path of exile

Embracing Trade League

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Good Morning Friends! It has been almost a month since the start of the Crucible league, and I thought I would talk a bit this morning about my experiences with the league as a whole and why this is probably the best league I have participated in… even though the actual league mechanic is a bit of a dud. I discussed this the other day but effectively I have been “really” playing Path of Exile for the last four leagues: Sentinel, Lake of Kalandra, Forbidden Sanctum, and now Crucible. While I technically dabbled with the game before that, I didn’t “really” play the game with any purpose or direction which is sadly a key part of the Path of Exile experience. During that time each league has improved my personal experiences and I think the core behind this improvement is my willingness to embrace the trade mechanics within the game.

Prior to Kalandra I technically played in the trade league but never interacted with it. In Lake of Kalandra, I barely touched trade other than to solve a few very specific problems, namely finding some key uniques for my build. Starting with Sanctum I began legitimately trying to acquire currency and used said currency to solve problems with my build and ultimately started to dabble in actually selling goods on the market. With Crucible I was a functioning part of the economy from the very first days of this league and immediately set up trade tabs as I was playing through the content, making a few bits of currency off things I happened across but were of no use to me at the time. So it is by no coincidence that we are less than a month into the league and I am sitting here with three endgame viable characters and a mountain of currency to do pretty much anything I want to do in the future. Embracing the trade economy meant that I could fix problems with my builds pretty easily and get to a functional state within a very short time with each of them.

I will admit… the version of me that started seriously playing Path of Exile during the Sentinel league would have found this deeply distasteful. I’ve hated the idea of having to rely on auction house economies in games before, and this is even worse considering all trade takes place in person. The truth is however that trade practices are so automatic at this point in the community that most trades take less than 5 minutes and often go through without a single word. I’ve also found ways to make currency with the methods of play that I enjoy the most, and without specifically doing things for the purpose of currency generation. The above is a snapshot of my inventory on 4/12 when I was starting to gain a little bit of chaos and again this morning showing my war chest of funds that I can use to either improve my current builds or create something new.

Exilence is a third-party tool that will scan your stash tabs and evaluate items that are stored in them. I do this periodically to find anything that I might be sitting on that is worth a good deal of currency. The curve is somewhat choppy because I have not taken snapshots of my inventory very often this league, but you can see a steady increase from only having a few Chaos Orbs to having an estimated value of 15,949 Chaos Orbs or a little over 72 Divine Orbs in roughly a month into the league. Most of what I just said is probably absolute gibberish to the uninitiated. Essentially Path of Exile is a game without a gold equivalent and when you sell items to a vendor you get crafting resources. Some of these crafting resources have become cash equivalents due to the mechanical value of the game. Essentially the common scale goes a little something like this.

Common Trade Currencies

  • Chaos Orb – Randomizes the Modifiers of a Rare Item – The Dollar Bill of Path of Exile
  • Awakened Sextant – Used in Generating Map Sextants – 5.8 Chaos Orbs
    • Honestly relatively new pricing tool but gaining popularity in this league.
  • Exalted Orb – Adds a new modifier to a Rare Item – 14.7 Chaos Orbs
  • Divine Orb – Randomizes the Numerical Values of a Rare Item – 220 Chaos Orbs
  • Mirror of Kalandra – Creates a Copy of an Item – 57200 Chaos Orbs

Generally speaking, small trades are priced in Chaos, larger trades in Divines, and absolutely massive trades are when you get into the realm of the Mirror. Mirrors are this weird investment vehicle as it tends to go up in value as the league goes on because there are folks who only play individual leagues for the purpose of getting cheap mirrors. A Mirror of Kalandra goes for 118,400 Chaos Orbs in the Standard League and since all currency dumps into Standard at the end of a league… the value slowly trends upwards towards that Standard League price.

I’ve rattled off a bunch of prices, and you who are not indoctrinated at this nonsense are probably thinking… “Bel how the hell do you know this?”. Every trade economy needs a price guide. For sports cards there was Beckett, for Magic the Gathering there was Scrye, for Comic Books there was Overstreet, and for Path of Exile there is POE.Ninja. POE Ninja serves as the neutral arbiter of price based on trade volume data pulled from the official GGG Trade Website and offers up various APIs that other applications can use to facilitate price checking. So when you price an item at 2.2 Divine Orbs… the community as a whole just knows that what you mean is 2 Divine Orbs and 44 Chaos Orbs, 484 Chaos Orbs, or some other equivalent of readily used trade currencies. There is some natural fluctuation throughout the league but generally speaking, they stay in fairly narrow bands other than the Mirror which always trends upwards.

Through the use of loot filters and a general increased understanding of what makes something sought after in Path of Exile, I’ve gotten better at “eyeballing” something to determine if it was worth anything. When in doubt however I run an overlay called Awakened POE Trade that allows me to price check an item by mousing over it and pressing Ctl+D. This pops up a dialog window that shows that POE.Ninja thinks the item is worth it and has a number of active listings for the item. So while the estimate is 119 if you convert up the sextants you end up with a current trade value of 116 chaos to 121 chaos roughly. This current trend of pricing things in Sextants is a bit weird and so far folks tend to still prefer dealing with Chaos instead. So I could probably price this card out at 120 and it would move quickly.

So at this point, you are potentially asking yourself… “Bel how exactly do you make currency?”. Just like in life, there are a ton of get-rich-quick schemes that the YouTuber community will try and convince you of. Most of these strategies involve bulk selling relatively common and inexpensive resources through third-party sites like The Forbidden Trove or TFT for short. I don’t do this. I just play the game in the way I like to play it which means I tend to focus on Heist, Delve, and running maps to fuel those two league mechanics that I enjoy. A lot of strategies revolve around your Atlas Passive tree and for me, I focus on a few basic things like Shaping the Mountains and Skies to give you free bonuses from your map device and then went hard on Delve, Strongboxes, and Heist. Then I put a good deal of points into Metamorph to give me more boss rewards and Shrines to give me more pack size in my maps. Most of my mapping however is largely a fun means to an end to give me Sulphite which allows me to go do more Delve and to provide contracts to do Heist.

Delve is without a doubt my favorite part of Path of Exile. I just find it so chill to roam around in the procedurally generated labyrinth of madness. More specifically my favorite thing to do in Delve is to hunt for cities, which coincidentally pay out a lot in the way of interesting things. While hunting cities I go diving down tunnels looking for Resonator Caches which are a fairly plentiful but rarely farmed resource. For whatever reason… mapping is the primary focus for most of the Path of Exile players and Delve tends to be more of an acquired taste. This means specifically as folks start trying to craft ever more and more ridiculous items they will need more and more resonators and fossils in order to do this. Early crafting tends to be the realm of Essences and late crafting tends to be all about combining a certain number of Fossils to give you the heist chance of rolling that perfect stat combination.

So through this somewhat casual interaction with the game, I am accumulating trade value without really meaning to. Resonators come in four sizes and currently, their value looks something like this:

  • 1 Slot Resonator – 1.4 Chaos Orbs
  • 2 Slot Resonator – 1 Chaos Orb – No Clue why these are less popular
  • 3 Slot Resonator – 3 Chaos Orbs
  • 4 Slot Resonator – 30 Chaos Orbs

This is what I have gained from a night of chill gameplay doing delve, and if I were to liquidate it all right now it would be worth 545 Chaos Orbs. The disturbing thing about this is when I do list resonators, it is like turning on the hot light at a Krispy Kreme, and within 10 minutes I will be completely sold out. Similarly, I have started selling off my Awakened Sextants which I am not really using, because mapping is not my primary game mode and I sold 4 Divine Orbs worth of those in about 5 minutes. On top of this, I have made a bunch of 5, 10, and 20 Chaos Orb sales throughout the league of random items that I picked up off the ground and price checked because they looked interesting. This is all stuff that I am doing while I am enjoying the parts of the game that I actually enjoy… rather than going out of my way to try and build a “money-making strategy”.

I’ve been able to take that currency that I am accumulating over time and convert it into the items that I actually need to solve specific problems in my builds. Admittedly I am just as much of a tightwad in the game as I am in the real world… and I kinda hate spending money even when the money is fake and only really matters so long as the league is active. There seem to be specific brackets of spending that give you different effects. You can stabilize a build for a few Chaos here or there getting your resists in the right place. For around 100 Chaos you can set up a build to where it runs extremely comfortably and will let you complete your Atlas. For upwards of 10 Divines Orbs you can make a build generally feel really good and of note… all told for kitting out three different characters I have maybe spent 10 Divines in total. Then the order of magnitude jumps significantly and for example, I was looking for a replacement Sceptre to the one that I crafted for my Righteous Fire Juggernaut… and to get what I really want on it the price tag shoots up to 50 Divine Orbs.

Personally, I am pretty happy to be playing characters that “feel good” in that 100 Chaos Orbs to 2-3 Divine Orbs range. I would rather build several characters that are specialized in different sorts of activities than pour 100 Divine Orbs into a single character that can do everything that the game has to offer. Slowly I am working towards trying out the last few bosses needed for my Void Stones on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and if that requires some additional gearing… I might actually do that. However for meme characters like my Explosive Raging Spirits Necromancer… I think I am good where it is and might actually completely respec that character to try out some ideas I have for a Wintertide Brand build. Embracing the existence of the trade economy is ultimately what gives me the freedom to play whatever I want to be playing.

I could be frustrated and grinding away looking for the perfect drop, or spending all of my currency in the hope of maybe just maybe being able to craft that perfect item. Instead, I would rather convert resources that I am passively gaining through playing the game in the manner I want to play it… and then buy the items I actually want. Admittedly this is not a play style for everyone and I get that but I have made peace with the existence of the trade economy and become a thriving part of it.

Exploding Your Friends

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Good Morning Friends! Last night was the culmination of a “bad ideas” project that I have been working on for a bit. I leveled a Necromancer up through Kitava and geared it out yesterday, then tested the sort of content that it could do. You might remember that I played a Fire-based Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer some last league and enjoyed it quite a bit. This league as my third character I decided to go down that path again but take a slight detour into “Minion Instability” land. For those unfamiliar with that keystone, it makes it so that Minions explode when reduced to low life and deal 33% of their maximum life as fire damage to surrounding enemies. So essentially I am using Summon Raging Spirits to create bombs, which then nuke my enemies with a baptism in flames when they get low on life.

This entire build started when I stumbled onto a helmet in my travels. I was looking for a better version of my pseudo-six-link helm that I use for Righteous Fire when I came across this monstrosity for 5 Chaos. I snapped it up because my brain immediately went to using it for some sort of Explosive SRS build. While I would have liked it to have higher than a level 16 Minion damage gem, the important bit for the explosive goodness is that level 20 Minion Life. Essentially this makes it so my Summon Raging Spirits will have the following setup:

  • Summon Raging Spirits
    • Burning Damage
    • Concentrated Effect
    • Minion Life
    • Minion Damage
    • Fire Penetration
    • Combustion
    • Lifetap
    • +2% Critical Strike Chance

Generally speaking for a Necromancer build I would have looked to get a good Skin of the Lords with a useful keystone on it. However this league Skin of the Lords starts at 5 Divine Orbs for one with a crap keystone, and the only one available with Eldritch Battery is 59 Divine Orbs. This caused me to pivot and just lean into a bunch of gear with Armor and Energy shield. Other than the fancy shield that I just added last night, in total all of my gear could be purchased for a single Divine Orb, and you would probably still have some change left over. The pseudo-eight-link helm for Summon Raging Spirits allowed me to shift my chest to effectively become 3 four-links summoning different alternative summons.

  • Zombies / Spectres / Stone Golem
    • Minion Damage
    • Minion Life
    • Feeding Frenzy

This leads us to bad ideas item number two for this setup. Tavukai can effectively replace Infernal Army as a way of shuffling my angry skulls off this mortal coil as it deals them 20% of their maximum life as Chaos Damage per second. That gives my SRS a maximum duration of 3 seconds which is just about long enough to fly into range of the enemies and explode. When I was shopping for a Tavukai I noticed a number of them were corrupted with various abilities, and one had Golem Commander which gives me 40% increased buff from my Stone Golem and lets me summon two of them. So all told that gives me a maximum load of the following minions:

  • 7 Zombies
  • 2 Stone Golems
  • 2 Spectres
  • 8 Raging Spirits (largely limited by how fast I can actually click the button)

I geared my character out before taking down Kitava in Act 10, and pretty much instant-phased that fight. Then I went over to the Uber Labyrinth and while I did not get the achievement for insta-gibbing the boss I did burn through each of the Aspirant Trial phases super fast. From there I opted to test my mettle against a T1, T6, T11, T15, and finally a chain of T16 maps. I also decided to try a couple of fully juiced metamorphs in the laboratory as well, and for the most part other than a couple of dumb deaths to lockboxes I breezed through the content. I would say this character is extremely comfortable to run content on in its current state and could probably be scaled to do a lot more damage once all of my gems are actually level 20 and I have the rest of my passive tree points. This is what my build looks like as of today.

There are some glaring problems that I could fix given the time and desire to do so. Namely, I would like to get my block chance up much higher so that it properly acts as the defensive layer that it should. Additionally, there is the problem that I am not elemental ailment immune, and unfortunately, I don’t have enough mana reservation for the easy button way of fixing that with Purity of Elements. I am overcapped on my resistances but I am not really sure how I could fix that without regearing entirely to remove some of those resists, but it just means that I don’t have other stats on my gear to replace them. All said though I am pretty happy with this “bad ideas” character or at least happy enough for my third viable character of the league. The biggest immediate issue is just my low life pool of only 3500 health.

I have to be honest… this was more of a thought experiment than an actual character that I intended to do much with. Right now Toxic Rain and Righteous Fire are just stronger in their current state, and could be even stronger if I spent more currency on upgrading them. I mostly just wanted to see what this would do, and now that I have… my curiosity is satiated. My side project interest turns to a discussion I had with Ashgar yesterday about maybe trying to build a Wintertide Brand character, but I am not sure if that will actually happen. I would like to get a Scion up if for no reason other than getting the achievement for clearing Act IV with that class. Other than that I would like to finish getting my void stones this season, but that either requires a lot of farming T14 or higher maps looking for guardian map drops… or just buying the fragments I need to summon the fights.

This has easily been my best league so far, but it is a bit sad given that so few have dropped off the game. However, I’ve come to realize that the grind of Path of Exile is enough to keep me happy for the time being.

AggroChat #432 – Breath of the Jedi

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Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

This show was one of those times when random discussions that we did not plan happened.  Firstly we had a bit of an impromptu discussion about the Dungeons and Dragons movie which also led to some non-movie discussion.  From there Bel talks about his life as a Path of Exile Vendor as he has become increasingly immersed in the trade market as a seller.  Tam and Bel talk quite a bit about Jedi Survivor and how it is a more open game and might even draw some connections to Breath of the Wild.  Kodra talks about Lone Fungus and Ash about Everspace 2.  From there we fall into some unplanned discussions about how games seem to be moving away from Holiday Season release schedules, and then we get off on this tangent about the Gameboy.

Topics Discussed:

  • Dungeons and Dragons
  • Bel’s Life as a Path of Exile Vendor
  • Star Wars: Jedi Survivor
  • Lone Fungus
  • Everspace 2
  • Games Moving Away from Holiday Releases
  • Arguing about the Gameboy

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Ghosts of Leagues Past

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I got to thinking about my past experience with Path of Exile and the assorted leagues that I played in and then the ones that I actually took seriously. Largely this was spawned by the comfortable spot that I have arrived at in this league having two extremely strong characters, which led me down a path of exploring some of my past mistakes with this game. There is something about the complexity of Path of Exile that makes you forget entirely what it was like to play the game when you were first starting out. As a result, there are a lot of build makers that assume everyone will be engaging with the trade league and that low investment is anything under 10 Divine Orbs. Granted I am starting to reach that point myself in my journey as this league I have spent probably at least 10 Divines gearing out two characters.

The overwhelming success that I have had with Toxic Rain Pathfinder, has led me to start questioning some things. Namely, whether or not the state of the league is just exceptionally good, Toxic Rain is simply a great build, or I am just much better at the game now than in the past. It could be all of the three but the Toxic Rain build specifically has led me down this path because mechanically it is not that mechanically different from the Explosive Arrow Champion build that I tried back in Sentinel League and did not really enjoy. I’ve seriously played Path of Exile for the last four leagues and for both Sentinel and Kalandra, I had some significant issues with the game, which has now led me to objectively evaluate the state of those characters when I left them. Of note, I do not really play Standard, so any character from a past league is effectively in exactly the same condition I stopped playing when the league ended.

Before that, we are going to talk a little bit about the early murky time spent playing Path of Exile with no clue what was going on. One of the things I never really could figure out is why exactly I did not play Path of Exile before 2016. Sure the passive tree was daunting, but I figured that there had to be another reason. Yesterday I watched the original trailer and then immediately understood why I turned my nose up at this game. The prominent placement of Player Vs Player combat in the game’s features would have been enough for me to chuck the game in the bin. So it wasn’t really until April of 2016 that I gave the game a chance, and only then because I was really coming into a grove of playing Diablo III which made me want to branch out and try other prominent ARPGs. I’ve always loved this style of game but prior to Diablo III, the MMORPG had always been my primary game type, and like so many people I got trapped in the orbit of World of Warcraft for over a decade.

Sadly I have none of my original characters because, during the Sanctum league, I decided to purge them to free up their names. However, none of them were even vaguely close to playable or had anything resembling a “build”. I technically started playing during the Perandus League and I know Breach was active at the same time as I remember doing one of those and dying horribly to it. They used to do this weird cycle of challenge leagues where two events were happening at the same time. I did not manage to make it terribly far on my first attempt and I think I ended up stopping somewhere in Act II. It was not until 2018 and the “Don’t You Guys Have Phones” debacle that I really revisited the game, and at that point, it was during the Delve League. Basically, it was at that point that I started seriously diving into other ARPGs because I felt like Diablo IV was not actually going to happen. From that point forward I sort of picked at the game, never really making serious traction. I remember specifically playing during the Heist League, Expedition League, and Scourge League before finally taking the advice of following a build guide for Sentinel League.

For Sentinel League, I decided to follow a build guide from Zizaran as he was and still is probably one of the most “noob-friendly” guide creators. That said… there is still a huge gulf between his understanding of the game and what he takes for common knowledge and what a brand-new player understands about the game. So I legitimately thought I was playing along as expected and when I hit maps… I ground to a halt and struggled significantly. I think I made it to yellow maps before giving up on the league and trying another character for a while… getting both to 73 and thinking I had “made it to the end game”. However rough it was, it was enough to get this game into my bloodstream and make me want to take a much more serious look at it with the Lake of Kalandra league, when most of AggroChat tried the game out.

However, after four leagues of playing Path of Exile, I look at this character and cringe. Firstly notice that I didn’t have anything higher than a four-link on any of my gear. Like today I wouldn’t even begin mapping without at least a five-link… and out of sheer lack of understanding I was throwing myself into the gristmill with not having anything better than a four-link. Additionally, there was a massive problem with my resists… not a single one of them was at the natural level cap of 75% and my Chaos Resistance was negative 52%. Then defensively I am sort of all over the place with relatively low evasion, armor, and no life recovery to speak of. No wonder I struggled with this build. Yesterday I grabbed a 3.21 equivalent to Explosive Arrow Ballista and tried mapping… and shockingly I did okay. I had to ride my health potion a bit more than I would have liked, but there is a certain layer of muscle memory that has built up now where I am actively dodging attacks before I even register that I am doing it.

After moving away from Explosive Arrow I had dinked around with what started out as a Righteous Fire Inquisitor and then got stuck playing Wintertide Brand because I enjoyed that gameplay so much. So with Lake of Kalandra, I wanted to play something Brand based and it seemed like Stormbrand was going to be a good option. So I followed a guide from Velyna and again… something got lost in translation. At this point when I look back on this character, I am shocked that I managed to make it all of the way through unlocking the Atlas. I remember a number of the red maps being exceptionally painful to complete but just assumed that Stormbrand was a far weaker build than the comfy gameplay that I would eventually find with Righteous Fire Juggernaut in the Forbidden Sanctum League.

Once again however looking back at this character makes me cringe in ways that I find hard to explain fully. I thought I knew what I was doing during the Kalandra League, and I very clearly did not. First of all, once again I was not even close to sitting at the natural resistance cap of 75% in each elemental resistance and still had a negative Chaos Resistance. For Crucible League this was “day one” stuff, or at least day one from when I reached the end of the Acts. Then again I didn’t have anything resembling a plan when it came to defenses. I had too little Armor to be an armor build, too little Energy Shield to be an Energy Shield build… and a completely insignificant amount of Evasion and Life Recovery. Once again I thought I was doing what the guide told me to do, but clearly missing something in translation.

Last night I pulled out the most recent copy of this build and reset my passive tree. I was able to do several maps relatively comfortably and was amazed at just how good this did at the clearing. It even did a reasonable job at killing bosses, but once again struggled to stay alive and it was only through constantly dodging attacks that I reached anything resembling comfortable gameplay. If I got hit… I had to ride the flask. I also noticed that NONE of these characters have anything resembling a flask strategy… but I guess that was a lesson I did not fully learn until playing the Juggernaut, last league.

One of the problems with Path of Exile that really plagues new players is the extreme level of complexity. For a while, I legitimately thought maybe that Zizaran and Velyna were just bad guide creators, but looking back I realize that no… they did a relatively good job but just simply were missing steps that they assumed everyone understood. They are creating guides for folks who are already engaged with Path of Exile and understand the concepts. However, no one really understands Path of Exile until they have lived with it for a while and failed miserably enough to fully understand why they were failing. Knowing what I know today, I could go back and fix my Sentinel and Kalandra characters and could have had a much better time in both Leagues had I understood what I do now.

However I have only arrived at that knowledge through almost a thousand hours of gameplay, and multiple hundreds of hours of regularly consuming content about the game. Almost every single day I learn something new about Path of Exile, and there are still game mechanics that I have not really engaged with at all. The cliff of knowledge is so brutal to climb that it makes sense that after ascending to a plateau… these creators forget what the climb felt like because they know they still have another sheer face to ascend in front of them. For example… Subtractem has an hour-and-a-half-long guide on the Betrayal League mechanic… and it only covers “the basics”. Grasping anything more than the most basic understanding of many of the league mechanics requires a similar dive into the abyss of Path of Exile knowledge.

So we arrive at where I am today. I deeply love the game and wish more people did. However, I also know what a brutal climb it is to get to at least where I am today, knowing that I am but a “babe in the woods” before some of the folks who have been actively playing the game since launch. The problem with Path of Exile is a problem that I have seen in so many MMORPGs as well, in that the level of complexity required to really be efficient and good at the game… requires so much of the player and as a result most folks never really reach that point. I could ramble on about the madness of what group construction looks like in Guild Wars 2 for example, and how nothing in the game would ever lead you to a point of understanding it. This is also why I appreciate games like Last Epoch so much because you don’t need to have played 300 hours of the game to be able to grasp the concepts, and there is an in-game guide that legitimately tells you everything you really need to know. Knowing that however… doesn’t really make me love Path of Exile any less for its beautiful madness and complexity.