POE2

Searching Crucible Trees

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Hey Folks! Yesterday I said some nonsense about wanting to finish up the campaign on my Arma Brand Scion. What I did instead… was spend all night last night running maps on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. This was not necessarily one of those planned event sort of things, but just something that happened. Yesterday I talked a bit about needing to go for Pain Attunement for my Scion, to really make sense of running around in low-life mode all of the time. The problem is the node is way the hell over between the Witch and the Shadow on the passive tree. There are a few alternative ways to get this… the first being a Skin of the Lords but there are currently none available on crucible trade league with the correct combination of socket colors… and even with wrong colors, they start around 8 divines. Another option would be Crown of Thorns, but I am using my helm currently as a pseudo-six-link for Righteous Fire… so I don’t really want to do that.

The last option is to try and find a weapon with a Crucible tree that has the Pain Attunement node. These are apparently sought out because again… the cheapest one I could find is a shitty wand for 8 divines. So it made me remember that during the entire Crucible league, I have been chucking +40 Elemental Damage bases into my bank. The idea was that at some point I would run a bunch of crucibles in order to craft myself the PERFECT Righteous Fire Sceptre. This never happened, but I am finding myself in need of that pain attunement node so I hopped on my RF Juggernaut and tore through T16 maps all night long in search of this one elusive node. The thing is… I don’t even really care about the rest of the crucible tree and would likely craft on any base that I could get that node.

I think Crucible is one of those leagues that will be judged more fondly as time passes. When it was first revealed it had a bit of a “is this all” feeling to it. The league mechanic itself was not terribly rewarding, but it did allow you to do some really weird shit with your weapons and shields. It has also produced a number of completely broken builds. More than anything though, it caused someone like me… who doesn’t do a lot of crafting… to completely change the way I viewed items. Everything had its initial value, but also the possibility to turn into something interesting if it happened to roll exactly the right Crucible tree.

I am legitimately not joking when I say I have many stash tabs crammed full of potential bases for various projects. This is my sceptres tab, but there are also a number of these sitting in a dump tab as well that I never sorted into the proper tabs. I collected Champion Kite Shields because I was hunting for bases that happened to have the node saying that it sold for a unique. I was trying to get some cheap Aegis Aurora, but the market for that item plummeted given how much more common it was thanks to the crucible trees. I also cannot count the number of bows of various tripes that I unlocked Crucible trees for hunting for specific nodes to bolster my Toxic Rain and Explosive Arrow builds. It was not “bing bing wahoo” exciting, but it served as a constant project in the back of my mind which means that the league mechanic as a whole probably did what it was supposed to do.

While it is the end of the league and nothing really matters anymore… I gotta say I enjoyed zipping through maps last night and chasing Crucible trees. Admittedly this only really works because I have a fairly powerful character who can mostly laugh off the extremely rippy nature of Crucible mobs. Essentially my goal while running these maps was 1) to find another +40% Elemental Damage Sceptre base and 2) to find another t16 map… allowing me to basically infinitely sustain this nonsense. For the most part, it worked, but I did have to put a slight tweak into my loot filter just to make sure I was not missing Void and Opal Sceptre bases. I did this a while ago for Champion Kite Shields because I was doing the same thing, trying to sustain so that I always had an item to unlock waiting in the wings and was getting another map to keep churning the process out.

I added a few bonus objectives last night, namely trying to collect new bosses for the Maven with each map run and then eventually running at Maven Atlas when I filled up her bar. This led to more than a few boss maps, but the only one that I stopped what I was doing and ran was the Hunter map I got. Hunter bases are so freaking valuable as a whole that it felt like something that was easily worth doing. I got a Council of Cats card that I had never seen before which was pretty cool. It isn’t valuable really but still sorta neat as it unlocks a series of Feral-Cat-themed items. Maven’s Atlas fight is fairly straightforward on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut and in theory, I am building towards more attempts at the Maven if I choose to go down that path. I am not exactly the biggest fan of that fight as I am not good at the memory game.

One of the things that Path of Exile excels at is giving you missions. It isn’t so much that the game draws a line in the sand and tells you that you have to do this 400 times in order to progress. If it did that it would feel awful. What it does instead is give you the tools to go target farm something yourself, while knowing in the back of your head that there is always a way to just buy your way out of the hole you have dug. I know that at any point I tire of this mission, I can just spend the divines to buy the item I am seeking… but that sort of is what makes the search more enjoyable. Can I do this thing that has value in the game for myself, rather than just hitting the auction house? That is ultimately the question and at least for now, I am enjoying that search.

Self Immolation Phase

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Good Morning Folks! I’ve continued to descend into madness with my Scion and last night made a number of changes. Firstly you will notice that I have a giant firey ring of death… aka Righteous Fire. At this point you are thinking “Bel, you said this was an Armageddon Brand Build”, which is fair and that is still very much the case. The thing is RF gets used in a bunch of builds that are not necessarily relying on it as the primary damage source. In the case of my nonsense build… I am mostly using it as a flat 41% Spell Damage buff, while also doing a decent job of mopping up little things that get a bit too close. The other thing you might notice is that I have reserved almost all of my mana bar, and half of my life bar, meaning I am living somewhat dangerously.

I’ve opted to play around with Petrified Blood, which is the first time I have really used this as a defensive layer. The idea behind it is that you cannot recover more than half of your life, but the bottom half of your life bar… is “protected” in that 92% of damage taken is doled out to you slowly over time… allowing your regeneration to have time to work. Given that my goal with this build is to largely stack life and regeneration, I thought this might be a viable option, and other than causing me to freak out all the time… so far it appears to be working. I’ve included tooltips for both Armageddon Brand and Righteous Fire so you can see where I am currently. Based on Path of Building my numbers do not look amazing… but I am also dealing with a lot of level 14ish skill gems so that should improve over time and levels gained.

Last night I beat my third labyrinth and finished choosing my second ascendency for Scion. I was leaning towards Chieftan just for the regen, raw fire damage, and ability to cover enemies in Ash. The 10% Strength boost may also be good if I pick back up the ability that converts the strength damage bonus to spell damage. All told I think this combo is probably about as good as it gets for Armageddon Brand Scion. I would probably never purposefully build this way again, but in this experiment, I am just rolling with what I happen to have currently. The notable that I need to figure out a way to pick up is Pain Attunement. Since I am permanently on “Low Life” this will give me a significant boost in damage. I do not believe this can be anointed, but it is available as an option from crucible weapons. I need to sift through my stack of rejected sceptres and see if any of them have it.

I got to Act 10 last night before I went outside to play with Greybie. I will likely finish that up over lunch. I often slow-walk Act 10, but really… the only reason why I tend to do that is to finish up my third Labyrinth before taking another resistance hit. Given that I have already done this… I should probably just finish things up and then begin trying to fix my resists permanently and swap out some gear. I’ve taken my sweet time with this character, mostly because I’ve enjoyed the relaxing leveling process but now I am curious how well it is going to do in early maps. I am having way more fun with this character than I ever expected. When I created it, I legitimately expected it to be a throw-away experience and to never log into it again after beating Dominus. I am super excited about the possibility of what ExileCon might bring, and also really interested to see the announcement of the next FFXIV expansion this weekend as well.

Scuffed Arma Brand

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Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s epic blog post, I am going to take it a bit light so I can actually publish it… in the actual morning. Over the weekend I dusted off my Scion character and have been playing it a bit. I don’t exactly know what I am doing but I am having quite a bit of fun screwing around with it. As I have said before, this character was created only as a way to knock out the clear “Act III on a Scion” achievement but wound up trying out a spell gem that I had never played with before. I like brands as a concept and have played a Wintertide Brand and a Stormbrand build to high levels and enjoyed both. Armageddon Brand works a bit differently in that most of the damage it deals, comes from a single massive meteor that falls from the sky and strikes an impact area surrounding the mob it is targeting.

The end result feels so good as you send down projectiles from above to decimate oncoming packs of monsters. I recorded another one of my dumb videos last night showing off some footage from blood aqueducts. The thing is… I am enjoying this enough that I am legitimately considering trying something like this for a league start. I don’t love the fiddly nature of Scion, so if I did this I would be focused on Inquisitor because it comes with a sizeable amount of survival. The biggest problem that I have with the build currently is it has somewhat anemic single-target damage. To be fair… this is traditionally the problem with a brand build, but I think with enough crit this might resolve itself.

Another problem that I am struggling with right now, is trying to figure out where I want to go on my tree. Since I am doing this completely without a map at this point, I am mostly just trying to seek out things that either give me survivability or elemental damage and crit. Right now I have a bunch of points invested in the minion damage setup that gives me a flat damage increase like I would use with Righteous Fire. I am wondering if those points are better spent elsewhere. There is a cluster of fire nodes way up north that might be worth respeccing and pathing towards. While I recorded the video last night, I sort of hem-hawed around about what my second ascension would be… and last night I made the decision to officially go Chieftan. I need to get another labyrinth down so that I can actually make that happen.

As far as a league starter version, I am sorta leaning towards this sort of build from RaizQT. He is a hardcore player so values survival… so when he says it is Tanky, he probably means that it is actually tanky. On POE.Ninja there are a bunch of players working off some version of this build focused around the Rathpith shield. The negative with that shield is you take 10% life damage every time you cast a spell… but you also gain a ton of damage as a result. Essentially to make this work you need lots of life and even more regeneration… given that it also runs Righteous Fire just to buff the fire damage. It feels weird that I am contemplating not starting RF Juggernaut since I have had so much luck with that build, but I also feel like I probably need to branch out a bit.

If I find myself struggling, I can always lean back on the RF Juggernaut again to fund any sort of nonsense that I want to get up to. I might change my mind by the time the 18th of August actually rolls around, but right now… I am very seriously contemplating an Armageddon Brand Inquisitor for my league starter. In the weeks between now and then, I sort of want to map out a bit of a POB for myself based on the elements that I see from the builds on POE.Ninja. In the meantime, I will continue to screw around on the Scion and see if I can make it viable for mapping.

Path of Exile II Hype Intensifies

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Path of Exile II Logo

Friends… I am starting to get so overwhelmingly pumped about Path of Exile II. With Not-E3 going on right now, we’ve got two new teaser trailers kicking around after a few years of relative silence. I talked about the first one last week(Ngamakanui), and then we got another one during the PC gaming show (Aggorat). I’m expecting ExileCon on the 28th of July to be a massive deal and essentially outline not only the full feature set of this mega-expansion as well as a general release schedule. It would be truly wild if they just shadow-dropped the game at the show… but I sort of doubt that will be the case. We do know that the Crucible league that is wrapping up was a bit smaller than normal because we are expected to get a really massive league launching with ExileCon, and I wonder if it will be directly tied to Path of Exile II.

Screenshot from ExileCon 2019 Presentation Showing the text One Game, Two Campaigns

One of the things that have been a bit hard to wrap our heads around has been the fact that we keep referring to it as a new game… but in reality, it is just a continuance of the original game. The idea is that everything about Path of Exile 1 continues trucking along, and all of the expansion league content applies to both games going forward. This solves one of the problems that I had when Destiny 2 was released because it felt like we gave up too much of the good stuff that was in Year 3 of Destiny 1… to end up getting a crude shell of a game that wasn’t fully fleshed out and lacked a lot of the quality of life features we had gotten used to. So I will not only get a brand new campaign, and a whole slew of new abilities to play with… but also get to keep access to the leagues that I love like Delve and Heist.

Screenshot from the Path of Exile II Teaser Trailer Aggorat showing a large creature raising up out of a pool of filth and a Monk like characters standing to fight it

One of the things that I find interesting is that in the two latest trailers that we have seen so far… I feel like we are seeing brand-new classes on display. For example in the Ngamakanui trailer, I just assumed I was seeing the Witch on display because it was a female caster… but Aggorat pictured above has made me reassess those assumptions. The “Monk” class that we see on display in that trailer does not really match the visual signature of any of the starter characters that we currently have in the game. This makes me think one of two things is happening. The first idea is that we are getting several new starter classes and both of these trailers have showcased a different one.

Screenshot showing the Diablo IV Character Creation Interface

The other more intriguing idea is that maybe we are getting a detailed character creation system similar to the one that we just go with Diablo IV. I don’t want to get my hopes up too much, but it would be so freaking amazing to be able to craft my starter character to look however I want it to look. Not that I mind playing a feeble old man, a girl in rags, or a beefcake in a diaper… but the entire ARPG experience is so much richer if you get to pick your own appearance. This would also solve the problem of not being able to play the gender you would prefer to play. That doesn’t necessarily impact me directly given that I pretty regularly flip back and forth between gendered options just to mix things up when a game gives me that ability. However, I know this is a big deal to a lot of players and it would be amazing to see these character models trickle out into the rest of the game.

Screenshot from recent Path of Exile II Teaser trailers showing the text Find Out More July 28 www.pathofexile2.com

Suffice it to say I am pumped for July 28th… but am trying really hard to reign in my expectations. I have considered taking the day off from work just so I can watch the presentation uninterrupted. A lot of the reason why I have been so engaged with Diablo IV right now… is that I am in somewhat of a holding pattern until the next Path of Exile league. The only negative I can see about the “two campaigns one game” thing, is that for players who were maybe hoping POE2 would be a fresh start and wildly different. I expect a lot of new toys to play with, and a lot of changes to the game engine to make it feel a bit more responsive and have much better visuals, but I also sort of expect POE2 will feel a lot like the original release in the way that the end-game works. It took me over a thousand hours in this game to really come to a place of loving it wholeheartedly, but that is sort of a big ask for most players.

I do think the relatively shallow nature of Diablo IV, is ultimately going to make a lot of players feed into Path of Exile. There were a lot of folks holding out hope that D4 would be the next best ARPG and I am not sure that is the case. It has a lot of great moments, and yesterday I released a video talking about some of my favorite things. However even in a video where I tried my best to stay positive… a number of complaints still made it into the recording. I am almost vibrating with hype for what I am seeing for Path of Exile II though, so the future still seems exceptionally bright. I’m also extremely pumped about the release of Last Epoch 1.0 later this year. We are truly living in the golden age of the ARPG, and the loot will flow!