Red Maps

Large Axe Enthusiast

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Good Morning Folks! I think I have arrived at the point with Boneshatter where I am really starting to love it. I mean it kinda feels amazing to swing a big axe and watch things explode around me. I absolutely get why this build has been so popular for as long as it has. That somewhat concerns me however given how stable Righteous Fire was for years… and then was suddenly changed fairly drastically. Yesterday I swapped over to Boneshatter of Complex Trauma and got it raised to 20% quality through the Labyrinth. Essentially this is a Boneshatter that ramps much faster but resets when you hit 10 stacks. So this is probably a DPS loss for bossing, but seems to be a massive boost for mapping as most engagements do not last terribly long. I would imagine it is probably also good for boss fights where you need to move around constantly as you won’t hit the reset point quite as quickly.

I saw a noticeable spike in damage when I swapped gems, so at least for me… it seems to be the right call. I am not sure if that will be the case for everyone, however. I still could use a much better axe and my gear is still quite a bit scuffed. I am not running a six-link and would ultimately like to find a chest so that I can put all of my utility stuff in a six-red-socket axe. There are a lot of gems that I am just not using right now. For example, I have Purity of Elements, Grace, and Pride all vying for my last reservation aura slot. Grace is just silly because it allows me to arrive at some extremely high armor levels. Purity of Elements I was using for a bit when I was not capped, and then Pride seems to be what I use most of the time. Thing is… I’ve never unsocketed the gems I am not using which means there is a lot of room to grow my build. At some point, I will shift Blood Rage to a Cast when Damage Taken setup along with Vaal Molten Shell if I can ever find one.

As far as progress goes, I completed my white and yellow maps yesterday which only leaves some red and unique maps to hit my 115. I am sitting at 84 bonus objectives completed which means between yesterday morning and today I managed to pick up 19 new ones. Something new that I learned is that apparently, Delve can drop maps that you do not have access to otherwise. I always thought the maps form Delve followed the logic of needing to drop connecting to some other map that you had already completed. However yesterday I picked up several red maps that were disconnected from everything else. So I guess maybe that is a point for rushing down into Delve earlier than I would have thought. The rest were picked up through the three to one vendor map crafting recipe especially to fill out the remaining yellow maps that I had not seen.

Another thing that I did not realize… is that apparently you can get Awakened gems while Maven is witnessing a fight. I always knew that you could get them from Maven’s Crucible encounters where you fight things that she had witnessed, but I did not know that the sheer act of her witnessing a fight could drop them. I feel like even then, this is probably a unicorn moment and I will likely never see another one of these. It was already pretty rare to get them from the 8 ways, and I am sure it is even rarer still to get them from a map. I do wonder if the atlas keystone that makes extra bosses show up when doing a witnessed map causes the drop rate to increase. Admittedly I am also running with WAY MORE rarity support than I normally do due to those wild rings I showed off yesterday. I might be seeing things on the drop table that I would not normally see without running a specific Magic Find character.

Speaking of unicorn moments, I also got a Voidborn Reliquary Key to drop down in Delve. Normally speaking I would sell this because I can use the 3 divines that they often are way more than I can the crap unique that is sure to drop. Ace had not seen one of these so I streamed briefly over Discord opening it. Shocking to no one I got a crap unique, but it was at least a reasonably well-rolled Ventor’s Gamble. Were it not for the slight amount of reduced quantity I would probably use it or suggest someone else use it. It would have been hilarious though if I had gotten something like a mageblood given that I am in a private league. Currency and expensive item drops don’t mean quite as much as they normally do since what matters most is the crafting value of an item.

I am legitimately having way more fun than I thought I might playing Boneshatter. I was in pretty heavy mourning for Righteous Fire and while the build is still technically viable it is a bit of a shadow compared to its former self at least for Juggernaut. I spent some time playing around with my well-geared RF Jugg from last league and it is still absolutely viable for mapping and honestly most content… but I kill things noticeably slower. I could probably shift up my build a bit to stack more life, which would then give me much more Righteous Fire damage but would probably mean I would be losing Fire Trap damage in the process. I assume at some point we will let our characters go into Trade League and when that happens I plan on devoting some effort into tweaking my Boneshatter build to see just how good an optimally geared one feels. In the meantime though I am having a freaking blast bashing things and making them explode.

Raider on Red Maps

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Hey Folks! We did not record an episode of AggroChat last night, and as a result, I don’t have the usual Sunday post. Instead, I am going to talk some more about Lightning Arrow Raider. Last night I finished leveling through the campaign and then started running some maps to test the build further. I am still very much wearing the same SSF gear that I picked up through the campaign, with some minor crafting in order to try and fix my resistances a bit. As it stands I have woefully negative Chaos Resistance, very low Cold resistance, and then capped Fire and Lightning. If you want to check out the current state of my build, I dumped a fresh POB or you can check out my character on Path of Exile website.

I also recorded a video of me running a T11 Red Map, where I took a single death from a random rare. I had no clue what hit me, but after the fact while editing I noticed that it was an Innocence Touched monster, which is one of the more annoying god-touched mobs. All told I am pretty happy with where this build ended up with only some assorted bench and essence crafting. It gives me a lot of hope for a smooth transition into maps as I do this all “for real” on Friday evening. I’ve always liked leveling a Ranger because generally speaking all of the tools you need you have easy access to. I will likely run Lesser Multiple Projectiles/Mirage Archer/Caustic Arrow until I can get Lightning Arrow from the quests. I also plan on muleing a bunch of Lightning Arrow gems as I can so that I can hopefully corrupt my way into a Vaal version if I don’t get one to drop.

My goal with the build is for it to be a fast mapper that I can hopefully use to progress my Atlas quickly. At some point, I am likely going to create a Righteous Fire Juggernaut again to have something that I can do Heist and Delve with. I have to say though I am looking forward to playing something with big screen-clearing potential because there are a lot of league mechanics that I have never really explored very much. Legion, Blight, and Breach all really want you to be able to kill lots of the screen quickly in order to get the best possible rewards, and Righteous Fire has always sort of sucked at this. I am legitimately wondering how well this build will do with Heist as well, and I’ve spent a tiny bit of time in Delve and it seemed mostly fine so long as I did not press out into the darkness too much.

If nothing else there is a satisfying explosion of lights whenever I fire my Lightning Arrows, and that will be fun to map around on. I am not necessarily trying to race or anything, but it will be fun to wreck maps for a change. Don’t get me wrong, Righteous Fire is plenty good at mapping but it never felt anywhere near as satisfying as some of the videos I have watched of dedicated mapping builds. I think my early strategy will be Essences, Expedition, and maybe some Lockboxes in order to get a stash of crafting materials to help fix my own gear. I am also going to try and lean as little on buying from trade this league as I can. The main reason why I am not rolling SSF however is so that I can start selling things that I might find along the way that could be worth some change. I am definitely a trade enjoyer, but it was also refreshing to level the Lightning Arrow Raider on mostly found gear.

Anyways… I feel like I am probably annoying everyone with talk of Trial of the Ancestor league. I am excited I guess, and just can’t stop talking about it.

BelToxica and Red Maps

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Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to share some nonsense about my second character for the Crucible league in Path of Exile. In the last league I fiddled around a bit with a few different Toxic Rain builds, but I never fully committed to them. I tried a Trickster variant and a Pathfinder variant, and of the two I definitely preferred Pathfinder if for no reason other than the fact that the Shadow voice lines annoy me. When it came time for me to futz around on a second character I decided to give it a shot. Mostly the pattern that I fell into the last league was to farm Sulphite with my alt and then largely reserve my Righteous Fire main to doing deeper levels of Delve. Mostly I originally did this because I did not want to risk taking a dumb death and setting back my leveling progress. However, over time I found I enjoyed flipping between two characters for its own benefit.

Having played a few variants of Toxic Rain last league combined with the fact that Zizaran declared that this was his league starter for Crucible. I cobbled together my build from bits and pieces of a good number of guides. Now for Righteous Fire which relies on Armor and Regeneration, I felt like I fully understood how to make that class feel good. I have never managed to get very far in any class relying on evasion gear, so I am not even sure what to target for defenses. In theory, my guess is that you want 90% avoidance similar to how you want 90% mitigation from armor… and I am so very far away from that number.

Last night I finished the campaign and spent some time shopping on trade to cobble together a set of mostly rare gear focused on Evasion and Energy Shield since I need the later for Eldritch Battery. I am wearing The Restless Ward in part because I happened to have one laying around and I noticed that Zizaran was also wearing this chest… likely because it provides a good deal of Evasion and Energy Shield. I spent ENTIRELY too much currency on making it a six-link so if I had it all to do over I absolutely would not have gone down that rabbit hole. However, once I was committed to it, frustration and stubbornness kicked in and by god, I was going to be the random number generator no matter how much currency I threw at it. I would have been far better served by just getting a high evasion rare chest from trade for around 10 Chaos.

Last night after painstakingly getting my resists perfect and equipping viable gear for every slot… I opted to run a few maps. In total, I did a Tier 1 white map, a Tier 10 yellow map, and a Tier 14 red map and was able to successfully clear all of them. I did however take way more deaths than I was happy with, which led me to search on my phone last night while laying in bed. Essentially so long as I did not get hit, I could clear entire screens at once but if I got touched… I basically crumpled and died. I mean admittedly… high-level Greater Rifts on the Demon Hunter in Diablo III mostly this way as well. So long as you can duck and dodge out of the way of encounters you can wipe the screen but the moment you get noticed you take a death. This would be an acceptable risk were it not for the annoyingly stiff death penalties in Path of Exile. When you are 95 a single death can set you back a day’s worth of leveling.

Ultimately what I landed on was that I had been playing Pathfinder wrong. Essentially the Pathfinder specialization is all about flask effect and charge recovery so that you effectively have the equivalent of a Mageblood with all of your flasks up extremely often. As a result, the correct way to play this class is to proactively keep your life flask rolling at all times. What this does in practice is make it so that when you do get hit, you zoom right back up to full health quickly without investing in massive amounts of regeneration. I still think it would feel better however with more spell suppression and more evasion so that I am just getting hit less often. Similarly, I need a bit more health so that I am further from “one-shot” territory which will allow the flask to do its work.

I’m only level 78 and I’ve also not run my 4th Labyrinth which I should knock out today. That will give me Nature’s Boon which gives me a 30% increased Flask Effect and the pathing node 10% charge generation. This should increase the uptime of everything making it feel stronger. The biggest thing that I need to do is figure out how to squeeze in a 4th aura and get the rest of my assorted abilities online like Malevolence cast with Divine Blessing. I’m also not actually using Despair right now for cursing purposes, which is additional damage I am leaving on the table. So essentially I have room for improvement but the fact that it can already run Red Maps… seems like a win to me. If nothing else this will allow me to comfortably generate Delve juice to feed those adventures on the Righteous Fire Juggernaut.

Then there is the problem I have with Path of Exile where finding one item… makes me want to build an entirely new character around it. While searching the market for something completely different I stumbled onto this helmet that was dirt cheap for what it offered. This is now making me want to start a Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer and lean toward fire like I did last league. This helm would in theory allow me to create a pseudo-eight-link for Summon Raging Spirits. I am just not sure if I will go for traditional Fire SRS or Minion Instability Exploding SRS. Whatever the case… I am starting to stockpile decent items that I happen to find along the way that would make that build work. I find that I am coming to love the absolute bullshit levels of minutiae and build crafting of Path of Exile.