Raider

3.22 Builds In Review

by

Good Morning Folks! While I still have quite a few things that I want to tick off before I am completed with it, I feel like the 3.22 Trials of the Ancestor League is starting to wind down a bit. You can see this in the community as the various streamers detach from the game and start playing other things. I know personally I plan on giving Diablo IV Season 2 a shot tomorrow, and seeing how I feel about that game. As far as objectives go, I have 4 pips of experience to go from level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut which will be a first for me in a season. Apart from that, I want to knock out at least one more objective so I can get a sad little totem pole for my third league in a row. So I know that I will still be playing quite a bit, but I am finding my desire to build new builds waning.

As a result, I thought I would spend this morning reviewing my builds for this league and talking a bit about them. This is mostly going to be me posting links to videos that I have recorded throughout the current league, and talking about my feelings regarding the build and how successful it was. This grading will be governed by my own personal feelings about how best to approach Path of Exile. I like tanky builds and I am learning that even when I play a successful build… if it feels too squishy it ruins the experience for me.

Vaal Lightning Arrow Raider

Toward the end of last league I did a brief test to see how it would feel to league start Lightning Arrow, and honestly, the leveling process and early maps felt extremely solid. This prompted me to commit to league starting this build for Trail of the Ancestors and for the most part it went smoothly… until I hit a wall around red maps. Knowing what I know now… this is the point where I should converted my tree over to the critical strike variant, but I did not… and floundered greatly. This built felt amazing when it came to clearing maps… and then struggled significantly with map and atlas bosses. I thought that Raider would give me some additional defensive layers that would make it feel better… but it just was not enough.

The positive of the build is that it allowed me to farm up enough currency to pay for my swap over to Righteous Fire. The negative is… I could have easily just league-started Righteous Fire. This build would essentially color my league experience because I spent a lot of time frustrated that this did not feel good to me. I am not a map blaster and I do not love playing builds that feel like they have paper-thin defensive layers. For those who are curious, this is what the POB looked like at the time of recording this video.

Personal Rating: C Tier

Righteous Fire Juggernaut

So after the feelings of failure regarding Lightning Arrow Raider, I rolled right back to the old familiar and comfortable in the form of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. With this build it is a cakewalk to finish your atlas and get your first two voidstones, and it also allowed me to set up shop in delve and start producing raw materials in bulk. I think I have come to the realization that I am going to want an RF Jugg in every league given how much I have bonded with the playstyle, and given that it enables me to spend a large amount of time down in Delve. I did not record a video on this build until fairly late in the league and after I spent some currency on getting a Hinekora, Death’s Fury setup with Forbidden Flesh and Flame jewels. Once I ding 100 hopefully this week… I am going to shift over to trying to knock out all of the bosses with this character. I get into this pattern of not wanting to risk a death when I am gaining experience given that it slows down so much after level 95.

You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.

Personal Rating: S Tier Plus

Summon Raging Spirits Guardian

The Trial of the Ancestors League saw significant reworks of two Acendancies, the Templar Guardian and the Marauder Chieftain. In a desire to play with these, I decided to roll a Summon Raging Spirits build as I have often done in past leagues, but play it instead with the new Guardian Ascendancy. This build… is a miraculous powerhouse. This entirely rests upon the shoulders of the fact that the Guardian unique minions are so damned strong. From the very first Labyrinth, you end up getting something with the relative power of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and it can essentially carry you from that point forward. There is a reason why Guardian is the most popular Ascendancy in Ruthless League, making up over 14% of the player base and even higher if you get into the hardcore modes.

What I was not expecting necessarily is how good this felt mapping, because essentially you are using Convocation to keep dragging your pet RF Juggernaut as you shield charge through the map. Summon Raging Spirits always feels great when it comes to killing bosses, but the Sentinel of Radiance pet really makes the map clear in general feel so good. If this does not get nerfed… it is a strong contender for starting “Bel League” because after playing this in the Toucan Treasure Hunt, it can be functional with zero gear.

You can find my POB over on the POE.Ninja page for this character.

Personal Rating: S Tier

Storm Brand Inquisitor

It took me a few leagues before I reached a point where I truly understood how to build a character in this game. During Kalandra League I tried Storm Brand Inquisitor, and apparently thought that things like capping your resistances were a suggestion rather than a requirement. Last league, I gave the Explosive Arrow Champion a bit of a redemption arc, as I revisited the character I attempted to play in the Sentinel League and made it feel amazing. So this league I really wanted to do the same for Storm Brand Inquisitor to see what that build could do if I actually built it correctly. The end result… was pretty disappointing. Can it do a T16? Technically yes. Does it feel good doing a T16? Absolutely not.

There is admittedly part of me that wants to poke this with a stick until I figure out how to make it work. I might revisit it in future leagues and try and build it out to be a bit more viable. That said… doing what I did with Explosive Arrow and taking the same build, but just fixing my resistances… did not solve the problems with this build. The disturbing thing about it is that I actually did spend quite a bit on the build to get it to the sorry state that it is in currently. I’m sure given enough time I could get it feeling better, but I am just not sure it would ever feel the way I want it to feel.

For those curious you can see the POB at the time I recorded the above video.

Personal Rating: D Tier

Fire Shield Crush Chieftain

Since there were two ascendancies that changed with this league, and Guardian was so freaking amazing… I decided that I wanted to create something with a Chieftain. The obvious choice would have been Righteous Fire, but I did not really want to recreate that and eventually, I just stole the best node with forbidden flame/flesh for my main RF build. Another build that I have been wanting to play for some time is something built around Shield Crush, so I crudely banged these two build concepts together until something emerged. The end result was an armor-stacking fire damage conversion build that focused on igniting things with Shield Crush and waiting for them to explode with Hinekora, Death’s Fury.

In truth… it is a pretty fun build hampered a bit by the fact that I refused to spend the currency to take it to the next level. The best armor stackers tend to be built around the Duelist class because they can double dip in both Armor and then also convert Evasion over to armor which produces bigger numbers. Stacking armor directly relates to additional damage. The other problem is that the ideal chest piece for this build starts around 20 Divine and has the ability “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance”. As it stands my armor is over 100k with my flasks up, but with a chest like that, I could probably double that. All in all, it is a fun build, with a good map clear… but completely falls apart when it comes to killing bosses. If I were going to change anything, I would find a way to work in Vaal Breach as it would give me waves of fodder which would then hopefully proc Death’s Fury explosions helping me take down bosses faster.

My POB at the time of recording the video.

Personal Rating: B Tier

Vaal Absolution Necromancer

During the Toucan Treasure Hunt private league, I opted to level up a SRS Guardian, just because that seemed so strong without needing to rely on any gear. There was a period while leveling where I was messing around with the Absolution skill, which while technically a minion ability is mostly just a big lightning strike that spawns minions that do similar lightning strikes. This prompted me to want to give the build a shot so I rolled a Witch and leveled it with Vaal Absolution eventually turning it into a Necromancer. First comment… I played a Necro because after playing two Guardians… I was reluctant to roll another one. That said… I feel like Absolution would be so much stronger if played with a Guardian mostly for the free elemental buffs and the chonky tanky fiery boi. That said the Necromancer version is quite a bit of fun and felt extremely comfortable clearing maps. If I were willing to put the same level of investment in this build that I had in other builds in this league, then I am sure it would be quite solid.

That said… the playstyle of standing still while you cast Absolution with Spell Echo left something to be desired. I didn’t really have any problems with taking Deaths while I was casting, but it did feel a little awkward and went afoul of my “always stay moving” sensibilities. I am not sure if I would ever play this again, but I certainly found it interesting.

My POB at the time of recording the video.

Personal Rating: B Tier

Magic Find Lightning Arrow Deadeye

Sometimes I get something stuck in my head, and this league… it was a general sense of frustration over my league starter not feeling amazing. As the league was beginning to wind down I decided to go big instead of going home… and poured roughly 40 Divine Orbs into converting my build into the Magic Find variant that so many players were having good luck with this league. The end result has been an interesting experience. Deadeye is in fact the best choice for this sort of build with the Ranger class… but it is way the hell squishier than I am comfortable playing. Sure I can do pretty much all of the content and stack as many eldritch altars as I want… but if I fail to kill something before it looks at me… I fall over rather spectacularly.

Magic Find is also way more subtle than I would have expected. While I managed to make back a ton of currency largely in the form of Blue Altars that handed out Divine Orbs like candy… I didn’t really manage to find any big-ticket items apart from enough copies of The Fortunate to turn in for a couple of Divine Orbs. While I have run many Crimson Temples… I have yet to see a single Apothecary and I’ve not pulled four Headhunters or Magebloods like the magic find YouTubers would lead you to believe. Is it worth running Magic Find with this sort of build? That is highly likely because I made back the 40 Divines Spent on the build in roughly a week. Is playing a squishy glass cannon character doing it for me? Not really.

You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.

Personal Rating: A Tier

Vaal Lightning Arrow Champion

You would think that the whole magic find exercise would finally push Lightning Arrow out of my brain, but you would also be wrong. When I started my Raider version of this character, I thought long and hard about going with Champion. Champion is the “tanky” class for building a bow character, and I really loved my Explosive Arrow Champion last league. As the AggroChat crew is talking more and more about “Bel League” I decided I wanted to test a theory… that theory being that Champion would have made a much more drift-compatible version of Lightning Arrow than anything I had tried to date. So last week in a day and a half I leveled a new Champion character with Vaal Lightning Arrow and by Friday evening I had it geared and mapping.

This is a great character. It has all of the tankyness of a Champion with all of the killing power of the traditional Lightning Arrow builds. It suffers from the same challenge taking down bosses, but the sturdy nature of the build gives you plenty of time to dance around while waiting on your Artillery Ballista to burn the boss. Over the weekend I mapped with basically nothing but this character, and there were several times when I managed to run enough T16 maps to completely refill my sulphite without taking a single death. That in itself is huge, and I’m already sitting at level 90 and fully expect to be able to smoothly ascend past that level as though I were playing one of my Righteous Fire Juggernaut characters. I will absolutely build another one of these in “Bel League” pending there are no major nerfs to either Lightning Arrow or the Champion Class itself. I’ve also played this with Tornado Shot and Ice Shot… and while both are strong I just don’t enjoy them anywhere near as much.

My POB at the time of recording the video.

Personal Rating: S Tier

As I said at the start of this post, I think I am probably done rolling new characters for the rest of this league. I have a solid stable of characters and at least three of them that I enjoy greatly. I want to finish out level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and I want to knock out a few more achievements toward the league challenges. I’m currently specced heavily into Ritual on my Atlas, so it should not take terribly long to reroll 25 more favors or get 4 more Blood-Filled Vessels. I could just buy the latter from the market, but I never really like doing that. I know starting tomorrow I want to spend some time playing Diablo IV Season 2 and giving it a fair shake. After that, I still want to pop into New World and see what the expansion is all about, and mostly level the new Flail weapon. Combined, these will likely take me all the way until December when the next league starts and we properly begin the “Bel League” private league thing. If there is a lull in the middle somewhere I might pick back up Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield… or potentially even start a new Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough to see all of the changes.

This morning however I wanted to give a proper rundown of my thoughts on all of the builds of the league. If I end up doing anything further, I might steal the Magic Find gear from my Deadeye and see if I can make something that still feels sturdy with the Champion. Anyways! I hope this week is great for you all. If you have made it this far in the post, I thank you for reading because I am certain there are folks out there who get very very sick of my nonsense.

Adventures in Magic Find

by

Good Morning Folks! We talked a bit about this on the podcast this weekend, but Ancestor League as a whole has had some amazing staying power. More specifically I find myself still extremely engaged and we are just shy of two months into the league at this point. Throughout this league I have built six builds thus far, but only one of them… really did not live up to my expectations. Lightning Arrow Raider felt like it was going to be this amazing experience, but really… the survivability of that class did not live up to my expectations. I think in part I held onto the original configuration of the build for a bit too long and did not lean into the more crit-based build. The problem being that there was really no clear indication of when I should be doing what, but when I hit red maps things started to struggle quite a bit.

Over the course of this league, I had managed to build up quite a nest egg of currency, and I decided to burn through it in a final act of rebellion. I opted to shift my league start Lightning Arrow build into a Magic Find Crit Variant. I sifted through a bunch of options and landed upon largely following the template of Balor Mage from his solo magic find deadeye. This late in the league… everything was overinflated but I managed to cobble together the basic skeleton of this build. In truth, the respec was nowhere near as significant as I thought it would be… but still managed to burn through around 80 Regret Orbs to make it happen. Most of the cost of the build was tied up in a handful of unique jewels including a new Watchers Eye, a large ring Thread of Hope, and then I opted for a more budget option of an Impossible Escape instead of another massive ring Thread of Hope.

You can see some footage of me running through a Crimson Temple map. I am not good at “blasting maps” as it were, and still go way too slowly. However to coin something I said in the earlier Lightning Arrow video “It sure do kill”. It suffers from all of the problems that Lighting Arrow always had, where it does not have great single-target damage… and since I am no longer running an Artillery Ballista link I cannot lean upon that. However, when it comes to clearing entire screens worth of trash it does a phenomenal job and still manages to obliterate all but the tankier rares. Basically, I have been consuming my stockpile of Crimson Temple and City Square maps, and while most of the results have not been dramatic… there is a significant upward trend in the amount of currency that I am pulling from them.

The most dramatic event is that I had a Crimson Temple where I got eight raw Divine Orbs that dropped. Most of it however has been significantly more subtle where I just find single Divine Orbs a bit more commonly and have pulled several Voidborn Reliquary Keys which sell for 3.2 Divines each. I’ve yet to find an Apothecary card or any of the big chase rares, but it has been noticeable enough to know that something changed. I started running Blue Altars mostly because I needed an influx of the Eldritch currency associated with them. I might switch over to Red Altars soon just to build back up that as well, but it has been nice to occasionally hit a Sulphite Scarab Altar and help fuel my delve juice proceedings.

In two days of casually running maps on Magic Find Lightning Arrow, I have essentially repaired most of the dent that getting the gear to set up the build in the first place caused. I am not hitting things anywhere near as hard as I could be. In theory, I should be running a much more strict filter that only flags high-value items in order to maximize the speed at which I am running things. I however enjoy mulling over random small items and hunting for interesting fractures. I also like picking up “bubblegum currency”, which is not a thing that most magic finders do. So while I could improve my gear significantly as I picked up some of the cheapest magic find options available… I am not sure if I could ever really optimize my gameplay patterns in a way to generate mirrors’ worth of currency… nor would I have any real interest in spending that kind of currency in the first place.

This has allowed me to see how the other half lives. I get the appeal… but also I hate being this squishy. I’ve put on a couple of levels since switching over to this build, but I am losing way more experience than I am gaining and have mostly stalled out at level 93. I am missing one of the key defensive mechanisms built into this build that centers around getting stunned often, but recovering a ton of health when you do so. I might see if I can reconfigure my tree in such a way as to pick up these points without losing any other serious benefits. That might let me get back into positive experience territory again.

All in all, this has been interesting… but with us contemplating a private league next time, it means that none of the currency I am attempting to gain will have any value other than for crafting purposes.

Sometimes a Failure Isn’t a Failure

by

Friends… I’ve been struggling with something for the last couple of weeks. For the Trial of the Ancestors league, I decided last minute to make a shift in my normal routine and start the league as a Lightning Arrow Raider. I spent time right before the league launch leveling one as a test, and then ultimately decided I could live with the consequences of playing a much faster… but much squishier build. The truth is… I could not. I almost immediately missed being able to spend my time farming my favorite league mechanic… delve. Before the end of that first week of the new league, I had already started leveling another Righteous Fire Juggernaut and was happy as a clam farming delve. For the most part… I had considered the Lightning Arrow Raider a bit of a failure and that I should have stuck with the tried and true Juggernaut.

On some level, this made a lot of sense. I love the Righteous Fire Juggernaut so much that I have now played it for three leagues, and even went so far as to get my friend Ammo to draw my particular chosen appearance for the blog banner. What makes this even more complicated is how intrinsically attached this character is to my favorite game mode… because I love spending my time bopping from node to node down in Delve. It is super hard for any other build to compete with this… pending it is not also a super tanky build that can survive down there. The thing is… I knew going into the Lightning Arrow Raider that it was going to be a deeply mapping-focused build and as a result, I knew that it would have limitations. While I considered it a failure… it did manage to gather up enough currency to be able to outfit itself in gear, and fund all of the starter gear I needed for the Juggernaut and then still some to spare… as well as unlocking over half of the Atlas of Worlds. That really does not sound like a failed state to me if I view it through a bit more neutral lens.

To some extent… it also isn’t really the problem of the build because I knew there were some glaring holes in my itemization and I was not really willing to invest the time, effort, and more importantly currency to fix them. I can deal without Chaos Damage being capped given that I am mostly zooming around maps. What I could deal with significantly less so… is the fact that I was doing nothing to fix my ailment problems and at the same time invested NONE of my Divine Vessels into actually unlocking a proper pantheon. I treated the character like it was disposable… which as a result produced a feeling that I was playing something impermanent in the way I approached it. For as little effort as I really put forward to fixing its problems, it probably performed even better than it should have.

So last night and this morning I swapped around a bunch of gear, in an effort to try and solve some of those problems. Essentially up til this point, I had been using Wurm’s Molt to solve some of my attribute problems since this build is STARVING for Strength and Intelligence. Essentially most of the gear swaps were an attempt to stop using this damned belt and move over to something more fitting like a well-rolled Prismweave. One of the first steps was a necklace swap because I needed some raw attributes as well as some minus mana cost along with a less-than-ideal anoint that I am using to fix intelligence problems. This led me to look at quivers and I stumbled onto the extremely interesting Shattered Divinity which gives me a pet Harbinger that casts useful buffs on me every 4 seconds. I made the swap from Shadows and Dust which gave me Rampage and Unholy Might over to Tanu Ahi which I had in my vault which gives me Adrenaline and Onslaught.

Lastly, I finally spent a large chunk of currency and picked up Ancestral Vision which makes me officially elemental ailment immune. All of this combined with finally taking the time to get a Cast when Damage Taken/Immortal Call set up in my gloves has led me to a point of dealing noticeably more damage and adding a few more layers of survivability. I am officially off the radar at this point and veering further away from what most of the other Lightning Arrow builds look like, but I am also adapting it to feel more like something I want to play. I have to say all of these changes have breathed new life into the build and made it enjoyable to run around once again. Hopefully, I can stay alive long enough to pour on a few more levels and pick up an additional frenzy charge.

Sometimes a failed build… is really just a build that I gave up on. I think I was simply homesick to be back down in Delve, and cut this off a little too soon. We will see how things go from here because I am just about out of liquid currency and need to spend some more time making it before I dive further into my Storm Brand Inquisitor.

Frightening Scarab Market

by

Good Morning Folks! Well, this is the weekend where I officially switched mains it seems as if my Juggernaut has now eclipsed the level of my Lightning Arrow Raider. I gotta say that I enjoyed the Raider quite a bit, but it hit a bit of a hard plateau around red maps. I knew the class was going to have some survival issues, which was pretty understandable… but what I did not expect was just how much harder boss fights would be than I am used to. Essentially so long as the Raider is killing small mobs it can keep its dance of death ongoing forever. However, when I am just fighting a single target, I am not getting near enough life and mana leech to keep everything going and I start harming myself with lifetap. The RF Juggernaut however… is just stable all the time which is I guess what I had been missing.

I am in the awkward part of mapping where I only have a few maps left to go… and they are becoming increasingly more difficult to get to drop. I am sitting at 103 of 115 with a number of those remaining maps being uniques. I am abusing Kirac missions and Scouting reports to try and roll my way into the maps that I am missing, but I have a feeling at some point I will resort to just buying the ones I am missing. I tried the strategy of going ahead and running red maps from Kirac even though they are not corrupted in the hopes of getting raw maps that I can corrupt to drop. However, that really has not worked out terribly well so far even though I have one of those maps I completed but did not get the bonus for in my favorite slot.

It could also be that I have just not been running enough maps lately, because as I have gotten my Juggernaut online, I have spent more time underground. I’m continuing the veer slightly deeper and am comfortably trucking along around 130 depth. Mostly I am chasing cities and will go to whatever depth I need to in order to intercept them. I’ve finished off one full Abyss City, and two Vaal cities including a Vaal boss, and am currently winding my way down to a four-node Vaal City. After finishing that I will backtrack and pick up the Abyss City that I can see on my map. I’ve over-upgraded my Resistance and Light Radius and am beginning to knock out some of the other upgrades as I get the Azurite to unlock them.

I would probably spend ALL of my time down in Delve were it not for the fact that Scarab prices right now are a bit bonkers. I am not sure if Delve is more popular in this league, or if there is some mechanic that used to produce a lot of Scarabs that is not currently being run. Whatever the case right now the humble Rusted Suphite Scarab is going for over 1 Chaos Each, which is a little too rich for my blood. I can still fill my Suphite Meter thanks to the Atlas Passives and getting a bonus from completing maps, but it is fairly slow going. I wish there was some sort of Scarab vendor or something in the game that you could trade bubble gum currency for Scarabs. It does make me wonder if more people are playing Trials than I expected, and since Scarabs are a relatively uncommon reward not as many are making it to the market.

Now that I have the Juggernaut up and running, I have been trying a bit of heisting as well since the Righteous Fire character does really well at Delve and Heist both. I vaguely remember blueprints rewarding quite a few scarabs, so that might be an alternate method for refilling my coffers. I might try rerolling scarabs because I think there is a Harvest recipe. Heist though is fun on its own merits and I still need to go through the process of unlocking all of the thieves and leveling them. There is an awful lot of minutiae when it comes to getting set up in a new league and unlocking everything that you need to really be viable. The good bit is that I have goals plenty to focus on.

In other news, I am finally back on my reading nonsense… as a couple of books had broken me a bit. I tried very hard to get through Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. I am not sure if it was the extremely brutal, violent, and oftentimes racist content… or the general lack of punctuation or any sort of scaffolding to better explain who the fuck was talking. Whatever the case that book beat me, and while I figure it is probably an important read to understand the brutality against the Native tribes that lies behind the Cowboy mythos… it was just too bleak for me to continue trudging through. It knocked me out of commission for several months and I am finally getting back on the horse again with finally reading Old Man’s War by John Scalzi. So far this is a much more comfortable read, even though it has its own bleak content… just not quite as brutal.

I’ve also been struggling a bit with feeling generally out of it. Over the weekend my wife started coming down with something, and I am wondering if I too am catching whatever she brought home from the hellions that she teaches. I’m in a bit of a funk on top of that though. I’m having one of those ” would anyone miss me if I was gone” malaises that washes over me from time to time. I will pull through the other side I am sure because I know it is nonsense. If you made it this far in my blog post I know that you would probably miss me. I think part of it has also been brought on by the fact that it has been way the hell too hot to do anything outside of stay sequestered inside in the air conditioning. Hopefully, that too will pass.

Anyway, I hope you all have a wonderful day and a wonderful beginning of the week.