path of exile

A Shiny Tabby

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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bit of a mixed bag of activities. I was back in Path of Exile and spent some time on my SRS Guardian. After playing a lot of my Storm Brand Build and Shield Crush Build… it honestly felt amazing to be back on this character. The strength levels of that build are just so much higher and honestly for so much less investment. I fear that this is going to mean that Guardian eats a few swings from the nerf bat before 3.23. If it remains intact, however, I am contemplating this as a league starter for the next go-around. You would have thought I had learned my lesson to stop trying to start something other than Righteous Fire, but legitimately… SRS Guardian feels equally as good and it reached a point of power way faster than RF usually does.

I spent a bit of the evening cleaning out monster parts from my stash tab. One of the things that I like about having Metamorph on my Atlas tree is that I am somewhat passively gaining monster bits and then can have an hour or so of constant fights in Tane’s chambers. Mostly I shifted to running Metamorph because the prices of catalysts are outrageous in this league. 20 Prismatic Catalysts to quality up a single resistance ring has been around 400 Chaos Orbs, which feels way too rich for my blood. There is also the side benefit that I have had pretty decent luck in getting raw Divine Orbs to drop from stomping monsters.

Another thing that I had some exceptional luck with, is that last night I saw three Voidborn Reliquary Keys. I sold two of these and decided to open one because it is always fun to gamble a little bit. While most folks seem to open these chasing a Mageblood or a Headhunter, I am honestly fine with anything else interesting that just happens to be shiny. Last night I pulled what I had honestly wanted all of this time… a Shiny Tabula Rasa. This will let me twink characters in style going forward… though honestly I am not sure how many more builds I am going to make this league.

I spent most of my evening down in Delve, slowly crawling my way across the randomized map. This really is my happy place when it comes to Path of Exile. I was chilled out sitting on the sofa with my laptop, a cat to my side, and listening to an audiobook. I found all three reliquary keys down in Delve last night, and to be truthful… most of them that I have found for the last few leagues all came from Delve. That makes sense because statistically, I am doing way more delve than I am doing any other content. I’m loosely looking for Fire-themed nodes because while I have a decent enough Flammability On Hit ring for the Shield Crush Chieftain, I could always use a slightly better itemized one. I’m also hunting for the parts for precursor rings because those are selling extremely well in this league.

Speaking of sales… the reliquary keys and a few other divine orb drops have helped me recover from the significant outlay of currency that I spent kitting out the Shield Crush Chieftain. I’ve started using POEStack to track my currency since Exilience Next appears to be toast at the moment. In truth, I think I like having a web app way more than a stand-alone desktop client. Additionally, if I ever do start selling on TFT, I will at least be very familiar with the interface. I know that I will probably spend most of that before I gather much more, because I seem to always be funding the next idea that I want to play. I still want to try something with cyclone, but that seems to be always on the far horizon and not something that I am actively doing.

The last thing I guess I will talk a bit about this morning is that I finished up The Final Empire the first book in the initial Mistborn Trilogy. It took me forever to read anything by Brandon Sanderson, but now that I have… I understand what all the hype has been about. The world that he built and the characters in it were deeply enjoyable. I know without a doubt that I am going to be consuming the next two books in rapid order. I really enjoyed the way magic worked in this world and I look forward to seeing how the character of Vin continues to evolve. There is this whole part Shinobi part Jedi thing going on that I dig and I genuinely like a lot of the background characters as well.

I think tonight I will probably be back in Diablo III, working on chipping away at some more of the seasonal achievements. While I am enjoying myself there, I don’t find the gameplay anywhere near as compelling as Path of Exile. It is a heck of a lot of fun, but the dopamine hits are nowhere near as potent.

Fire Shield Crush Chieftain

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Good Morning Folks! I thought this morning I would talk about my latest mess of a build in depth. I mentioned this on Friday, but essentially this build came about because I wanted a reason to play a Chieftain with its new ascendancy and a reason to play Shield Crush. While there are no actual guides on how to play a Shield Crush Chieftan, there are folks playing Physical to Fire Conversion Chieftans and folks playing Shield Crush. So as a result I spent quite a bit of time on POE.Ninja and kitbashed together something that felt right. I have no clue if anything I am doing is close to optimal, but I can clear red maps so I am going to call that a win. While nothing about this morning’s post is purporting to be a guide, here is my POB if you are interested in trying to follow along.

I recorded some footage of me doing a yellow map… largely because I am trying for the third league in a row to farm the damned Primeval hideout, which requires a lot of luck and running Primordial Blocks. I feel like the above gameplay does a pretty good job of highlighting both the strengths of the build and the weaknesses. The strength is when I charge into a pack of mobs, they usually explode in a brilliant pyroclastic wave. The weakness is… any time I encounter something fire-resistant or extremely tanky. I wind up getting a Niko elemental that is both Soul Eater and Shakiri Touched… and it takes for freaking ever to chew through. All in all, though it feels pretty enjoyable and is extremely tanky.

The new Chieftain ascendancy is this weird mixed bag of extremely powerful nodes and some that are situationally good. The real benefit of this ascendancy is that you can easily fix your elemental resistances. The side benefit is that Hinekora Death’s Fury causes big fire explosions… far bigger than anyone expected when this was announced. It isn’t quite an entire screen radius but it is almost there. I feel like the correct order to choose these is Tasalio, Hinekora, and then Valako because it allows you to fix your resists sooner rather than later. The fourth node is less certain because you have a few options with no clear winner. I am likely going to go with Ramako because it is the lazy option. Ngamahu is probably technically better but it requires you to carefully plan which nodes to put non-unique jewels in to get the maximum benefit in stacking Fire Damage. At least I will likely go Ramako for now and then maybe shift to Ngamahu after some more levels and thinking about it.

Let’s look at a couple of abilities that are key to this build. Shield Crush and Shield Charge are similar in that they scale based on the armor and evasion rating on your shield. This means the more armor or evasion that you happen to have, the more damage that attack is going to do. They also scale based on your physical damage as a whole, so I am looking specifically for ways to scale that. They are both tagged as AOE, and in a perfect world I would be able to incorporate something into the build that gives gem levels to “All AOE Gems” but unfortunately I don’t have that in the build. Given that physical is kind of a pain in the ass to deal with, I am converting as much of it as possible to Fire Damage, which gives me a number of other scaling options. I am primarily accomplishing this through a combination of the Avatar of Fire keystone, The Fire Mastery that converts 40% of physical damage to Fire, and Herald of Ash.

So we know from Shield Crush, that I want as much armor or evasion on my shield as humanly possible. That really probably means that you are looking at either Emperor’s Vigilance or Dawnbreaker. Both of them have very specific reasons to use them and I wound up going with Emperor’s Vigilance because it saves me two passive skill points on the tree, because I wanted Glancing Blows either way. The other semi-required unique would be Replica Dreamfeather which allows me to scale my attack damage based on how much armor I have which allows me to turn a defensive layer into an offensive layer. Currently, I have 36471 armor which would give me 81% increased attack damage. This is most definitely not what I would consider a cheap build, because I think at this point I am about 10 Divine Orbs into it.

Since I was already spending a good deal of money on this build, I decided to go all in and lean on the Replica Dragonfang’s Flight which in spite of its name… has nothing to do with the other replica items from Heist. This is a weird new item that gives +3 gem levels to a specific gem and there exists a version of this amulet for every skill gem in the game. Some of these are extremely expensive, but Shield Crush is one of the cheaper ones and can be picked up for under a hundred chaos. I’m also taking advantage of the Circle of Anguish which scales my fire damage and increases my fire resistance by quite a bit because I will always be running Herald of Ash. This squeezes things a bit and keeps me from being able to cap Chaos Resistance because the large number of uniques that I am running makes it a bit challenging.

Since I want to have a bunch of armor, and it is relatively straightforward to get 4000 armor on a Brass Dome … that also comes along with crit immunity I decided to lean on that chest piece. I managed to find a bargain on a 4% to all maximum resistances chest with all of the right colors and a 6% reduced fire damage taken corruption for 2 Divines. The negative is I no longer gain life from strength, and as a result, I am a bit low on life as a whole. To help mitigate some of that, and to give me a bit of regeneration I decided to lean on a well-rolled Immortal Flesh. There are other options that would not give me as many defensive layers for example Arn’s Anguish is something I have seen used on a few Shield Crush builds. I like survival and I like feeling tanky so… regen is a win for me.

This leaves me leaning on Boots, Gloves, and Helm to try and fix my Chaos Resistance while also stacking as much Fire Resistance as possible… which then in turn fixes my other Resists thanks to Tasalio Ascendancy talent. I also needed to lean on these sockets to fix my lack of Dexterity… which made the gear really really expensive. Normally to get Dex on an item it needs to be an evasion base, but I want Armor given that I don’t currently have access to Iron Reflexes to convert Evasion back into Armor. I think honestly the BEST version of this build we double dipping from armor and evasion to convert it with that keystone. It does make me think that maybe Champion would be the best possible class for a Shield Crush build.

All in all, I enjoy the build. I need a heck of a lot more levels on it and the more I play it the better it feels. Do I think this was worth 10 Divines? Probably not. If I spend more time working on this build I would really like to have Forbidden Flesh/Forbidden Flame jewels that give me Unbreakable from Juggernaut, but they are currently ungodly expensive. There are a bunch of expensive things that I could do to optimize my damage but for the moment… I think I just need to pile on more levels. Would I suggest this to someone who just wants to map quickly? Probably not. Is it fun in its own way? Absolutely.

The Next Ugly Duckling

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One of the things about me and Path of Exile is that it seems like I always have to have some project that I am tinkering with. In this league, I have had two resoundingly successful builds, and two that are probably way better than I am giving them credit for. Righteous Fire is essentially a guaranteed banger at this point, and I have tweaked it further than I have in previous leagues. There are still places I could go with it but it would involve a significant respec of my tree and figuring out a way to deal with ailments. Summon Raging Spirits Guardian is way stronger than I would have expected it to be, and it legitimately is on the same tier as Righteous Fire in my mind. Lightning Arrow did what it was supposed to do and helped me fund the switch to Righteous Fire, and then there is my Storm Brand Inquisitor that honestly gets better the longer I play it. Now I feel like I want to venture forth into undiscovered territory.

Two ascendancies saw massive reworks, the Guardian and the Chieftain. So I knew that I wanted to do something with Chieftain just for the hell of it, and so that I could experience the Hinekora node before it likely gets nerfed in the future. An ability that I really like but have never built around is Shield Crush. I played with it a bit on Ruthless, and remember seeing an interesting-looking Juggernaut build from Jorgen that was a deep delver. So I got it in my head that I wanted to try and take that concept and transplant it to the Chieftain tree and then focus on Physical to Fire conversion with some Ignite damage. Normally in this situation, I would lean on POE.Ninja to see what other builds are out there in the wild trying to do this thing. Unfortunately… there are two folks trying this in trade league and one in hardcore… and they are all somewhat doing something different with it.

One of the things that I have learned while playing Path of Exile for several leagues, is that just because something is not in the meta does not mean that it is bad. The challenge of course is that I just have to figure out how to make this combination of abilities feel good and strong enough to get through the campaign. There are some very specific uniques that I have already acquired that should make this feel great… but I have to get to the other side of the leveling gap before I can really utilize them. At the moment… I am sort of making it up as I go along and hoping that given a sufficient number of regret orbs, I can eventually shape this into something that feels great.

I’m currently in Act IV and desperately in need of an upgraded shield and preferably an upgraded sceptre that I can actually equip. My intelligence however is in the dumpster, so I am struggling to find something that is both a sufficient dps upgrade and that I can actually equip right now. For the moment I am running around with a hammer and that seems fine. The shield is important since shield crush scales off armor and energy shields. Mostly I want as much armor as I can reasonably get on the shield, but I’ve yet to see a new base for several levels. Unfortunately, the vendor in High Gate doesn’t seem to have anything to offer that would really help me out. I can do sufficient damage, and I am pretty tanky… but it just is a bit slow going at the moment. I feel like I am going through the ugly duckling doldrums for this build but I am going to push my way to the other side.

I’m not to the point of sharing a POB because I am not entirely certain what changes I am going to need to make in order to improve this. I took Avatar of Fire, and I think maybe I did so a bit too early. Between it and a few other abilities I was converting 90% of my physical damage to fire… but I think maybe it would be better off to also have access to other damage types for the time being. That is probably a late-game choice if I end up making it. I was looking at a build that was trying to do this back in 3.19… at least the fire conversion shield crush but the tree has changed significantly since then. It will be interesting if I can ultimately turn this into something fun.

Apprentice Labyrinth Runner

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve been doing some nonsense this weekend, that I have honestly spent the entirety of my time playing Path of Exile avoiding. The Lord’s Labyrinth and all of the higher-level derivations of it is a piece of game content that unlocks your access to Ascendancy points. On every character you will in theory need to run it 3 times, in order to unlock the 8 points that you can spend on Ascendancy talent points. Then if you need to change your Ascendancy later, you can run it again in order to do that. Essentially these have traditionally been the bane of my existence and similar to set mastery dungeons in Diablo III, they are the thing that I avoid for as long as possible. The problem with the Labyrinth is that there is no forgiveness or wiggle room, and if you die… you have to start over from scratch.

There is a website devoted to telling you the shortest path through the Labyrinth, which is handy while doing your four labs per character… but were that the only benefit the site would likely not exist. The final victory room of the Labyrinth gives you access to a series of glove, boot, and helm enchants. Running the level 75 version called the Eternal Labyrinth costs an Offering to the Goddess, but at the end of it you are presented with a choice of three different helm enchants. There are roughly three enchants available for almost every active skill gem in the game, so that means each time you run the place you are fighting hundreds of possible combinations hoping that you get the one you need for your character. So far I have lucked into the Righeous Fire Area of Effect enchant, but what I really started this process to get was the one increasing Fire Trap Burning Damage.

There are a handful of ways to get your helm enchant. The first way of course is to luck into finding it yourself. The second is to buy a viable base from the market that already has your enchant on it, and then craft the helm into whatever you need it to be. The third… is to hire a hopefully reputable Labyrinth Runner to chain run the zone over and over until they can get the desired enchant on your helm. This weekend I essentialy became a lab runner for myself, and will probably continue doing a few each day in an attempt to get the enchant I really want. It seemed like a waste to not do anything with all of the helm enchants that I could not use, so I have started squirreling away a tab full of reasonable helm bases sorted by armor, armor/evasion, armor/energy shield, energy shield, evasion, energy shield, and pure evasion. I also take the helms off all of my other characters while I am running this process, just in case an enchant they can use comes up.

Since Delve is my primary game mode, it provides for a ton of raw resources. The level at which I am running Delve means that in theory I can farm a near infinite number of item level 84/85 helmets to feed into my Labyrinth running nonsense. For the moment I am pricing these at 1 div, and then will price them down over time as many of them inevitably do not sell. Delve is critical to this strategy because it also produces a truly silly number of Offering to the Goddess, a drop I have long considered to be pure trash for my previous leagues. Because of the sheer number that I have picked up over the course of this league, I ran roughly 30 Labyrinth’s yesterday afternoon and I’ve yet to put a dent in my supplies. Even if I needed to buy them… they tend to go dirt cheap on the market.

The core way that I gain currency will likely always be Delve, but one of the side ventures that I have been playing with this league is resistance gear. Everyone needs it, and everyone needs a unique combination of stat hits. So as I have been running delve I have been chucking rings and amulets with decent resistances on them in my bank under either a 10 Chaos or 20 Chaos tab. It has been shocking the number of items that I would ahve considered trash previously, that I am getting a stack of chaos for now. It isn’t going to make me wealthy by any means, but it is relatively constant trickle of decent currency while I am mapping or delving. The other thing that I have started doing is taking otherwise worthless uniques and throwing a Vaal Orb on them. Often times a 1 Chaos Unique with a really good Corrupted Implicit on it will sell for upwards of a Divine. I’ve sold several of those for in the 80-100 Chaos range.

Nothing will match the stability of Delve though. I know without a doubt that when I am ready to focus on selling this tab I am looking at around 2000 Chaos or 8 and a half Divine Orbs. I don’t tend to price out my delve tab until I am ready to sell it, because otherwise it will annoy the shit out of me with pings. Delve has not been terribly popular this league, and as a result the prices for resonators keep trickling up along with the more hard to get fossils. The later in the league we get, the more big crafting projects tend to happen and for those they need a ready supply of resonators. Folks ramping up for a big project, like to buy in bulk so generaly speaking I can charge a bit of a premium and still liquidate the entire tab in about ten minutes.

The one thing that I wish I could do… is let my guildmates peruse my vendor tabs. I chuck anything that looks halfway decent in the tabs to see if it will sell. That is not to say that I don’t specifically keep my eyes open for anything that I think another guild member might use. I’ve put all of my six links of any use in the guild gear tab, but I know I likely have a bunch of niche items that someone might be interested in. Specifically when it comes to fixing resistances, it would be handy to let folks browse my inventory of wares. I would happily chuck stuff their way because it is mostly just going to sit there and rot otherwise. While I continue to have a fairly constant trickle of trades, I am acquiring stuff way faster than I could ever liquidate it.

I get this weird sense of joy from being a vendor, and this is something that I have not really experienced in other games. I’ve mostly avoided using the Auction House in games with them, and while my retainers are full with random items in Final Fantasy XIV, it was never something I focused on. I think the one time that I really used them was the Broker boards in EQ2, and in truth FFXIV and POE both have a similar system. I can price an item, throw it in a tab, and then mostly forget that I have it. If it sells awesome… if it doesnt… also no big deal because I am not having to constantly retrieve closed auctions from my mailbox and repost them. Path of Exile feels like I have rented out a booth in one of those big flea markets, and I just keep adding more merchandise until everything is crammed in there really tightly. Folks end up needing such weird stats to finish out a character, that there is always someone out there needing at least one thing I have for sale.

I enjoy this aspect of the game, which is ironically the aspect that turns my friend Ace off the most about Path of Exile. I was afraid of trade for the first few leagues. Then it was something I accessed because I felt like I needed to… but ultimately held my nose while I did it. It wasn’t really until I was by myself grinding delve that I finally reached a point of acceptance with trade and eventual legitimate enjoyment. Now trade is a major component of this game for me, and it feels like anything I could be doing in the game… is ultimately getting me towards whatever goals I have. Every map I run, every delve path, every blight, every legion, and god forbid even every labyrinth is collecting dross for me to sell and turn into the item that I need to upgrade my builds just a little bit further. After decades of feeling like I had no viable way of making currency in MMORPGs, it feels like I have so many possible ways to fund my nonsense in Path of Exile.

Anyways. I hope you all had a great weekend, and that the new week is smooth and chill.