Righteous Fire

Return of the King

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Good Morning Folks! Last night I dinged 97, and is often the case when I have freshly dinged and no longer worry about experience loss for a bit… I decided to try a few things. One of these was the new version of the King in the Mists fight that originally debuted in the Affliction League. This is now accessed through a fragment called An Audience With the King that can show up as Ritual rewards, and over the course of running a bunch of my Einhar/Ritual atlas, I found three of these. It feels like this fight is much easier than the version I remember from Affliction League, either that or I am much stronger than I was at the time I fought him initially back then. In my three kills I got 2 copies of Untouched Soul and 1 copy of the chase item Light of Meaning which is a rework of the Perandus Pact from Necropolis League. The version I got was the lightning damage variant which I sold for five Divine Orbs.

I feel like I have reached the point where I am starting to see the flaws of the Settlers of Kalguur league. Don’t get me wrong I am still having a blast and I still love the town mechanic, but there is a bit of an Achilles heel. Essentially any activity that does not produce copious amounts of gold… is the wrong choice for spending your time. Delve was doing decently gold-wise for a bit, but now just cannot keep up with running maps. However, even when running maps I average around 10,000 gold per map if I attempt to fully clear everything. It creates this scenario where you feel like you are being chased by a loan shark and never quite able to get ahead. I went to bed last night with a decent gold lead and woke up this morning to see that almost all of it was drained away by my 3000+ gold-per-hour upkeep costs that just kept ticking overnight. I am not actively running mappers right now, and I am barely shipping anything… and have heard that for folks with high-end mappers, their upkeep can be 30k to 100k per hour. Basically, I feel like I have to keep pushing in order to feed the beast, or feel like I am falling behind.

Last night I spent the tail end of my evening leveling a ranger that I am ultimately planning on going Deadeye to play Elemental Hit of the Spectrum. However, doing low-level content means that my gold drops shifted from 100 or so gold at a time to 5 gold at the best of times. This slowed my gains to a trickle which means that for the entirety of my leveling period, I maybe got 2000 gold, which doesn’t even pay for an hour of resource gathering. I am hoping that either GGG increases gold drops, or reduces upkeep costs because we are heading towards a mobile game scenario where it feels like you can never really get ahead. Sure there is zero penalty for letting the coffers run dry. Everything stops, and the game complains at you, but effectively all of your workers sit there until you are ready to feed them gold again. Alternatively, I could manually deallocate everything so that they stopped costing me any resources. I might end up doing that for a bit while I am leveling alts just so it doesn’t feel quite so bad to watch it all waste away.

Part of why I am leveling a bow character is that I managed to pull a pretty well-rolled Widowhail while playing my Righteous Fire Chieftain. No one plays Elemental Hit of the Spectrum with a Widowhail, but honestly, I sort of want to understand why. I got this quiver with attack all elements, bows fire an additional arrow, global accuracy increase, and crafted attack speed on it. In theory, once you multiply these values by 2.4 you end up with what seems like it would be a pretty solid elemental bow. Maybe it won’t work, but maybe my weird kludge Deadeye will work just fine. I’ve also been setting aside good Armor/Evasion gear that I have gotten from shipments and in theory, have most of everything ready to go for an attempt at this character. All I really need to do is farm up the gem… which I will absolutely do on my RF Chieftain because I can steamroll the Labyrinth.

For now, I am leveling double Lightning Arrow, one with a Mirage Archer setup in a Quillrain and one with a Ballista Totem setup in a Foxshade chest. I did try leveling with a gem that I have never used before and I think I might like it better than pretty much any bow gem for early levels. One of the challenges with bow leveling is when you first start out you don’t have access to Lesser Multiple Projectiles which means for a bit you just don’t have terribly good coverage. Galvanic Arrow however fixes this and is one of the first gem picks that you have access to upon reaching Lion Eye’s Watch. Essentially it fires out three bolts of lighting that fork giving you a good deal of coverage and allowing you to shred packs. I am sure someone will tell me all of the reasons why this is not a great skill, but having just used it until I got Lightning Arrow, I gotta say it felt pretty solid.

I got tired of looking awful and this morning I decided to go with a Vaal theme for leveling purposes. I went with the Vaal set from the 2024 supporter packs, the giant rolling Vaal orb pet, and the baby Vaal oversoul minion. I have a lot of MTX for Path of Exile, but I gotta say given how much enjoyment I get out of the game and how optional all of them are… I’ve never really felt bad giving them money. I am near the end of Act 3 currently, and I want to at least get up to level 56 tonight if possible so that I can see how the Widowhail combo feels in real-world usage. I might try and farm up elemental hit gems over lunch, or I could just stop being cheap and pay the 40-50 chaos they are going for currently.

Still hoping we see a patch before the end of the week that addresses the gold issues. Are you paying Path of Exile? What have you thought of the Settlers League so far? Drop me a line below.

A Weekend of Upgrades

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Good Morning Folks! I played a heck of a lot of Path of Exile this weekend and a lot of that time was focused on gold acquisition to feed the league mechanic. I did some Photoshop magic to create a single screen that shows all of the parts of the town that I have maxed out. The only thing not shown here is the Recruiter which does not have its own doodad on the town view. Mining helped a lot because it means that I get gold from marking ore in my maps, which also means if I happen to find two nodes in a map it increases my gold gain significantly. Generally speaking, I am clearing 8k to 20k depending on a bunch of variables in each map but more often hover around the 10k mark. I still have my enchanter, disenchanter, mappers, and recombinators to max out before I have everything at the level cap of 11.

The thing is… I am not sure it is really worth pushing through to level everything up. Granted I have not put any effort into significantly upgrading my workers… but with capped shipping I seem to be largely getting the same results that I have always gotten. The main difference is I have three ships and all of the ports unlocked at this point. The league mechanic feels like it pays out significantly better in gear than it does in currency. This can be really cool as I will talk about a bit later when I go over my gear upgrades, but since gear isn’t selling amazingly well in this league due to the mechanic is generating so much of it… it is not like getting a ton of gear really helps your bottom line. So long as I get a few chaos per boatload I am mostly happy. I’ve yet to pull anything higher than an exalted orb from a shipment, and I think in truth I will be better served tweaking my map runners to be able to reliably do t16s.

That said occasionally you get some amazing gear from the mechanic. The gloves that I swapped to yesterday are better rolled than a pair that I was looking at on the market going for 8 Divines. I legitimately was contemplating making that purchase and I am so glad I did not given that I wound up with essentially the same thing for free. I’ve also been wearing league mechanic boots for a while now with no signs of finding reasonable upgrades. The big upgrade of the weekend though is that I sold a big ticket item and bought a rather expensive fractured sceptre base and then crafted it into a replacement weapon. Lastly, I swapped out my pseudo-six-link helm for a slightly better-rolled one. I had picked up my previous one for a steal and was able to flip it for 3 Divines when I only paid 1.5 Divines for the new one. For things like that I tend to overprice because I don’t necessarily care about a fast sale.

In other news, I ran into one of the new optional boss encounters that can show up in T16 maps. The Black Knight is in theory a replacement for the Black Morrigan encounter, but instead of showing up in the Viridian Wildwood, he shows up as a clickable hole in the ground called the Starfall Crater. Fighting him feels an awful lot like fighting Aul the Crystal King, so it was not a big deal to beat him since I have done that fight so many times down in Delve. I was hoping to get him to down Svalinn so I can make a dumb block build that triggers spellcasts… but mostly I just got a ton of Verisium and Runes. Really hoping that I can find a bunch more of him so I can try and farm the shield. All in all, it was a really fun optional encounter, similar to finding the Nameless Seer.

The biggest progress from the weekend is that I have completed the 115 normal and unique maps that make up the Atlas. On top of that, I have done Vinktar Square and am only lacking Doryani’s Machinarium from the challenge of running all of the unique maps. I am hoping a Doryani’s drops down in Delve soon because I am beelining to fight any bosses that I encounter down there. What prompted me to push through and buy the last few maps is that I needed the crafting recipes that they generated in order to craft my scepter. Truth be told, none of the maps were more than 20 chaos with Doryani being the outlier going for around 2 Divines. Now my focus really turns to trying to knock out some of the challenges that I am close to finishing up. Basically, my goal as always is to do enough challenges in order to unlock a totem pole for my hideout. Once I have done that… any progress after that is gravy.

Finishing out my 115th map also unlocked the last of the rewards in Kirac’s Vault, with that very last item being a simulacrum. One of the big changes that they made in this league is that Simulacrums essentially start 15 waves into the previous progress and cap out at 15 waves instead of 30. So essentially doing a 15 now is the same level of accomplishment as doing a 30 previously. I am a big fan of this change because it did previously feel like you spent a lot of time facerolling waves until they started to matter. I took a ton of deaths and basically lost any progress toward 97 that I had made… but managed to complete all fifteen waves. Truth be told in those last few waves… the trash mobs were WAY more difficult than the boss encounters. That said I did try really hard to split up Ominphobia and Kosis so that I did not have to be fighting them at the same time. I didn’t necessarily get anything amazing for my troubles but did manage to pull a few different copies of Megalomaniac.

I’ve not made it super far into Delve this league and am sitting around 150 depth. I have gotten several lucky divine drops from nodes, however, which has been great. Recombinators continue to be my most reliable method for earning a bunch of chaos quickly, and the currency exchange is freaking amazing. I need to spend more time down there, but the mapping has just felt better because it helps feed the league mechanic more efficiently. I’m mostly running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual strategy in maps and have lucked into one spawn of Black Morrigan that happily occurred when I was running a duplicating scarab so I got two copies. What has been shocking however is just how many Omens have been dropping from the map spawned ritual mobs. I’ve already pulled two Omen of Connections, a few Omen of Blanching, and pretty much every other more common Omen a half dozen times. The biggest challenge is that none of my trees have a lot of map drop support so sustaining maps is a big fraught at the moment.

All told however I am still having a freaking blast. This legitimately might be my favorite league even though the ground loot that is dropping in maps has not been that phenomenal. If I need money I can go farm up more resonators and fossils down in the dark, but for now, I am mostly able to afford anything that I really want. There are some upgrades that I still need… namely I have been trying to roll a large cluster jewel to replace the janky one that I am using currently. I also have a nice corrupted Cloak of Flame that I am slowly working on getting socketed and linked, but it is a bit of a stretch goal. I also have another Shaper Shield that I am occasionally trying to craft into something better than the one I am currently using. I like having some long-reaching goals though so I am not in any real rush to acquire anything. Getting my Six-Link chest due to getting Black Morrigan went a long way to improving my league experience. I also need to swap out some of my gems for Awakened versions, but it isn’t like I am struggling with anything currently.

I got a really nicely rolled Widowhail, and found a pretty nice quiver to go with it from the league mechanic… so I am starting to get that itch to try rolling a bow character. I’ve been stockpiling decent drops for that eventuality given that I seem to always end up wanting a bow character. I’m also contemplating trying to build something around Volcanic Fissure of Snaking again. Then there is the whole desire to try Lacerate of Haemorrhage Gladiator like literally everyone else in this league. Basically, I am starting to feel that alting itch, so I fully expect before the end of the week I will have rolled something new.

Fully Specced Betrayal is Wild

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Hey Folks! Tomorrow is the start of Blaugust and with it will come some more Blaugusty-themed posts, and probably a few days without proper league updates. Not that I think anyone out there is hanging on my words wanting to know what I did the day before… but you know I can pretend right. At this point, I am completely done with white maps and almost done with yellow maps. I get in this weird place where I try and finish the yellow maps before I run any of my red maps because I know Kirac will progressively stop offering lower maps when I actually do that. Tonight we have raid night and I will be back in Final Fantasy XIV, but after I bid Ace adieu for the evening I plan on starting running corrupted reds to begin knocking them out.

I did some more upgrades. First I bought a +1 fire gem neck for pretty cheap and was specifically looking for one with a lot of dex on it, fire res, chaos res, and everything else was negotiable. I picked up a second amethyst ring which gave me quite a bit of life and was enough to cap my chaos resistance while also pouring on more fire resistance to feed my regen. The boots came straight out of a shipment and all I had to do with it was drop a chaos/fire affix on them and resistance swap cold to fire with harvest. I still need to get relevant eldritch implicit on it, but did manage to hit ignite proliferation on my gloves. I think my gear is good enough for now to make it all the way through T16s. At some point, I plan on probably going block-based and dropping determination.

Right now I am running my first Atlas with Niko and Jun and will probably splash in some more points into Ambush and Scarab gain. My second Atlas for the moment is Einhar and Beyond with the goal of trying to farm Black Morrigan for six linking my chestpiece eventually. I believe Black Morrigan can only spawn in T14 or higher so I will get a bit more serious about that when I get up there. I’ve never done Betrayal with full Atlas support and it is honestly pretty wild. I will kill a single Betrayal mini-boss and end up getting a big ole loot explosion. For example, the above loot is from killing Hillock who spawned by himself and then offered to drop some currency. So I get why folks are talking about this mechanic for early loot bases. For me, I mostly was trying to speed run my way through the betrayal crafting unlocks. Once I get all of those I am likely going to shift over to Expedition since it is also on that same side of the tree.

At this point, I am sitting at 69 maps in my atlas and the only yellow-tier map that I have left is Leyline. I used a horizon orb to get a copy of that map, and will probably run it after I finish work and before I start doing some FFXIV nonsense. So like I said we have raid night and then I need to start running experts again because new bookrocks unlocked today, but tomorrow I will likely push through as many of the red maps as I can and see if I can maybe wrap my atlas up before the weekend. I running a bit low on chaos and do not want to cash in any of my divines yet, but I will likely start buying some of the unique maps needed to finish out the atlas. I am slowly pushing my way through Maven, Searing Exarch, and Eater of Worlds and hope to have those unlocked by the time I hit T16s. Hopefully, I get some more big ticket items to drop so I can be a little more liquid.

This league is so freaking good folks.

Settlers League is Great

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Good Morning Folks! I am a bit late getting a post started today because work things got in the way early early this morning. Friday was the launch of the Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile and I have been having a blast. I was a bit slower going through the campaign than I normally would be, largely because I spent a lot of time doing the league mechanic once it unlocked upon arriving in Lioneye’s Watch in Act 1. Normally I don’t invest heavily in the league mechanic until I have made my way into mapping, but I feel like doing it while campaigning was the correct choice because a lot of the upgrades end up being time-gated. As a result, it took me roughly 20 hours to finish the campaign which was Friday evening, off and on throughout Saturday, and then finishing my 3rd lab and killing Kitava early Sunday morning.

As of this morning, I am 44 maps into progressing my atlas and very smoothly running through white and yellow maps without significant upgrades. I’ve actually kept track of my expenditures this time around so that I would be able to recap in a blog post. Currently, I’ve spent 51 Chaos on everything I am wearing, including an -15 Immortal Flesh (1c), Cloak of Flames (5c), Rise of the Phoenix (2c), a Fire/Chaos/Dex Helm (3c), Chaos/Fire/Life Ring (20c), and Chaos/Fire/Life/Dex Gloves (20c). I had a bit of a windfall pretty early on where I sold an influenced base for 80c, and an Enlighten support for 260c. On top of that, I have picked up miscellaneous Chaos Orbs and 2 raw Divine Orbs. I’m not in a real rush to buy items but it feels good to know I have some spending money when I ultimately want to replace most of my rare gear. You can get a ton of life on items right now, and I hope to end up replacing pretty much everything with at least 100 life rolls on various slots.

What has kept me from needing to buy a ton more gear is the fact that the league mechanic produces a ton of really good items. While it isn’t generating a ton of raw currency it is producing a lot of items that have relatively high tier rolls, including lots of really good resistances on them. I was kind of screwing up the shipping mechanic a bit, but Sunday a bunch of videos came out explaining how it works or at least how to improve your results and I hope to see a big payoff at some point either today or tomorrow. Essentially each port city has a hidden faction system, and you unlock higher tiers of faction by fulfilling their requested goods. When you fill all of the items on an order it unlocks a new higher tier of demands and again… just by shipping only those items you are basically guaranteed to get more return than you are sending.

I’ve gotten some truly wild items out of this. For example, never did I expect to have it in the cards to be using a one-handed axe right now instead of a scepter but…. that is where we are in the league. I got this axe back from a shipment that had +18% Dot Multi, and +24% Fire Dot Multi on it… which was infinitely better than the scepter I had been using. I threw the new Ignite enchant on it and crafted the Fire Damage/Ignite Combo Betrayal mod on it. This is pretty much better than anything I could get for less than six or so Divines at the moment. Sure the physical attack damage doesn’t really do anything for me… but also I might end up recycling this item into some sort of a fire-based melee build later once I can afford to craft or buy a “forever” scepter.

Legitimately I am having so much fun with the shipping mechanic, and a lot of the items it brings back… might be useful for throwing into the recombinator later. Right now I am using my cast-offs to feed into the disenchanter as arcane dust seems to be a premium commodity that a lot of the upgrades require. At some point, I need to spend some time hiring and firing better people, because I have a bunch of workers that are less than optimal. You can get these combo workers that have lots of different skills… but you end up paying a premium for each additional skill level that they have. I would be better off replacing those with single-stat workers to hopefully bring down my total gold sink for the town a bit.

I’ve not made it super far into Delve, largely because… you can’t gather resources down there. You get a heck of a lot of gold in a short period of time which is good, but I keep running dry on the various ores that are needed to feed shipping. As a result… I might be spending a lot more time mapping this league instead of plumbing the depths for cities. I’ve found my very first city, but it is at around 80 depth which means that the payoff is not amazing. I am still working on spending Azerite to unlock things because if nothing else Delve is amazing for producing sheer quantities of bubblegum currency… something that I find myself tragically lacking. For example, I have zero of my flasks automated at this point… because I don’t have the Glassblower’s Baubles to quality them… nor do I have the Instilling Orbs in order to craft on the auto-use enchant. Both of these are problems that will likely be solved by delving more.

What makes this league so great is honestly the virtuous cycle that takes place between mapping/delving and then returning back to town whenever a shipment comes in. Right now I have two ships going one that is working the 45-minute routes nearest to Wraeclast and one that is working the 2-hour routes that are furthest away. This gives me two distinct reward horizons that look forward to, and nothing feels quite as good as seeing the pop-up in the corner of your screen indicating that it is time to go back and see what the journey brought. It puts me in this pattern of trying to see how much I can get done before the ship comes back and the two cycles feed each other. Mapping and Delving generate gold and resources that I can then invest in my town and keep moving forward. I legitimately hope this system goes standard because it is pretty freaking great.

Honestly, I am super glad that I went ahead and stuck with old and reliable Righteous Fire because it has given me more mental bandwidth to explore the league mechanics without also having to figure out my damned build. Are you playing Settlers of Kalguur league? What are your thoughts so far? Drop me a line below.