poe

Shield Crush of the Chieftain

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Good Morning Folks! Last night was a bad weather night so I am running on minimal sleep. However that said I recorded a video of gameplay of my Shield Crush of the Chieftain Juggernaut… which is a mouthful. At this point, I am level 86 and have picked up most of the things I was seeking out, and feel relatively confident that I can make a general pronouncement about the build as a whole. Does it work well enough? Sure. Does it feel amazing? Not really. The problem with Shield Crush in general is that it is largely a stationary ability and in order to crank up its damage, you probably want to be running it with Multistrike. I personally don’t like the way Multistrike feels, so for reference, I am using Melee Splash instead in my gameplay.

I think the ideal playstyle is to gather up a bunch of mobs and then burn it all down at once from a stationary position. This works but also doesn’t necessarily feel amazing for mapping, especially not when you are going to struggle with a lot of tankier mobs. This was admittedly the very first T16 that I had attempted and it went smoothly enough. I never really came close to dying, and a lot of the mobs were taken out pretty easily but each time it stranded a single rare that I needed to chew thing. I am wondering if maybe the play would have been to try and run this build as a Chieftain for Hinekora explosions which would honestly go a very long way towards feeling tasty with clears. However, in that scenario, I would have probably chosen to go with a Cloak of Flames/Damage Conversion setup rather than trying to get as much armor out of my chest as possible.

The problem with armor scaling and damage conversion is that it requires some very specific items… a few of which are a bit “spendy” in a normal league. For example, I was able to pick up this grasping mail with the “Armour is Increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance” for around 8 Divines in this league, but I have priced out the same item in other leagues and they were going for around 25 Divines. The cheaper option that gives you the same explicit is Formless Flame which itself can have over 1000 Armor but comes with a -30% Fire Resistance penalty reducing how much scaling you can easily get. Legitimately the more I sit here and think about it, the more I am wondering what converting this over to chieftain would do. If I did so I would end up dropping all of the crit nodes and go for Resolute Technique.

The other piece that artificially inflates the price of this build is my Aul’s Uprising. I picked this up off the ground so it cost me nothing, but these often go for several Divines in a more normal league. In this league, there are only a couple of stacks of chaos orbs. Essentially this is allowing me to not have to deal with trying to anoint charisma to fit in all of my auras as I am running Determination, Grace, and Defiance Banner all to keep bumping up that Armor score to 250k. I do wonder however if this would be better with a Strength stacking setup and running Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler and leaning more into the fire damage. I might Path of Building out some of these divergent paths to see if one of them is clearly better than the others. No one seems to have solved this problem as right now there are only four builds on the ladder that are attempting to use this ability… two of which are using it for Generals Cry.

There is a version in Hardcore however where someone has leaned heavily into the ignite damage and I am curious if maybe that is the correct play. Similar to what I said above they went down the Resolute Technique path of dealing zero crits, and have instead scaled similar to how you would scale Righteous Fire. This biggest change though is that they ended up going with a Dawnbreaker which can get upwards of 2000 Armor on a single item. Then interestingly they used Dyadian Dawn which is largely thought of as the “Explosive Arrow” belt as it was popularized with that build, but makes it so that you deal zero physical damage but your ignites deal damage faster. I think I might go down this rabbit hole a bit further because at the moment I am largely dissatisfied with the current state of my build.

Anyways this is part of the fun of Path of Exile… sometimes you go down a path that is a dead end. Sometimes that path branches a bit but can still maybe end up in an interesting place. I am maybe not giving up on this one yet.

Crushing Some Fiery Shields

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Good Morning Folks! I hope you had a most excellent weekend. I slept like crap last night so I find myself in a bit of a haze… which messes the foggy mess of nonsense that is going on outside today. I’ve officially entered the “playing with dumbass ideas” phase of the Necropolis league, and as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend leveling another Marauder. At this point, I am hanging out on the Oriath docks and nearing the push to finish the campaign. I think over lunch I might try and do the third Labyrinth and push through to the end so I can begin the “gearing phase”.

During the Ancestor League, I attempted to create a Shield Crush Chieftain. My idea was relatively straightforward… take the class that makes it easy to cap elemental resistances and then make it deal physical damage converted to fire damage. The above video is of some footage of me doing a T14 map and shows the state of that build as I managed to get it. You can check out the POB but essentially I was attempting to use Avatar of Fire to convert all of the damage that I was dealing to Fire Damage. It sort of worked… but mostly was less than exciting. However, with the Affliction League, we got a Transfigured version of Shield Crush that essentially was doing the thing I was trying to do… baked into the gem itself. My guess is that there are a lot of folks looking for build content for this gem, because my first Shield Crush Chieftain video that is titled that… has gotten more traction than it deserves.

However, once that seed was planted into my head… I wanted to give it a shot even if it also turned out to be a failure. I am being exceptionally lazy and running Forbidden Flesh/Flame combo to give myself Tasalio Cleansing Water which makes my overcapped Fire Resistance apply to everything else while running a Juggernaut. Other than that I am mostly stacking armor, life, and regen and a few sources that increase “attack damage” but not specifically “physical damage”. I am not where I am ready to do a proper show and tell of how things are going, and am just about to break out into a cluster setup over the next few levels. We will see how it goes but for right now… it feels pretty freaking good.

I am going down the Armor Stacking path which means I am running an Emperor’s Vigilance and a Replica Dreamfeather both of which are extremely cheap right now. I leveled using Brutus’ Lead Sprinkler but it started to fall off significantly the higher in level I got… since I am not explicitly stacking strength. I’ve picked up a Grasping Mail with the “armor increased by over-capped fire-resistance” explicit which is why I decided to do the forbidden flesh/flame combo. I think I paid 8 Divines for the one that I got which has over 1000 armor on it and a decent amount of evasion as well. I am also converting all of my Evasion to Armor through the Iron Reflexes keystone. I will likely take advantage of this when I pick up boots and gloves going for as high of both armor and evasion as I can find with chaos resistance and fire resistance.

At the moment I am running around in a Brass Dome, but only because I pulled one from the Forgotten Sage and figured I might as well use it. Also hilarious… you can equip a Headhunter at level 40 so I ran around with one of those for a while but I have no clue what my final belt is going to look like. Maybe a well-rolled Immortal Flesh since I seem to care about Regeneration. Last time around I went with Arn’s Anguish but I am not sure if I am going to be using anything that generates endurance charges. Regardless the build feels good right now and looks really cool because Shield Crush of the Chieftain has a much wider range than normal Shield Crush does… and once I get Fan the Flames up and running my ignites will start spreading. The biggest challenge is going to be getting enough stats on the few non-unique slots that I have.

By tomorrow I should have a good idea of how well this build actually works so I might do one of my videos showing it off. For the moment I am using a Flammability on Hit ring for my curse which seems to work pretty well, but unfortunately, it doesn’t have any chaos resistance on it. It was something that I picked up off the ground down in Delve and held onto.

Monsters Mastered

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Good Morning Folks! I spent a good chunk of my evening hanging out in Path of Exile down in Delve hunting for bosses. I finished up the Masterful Monsters challenge last night which involved defeating 50 Delve, Syndicate, Bestiary, or Incursion bosses aka the endgame bosses from the original “Master Missions” that went away this league. I would say the vast majority of those 50 bosses came from Delve since I spent most of my time down there, but I did pick up a number of beast spawns to knock out some of those as well. It seems like Curiosity Vaal Aspects have slowed down in sales, so I decided to go ahead and turn one of them into an Adorned Jewel. I didn’t get a high roll but I at least got one that is over 100% increased buff so usable. I am contemplating swapping over to the Adorned version of the Righteous Fire build so might create a few more if sales don’t pick up.

I am still not certain how many of these achievements I am going to go for, but in theory I should be able to knock out the Heist one called Tactful Thievery easily enough given the stockpile of contracts I have. Sanctified Scarabs will also be pretty easy given napkin math I will need to run 9 more maps with four scarabs to hit the goal. Map Magnificence is a much longer stretch… but also doable if I just put my head down and grind maps. Once again per napkin math that should take me around 260 t16 maps to finish that one off. In theory, I could just burn through all of my corrupted maps on my Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Champion and not worry much about the rewards. After that, the objectives become significantly harder. If I can do The Feared… I will wrap up another one but given how hard Atziri was in that fight… I am not sure I will be able to survive long enough to take her down.

I also spent some time leveling my Witch, who for the moment is not yet ascended and leveling through abuse of Storm Brand of Indecision. Like I remember folks complaining heavily about how much this skill was nerfed into the ground, but it still feels phenomenal for leveling purposes. Basically, once I can equip most of the uniques I have sitting in the bank I will respec the character entirely to go down the Tornado of Elemental Turbulence path. I managed to fish for a level 1/20% quality one so I will begin muling it at level 34. I am going to be extremely slow leveling this character because at the moment I think I care more about knocking out “acheesements” than I do leveling yet another character.

In another piece of news… Maxroll has thrown their hat in the Path of Exile Bulk Trading game. On top of this, they have also created their own TFT competitor Discord that will eventually connect up with the new website. Recently Zizaran partnered with Maxroll, and he appears to now be the owner of this new Discord. On top of that streamers Subtractem, Crouching Tuna, and Tenkiei have joined in to moderate the moderators and make sure things stay transparent and on the up and up. So I wish them luck and I hope they continue to expand the functionality of this new site. So far it seems pretty solid for bulk trading and I might try and liquidate my coffins at some point over the weekend. I am still picking them up but I think I am mostly not going to engage with graveyard crafting any further. It just isn’t really my jam.

I don’t love that it is “Yet Another Discord” and I’ve only minimally interacted with TFT, but I do like Maxroll quite a bit and think that they are doing a good job of trying to create “best in breed” applications to support the games that they cover. I can’t see that anything they have done so far cannot be a positive in the grand scheme of things. Partnering with Zizaran was a good move as the official host of his guides. Pohx would be someone else I would love to see them work with, but he has invested a lot of time in his own website. Anyways I know that these posts are only useful for folks who are already engaged in Path of Exile, but given that it is already a struggle to keep posting this is kind of what you are going to get.

Masterful Monsters

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Good Morning Folks! Between yesterday’s post and this morning, I finished off two more league challenges. Namely, I knocked out the challenge involving killing a bunch of specific league boss encounters, and I finished the one that was focused around Essences and corrupting them. I am three kills away from taking out Masterful Monsters which I am largely getting down in Delve by hunting Abyssal, Vaal, or Primal bosses. I have a few Incursion temples that I could run to knock out Vaal Omnitect which would count as well. I chain-ran a bunch of Bestiary bosses to knock out a good chunk of these as I was sitting on a bunch of the portal crafts to spawn them. I think the next one I will start chipping away at is the Heist-related one where I am pretty close to finishing up a few of the meta steps, but largely I have not even finished unlocking all of the rogues.

I am to the point of Righteous Fire where it would benefit me to swap Fire Trap to my chestpiece, but I have a tricky coloring situation there. Essentially I picked up this excellent Cloak of Flames cheaply… and have been throwing tainted chromatic orbs at it when I get them. Basically, I need RRRGGG and there is no easy way to get that on a pure Intelligence base. I could throw 1000 Tainted Chromes at this or I could get it in my next drop. In theory, I should probably focus on farming tainted currency for a bit and try and knock this out given that tainted chromes are a bit painful right now to buy in bulk. I tried the bench craft for red and green sockets a few times and burned through some of my excess vaal orbs to no real luck.

There is a skill I have been interested in this league called Tornado of Elemental Turbulence that allows you to throw out three Tornadoes at a time, but they deal damage with a random element. It just so happened that this morning Mathil published a video showing off his wonky build for this ability and it looks interesting. It would be a way squishier character than I am used to playing, but I do kinda want to play an “offense is the best defense” character to see if I could get used to it. The positive of his particular build is it is mostly uniques… and mostly things I already have sitting in my bank. I also have a Witch character that I created at the start of the league to mule some abilities that I had planned on originally making into something Detonate Dead related. I might level it up and see what this build feels like.

That will however require me to do some transfigured gem fishing in the Labyrinth. Lately I have been using Doppelganger card sets to do this which turns in for a 20% Quality level 1 Mirror Arrow card. When you use the basic lab ability to swap a gem for a transfigured gem of that same color, it will respect the level and quality making it an easy way to get 20% quality green gems to level. I was doing this to get copies of Elemental Hit of the Spectrum for attempting to corrupt it into a level 21 version. I figure in the coming days I will do the same fishing for Tornado of Elemental Turbulence. This is one of those rare cases where I think I am actually corrupting for a 20/23% gem instead of a 21/20% gem given that Quality increases movement speed giving the attack better quality of life.

Anyways! We will see what comes out of this. I know Diablo IV dropped some information on Season 4 yesterday and that we will get more info after the campfire chat. I figure I will give that game another shot, but my hopes are not high. I kinda feel like the folks working on that game don’t really understand how to make an ARPG that ARPG players actually enjoy. There was a whole sound clip from one of the earlier campfire chats where one of the devs indicated that he thought Elden Ring, Hades, Hollow Knight, and Diablo IV were all in the same genre of “Action RPG”. While I think the itemization updates are good, I still have zero faith that the folks steering that project have a clue what the folks who will stick around and keep playing season after season actually want.

Anyways! I hope you are having a most excellent week. I am still struggling to focus and fighting off a massive “turtle mode” but trying to brute force my way out of it.