Righteous Fire

First Crucible Divine

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday was a pretty big day, not only because we now have a brand new roof on our house… but also while listening to the constant banging I made quite a bit of league progress. First up I stopped putting it off and finished my fourth Labyrinth which means I have a fully specced out crusader. I could say that I was avoiding it due to a pretty significant bug happening in the armor scaling of the Unbreakable ascendency ability, but in reality, every game seems to have one activity that I loathe and put off for as long as possible. For Diablo III it is Set Dungeons, and for Path of Exile it seems to be doing my 4th Labyrinth.

I hit level 90 last night and woke up this morning to find out that the Unbreakable Ascendency was fixed, which means that this is a snapshot of what my defenses look like right now. I had been using the armor mastery passive that doubled the armor of my hands and feet in order to help out a bit with not quite hitting the physical damage reduction cap, so this morning I dropped that point. I am wildly over-capped on my resists, but that is in part on purpose because at some point I will drop Purity of Elements to add on some additional damage generation auras. The challenge there is always that I will need the Charisma anoint and some ways of making myself immune to elemental afflictions. In mapping and Delve I feel sufficiently tanky and quite honestly do not feel very far off from the point I reached last league when I had a Brass Dome.

I’ve finally started to feel like Delve is providing again now that I can comfortably hang out around depth 100. I will continue to push down a bit, but right now I am hunting resources. I got my very first Divine Orb of the league down in an Abyssal City. It was my first City of the league as well, but right now I am branching out to the side “City Hunting” as they tend to provide the bulk of the resources I am looking for. My goal is to keep gaining “tanking” ability and start going down to around 200-250 hunting Aul the Crystal King. Quite honestly though the build is feeling very stable on what has been a fairly low total investment. I picked up a slightly better Immortal Flesh with minimum resistance loss and bought some tainted currency to get some quality on my chest piece. I think the next big upgrade I will be going for is either Legacy of Fury boots or going all the way for a well-rolled Brass Dome.

As far as currency goes, yesterday was really good for my bank. What is not reflected by this comparison is the 30 chaos that I spent yesterday on various minor upgrades. Getting a Divine Orb really helped my spirits, but you will notice that I am also up significantly in almost all of the basic currencies. Notice that things I struggled with like Armourer’s Scraps I now have a pretty decent stockpile of them. What I really need though at the moment are some instilling orbs so that I can get my flask routine online as well. Generally speaking, I run all of my flasks with the setup of gaining 3 charges every time I am hit and then consuming the flask anytime it hits full charges. This adds a whole other layer of defenses to the build and at the moment… none of them are functional. I think this might be why I enjoy leagues so much it feels like I have a constant string of minor projects that I can engage with in order to improve my character. My happiest moments in World of Warcraft were when there were activities that I could be engaging with on a nightly basis, that would show incremental movement for my characters, and Path of Exile sort of scratches that same itch.

The biggest improvement from yesterday is probably in my Atlas progress. I am now well into yellow maps and have done a few red maps. In total yesterday I knocked out 24 Atlas bonuses and then picked up a few passives from Maven and Eater progress. I’m essentially alternating between making progress in Delve and making progress in the Atlas and then using map completion as fuel to refill my sulphite stockpile. At some point, I really need to start doing some Heist, because I’ve yet to really even engage with that mechanic. Mostly I need to level my rogues so that I can start doing missions for Replica Uniques and Alternative Quality Gems. Speaking of gems I have a crop of 6 copies of Righteous Fire that I have been muling in my secondary weapon slots I am just about to do the 20% quality vendor recipe and level once again. I am hoping out of six corrupts I will get a Level 21/20% gem. If that pays off I will start doing the same for Fire Trap.

As far as my Atlas passive tree goes, I’ve picked up Shaping the Skies, Seas, and Mountains as well as all of the nodes that are beneficial to the production of Delve resources and Niko missions. I’ve gone through and picked up quite a few strongbox nodes as well and am working my way toward the node that makes all strongboxes corrupted and rare. Since Delve provides quite a bit in the way of Divination cards and Maps, I opted to only focus on the strongbox nodes that reward currency and duplicate that. If I get a bossing character leveled up I will likely shift back to what I did last league where I do mapping on a character that can stomp Metamorphs and invest some points into that mechanic, and then focus on RF Juggernaut for doing Delve and Heist only.

All told I am having a freaking blast even though the crucible league mechanic itself is a bit of a bust. My hope is that once I get fully built out on the Jugg, I will be able to handle full-strength crucible mobs and then start chasing some of the specific uniques that are worth something. More specifically I am probably going to start stockpiling some higher-level Champion Kite Shield bases in a tab for attempts at finding an Aegis Aurora. What I am really hoping is that in the coming week, the prices for resonators stabilize so I can start selling those as well. For the moment I am sitting on a stockpile because the prices are just too low and I know given time they will trickle up in price. When that finally happens my currency machine will be online and I will be able to fund pretty much any project I might have.

Starting Crucible Maps

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Good Morning Friends! I am unfortunately what you would call a “microtransaction enjoyed”. Not that I love having parts of a game carved up into bite-sized monetary transactions, but I enjoy cool cosmetics. Grinding Gear Games knew how to hit me right in the feels this time… when they introduced the crawler bear. Normally in Delve, you follow around an automated minecart-looking thing called the crawler, and in one of the league packages this time they have a skin that turns it into an adorable bear friend. So when you are doing other content he follows you around as a pet, and when down in Delve he leads the way for you. This is so definitely in my wheelhouse that I would have bought whatever pack he was in… thankfully it was the cheapest one.

Last night I finished the campaign which meant that I needed to go on a bit of a shopping spree to get my gear in order. Thankfully I managed to get a Seven Years Back Luck card from one of the Act 10 zones that I was able to turn into 60 Chaos Orbs. Other than that I had picked up around 15 Chaos Orbs through completing the campaign and I judiciously spent almost all of it on getting my character to where it needed to be to comfortably start mapping. What this meant more than anything was getting my resists capped and my armor up a bit, and then swapping around gem sockets so that I could fit more auras and have things in a more standardized setup. The armor should bump up considerably once I get my final Labyrinth done… of which I have yet to see a trial in any of the maps I have completed.

Every armor slot needs improvement, most specifically I could not come anywhere near close to touching a six-link in the correct colors and wound up going with a five-link corrupted for 20 chaos that will be “good enough” to hold me until hopefully, I can replace it with a well rolled Brass Dome. Right now prices in general are just completely bonkers. Let’s take Blessing of Chayula as our canary in the coal mine. This is an item that used to vacillate between 20 and 50 chaos, and now they are going for over 400 chaos. Essentially this item is needed for crafting items used by a good number of builds including the Poison Summon Raging Spirits meta build last league. I am uncertain if the Breech changes are really as bad as people seem to think they are, but it was a popular mechanic for farming and now the community seems to have agreed that it’s no longer profitable… which means everything that drops there has a wild price tag.

The biggest problem that I am currently having myself is that I am just not getting much of what folks generally call “bubblegum” currency. The biggest thing I am having a massive drought of is Armourer’s Scrap and Blacksmith’s Whetstone. By this point in the league, I would normally have everything I am wearing at 20% quality without issue… and now I am essentially consuming them as soon as I get them with zero stockpiles. I’ve also yet to see a single Exalted Orb or Divine Orb and am in a constant struggle to get Chromatics and Fusings. I’ve also not found much in the way of tainted currency yet, but I am hoping that changes as I get further into maps and delve. Vaal Orbs are currently the thing I am concerned about given that in order to get Atlas credit for red-tier maps I am going to need a stockpile of them.

That said I am a very long way from red maps, or even yellow maps honestly. As of last night, I have completed 16 of the 115 nodes needed on my Atlas. I’m essentially running what I have easy access to right now, and hoping that either Kirac missions or map drops get me further. At some point, I will create the spreadsheet that I usually use to track these things, but for the moment it is just me and Ashgar participating in this league so I have not really felt super rushed to get that ready. However, I am already to the point of not being able to remember if I have already gotten credit for something. So this is likely going to get created today for my own benefit. I wish there was some indicator on the map itself if you have full credit for it already.

Since I love Delve, I’ve made a hard beeline to pick up all of the Niko nodes on the tree. After that, I will likely circle back around and get strongbox nodes for a tree that looks a little like this before expanding out. Specifically, there is a node called Mining Byproducts that states that you have a 10% chance to get azurite from chests and nodes in the area. Thing is… I am not sure if this means small white-quality chests in the zone or strong boxes. In either case, I am going to do some experimenting because maybe I have been doing this wrong all along. Maybe I should have been opening all of those damned chests in a map because maybe they would have been giving me more sulphite. If nothing else I like opening strongboxes in a map so I almost always include them regardless.

As far as Delve goes, I have made piteous progress. Essentially right now I am trying to cherry-pick Azerite nodes and chest nodes so that I can build up a stockpile of resources. At the moment Delve crafting resources are not worth selling. However, as the league carries on and folks start trying out complex crafting projects… I fully expect this to change. I think enough videos circulated in the last league stating that Delve was a “get rich quick” scheme. However, I know that Delve is very much an acquired taste and I do not expect most players who might be trying it now, to stick with it. I should have probably gone for shaping the seas and skies first, but I wanted to start my Delve engine as fast as I could given how sparse currency has been to this point.

All told I am personally enjoying myself, but as many folks have commented it feels like playing standard. I have little to no interest in the league mechanic as a whole because it isn’t terribly useful in the grand scheme of things. In theory, I could keep weapons in my second set of inventory slots and then use those for trying to unlock crucible trees… but generally speaking, I use those instead to mule gems for leveling and corrupting. I don’t love the idea of keeping random weapons in my inventory spots either. At some point I am probably going to try my hand at getting a good scepter base, and then trying to find one with a decent tree… that I will then use in a Delve crafting project. In the short term, however… I still have a ton of mapping to do and progress to make in Delve.

Crucible League Start

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Good Morning Friends! This weekend was the launch of the new Crucible League in Path of Exile. I had Friday off and as a result, I opted to hop in and attempt to play when it officially launched a 3 pm my time. In the grand scheme of things it honestly went pretty smoothly. At the time I took a screenshot, there were just shy of 68,000 players waiting in the queue, and based on the numbers Grinding Gear Games released they had a new peak concurrent players of 321,180 over the weekend. As far as stability goes, but the time I managed to chew through the queue things seemed pretty solid. I created a Witch and ran her up to level 4 to get some spells, and then started my soon-to-be Righteous Fire Marauder. When I did the character swap there was another very short queue but from that point forward I was able to stay connected and level without any issues.

As stated before I am largely following the tree that Pohx has come up with that you can find over on his website. This meant starting out with the meatball again… aka rolling magma and then rapidly transitioning into a combination of Holy Fire totem with Phantasmal Support and Flame Wall. In theory, I could have continued to use Rolling Magma until I transitioned into Righteous Fire, but honestly, I prefer the albeit slower totem/firewall gameplay. I grossly over-leveled the content so I failed to get access to Armageddon Brand before I could actually convert over to Righteous Fire. That is honestly the wild thing about the changes made to the tree, is that I was able to be running RF before leaving Act 2. Admittedly all that it really took was me getting access to the spell, which I found from a Vaal area which means I am running Vaal RF for now and at some point will swap out to the normal version.

Being able to run Righteous Fire and some semblance of the actual build early, made this quite possibly the most chill leveling experience I have had in Path of Exile. Until I got Firetrap up and running I kept Righteous Fire going while dropping Flame Wall and Holy Fire Totem, and technically still have Flame Wall currently for added damage. As is a habit, here is my very first Chaos Orb drop of the season, found in a level 16 area in Act 2. At that moment I was still running Pohx’s loot filter, which is based on the World of Warcraft coloring scheme. I’ve now swapped back to the standard issue Neversink, but Pohx’s did help a bit to specifically call out some drops that were the ideal gem socket colors for the build early on.

The crucible league mechanic is fairly interesting, but also fairly dangerous. Right now you channel an ability to add experience to the item you are forging. The longer you channel, the harder in theory the mechanics become. The problem is there is no clear way of determining just how hard you are making the encounter because all of the affixes applied to the mobs are obfuscated. This means there are times when I can channel all the way up with impunity, and other times that the encounter will one-shot me, without a clear understanding of why. My hope is that we see some rapid reworks of this system to maybe expose some of the mechanics of what say 20%, 40%, 60%, and 100% would do to the encounter with an ability to just pick a percentage. The nice thing is that these are not one attempt and you fail… you can effectively zerg the encounter until you have killed everything in order to collect your item. Mapping will of course limit you to the six gates problem, but I would imagine that most of the hardcore players are staying the hell away from this league mechanic in general, as it is way too unpredictable.

The other problem with the crucible is it has a way of bricking items. For example, if you are doing some sort of Elemental Equilibrium build and cannot have a specific damage time on your bow… getting that type from a crucible tree means there is little you can do to fix it. The above video shows a process of re-rolling your crucible trees but it seems extremely painful. I could see this as part of some extremely expensive crafting process where you find a good base item… then try and get the perfect crucible tree and THEN craft on the item to try and make the perfect rare item. I mean if you are willing to throw 100 Divines at crafting an item, then in theory you are probably willing to go through this amount of tedium and pain in order to get a sweet crucible tree on it. I figure all of the mirror items in this league will be crucible crafted as well as have the perfect rare stats on them.

I had deep concerns about the sweeping mastery changes and what they would do to the Righteous Fire build, and at least on the surface level it seems to have made things stronger. I guess I was not fully expecting the new fire mastery of “Regenerate 1 life per second for each 1% Uncapped Fire Resistance” to be quite as strong as it actually is. Admittedly this is prior to taking the second resistance hit from Act 10 Kitava, but right now this one node is giving me 305 life regeneration per second. This ends up making Fire Resistance a dump stat that adds a ton of survival with it and also makes it so I can hopefully better survive those map affixes that lower my resists. At this point, I am still in Act 8 and taking things extremely slowly. I spent a bit of time farming Blood Aqueducts trying to get a six link to drop. I have a perfectly colored corrupted six-socket chest but would need to get some tainted bindings in order to make an attempt at linking them.

After rushing around the last league… I think I am going to take things pretty languidly because I figure the longer I wait the cheaper items will get. I did manage to pick up a single decent item for 1c and am now just gathering my resources so I can afford a viable six-link as I start early maps. My goal as always is to knock out my third lab before beating the campaign and taking another resist hit. The first two labs were easy as pie however so I expect the third won’t be too awful either. Having a heck of a lot of fun even if the league mechanic is sort of suspect. I enjoy the forging process itself, but it is way too dangerous to spend a lot of effort on it right now.

The Heart Wants

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It is weird to me how I have gone from thinking I would give the Crucible League a hard pass… to be extremely excited for the league start tomorrow. It reminds me quite a bit of back when no matter my mental state… the mere existence of BlizzCon and the news feed that would come from it would stir up a desire to log back in. I seem to have been inoculated from BlizzCon Madness over the last several years, and even though I was playing the Alpha for Dragonflight I had no real interest in playing the game at launch. That said I am still extremely susceptible to Diablo III Seasonitis, and it brought me back to the game to play with the Altar mechanics in Season 28. It seems that maybe with Sanctum, Path of Exile finally burrowed its way deep into my core and I am going to be just as vulnerable to the League Virus as well.

I’ve had people ask me before why I participate in Seasons and Leagues… when in truth you are just playing the same game over again but taking away any advantage you might have earned in the past. This is so much the case that I rarely if ever touch my “Standard” characters that largely just end up being a storehouse of materials that will never be used. For me personally, it has nothing to do with the challenge, but more that it is like this microcosm of a game launch. I love the launch of a new MMORPG and the excitement as folks scurry around trying to adapt to the game systems and the almost crushing amount of content flowing forth about the game. That same environment exists around the launch of a new season or league as everyone gets excited about the start, and then gibbers excitedly about what new lessons they have learned and exciting drops they might have found. It is all of the excitement of an MMORPG launch… crammed into a few weeks to a month every three or four months repeating like clockwork… and once you engage with it fully it can be addictive as fuck.

The unfortunate truth however is your “Standard” characters often feel like cleaning up after one hell of a party. Path of Exile has maybe the best method for dealing with the cleanup. Essentially you get a tab added to your standard inventory that is marked as “remove-only” and then you can withdraw things from it at your leisure. This is far better than the Diablo III norm of just mailing you all of your items. In a season or league, you end up just collecting a bunch of nonsense. For example, I apparently gathered up almost 9000 Chaos Orbs, that I never took the time to convert to Divine Orbs for easier storage. I spent some time yesterday straightening up my standard inventory in prep for the launch of the new league, which meant painstakingly withdrawing items from one tab and depositing them into another. I should have waited until AFTER the league patch dropped because the stack size is being increased from 10 to 20… and it would have literally taken half the time.

I am certain that I will be starting out the league as a Marauder and moving towards Juggernaut and Righteous Fire because it is just too good of a general build not to have at my disposal. During the last league, I ended up leveling and gearing a whole slew of characters. Other than the RF Jugg I had my SRS Necromancer, Seismic Saboteur, and two attempts at a Toxic Rain build that I liked in both Trickster and Pathfinder variants. Primarily I say this because I absolutely expect to have more than one character. Righteous Fire is an amazing build for Delve, Heist, and burning through the early maps but at some point, I want something that is more “Bossing” friendly. I only ended up getting two void stones last league, because quite honestly… I do not enjoy the bossing game nearly as much as I enjoy the rest of the game. However, I might want to change that and try and knock out the last two void stones so I can have T16 maps for everything. For those curious, the above video is Pohx simulating a run of all 10 acts as Righteous Fire.

If I was not starting Righteous Fire, I would probably try out this build from Ghazzy which is more of a traditional ARPG minion build. I don’t think it will probably be as good of a bosser as my SRS build was last league, but it looks like a pretty chill option. The only annoying thing is using Hungry Loop to essentially give you a 5 link for Animate Guardian. I do not love Animate Guardian, so if I did try this out I would probably run it largely ignoring that. The spell is cool in design but the fact that you erase uniques to equip it… and then lose them all if it ever dies… just feels bad. We will have to see how bad the Poison SRS variant is currency-wise, because I might try building this league as my “bosser” since I enjoyed my Fire variant in Sanctum.

I don’t get at all why I am caught up on this emotional rollercoaster of the league start when I am legitimately enjoying myself playing Last Epoch. The heart wants what the heart wants, unfortunately. I did get my primalist/beastmaster up to the second monolith last night however and am still enjoying that gameplay. Right now without going into totems like the build I was loosely following suggests, it feels quite a bit like a HotA Barb from Diablo III. It also seems to have just a ton of survival and feels way tankier than my Necromancer does. I’m technically working on the Monolith that has a higher than reasonable chance of dropping the Herald of the Scurry helm that I will ultimately need, but unfortunately, I think the level is too low yet and I will have to farm it once I get to empowered monoliths.

I’ve also been back to logging into BelginnersLuck shown in the first screenshot of the post and trying to get a unique to drop from Hillock. If nothing else… I am definitely much faster at pathing through that first map in a league and much better at fighting that first obstacle. Tomorrow I will be rolling a brand new character and diving into the league. I don’t necessarily expect any of my friends to really join me in this madness, because I know it literally is that now… madness. I enjoy myself though so that I guess is the part that matters the most. If you plan on diving into the Crucible league drop me a line and say hey.