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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.

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.

Minion Guardian is Phenomenal

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Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s more heavy topic, we are returning to my regularly scheduled Path of Exile nonsense. This morning I am revisiting the Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build because quite honestly… this might be my favorite build of the league. I will always love Righteous Fire for its chill delving potential… but Guardian SRS sorta rips. This has become my swiss army knife character for doing all of the content that is perfectly fine on RF, but just a bit slower because that build is not exactly a damage-dealing powerhouse. When I recorded a video earlier this week I had reached a point where I was mostly staying in T13/T14s because T16s felt a bit rippy. Since then I have learned that after a dozen levels… I can do pretty much even the worst modded T16 map and be able to accept a slew of bad Searing Exarch altar mods to boot.

So this morning I recorded a very quick 9-minute reprisal video showing off what the build looks like doing a simple Rare 5-Mod T16 map. I get stacked with a number of time-consuming league mechanics like Syndicate, Expedition, and Ritual… so I mostly avoid these to keep the video run time short. I promise however that I have zero problem with any league mechanics on this character. Even Legion feels great as my army of tiny skulls can spread out and break out all of the frozen encounters. I still mostly zoom around looking for clusters of boxes, but in the end I will have broken out most of the encounters during the time limit.

Legitimately… pending Grinding Gear Games does nothing to screw up this build by the time 3.23 releases… this might end up being a phenomenal league starter. This is still lagging behind Necromancer significantly with only 519 characters cataloged by POE.Ninja running the combination of Guardian Ascendancy and Summon Raging Spirits. Conversely, almost 3000 characters are running Summon Raging Spirits with the Necromancer Witch Ascendancy. Across the board in the Ancestor Trade league, only 2% of players that have been cataloged are running any form of Guardian. I do sort of wonder when the zeitgeist is going to realize how strong this build really is… and adopt it en masse like they did Poison SRS a few leagues ago. The thing is… this build requires ZERO specialized gear to work. The uniques I am running are all nice to haves and you could run this with trash yellow gear without any issue. This is evidenced by the fact that SRS Guardian is currently the most popular build in Ruthless.

Now that my SRS Guardian is essentially a “solved problem”, I’ve shifted my focus back to my Storm Brand Inquisitor. I am working on this to make it feel better, but honestly… its survival is currently sort of shit. I’ve failed at the second Labyrinth several times now. I have an inventory full of better gear that just needs levels to equip, so this might be one of those characters that I make it all the way to the second Kitava fight without having done any of my ascendancies. The first ascendancy that gave me consecrated ground any time I am stationary has helped, but not enough to make up for the fact that I just get wrecked anytime something makes contact with me.

I remember this build being frustrating the first time I played it, and quite honestly… if I ever get the inkling to play a brand build in the future I think I will likely stick to Wintertide. I remember having a lot of survival issues during Kalandra with this build around the same level range I am in currently. I am shifting what I can for the moment, but essentially I am just death-zerging my way through some of the encounters. I need levels so I can start equipping the correct items for the build, at which point I think my damage output will make up for my tissue paper defenses. The entire purpose of playing this character was to give it a bit of a redemption arc… but I gotta say… I still feel like this build is sorta shit. I am sure it will be fine once I get some proper gear on it and can fix my defenses but ugh… this is a bad build to league start. My assessment of it back then was not super generous and even knowing what I know now… I still feel like it is an awful leveling experience.

All of that said… I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with at least two of my four league characters. Righteous Fire Juggernaut is always a winner, and SRS Guardian is so much better than I thought it would be. Now I have to admit… part of me wants to play something with the Chieftain changes after seeing how big and beautiful those 5% explosions can be. I also want to maybe try Shockwave Totems or something similar to that. If my Storm Brand attempt continues to be shit… I might respec it to Heirophant and embrace the totem lifestyle instead.

Summon Raging Spirits Guardian is Great

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Good Morning Friends! I’ve spent a lot of the weekend fiddling around with my Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build and thought I would talk a bit more about it in-depth this morning. For the uninitiated, Summon Raging Spirits is an ability in Path of Exile that summons low-life minions that ultimately die after a short period of time. While they are alive they deal a lot of fire-based melee damage and auto-target the nearest enemy. Essentially think of them as a sentient fireball or something akin to the Demon Skulls from the Doom FPS series. There are a lot of ways to play this but traditionally this has been done with a Witch using the Necromancer ascendancy, in fact, I have played this a number of times in the past both during the Sanctum league and a very short-lived minion instability version during Crucible league that caused them to explode and deal damage based on their maximum life.

The 3.22 league, brought forth some significant changes to both the Chieftan Marauder Ascendancy and Templar Guardian Ascendancy. Essentially the Guardian now has two unique pets, the first of which is the equivalent of a giant Righteous Fire Juggernaut called the Sentinel of Radiance. It is a temporary minion that moves extremely slowly but blankets roughly half of the map in burning damage for 20 seconds before poofing. In order to combat the EXTREMELY slow movement speed… we use a spell called Convocation to teleport all of your minions to you allowing them to bip around the map. The other unique minon is called the Elemental Relic, and you can have 3 of them up at a given time and they are summoned by your minions hitting targets. If you have all of them up, they will be granting you and your minions Level 27 versions of Anger, Hatred, and Wrath. Raging Spirits hit extremely quickly, so for the most part you are guaranteed almost 100% uptime of these buffs while in combat.

This weekend I recorded one of my dumb little videos showing off running a map. Essentially I have been spending most of my time running tier 14 and 15 maps to farm Maven invitations, but in the above video, I am doing a Tier 13. In the video, I state that 16s were a bit “rippy”, which was true… until I poured on a bunch of levels and swapped out some of my gear. Essentially now I am zip through 16s as quickly as I do a 13 in this video. Mostly the gameplay is me charging to a pack of mobs, using convocation to summon my Fiery Lad on top of the pack which between the Righteous Fire Damage and Carrion Golem Bone Flechettes pretty much explodes everything but the Rares at which point I summon a string of Raging Spirits to burn those down… and then repeat until the map is cleared. One of my problems with SRS builds in the past is that they were pretty slow to map because they revolved around trying to herd a pack of raging spirits around the map. Shield Charge + Convocation takes care of this problem and quite honestly I am not sure if I would play SRS without this combo in the future.

The build in its current state is not exactly what I would consider a budget build. That said… I am uncertain that any of my gear is actually required. I have no clue how much currency I have spent on it, but I would guess in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 Divine Orbs. The build felt good and was completely viable from essentially the point I got my first two ascendancies that gave me my unique minions. You could likely perform well with this in a Solo-Self-Found environment because while all of the uniques are nice-to-haves, I don’t think they are really required to make the build function. You would need to do quite a bit of abyss to farm up Ghastly Eye jewels with minion damage and some survival stats on them, however. At the time of writing this… here are a few price checks for the above items:

In reality, you could run this build without any of this… save for maybe crafting your own minion wand. I picked up my first +1 wand off the ground, so they are common enough that I usually end up seeing several so long as you put Convoking Wand on your loot filter as something you want to stand out. There is nothing in my gear that I am really relying on to make the build work. Sometimes you have a series of uniques that produce a very specific interaction that if you don’t have it… your build is bricked. This is absolutely not the case with Guardian SRS, and in theory, you could run happily with a +2 Minion Gem Tabula Rasa(roughly 20 Chaos) and then just a bunch of decently rolled Armor/Energy Shield items.

If you want to give this a shot, then I would definitely check out the build guide from GhazzyTV. I veered slightly off course to stack up some more defenses, so you can also check out my latest POB if you want to see what my tree and gear look like exactly. Essentially right now I am working on building toward being Spell Block capped and then picking up some more minion survival nodes. I had this problem for a bit where my Spectres would die anytime I attempted to take on a high-end Legion pack, and I was trying to gain some additional health and regen to keep them and my carrion golem alive more often. The spell block thing was an oversight I completely missed that node cluster earlier. I feel plenty tanky as is, but as I talk about in the video the combination of Mind Over Matter and Eldritch Battery put me in a situation where if I start taking damage… it sort of snowballs into a death.

This is what my defenses look like. I have decent enough armor but if I have enough points and manage to get this character a bit higher… I will try and pick up another jewel socket on my tree and attempt to get a bit more armor and health. Health truthfully is probably fine as I am a little over 4000, with an Energy Shield that is a bit over 2000. Most of the time I have 75% chance to block attacks, and hopefully will also have 75% chance to block spells soon… though currently, I am sitting at only 65%. I don’t have much in the way of raised elemental resistances but they are all capped along with Chaos Resistance. I feel way sturdier than either of my two past SRS Necromancer builds. In a perfect world, I would pick up Golem Commander and also run a Stone Golem but I am just not sure I can spare the points and I definitely can’t give up my Testudo anoint.

What I did not expect, is how quickly this has become my mapping character of choice. Essentially I have been working on unlocking an attempt on Maven by using this character to get 10 T14+ witnesses and then hopping over onto my Righteous Fire Juggernaut to complete the 10-way. Whenever I manage to fill up my Sulphite, I shift gears and go delving on the Juggernaut until I run out again… then return to the cycle of SRS Guardian Maven invites. At some point, I will start doing some altars and see how well the Guardian can deal with a lightweight boss like the Black Star or Shrek. In theory, SRS tends to be pretty great at bossing and while I am not entirely certain what my damage looks like… according to Path of Building it should be somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.3 million. POB is notoriously bad at calculating minion damage however so I have no clue what the realistic damage looks like whether that is higher or lower than that number.

All in all though, if you are looking for a really chill minion character that you can in theory play without any expensive gear… you might give this one a shot. I’ve definitely spent a lot of currency on mine, but I am not really sure I had to. I think I might just be gilding the lily at this point.