Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to share some nonsense about my second character for the Crucible league in Path of Exile. In the last league I fiddled around a bit with a few different Toxic Rain builds, but I never fully committed to them. I tried a Trickster variant and a Pathfinder variant, and of the two I definitely preferred Pathfinder if for no reason other than the fact that the Shadow voice lines annoy me. When it came time for me to futz around on a second character I decided to give it a shot. Mostly the pattern that I fell into the last league was to farm Sulphite with my alt and then largely reserve my Righteous Fire main to doing deeper levels of Delve. Mostly I originally did this because I did not want to risk taking a dumb death and setting back my leveling progress. However, over time I found I enjoyed flipping between two characters for its own benefit.
Having played a few variants of Toxic Rain last league combined with the fact that Zizaran declared that this was his league starter for Crucible. I cobbled together my build from bits and pieces of a good number of guides. Now for Righteous Fire which relies on Armor and Regeneration, I felt like I fully understood how to make that class feel good. I have never managed to get very far in any class relying on evasion gear, so I am not even sure what to target for defenses. In theory, my guess is that you want 90% avoidance similar to how you want 90% mitigation from armor… and I am so very far away from that number.
Last night I finished the campaign and spent some time shopping on trade to cobble together a set of mostly rare gear focused on Evasion and Energy Shield since I need the later for Eldritch Battery. I am wearing The Restless Ward in part because I happened to have one laying around and I noticed that Zizaran was also wearing this chest… likely because it provides a good deal of Evasion and Energy Shield. I spent ENTIRELY too much currency on making it a six-link so if I had it all to do over I absolutely would not have gone down that rabbit hole. However, once I was committed to it, frustration and stubbornness kicked in and by god, I was going to be the random number generator no matter how much currency I threw at it. I would have been far better served by just getting a high evasion rare chest from trade for around 10 Chaos.
Last night after painstakingly getting my resists perfect and equipping viable gear for every slot… I opted to run a few maps. In total, I did a Tier 1 white map, a Tier 10 yellow map, and a Tier 14 red map and was able to successfully clear all of them. I did however take way more deaths than I was happy with, which led me to search on my phone last night while laying in bed. Essentially so long as I did not get hit, I could clear entire screens at once but if I got touched… I basically crumpled and died. I mean admittedly… high-level Greater Rifts on the Demon Hunter in Diablo III mostly this way as well. So long as you can duck and dodge out of the way of encounters you can wipe the screen but the moment you get noticed you take a death. This would be an acceptable risk were it not for the annoyingly stiff death penalties in Path of Exile. When you are 95 a single death can set you back a day’s worth of leveling.
Ultimately what I landed on was that I had been playing Pathfinder wrong. Essentially the Pathfinder specialization is all about flask effect and charge recovery so that you effectively have the equivalent of a Mageblood with all of your flasks up extremely often. As a result, the correct way to play this class is to proactively keep your life flask rolling at all times. What this does in practice is make it so that when you do get hit, you zoom right back up to full health quickly without investing in massive amounts of regeneration. I still think it would feel better however with more spell suppression and more evasion so that I am just getting hit less often. Similarly, I need a bit more health so that I am further from “one-shot” territory which will allow the flask to do its work.
I’m only level 78 and I’ve also not run my 4th Labyrinth which I should knock out today. That will give me Nature’s Boon which gives me a 30% increased Flask Effect and the pathing node 10% charge generation. This should increase the uptime of everything making it feel stronger. The biggest thing that I need to do is figure out how to squeeze in a 4th aura and get the rest of my assorted abilities online like Malevolence cast with Divine Blessing. I’m also not actually using Despair right now for cursing purposes, which is additional damage I am leaving on the table. So essentially I have room for improvement but the fact that it can already run Red Maps… seems like a win to me. If nothing else this will allow me to comfortably generate Delve juice to feed those adventures on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut.
Then there is the problem I have with Path of Exile where finding one item… makes me want to build an entirely new character around it. While searching the market for something completely different I stumbled onto this helmet that was dirt cheap for what it offered. This is now making me want to start a Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and lean toward fire like I did last league. This helm would in theory allow me to create a pseudo-eight-link for Summon Raging Spirits. I am just not sure if I will go for traditional Fire SRS or Minion Instability Exploding SRS. Whatever the case… I am starting to stockpile decent items that I happen to find along the way that would make that build work. I find that I am coming to love the absolute bullshit levels of minutiae and build crafting of Path of Exile.