it is unlikely that we are going to see much of them on the camera.

I’ve been playing around on Beltoxrain my fledgling toxic rain trickster and I am not yet certain how I feel about the build. Right now it deals a ton of damage but sort of has shit for survival. The fact that I am using a Tabula Rasa to level doesn’t exactly help that fact because the chest piece is generally a good source of survivability. The killing power is most definitely there but I can very easily run out of mana which means I am running clarity to help try and solve that for the moment. We will see how I fair when it comes to the first Labyrinth that I am getting close to running. I am nearing the end of Act III and still can pretty much shred anything that comes up to me. Toxic Rain feels so freaking weird to use, that I am not entirely certain this is the build for me in the long run. I might try to pivot to building something for Explosive Arrow Balistas instead.

I did get enough porcupine cards to get a six-link short bow and now am using my Righteous Fire main to try and farm some dread essences so that I can hopefully get a good roll with attack power and bonus to bow gems. At this point, I am honestly thinking of this more for Explosive Arrow than I am for Toxic Rain because I have a feeling like I will be starting another character at some point before the end of this league. One of the things that annoy me greatly about builds in this game is that most of the creators tend to consider “50 divines” as a “cheap” build. I’ve yet to see ANY divines drop let alone enough of them to be able to afford something like that. At the moment I tend to focus any currency that I do have on improving Righteous Fire because it seems to be what I am clearing most of the content with.

I’ve struggled a bit on mapping progression, only because I am finding it very hard to get the right maps that I need to drop. I could of course just buy my way to victory but that sorta feels like cheating a bit. For the moment I am running maps in the near vicinity to the ones I need to drop hoping that maybe I will get the ones I actually need for bonuses. The other challenge that I have is trying to get a corrupt that I can actually run. I’m pretty close to dinging 91, which makes me not really want to risk losing progress on a bad map combo. Essentially maps that fuck with my Elemental Resists, Reflect Elemental Damage, or screw with my Life Regeneration is undoable. I get that corruption is supposed to be something unpredictable but I do wish there was a bench recipe to scour a corrupted item that had scouring and Vaal orbs or something, or required a heck of a lot of harvest materials.

It isn’t that I am not seeing a ton of maps dropping… it is just that they are mostly white maps which are significantly less useful currently. I should just burn through a bunch of these hoping for the best honestly because right now I have gathered up a rather large treasure trove of them. I could of course sell them off in bulk, but I try not to engage with the trade league any more than I have to. I know I still have a very long way to go until I start getting t16 versions of everything. I need to kill all of the bosses in order to finish unlocking my atlas. I am still having a heck of a lot of fun, but I am not loving feeling like I stalled out at some point.

The Righteous Fire play style is probably the favorite I have experienced in Path of Exile so far. The problem being in order to move from where I am now to be able to do much higher content it feels like I either need to get lucky or spend an awful lot of currency. A lot of the things that I need now however include price tags that are multiple divines, which I just don’t have yet. I might have to swap up what I am doing in order to figure out a way to make better currency. Essentially I am going to keep plugging away as is hoping that I finish things out the Atlas and then see what it takes to finish up with the bosses. Once I ding 91 and secure that level, I am going to run a map and see how functional I can be just turning off Righteous Fire and leaning entirely on Fire Trap. I have 3 gems for Fire Trap and Righteous fire each leveling currently, and my hope is to do the 20% quality swap and then level them again and attempt to get some corrupts. I know Fire Trap in a level 21/20% quality version sells for a few divines so that might be an option to make some money if I get lucky.

In the meantime, however, I really need to work on catching up on some of my data. I’ve done a poor job of keeping track of the games I have played this year. I normally do a rundown of the games played and I won’t be able to do that normal end-of-the-year stuff if I don’t start tabulations soon.

Tabula Rasa Farmed

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I talked about setting forth on a dumb adventure that was trying to brute force my way to farming a Tabula Rasa. For those unfamiliar with Path of Exile, the Tabula is essentially the perfect starter item that you can equip at level one and has six linked white gem sockets, allowing you to basically get your spell links faster than usual. The catch however is that the item has no stats on it other than the six gem links. There are a number of ways to farm one of these up but I specifically chose Blood Aqueducts zone because Waterways is not in the Atlas this league and Waterways the other map that can drop it is a tier 13 and I’ve yet to see one. Blood Aqueducts is also largely a straight line, which means I can zip through there relatively quickly making the total clear time of each reset extremely fast.

I set down this path initially because I wanted a Tabula to start the Toxic Rain Trickster that I am working on. However, what set me down that path was picking up a Replica Quill Rain from a Grand Heist. However, while farming the Blood Aqueducts I managed to pick up a legitimate Quill Rain that is probably better for the build overall due to the higher attack speed. Both are currently five-links, so will take some effort to push them to six-links. I have to say I got a shocking amount of loot from farming this one map over and over. In total, I found four six-link chests, one of which will do nicely for the Toxic Rain build once I get it high enough for that to matter and one that would work well for the character that Ace is leveling and that Thalen is leveling. I’ve also filled the Guild Bank with minor uniques that I had already seen a drop, probably the most significant that I got was a Call of the Brotherhood which is not expensive but is used by a number of builds.

So around 7:20 yesterday evening I got my last Humility card to drop as pictured in the first screenshot. In total it took me somewhere around four hours to farm the remaining Humility cards, but I went into this adventure having already found three of them in my travels. Had I started with none, it probably would have taken me somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours total. So I guess the question is which is worth more to you… the six hours of farming or the ten chaos that the item regularly seems to cost. I mostly did the farming method so that I could prove to myself that it was something that could be done relatively easily. Additionally, it is also something that you can do without having a maxed-out character that is heavily geared. You essentially have to get a character to act nine and then can farm this up freely. I personally used the time to work on leveling a set of 3 Fire Trap and 3 Righteous Fire gems for attempting to corrupt later for a level 21 gem of each.

As far as Toxic Rain Trickster goes… it is weird and is going to take some getting used to. Essentially the bulk of my damage comes from the spectral archer that hangs out attached to my head raining down bad stuff on the baddies. So I have to stop and channel for a moment to begin that process and then can run around like crazy avoiding taking damage. I’ve picked up a second copy of Toxic Rain that I have kitted out with Balista Totems so that I can drop those as well for additional unattended damage. Mostly I went down this path because I had already done an Explosive Arrow build and wanted to try one of the other “archer” staples. This also allows me to knock out a few achievements because I have never played a Shadow of any kind before. As of this morning, I am level 15 and have completed Act 1 entirely, and am moving on to Act 2. This is very much going to be a side project when I don’t want to do serious content on the RF Juggernaut.