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.
Yesterday I made it through the campaign on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and by the middle of the night I was back delving which makes me very happy. I burned through a lot of my available currency kitting out my character in gear in order to make my resists work. I purposefully tried to overcap resists by a bit because at some point I hope to swap out to a Brass Dome with +5 to maximum elemental resistances and that will mean losing the resistances that I currently have on my 5-link corrupted chest. Other than that I could probably due for a sceptre upgrade at some point, and then I definitely need to find a pseudo-six-link helm. Those however can wait because for now… I need to get my money printing machine up and running that will fund the rest of my adventures.
I’m very much in the early stages of breaking into Delve and getting my resistances up enough to go down further. I’ve been down to around depth 85 and have done just fine, but my resists are a bit puny for me to go diving down dark tunnels as I am used to doing. Once I get down to around 100 I will finally start seeing a lot of content in the side tunnels and hopefully some cities. There is one already on the map but I have to figure out how to approach it as there is no direct path that I can see. I think that is probably why I enjoy Delve the most, because it offers bite-sized adventures with promised loot at the end. It feels way more stable and reliable than mapping does in general.
When I last talked about my map progress I think I was around 73, and as of this morning, I am sitting at 88 of 115 maps completed. Essentially each time I shift over to run maps for sulphite I am trying to unlock something new. I’ve actually managed to get quite a number of the unique maps out of the way which feels really good. I did miserably fail one of them, but it was a T16 unique map which is always painful. Mapping still feels good on Lightning Arrow Raider, but she is way squishier than the Juggernaut which is to be expected because there is a massive difference in killing power.
Since I am spending way more time in Delve, I am starting to pivot away from Essences and towards Niko missions and Sulphite. I think I think once I finish picking up Niko nodes, I will shift towards picking more Legion on the tree or maybe Blight since the Raider can do those a lot better than my Juggernaut ever could. I think what I dig about having a proper map blaster is that if I decide to dive into mapping a bunch, I can pivot back without much issue. However what I have missed the most is the reliable currency generation of Delve, and the Raider just was not a Delve-friendly character. So much of what comes from Delve comes from careening down dark tunnels looking for treasure, and you really need something sturdy to be able to do that.
I am also still doing the occasional tournament for the league mechanic, and those mostly go smoothly. I’ve not won a tournament outright since crossing the 200 rating barrier, but I am also not really using a mechanic to cheese things. I do well enough to get several rewards though, but last night I saw my first six-link and missed winning it by losing the final match. I did pull a five-link earlier, so it seems like I am starting to get into better rewards territory in general. I feel in this weird place so far in that I have two highly functioning characters but am also mostly broke. Hopefully, a week of focusing on just doing some mechanics to get some stuff will help change that trajectory. Once I have more currency to play with, I will probably start rolling some more side projects.
All told though I am having a lot of fun. I feel much better now that I have my Tankyboi back in the repertoire of characters.
Good Morning Friends! This is probably going to be a bit of a short post because I really don’t have a ton to talk about today. We are an unknown number of days away from the league launch because quite frankly I’ve lost count and everything has begun to blend together. When I posted yesterday I was sitting at 68 maps unlocked and as of this morning, I am up to 73, so not a ton of progress. Essentially I am in the mucky phase of the atlas where I have to trade character levels for mapping progress, and it feels sorta bad. As I progress into red maps, they become more “rippy” as the community calls it and as such I take a lot more deaths. I can generally get through unscathed with the “six portal defense”, but it is sort of demoralizing.
So instead of making proper progress, I spent most of last night slowly poking at my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. I’m now near the end of act 6, and things are starting to speed up as more abilities come online. In theory, by the time we hit the weekend, I should easily be at mapping levels and through the campaign with this character. My survival is sort of iffy at the moment, but I should be good to knock out some of my trials today and actually become a proper “Juggernaut”. That should actually help quite a bit on the survival front. I need to fiddle with my gear so that I can run an additional aura and pack on purity of elements to fix elemental ailments.
Given that I have geared this character two times already in the past… I decided to go ahead and pre-emptively do a bit of shopping. It seems like a lot of the staples are really cheap right now, so I picked up an almost perfect Immortal Flesh, Saffel’s Frame, and Legacy of the Fury. I also managed to snag a pretty cheap 5-link chest that should hold me until I generate enough currency to buy another Brass Dome. That is the weird dichotomy of pricing right now… a number of the staples of RF are super cheap but others… like Burning Damage/Concentrated Effect Helms… are outrageously priced. Essentially if I can get an influenced helm on a decent armor base, I can attempt to craft my own BD/CE helm as I have done it before. Hell, you can have shockingly good luck just chaos-spamming one to get something usable.
I’ve played a lot of mapping characters in the past and had fun with them, and in this league, I wondered what it would be like to start as one. Truth is… as much fun as it is to tear through maps, it would feel better as a secondary “alt” character than it does as my “main”. It was a great way to start out and get some early progress, and lord knows progressing through the campaign is WAY easier on Lightning Arrow than it is currently on Righteous Fire. However much like I did with my test character, there is a big of a ceiling that I have bumped into as I am entering red maps. I could probably push through it but it would take a lot of currency to get there and significant upgrades. I can continue to “six portal defense” my way through the rest of the Atlas, but I sort of miss having that rock-solid and stable tanky character as my “main”.
I also greatly miss the stable currency generation that was Delve. It isn’t so much that it produced thousands of Chaos Orbs worth of merchandise to sell… which it did… but more that it also produced truckloads of what I consider “bubble gum currency”. My vault is just short on everything from bindings to jewelers to regals. I am not running enough bulk maps to make up for the difference, and truth be told… I am just not wired to blast through a map and ignore most of the stuff on it. “Map Blasters” as a gameplay style really seems to focus on casting a wide net across hundreds of map runs and trying to gather up a few good things each time. If I could get used to the speed, I could probably do this because I am over-sustaining maps by a large margin. I think I just prefer the mechanical loop of delve a bit more because each individual loop feels shorter and more concise. Delve is essentially the equivalent of running a Greater Rift in Diablo III and almost all of the loot is at the end of the event.
I think if nothing else… Trial of the Ancestor has cemented some of my preferences about how I want to approach the game going forward. I need to “main” a pretty tanky character and then use that to build out other alternate characters designed for specific purposes. Since mapping is not really my favorite thing about Path of Exile, then maybe I should not really pivot into playing that as my first character.
Good Morning Friends! The Crucible Challenge league is coming to a close in Path of Exile and I thought I would spend some time this morning talking about the various builds I played. The crucible mechanic itself was a bit cumbersome and lackluster unless you were willing to go extremely deep into the system and attempt to craft the perfect tree. I was not willing to do this, but I did interact with it at a very surface level. This was the league of completely insane builds that we will likely never see again, in part due to the crucible weapon tree allowing for some complete nonsense. The fact that there were nodes that allowed an item to vendor for a unique version of that item base, led to drops in prices of things like the Aegis Aurora selling at one point for as cheap as 60 Chaos instead of the usual 1-2 Divines.
What this did do was cause me to set up several tabs where I just chucked bases that I cared about into them… and then when I was bored or looking for something to do I would run maps and reveal trees. The problem with this plan however is that it was EXTREMELY rare that I went through a map and did not get one of the bases that I cared about to drop… so my supply never seemed to deplete. I should probably spend the next few days unlocking the trees that I already have revealed that sell for currency. Essentially I spent a lot of time fishing for a better tree to them try and merge with my assorted weapons… and never really had much luck. I think this was probably better for map blasters than someone like me who tended to favor Heist and Delve… two league mechanics without Crucible forges.
Crucible was easily my most active League and during it, I completed a large number of builds. I have to be honest… this is maybe my favorite part of Path of Exile. I like trying different things, given that there are so many years worth of content and so many skill gems that I have never really explored. More than anything this league was a bit of a redemption arc for characters that I had tried in the past and never really managed to get working. The only problem with trying out a bunch of different builds is that I never really elevated any of them as far as they could really go… before shifting gears and trying something else. I guess let’s review some of the builds that I played in this league.
Righteous Fire Juggernaut
Another relatively new thing about this league is that I recorded a lot of short videos talking about various builds. I’ve recorded several with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but here is one where I did some delving which is honestly how I spent most of my time on this build. Righteous Fire and more specifically the Juggernaut variant is just one of those comfy builds. You end up being super tanky and can mostly laugh off most incoming damage. I managed to clear 3 of the 4 Void Stones on this character and make it all of the way through mapping without much issue. I never really took this build as far as it could go because I essentially needed to complete the swap from Fire Trap on the pseudo-six-link helm to my six-link body armor and I never really wanted to mess with recoloring my Brass Dome. Additionally in a true endgame variant, I would have figured out a way to make myself ailment immune without Purity of Elements.
That said the version that I ended up with felt extremely good and served as my pillar for pretty much all of the rest of my shenanigans last league. I love this so much that even though I am not planning on starting Righteous Fire… it is pretty much a given that I will end up building one for delving. Here are the details behind the build.
This is the first build in what I call my redemption arc of past builds. I had tried a few versions of Toxic Rain during the Sanctum league, and never really landed on something that I enjoyed. Mostly what I landed on was that I had been trying to convert to Toxic Rain a bit early for my tastes and that in past iterations I was not running both Toxic Rain as a self-cast ability and on Totems. Additionally, I have learned that I really hate Focused Totem Support, because I do not want to be responsible for triggering my totems. Sure Focused Totems are a clear dps win, but you also lose the quality of life of not having to constantly aim them in order to get anything from them. I had a lot of fun with this character, but the negative with a Pathfinder is the reliance on constantly hitting your life flask to keep your regeneration rolling.
I am not sure if I specifically followed any single build guide, but probably the most comprehensive version available is the one that Zizaran produces for each league. This is really the build where I discovered POE.Ninja and their Builds section and I was able to compare and contrast a bunch of successful Toxic Rain builds in order to land on something that felt good to me. Admittedly this is sort of a more advanced process, but learning that I could adapt builds to fit my needs was a real game changer for me.
One of the things that I love about Diablo-style ARPGs is how getting a specific item that drops… often generates a desire to build around it. In my travels on my RF Juggernaut, I stumbled across a helmet with four gems on it… Burning Damage, Concentrated Effect, Minion Damage, and Minion Life. After spending a chunk of the Sanctum league playing a Summon Raging Spirits build… I had this desire to build around this helm and more specifically pivot into Minion Instability with a Fire Explosive Raging Spirits build. For the most part, this worked well, but as is the case with many of my builds… I was unwilling to focus on it enough to really sand off some of the rough edges. This could have been a great build on its own and would have been perfect cromulent as a main build. Its critical flaw… is that Toxic Rain and Righteous Fire were just better. Unfortunately, this character no longer exists in this state, because I recycled it into a later build.
There really is not a direct guide that I followed, but again spent a lot of time on POE.Ninja looking at other Summon Raging Spirits builds that utilized Minion Instability. If you want to go down this path, I did find a decent enough guide you could follow.
This is another build in my redemption arc because the very first time I attempted to follow a guide was back in the Sentinel League and attempting to play Explosive Arrow. I had no idea what I was doing, and going back earlier this league and looking at my old characters… it was painfully obvious. I had no real defensive strategy and made zero effort in attempting to cap my resistances. So knowing what I know now… I wanted to make an attempt at creating a better version of this character. Originally I thought maybe Zizaran’s definition of “Tanky” just did not match my definition of that word. Turns out no… Explosive Arrow Champion is EXCEPTIONALLY Tanky… almost to the point of being similar in feel to my RF Juggernaut. I had so much fun with this character, and unfortunately… it RAPIDLY eclipsed my Toxic Rain Pathfinder in the amount of time I spent on it. This is the build that I most associate with Zizaran, so of course I would suggest someone following his guides. If you have any questions however with this build or any of the other ones I have talked about… my comms are always open.
On the ultimate redemption arc build… we have Wintertide Brand Occultist. Back during the Sentinel League, I made an attempt at following Pohx’s guide for the Righteous Fire Inquisitor. However, I stopped short… and pivoted into undiscovered territory when I decided that I really liked Wintertide Brand. This led me to try Storm Brand for my Kalandra league starter, to mixed experiences but it also started a mental obsession with wondering what a proper Wintertide Brand build would feel like. So this League I decided to repurpose my Explosive SRS Necromancer and respec it into a Wintertide Brand Occultist. The only negative about this build is that I tried to do it on the most shoestring budget ever… which meant that I reused as much gear as I thought I could get away with from the previous build. The end result… works shockingly well and quite honestly in the time that has passed since I recorded the above video… I have gotten much better at playing it. I spent a good chunk of last night zipping through Tier 16 Red Maps with a decent amount of juice applied and it performs like a champ.
I honestly considered just league starting this build for Ancestor League, it is that stable. With enough attention and focus, I think I could resolve any of the existing survival issues. Namely, I need a lot more block but levels and investing in some good jewels for my passive tree would solve that. Sadly I don’t really have a guide for you to follow. The only thing I can truly provide is my POB. I pieced this build together on my own by looking at a bunch of folks who were doing something similar on POE.Ninja. Wintertide Brand is sort of an offshoot of the much more popular Cold Dot Elementalist.
My Sixth build of the league was extremely haphazard and a bit of a mess. I normally do not care about Achievements in video games but for some reason… I do in Path of Exile. There is an achievement for killing Dominus in Act 3 with every base class in the game, and the fact I had never done this with a Scion was bugging me. So I rolled a Holy Flame Totem/Flame Wall Scion entirely with the purpose of killing Dominus, and after doing this… I mostly felt fine with walking away from that character. As the league wore on, and I was feeling the itch to play some more Path of Exile I dusted this character off and made a pivot from Totems to Brands, and decided to roll with an Armageddon Brand setup. I successfully got it up to maps, and with enough time and investment, I could have probably made this an enjoyable character.
However one of the lessons I have learned… is it is okay to walk away from a character because it is relatively trivial to run up another character. I actually enjoy leveling through the contents and I find the process of “building” a character to be extremely therapeutic. Unfortunately, again there is ZERO guide here, and mostly just a lot of me winging it as I went and searching the passive tree for anything that I thought might be useful that I could path to easily. Do I suggest anyone follow my character? Hell no. Do I really like Armageddon Brand and want to give that ability a proper redemption arc in the future? Hell yes.
Now we get to what is technically my eighth build of the league. There is a Righteous Fire Inquisitor that I never finished because I decided that I really do not love the Inquisitor variant of that build and will probably always choose Juggernaut. Essentially this was my first time doing a “league start test” where I tried out a build to determine if I wanted to play it at the launch of the Ancestor League on Friday. I had noticed over the last few leagues that there are a lot of folks who play some variant of Lighting Arrow as a league starter, because reportedly it requires no gear to function. After playing it I can in fact verify that it does not require much in the way of gear and can map on four-links. The most popular variant of this is played with a Deadeye and is exceptionally squishy. I opted to go for a way less common variant that uses a Raider that is significantly less squishy… but also is nowhere near anything I would consider “tanky”.
I am league-starting this because I really enjoy leveling on a Ranger, and also… I really want to do some of the content that is facilitated by having a character that can explode an entire screen at once. I know at some point I will crave a tanky character to do some delve or similar meaty content… but I am looking forward to seeing how the mapping phase goes with this character. I managed to survive low-tier red maps without any investment and only some minimal bench crafting to at least partially solve my resistances. My goal is to see how far I can get without touching the trade league to help solve my problems, and mostly turn this into my mapper for the league. The nice thing about Ranger is that I will be able to pivot into a bunch of popular builds if I decide I get tired of Lightning Arrow.
While Crucible as a league mechanic was a bit “bleh” in that it didn’t really give me a fun repeatable activity that made currency… the “sandbox” state of the game was phenomenal. It is easily my favorite league of the four I have played thus far, but largely because this is the league where I felt like I finally grasped some of the nuances of this game. Of the builds that I tried this league… I would absolutely play RF Jugg, some form of Toxic Rain, Explosive Arrow, Wintertide Brand, and some form of Armageddon Brand build again. Probably my favorite build would be the Wintertide Brand Occultist because as time has gone on in the league I have played it more and more as my “not RF Jugg” build. Wintertide Brand just feels cool and adding in all the other cold dot mechanics feels super satisfying.
As we go into the Ancestor league I have a handful of builds that I want to try a make happen:
Poison Summon Raging Spirits Juggernaut – This is a staple of hardcore and I am curious if I can make a version that feels tanky enough to do delve. It is simple enough to pivot into Righteous Fire if it doesn’t work out.
Shockwave Totems – I still want to find a totem build that I enjoy, and since Shockwave Totems wrecked Sanctum the first time around… I am curious about this one as maybe a Hierophant build.
Exsanguinate/Reap – I played seismic totems for a bit during Sanctum, and I really liked Exsanguinate far more than I liked the actual Seismic totems. I know there are versions of this build that use Juggernaut for Hardcore, and others that use Scion for Softcore. I want to research this and try and make one that feels good.
Something with Cyclone – I love Whirlwind and its spin-to-win play style. Righteous Fire sort of scratches a bit of this itch of being able to just roll over the top of your enemies. I do however want to try and figure out a way to build around Cyclone and make it feel enjoyable… maybe a cold conversion.
Armageddon Brand – I enjoyed Arma Brand enough with the Scion to try and give it a redemption arc. I figure this is probably going to be best played with either Hierophant or Elementalist, but will need to do some research.
This is one of the things that I love about Path of Exile is that I always have projects within projects. I know for example that I will likely create stash tabs devoted to each of these ideas so that as I find gear that might be useful I can start gathering it up while I am playing my league starter. I sincerely doubt that many of you are going to make it down to this point in the blog post because this one is pretty massive. If you have, however, thanks for sticking around even though I tend to get hyper-focused and obsessed with a single game at a time. This has become more of a thing the older I have gotten.
Anyways I hope you have a most excellent day and I will see you tomorrow for more nonsense.
