Righteous Fire

Elder Influenced Helm

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Good Morning Friends! This morning I thought I would engage in a bit of a thought experiment. After the last few days, you might be asking yourself… “Bel why even bother with buying items in the first place, don’t they drop in the game?”. You would be correct. For every item that is available in the game, there is some method for farming it. Some of these methods are more deterministic in that they give you a higher chance of seeing that item… but even the best require a significant amount of repetitions before ever seeing something similar to what you are looking for. Essentially if you do not want to acquire an item through the trade market you have two options: target farming, and crafting. Both of these have their pitfalls but I thought I would dive into both a little bit.

The Target

Before we get started we need a target. Since I already talked about it yesterday, let’s go with the helm for Righteous Fire that I just purchased for 2 Divine Orbs. It is almost impossible to replicate this item exactly, so let’s just narrow our focus to the most important parts the socketed support gems. Essentially what I was looking for the most was access to a “Level 20 Burning Damage” and a “Level 20 Concentrated Effect”. Getting those gives you “Percent Increased Burning Damage” and “Increased Area Damage” respectively as those are coupled with the gems when they roll on an item. For this exercise, we are only going to look at those two stats on an item and it is a strength helmet base aka “pure armor”.

Farming The Item

The first challenge is that in order to see those stats on an item, the helm must be “Elder Influenced” meaning it comes from content that is capable of dropping Elder items. The little black and purple Iron Cross on the sides of the name banner for the item indicates that it is Elder Influenced. Now there are a number of game modes that can randomly drop Elder items… namely Delve, Ritual, Heist, and Legion. There is no real way to target farm Elder Influenced items there, so you effectively have to luck into seeing an elder item… and then further luck into it being a strength helm with the two gems that you need. I have no clue what the odds would look like for that… but it would be exceptionally low… like probably somewhere in the billion-to-one odds sort of low.

Your most likely option for seeing an Elder Helm with the correct stats would be to target Elder Influenced maps, namely the four Elder Guardians.

Organically these maps have a chance of dropping from the end boss of any Tier 14, 15, or 16 Atlas Map. I’ve struggled to find the exact percentage chance, but a bunch of googling this morning indicated that it was somewhere in the realm of a 3% drop chance. Now that is not a 3% chance to get an Elder Map, but a 3% chance to see an influenced map, and that pool includes Elder Guardians, Shaper Guardians, and Atlas Conquerors. Since there are 4 of each of those so a third of the time when you see an influenced map drop… it will be an Elder Influenced map.

These maps are also available through Kirac missions but the chance is fairly low there as well. I had to reroll Kirac missions six times this morning in order to take the above screenshot with an Elder Map available. Additionally, there is the chance of getting an Elder Influenced map that has no boss on it, and in these cases the drop chances for Elder items are awful. It is likely in the entire map you will see a single influenced item. However this type of map can be forced by using an Elder Scarab in the map device, but I would not really count on it improving your odds greatly.

Each time you kill an Elder Guardian it drops an Elder Fragment, and once you killed a full set of Elder Guardians you can place the four different types of map fragments in your map device to open your way to the Absence of Value and Meaning to fight The Elder directly. Everything that drops from this encounter is Elder Influenced so it is likely your best possible way to target farm items. Praetor Crown shown in the picture above for example would be a likely target for seeing those gem stats on it. For reference, the fragments required to fight Elder are:

Folks who grind out The Elder like this tend to “Boss Rush”, or go through the map as quickly as possible and only take out the end boss for a chance of seeing an influenced map. The focus is on clearing the maximum number of bosses that could drop a map, rather than clearing all of the content in any one map. The problem with this however is that it is very hard to “sustain” mapping by doing this, meaning getting enough maps to drop in order to keep chain running maps. So even boss-rushers tend to be interacting with the trade economy and buying a bunch of the same map in bulk from map sellers. I’ve been trying to get to all of the bosses legitimately and yesterday was the first time I managed to get four fragments together and kill The Shaper for example. Going after the Helm this way is going to take a lot of farming and even more luck.

Crafting the Item

The first challenge in front of you when it comes to crafting this helm, is that you need to find an item that already has the Elder Influence on it. If you have access to the trade league this is a pretty simple proposition and for around 1 Chaos Orb you can find something suitable to start with. However, since you are not wanting to use the Trade Economy at all, you are at a minimum going to have to have seen some sort of Elder Influenced item in your journey. That means you need some of the above farming to have occurred. Let’s start with that Praetor Crown that I showed earlier in the drops from The Elder. That is an Armor and Energy Shield base, so not exactly what I wanted but often times in crafting you have to sacrifice perfection for what is actually available. If I were making the perfect item, I would probably be going for Eternal Burgonet as my base and at item level 100.

The most common crafting method for a lot of players is through Essences. These are sort of a hamfisted approach but have benefits over Chaos Orb spamming in that you can guarantee specific stats. These are exceptionally useful for crafting things like the +3 gems bow that I made for my Toxic Rain Pathfinder because, with a Shrieking or Deafening Essence of Dread, you are guaranteed to hit +2 to Bow Gems. However for something extremely custom like two specific gems on a helmet… there really isn’t an essence equivalent. There is a website you should familiarize yourself with if you are going down this path called Craft of Exile which offers a number of tools to Calculate, Simulate, and Emulate crafting an item. No matter which type of essence I started with, it indicated that it would take around 2200 to 2500 crafts in order to land an item with the two gems in question.

So I looked at a few other crafting methods:

  • Essences – 2300 Crafts
  • Chaos Orb Spamming – 1400 Crafts
  • 3 Specific Fossils – 126 Crafts

I’ve talked before about how Delve and more specifically selling Fossils and Resonators is my primary source of income in Path of Exile. Now we are going to explain why they are valuable. Notice that the more ham-fisted “early crafting” options of Essences or Chaos Orb spamming all required you to have thousands of attempts in order to have a decent probability of hitting your item. Fossils on the other hand give you a series of “logic gates” to narrow down the choices of what can possibly roll on an item. I opted to go for the Cost Efficiency option because even if you are not buying the Fossils and Resonators, it will be far easier for farm 126 attempts rather than 21 4 socket Fossil attempts. I maybe see a single 4 Socket Resonator in a night of focused Delve farming. In the entire season so far I have only seen I think 8… but I’ve already sold several hundred 3 Socket Resonators. Let’s examine what each of the fossils does.

  • Dense Fossil – More Likely to Roll Defense mods and Cannot at all roll Life mods
  • Pristine Fossil – More Likely to Roll Life mods and Cannot at all roll Defense mods
  • Scorched Fossil – More Likely to Roll Fire mods but Cannot at all roll Cold mods

So combined this means that the item cannot have Defensive, Life, or Cold mods but will with almost certainty have fire mods. I don’t understand everything about this process but I do know that Burning Damage is absolutely flagged as a fire mod, so my guess is this specific combination targets that one Gem Mod. If you roll a single Gem mod, then you are by nature also more likely to roll two or more Gem Mods.

From there I flipped over into Emulator mode, which allows you to set up a craft and then mimic your spending various currencies on the item and see an equivalent crafting result. This is of course not perfect, but it does a pretty good job of showing you what is within the range of possibility and I have used this before I went down any crafting rabbit holes to try and make sure I was at least going in the right direction. So essentially I set up a craft using the three Fossils suggested and then clicked until I got the desired results. Now like I said before with crafting you oftentimes take availability over perfection, and in that case, by the time I had crafted 4 helms, I landed one with Level 16 Burning Damage and Level 18 Concentrated Effect. Was I ACTUALLY crafting this… I would have held on to that result and called it “good enough”. However, to match the item I bought the other day would have taken me 106 crafting attempts.

That means I would need:

  • 106 – Dense Fossils
  • 106 – Pristine Fossils
  • 106 – Scorched Fossils
  • 106 – Powerful Chaotic Resonators

In a good night of doing Delve, I would probably walk away with 10 of each Fossil and maybe 20 Powerful Chaotic Resonators. More specifically you would need to focus on farming the Magma Fissure biome in Delve for Scorched and Pristine Fossils, and the Fungal Caverns biome for Dense Fossils. If you figured a good rate of 10 of each Fossil a night, it would be around two weeks to farm up enough Fossils for this crafting attempt.

Why Trade Made My Life Better

So this might be an extreme example here because this is a very specific item that can only drop under some very specific circumstances. However, this is sort of the reality of tuning a build. You are going to find yourself needing to solve some very specific problems, and often that requires an item with some pretty exact stats as the solution. The problem here was to be able to invert my build and put Righteous Fire on my helmet without losing a significant amount of clear speed. Essentially I was confronted with no reasonable way of getting this exact item without a copious amount of target farming. It seemed a far better use of my time to convert the resources that I was getting into trade currency, and then buy the item from the market. This allowed me to continue playing how I wanted to play but also have access to the items I wanted.

This has been true across the board for all of the items I have sought out directly. Sure you can make a build function from things dropped on the ground, but you really need to be good at crafting and target farming items in order to really make that “Solo-Self-Found” lifestyle work. Maybe that is part of your enjoyment of the game, and that is awesome. However, for me, I just wanted my builds to feel comfortable, and the easiest way to get there was to engage in the Trade Economy. Every item in my character build has a method that I could go about farming specifically. This far into the league I have learned more or less how to go about each of them. That said… I don’t want to exponentially increase the amount of time it takes to get to a comfortable build. It is ultimately a trade-off that I decided to make, where I am having to deal with the hassle of interacting with other players for ease of access to the specific items I want.

Earlier this league I stumbled across this video, and it largely syncs up with where my feelings are currently. There are a lot of videos out there with strategies about how to best farm a six-linked chest piece but in all cases, they involve grinding away at a specific zone to get a specific set of divination cards. Whereas this video literally talks about the absolute easiest way available… just buying it. At the start of this league, I could not afford a six-link chest for Righteous Fire, but I picked up a five-link for I think 3 Chaos Orbs which was more than enough to get me started and allowed me to gather up enough currency so that when I jumped to a six-link it was a Brass Dome. Making the decision to avoid the Trade Economy entirely… is effectively playing the game on hard mode. I never play games on hard mode when I have the choice not to, and maybe you should evaluate if you should either.

I think this is the conclusion of this little chain of thought experiment posts. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and I will see you again on Sunday when I release this week’s AggroChat episode.

Automatic Screenshots

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I talked about how I wished there was a tool out there that would just take screenshots at key moments for me. I get deeply engaged and in a focused state… and forget to mash the screenshot key. Then there are moments where I am actively fighting and think a screenshot might be cool… but it is inconvenient to break the action and try and capture it. So instead what I posited is something sitting there in the background snapping a screenshot every minute or so, and then later I could review these and cull the dross. I think largely I landed on something that works for me in this fashion and while I hinted at it yesterday, I am going to talk a bit more about it today after having played with it.

I’ve been using an open-source program called ShareX since 2020 to record my screenshots. I like its default structure of naming the files based on the program that is actively in use and then dumping them into monthly directories. This works well for me other than on the first of the next month… when I seem to forget that I will need to start looking in a new directory. It is extremely flexible and even offers the ability to upload screenshots as part of the capture process. I’ve turned all of that off and I largely just use the “Capture Active Window” task hotkey. However, I noticed that I had available to me a “Start Auto Capture Using Last Region” option which will turn on the auto capture dialog to the left and minimize it. In order to turn it off you have to click through to your system tray pop up that window and hit stop. However what it does amazingly well… is just start working and do so seamlessly in the background until I am ready for it to stop working.

I did have to configure some overrides specific to that hotkey, and you can access those by clicking on the gear next to the hotkey that I configured. Namely, I needed to change the file naming structure because the default option was simply not granular enough for my needs naming the files a sequence of letters: A, B, C, etc. The other thing that I needed to do was manually kick off the auto-capture functionality and set it to full screen. The default seemed to be “region capture” which was capturing both of my monitors at the same time which is not useful at all. I removed the %pn from the beginning of the file name because for fullscreen captures it is not able to determine what program it is capturing. I wish there was an option to have it capture the active window, but it works well enough for what it does do.

So last night while I was running maps and done delve, I had it sitting in the background quietly snapping a screenshot every minute. This allowed me to capture some really interesting screenshots of skill effects firing off. For example, I was getting attacked by some sort of lightning attack it seems like and you can see my Toxic Rain falling as well as I was clearing my way through a Crimson Temple map. I never could have captured a moment in time with quite so much clarity as I would have effectively had to stop what I was doing, hit the print screen key, and then go back to attempting combat.

It also captured a good number of completely useless screenshots of me futzing with my inventory. The normal process of me running content is to fill up my inventory, then port to my hideout and dump said inventory before diving back in again. This means that I have a fair number of photos of me showing my inventory in various states of being unloaded.

There were enough cool screenshots though that I think this is going to be how I handle this going forward. For example, it caught a pack in mid-explosion down in delve which looks freaking sweet. Really at the end of the day, this gave me what I really wanted. While it would be cool if it actively triggered specific events going on in the game, I am more than happy to just have random shots at regular intervals.

As far as gaming goes… I spent a good chunk of last night clearing out this massive Vaal City Complex with about a dozen city nodes and a Vaal boss. Then down to the left I found another smaller Abyssal City complex with five nodes and a Lich Boss encounter. I also ran a lot of maps on the Toxic Rain Pathfinder to fuel delve and while doing so I was swapping out at the end of each map to run Crucible with Righteous Fire which is just better at dealing with massive amounts of damage. This provided a truly ridiculous number of Heist missions which I burned through to get the quest items out of my inventory. It legitimately was an almost perfect night of hanging out on the sofa, playing Path of Exile, and snuggling with Josie and Gracie. Josie was curled up beside me and Gracie laying on my legs.

I am legitimately not sure if this auto-screenshot thing is going to be of use to anyone else, but I certainly think it works well for my purposes. If you go down this path I would certainly be interested in hearing about your exploits.

Two Voidstones Down

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Good Morning Friends! It is another morning and another post about assorted Path of Exile nonsense. Last night I managed to get up to the point of fighting the Searing Exarch and the Eater of Worlds, which means I am effectively at the same point I closed out the last league with two void stones collected. I made attempts at Uber Elder but failed miserably in the last league. Effectively to get the next two void stones I will need to beat Uber Elder and then take down Maven with her memory game. I remember limping across the finish line in both Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds last league, but I defeated both without taking any deaths this time around.

I think the key difference is that my defenses are just much stronger this league than they were last. I am sitting at 90% fire resistance which combined with the rest of my defensive layers allowed me to just stand in most of the mechanics during the Searing Exarch. There is a phase in the fight where you have to dodge a bunch of incoming fireballs. I was too busy paying attention to the fight to take a screenshot, but here is one that I found online. In my current defensive posture… I could just stand there and ignore the fireballs entirely letting them hit me and explode without taking anywhere close to fatal damage. I figure if enough of them had hit me directly at the same time it might have knocked me out, but I at least dodged around enough to make sure I was only getting hit by one or two at a time.

The best-laid plans sometimes fail miserably… and for me, it was the fact that I thought I would be able to use the “no life modifiers” passive with my Brass Dome. It turns out that the negative life modifier of losing health from strength… knocks that chest piece out of the running. This means in order to use it… I am just going to lose some regeneration and total life. Here is what my defenses look like after the swap of some gear around losing some overcap fire res, some raw regeneration, and some raw health… but gaining permanent 90% physical damage reduction and crit immunity. In truth it isn’t really something that I notice so long as I am not eating some sort of degeneration effect, and across the board I just feel like my health bar almost never moves.

While making some gear swaps, I decided to get myself a budget pseudo-six-link helm. Traditionally for this play, you want level 20 Burning Damage and Concentrated Effect, but those helms are a bit out of my price range with the worst options sitting around 2 Divine Orbs and the best option available at 50. What I did instead is go for the arguably worse but still valid Less Duration, and I was able to pick up the helm shown above for 5 Chaos Orbs. I had to adjust sockets, chrome, and link it but I did so easily with the bench craft socket recipe. This gear swap takes the damage calculation in POB for my Fire Trap from just under 500 DPS to right at 1 million DPS. This was immediately noticeable and since I only really use Fire Trap during burn phases or while circle-strafing a boss… the spammy nature of less duration doesn’t really bother me.

One of the things I do each league is set aside the first white socketed weapons that I get for the purpose of “muling” gems in my secondary weapon slots. Last league I found a six-socketed white staff which was nice, and this time around I happened upon a pair of 3 socketed one-handed maces. It doesn’t really matter what you use, but I find white sockets handy for swapping up whatever gems I happen to want to level. Yesterday I finished my first project which was leveling 6 Righteous Fire gems to 20… doing the vendor recipe to swap them for 20% quality level 1 gems… and then level them again and corrupt them. I lucked out and managed to get 2 of the level 21 20% quality gems that I was seeking, and now have started “muling” some Fire Trap gems to hopefully do the same. I could in theory just buy the damned things, but this is simple enough and I kill more than enough mobs to level the gems pretty efficiently.

I think the next big project for me is to try and find a Sceptre base with a good Crucible tree… and then attempt to craft myself something with +1 gems and all of the assorted fire stats that I care about. Before then I might be shopping for some slightly better resist rings and attempting to use those to gain some more health and regeneration. Now that I understand the basics of a build, I am finding I enjoy the little project aspect of the game as I try and improve various weaknesses of my build. Right now I am trying to figure out how to deal more damage without giving up the tanky nature that I crave so much.

Bargain Brass Dome

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Good Morning Friends! I always feel bad when I have to miss a day of my normal posting schedule like I did last Friday, but it was needed. I hinted a bit about this on my Gamepad.club account but essentially we had a routinely scheduled downtime go south on Thursday night, which led to some corruption and caused us to have to restore the machine from backup. This meant I was on a call until after 1 am and then up again at 6 am on another call… leaving me completely dead to the world and largely monosyllabic all day long. I am so not used to late nights like that and generally speaking I am heading to bed around 9:30 pm during weeknights and while I occasionally fuck around on my phone until midnight… there is a significant difference between that and being “on a call”.

Apparently, it was an international “set up your backyard” weekend because I saw several folks talking about working on theirs in my social feed. We drug out our patio furniture and set everything up this weekend. We even had lunch out on the patio just off our bedroom on Saturday and it was delightful. For whatever reason… last year we never really spent any time in the backyard. I think in part it was due to us getting a late start in setting things up and also the heat starting super early. We’ve had the two resin rockers for a half dozen years, but they are still extremely comfortable to sit out there and chill in. My wife spent a decent amount of time out reading, but I of course spent most of my free time over the weekend playing Path of Exile, but in theory, I could probably set that up on the Steam Deck and do that from the back patio as well.

As far as progress goes in Path of Exile, I have now completed all of the normal maps and am missing eight unique maps. I am going to try and get these through Kirac missions if I can, but eventually, I will get tired of waiting and just buy them from the market. I have to say this season was my absolute smoothest path through T16 maps. I think in total I took 3 deaths in ALL of my mapping… which is damned impressive given how in previous seasons I have barely limped across this line. I feel like I am finally getting a grasp on how exactly to make a build feel the way that I want it to feel, and I was shocked at how quickly I assembled a workable Righteous Fire build this time. Granted most of that knowledge does not directly translate to any other build, but it is nice to feel like I can solve my own problems finally. In theory, I also feel like I could probably build RF Juggernaut without following a guide at some point in the future given how far I have veered off the template at this point.

This is what I look like currently with my defensive layers in place… namely my armor flask and molten shell active. I finally have all of my flasks configured to use automatically when full, and with me regenerating 3 charges each time I get hit, they are rolling the majority of the time. The thing that I really want to work on is getting my life regeneration higher, so as I now start swapping out some of my gear for better options I am going to prioritize getting that a bit higher. Being wildly over-capped on resistances is in part due to the fact that I am running Purity of Elements. I am continuing to do this only because I have not wanted to solve getting immune to all of the elemental afflictions on their own. That is probably a calculation I will eventually work towards so I can run auras that increase my damage rather than quite as many defensive layers. I am running Defiance Banner right now only because I had the reservation space and my Stone Golem got to the point where it could no longer stay alive for more than a few minutes at a time.

I am about to make some shifts in my gearing that are going to add some significant benefits, like being at 90% physical reduction without buffs active. The Brass Dome has been nonsensically priced in this league given the popularity of RF and other tanky builds. I picked up this 4% max resistance version for 1 Divine and then spent about 150 Chaos Orbs in Jewelers, Chromatic, and Binding Orbs to get it to six links and the right colors. Still, this is a massive bargain as compared to the 10.5 Divine Orbs that an equivalent six-link in the right colors is going for right now. Essentially I am waiting to swap until I have finished level 95 and have another talent point to allocate. Right now if I made the swap I would lose more life regeneration than I am comfortable with until I can afford to allocate the “+15% life if no modifiers on chest” which should give me around 750 more life, and with that make up the difference in regen. At that point, I will swap over to a level 21/20% Righteous Fire instead of the Vaal Righteous Fire that I have been using.

I think once I am rocking my Brass Dome, the next major swap I am going to do is start shopping for a pseudo-six-link helm for Fire Trap. At the moment I am running a helm with “Socketed Gems Deal 30% more Burning Damage” and a shitload of armor. This is fine but I have one banked that I am working on getting chromed to the right colors that have level 20 Burning Damage and level 20 Less Duration, which should be a massive boost to my fire trap damage. The problem is I will need to replace my 30% reservation efficiency with Purity of Elements enchant from Eternal Labyrinth… and we all know how much I hate running that place. So essentially this is going to be one of my pet projects, but in truth, I would take Vitality or Determination reservation enchants as well. Those would probably be the better option given that at some point I hope to stop running Purity of Elements. Regardless it means I am going to have to start getting over my aversion to running the Labyrinth.

All of this… fiddling with numbers and stats and gear… is I think why I enjoy Path of Exile so much. I always loved gearing in MMORPGs and one of my favorite things to do back in the day was create a “hit list” of things that I wanted to farm up for my characters. Path of Exile absolutely scratches that itch for me and as I am getting items… I am often finding things that make me want to roll new characters to take advantage of that good luck. Now that I have a build that I thoroughly love in the Righteous Fire Juggernaut, I have this feeling that I am going to be starting with that for as long as it is not nerfed into the ground. Then from there, I will branch out into other builds like the Toxic Rain Pathfinder I am working on. I figured I would close out the post with this truly nonsense unique map drop from the other day. I specced my Atlas Tree into the node that duplicates map drops… and as a result, I have filled the guild bank up with unique maps to help anyone coming along behind me.

I hope you all have an excellent week, and I am sure I will be bringing even more Path of Exile nonsense.