Sanctum

Ghosts of Leagues Past

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I got to thinking about my past experience with Path of Exile and the assorted leagues that I played in and then the ones that I actually took seriously. Largely this was spawned by the comfortable spot that I have arrived at in this league having two extremely strong characters, which led me down a path of exploring some of my past mistakes with this game. There is something about the complexity of Path of Exile that makes you forget entirely what it was like to play the game when you were first starting out. As a result, there are a lot of build makers that assume everyone will be engaging with the trade league and that low investment is anything under 10 Divine Orbs. Granted I am starting to reach that point myself in my journey as this league I have spent probably at least 10 Divines gearing out two characters.

The overwhelming success that I have had with Toxic Rain Pathfinder, has led me to start questioning some things. Namely, whether or not the state of the league is just exceptionally good, Toxic Rain is simply a great build, or I am just much better at the game now than in the past. It could be all of the three but the Toxic Rain build specifically has led me down this path because mechanically it is not that mechanically different from the Explosive Arrow Champion build that I tried back in Sentinel League and did not really enjoy. I’ve seriously played Path of Exile for the last four leagues and for both Sentinel and Kalandra, I had some significant issues with the game, which has now led me to objectively evaluate the state of those characters when I left them. Of note, I do not really play Standard, so any character from a past league is effectively in exactly the same condition I stopped playing when the league ended.

Before that, we are going to talk a little bit about the early murky time spent playing Path of Exile with no clue what was going on. One of the things I never really could figure out is why exactly I did not play Path of Exile before 2016. Sure the passive tree was daunting, but I figured that there had to be another reason. Yesterday I watched the original trailer and then immediately understood why I turned my nose up at this game. The prominent placement of Player Vs Player combat in the game’s features would have been enough for me to chuck the game in the bin. So it wasn’t really until April of 2016 that I gave the game a chance, and only then because I was really coming into a grove of playing Diablo III which made me want to branch out and try other prominent ARPGs. I’ve always loved this style of game but prior to Diablo III, the MMORPG had always been my primary game type, and like so many people I got trapped in the orbit of World of Warcraft for over a decade.

Sadly I have none of my original characters because, during the Sanctum league, I decided to purge them to free up their names. However, none of them were even vaguely close to playable or had anything resembling a “build”. I technically started playing during the Perandus League and I know Breach was active at the same time as I remember doing one of those and dying horribly to it. They used to do this weird cycle of challenge leagues where two events were happening at the same time. I did not manage to make it terribly far on my first attempt and I think I ended up stopping somewhere in Act II. It was not until 2018 and the “Don’t You Guys Have Phones” debacle that I really revisited the game, and at that point, it was during the Delve League. Basically, it was at that point that I started seriously diving into other ARPGs because I felt like Diablo IV was not actually going to happen. From that point forward I sort of picked at the game, never really making serious traction. I remember specifically playing during the Heist League, Expedition League, and Scourge League before finally taking the advice of following a build guide for Sentinel League.

For Sentinel League, I decided to follow a build guide from Zizaran as he was and still is probably one of the most “noob-friendly” guide creators. That said… there is still a huge gulf between his understanding of the game and what he takes for common knowledge and what a brand-new player understands about the game. So I legitimately thought I was playing along as expected and when I hit maps… I ground to a halt and struggled significantly. I think I made it to yellow maps before giving up on the league and trying another character for a while… getting both to 73 and thinking I had “made it to the end game”. However rough it was, it was enough to get this game into my bloodstream and make me want to take a much more serious look at it with the Lake of Kalandra league, when most of AggroChat tried the game out.

However, after four leagues of playing Path of Exile, I look at this character and cringe. Firstly notice that I didn’t have anything higher than a four-link on any of my gear. Like today I wouldn’t even begin mapping without at least a five-link… and out of sheer lack of understanding I was throwing myself into the gristmill with not having anything better than a four-link. Additionally, there was a massive problem with my resists… not a single one of them was at the natural level cap of 75% and my Chaos Resistance was negative 52%. Then defensively I am sort of all over the place with relatively low evasion, armor, and no life recovery to speak of. No wonder I struggled with this build. Yesterday I grabbed a 3.21 equivalent to Explosive Arrow Ballista and tried mapping… and shockingly I did okay. I had to ride my health potion a bit more than I would have liked, but there is a certain layer of muscle memory that has built up now where I am actively dodging attacks before I even register that I am doing it.

After moving away from Explosive Arrow I had dinked around with what started out as a Righteous Fire Inquisitor and then got stuck playing Wintertide Brand because I enjoyed that gameplay so much. So with Lake of Kalandra, I wanted to play something Brand based and it seemed like Stormbrand was going to be a good option. So I followed a guide from Velyna and again… something got lost in translation. At this point when I look back on this character, I am shocked that I managed to make it all of the way through unlocking the Atlas. I remember a number of the red maps being exceptionally painful to complete but just assumed that Stormbrand was a far weaker build than the comfy gameplay that I would eventually find with Righteous Fire Juggernaut in the Forbidden Sanctum League.

Once again however looking back at this character makes me cringe in ways that I find hard to explain fully. I thought I knew what I was doing during the Kalandra League, and I very clearly did not. First of all, once again I was not even close to sitting at the natural resistance cap of 75% in each elemental resistance and still had a negative Chaos Resistance. For Crucible League this was “day one” stuff, or at least day one from when I reached the end of the Acts. Then again I didn’t have anything resembling a plan when it came to defenses. I had too little Armor to be an armor build, too little Energy Shield to be an Energy Shield build… and a completely insignificant amount of Evasion and Life Recovery. Once again I thought I was doing what the guide told me to do, but clearly missing something in translation.

Last night I pulled out the most recent copy of this build and reset my passive tree. I was able to do several maps relatively comfortably and was amazed at just how good this did at the clearing. It even did a reasonable job at killing bosses, but once again struggled to stay alive and it was only through constantly dodging attacks that I reached anything resembling comfortable gameplay. If I got hit… I had to ride the flask. I also noticed that NONE of these characters have anything resembling a flask strategy… but I guess that was a lesson I did not fully learn until playing the Juggernaut, last league.

One of the problems with Path of Exile that really plagues new players is the extreme level of complexity. For a while, I legitimately thought maybe that Zizaran and Velyna were just bad guide creators, but looking back I realize that no… they did a relatively good job but just simply were missing steps that they assumed everyone understood. They are creating guides for folks who are already engaged with Path of Exile and understand the concepts. However, no one really understands Path of Exile until they have lived with it for a while and failed miserably enough to fully understand why they were failing. Knowing what I know today, I could go back and fix my Sentinel and Kalandra characters and could have had a much better time in both Leagues had I understood what I do now.

However I have only arrived at that knowledge through almost a thousand hours of gameplay, and multiple hundreds of hours of regularly consuming content about the game. Almost every single day I learn something new about Path of Exile, and there are still game mechanics that I have not really engaged with at all. The cliff of knowledge is so brutal to climb that it makes sense that after ascending to a plateau… these creators forget what the climb felt like because they know they still have another sheer face to ascend in front of them. For example… Subtractem has an hour-and-a-half-long guide on the Betrayal League mechanic… and it only covers “the basics”. Grasping anything more than the most basic understanding of many of the league mechanics requires a similar dive into the abyss of Path of Exile knowledge.

So we arrive at where I am today. I deeply love the game and wish more people did. However, I also know what a brutal climb it is to get to at least where I am today, knowing that I am but a “babe in the woods” before some of the folks who have been actively playing the game since launch. The problem with Path of Exile is a problem that I have seen in so many MMORPGs as well, in that the level of complexity required to really be efficient and good at the game… requires so much of the player and as a result most folks never really reach that point. I could ramble on about the madness of what group construction looks like in Guild Wars 2 for example, and how nothing in the game would ever lead you to a point of understanding it. This is also why I appreciate games like Last Epoch so much because you don’t need to have played 300 hours of the game to be able to grasp the concepts, and there is an in-game guide that legitimately tells you everything you really need to know. Knowing that however… doesn’t really make me love Path of Exile any less for its beautiful madness and complexity.

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.

The Abyss Stares Back

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Good Morning Friends! I am going to apologize ahead of time, but you are going to get another post completely full of Path of Exile nonsense. We are continuing my descent into madness… literally as I keep going deeper into Delve game mode systems. Last night I discovered Abyssal Cities and I am now on the lookout for as many of these as I can find. Since I missed the launch of the Delve league some four years ago, it floors me just how complete this game mode really is. While you do have to keep running maps periodically to build up a stockpile of Voltaxic Suphite to power your crawler friend and light the way, other than that you can pretty much get anything you could in almost any other game mode down in the darkness. I’ve gotten roughly a dozen Divine Vessels and a couple of dozen Offering to the Goddess that just drop randomly from stuff down in the depths rather than having to hope and pray you to see any of them above ground.

From what I understand there are three kinds of cities that can be found underground. The first is the Vaal ruins that I had been exploring previously and these supposedly start showing up somewhere around a depth of 30. I found my first Vaal city in the 70s, so your mileage may vary of course. Abyssal cities that I found last night and that are highlighted on my Subterranean Chart above in a yellowish outline start showing up in the low 100s. Primeval Ruins are the third kind that I have not seen yet, and those appear around 170 depth. Each City type can have a boss node, and I’ve yet to encounter any of those… and ultimately that is really what I have been searching for. I have a tunnel system around 70-80 depth that has produced five or six Vaal Cities, and last night I opted to dive down deeper and start expanding out around 100ish and almost immediately stumbled onto this first Abyssal City.

Because I got distracted by doing other things… I did not get nearly as much time underground. However, in my limited time, I managed to pull out all of those resonators sitting in my bank. Pending those resonators sell at least as quickly as my previous batches and for the same prices that is roughly 110 chaos worth of items that I pulled out, not counting a few nice pieces of gear that I am selling individually. I tend to price my items just high enough that I am not going to get instant sales which would interrupt the flow of my evening. Instead, I expect to throw items up cheaper when I am more in the mood to field trade requests. If someone wants to pay my inflated prices though, I am willing to stop what I am doing… waste a portal, and go make the trade. I will never be an auction house oligarch but I am making more than enough currency to keep fielding my nonsense plans.

Speaking of currency, I saw my first raw divine orb drop in the depths. This is only the second Divine Orb that I have seen in this league. I’ve seen an Exalted Orb or two in the dark below which keeps building onto my theory that almost anything can drop off node encounters. So far I’ve yet to see anything that is influenced by Elder, Eater, or Exarch so I am guessing that those items are probably limited to bossing or bossing adjacent activities. I have however seen a number of Synthesized and Fractured items below as well as more than a fair number of delve-specific explicit modifiers on items. I only know this because I continue to keep using Awakened POE Trade to price-check anything that looks like it might hold value, which tells me how good the rolls are on a given item and will call out league-specific mechanics.

I am absolutely certain that from this point forward… I want to go into Delve earlier than I did in this league. I am having a freaking ball with my time down there and getting enough currency to be able to fund upgrades to my builds. This is far from a high-yield currency strategy, but it seems reliable and also something that I already enjoy doing. The wide variety of items that I can see is honestly what keeps pushing me forward. I love seeing things that I have yet to see drop, and that happens way more often in Path of Exile than it does in a game like Diablo III. By midseason in D3 I have seen literally everything but Primal Ancient versions of things, and it all sort of blurs into this giant haze of orange text. Sure most of everything that drops is ignorable, but in every round, there is at least one thing that is worth hovering over to check the roll.

The last big thing that I did yesterday was spent some time respeccing my Atlas tree. I was already leaning into Delve a bit, but I removed “Wandering Path” and took all of the notable nodes associated with Niko as well. Basically, in Path of Exile the “trees” are comprised of small nodes often referred to as travel nodes, and big nodes which are referred to as “notables”. Wandering Path is a specific strategy for the Atlas tree which the effectiveness of all of your small travel nodes, but makes it so you get zero benefits from any of the notable nodes. This is great for when you are finishing your Atlas because every map you run will shower you with new maps to fuel your further exploration. However I am getting more than enough “map sustain” through Delve, and I no longer really need it from mapping as such I opted to focus on Strongboxes, Smuggler’s Caches, Ritual Altars, and Delve. I might whittle further into the atlas tree to try and pick back up Essences but for now, I am happy enough.

So essentially I am maining Righteous Fire and focused with it on progression in Delve. I have no clue what I am doing with Summon Raging Spirits in the least, or what I can really do to that build other than shift it to poison. I just am not sure if I care enough about it to fix the problems I am currently having with it. I am getting that old familiar itch of wanting to start something else to play with. I really want to see what the Seismic Trap life is all about, so I might be going down that path at some point soon. I am still periodically playing “BelginnersLuck” as I attempt to get Hillock to drop a unique and am to the point where if I am fast enough I can kill him before he can do the regeneration phase. I am so completely consumed with Path of Exile and all of its deep systems. I have no clue when I will climb back out of this chasm I have dug for myself, but for the moment I am happy.

Enter the Atlas

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Good Morning Friends! As of last night, I am officially in maps. So far they are honestly going pretty smoothly with a few moments of press potion panic but otherwise manageable. Essentially yesterday I finished up the rest of Act Nine and all of Act Ten, then did my third Labyrinth, and finally killed Kitava for the second time. The transition into early maps for Righteous Fire is far smoother than any build I have played so far. I now understand why Pohx has so many devotees because this build is awesome for just sorta kicking back and doing content. Granted I am only in white maps so far, and who knows what the transition into yellows is going to look like.

So far I have only swapped out a single piece of gear, but my resists seem to be solid. I am shocked that my gear is as seemingly good still as was. This is the kooky thing about Path of Exile is that gear level seems to not matter even one little bit but instead how lucky you were on the random rolls that it came with. Obviously, the higher the gear the better the possible rolls that can be, but I am still using some items that show equipable levels in the teens. At this point, I am probably going to start shopping for something that I can use as a six-link chest piece so that I can migrate over to using all of the appropriate gems for righteous fire. I think everything else should be relatively correct. I had to move frostblink over to lifetap finally so that I could start running skitterbots.

I had some exceptional luck in my last few acts of the game, and due to over-leveling as heavily as I did… started seeing tier-one maps dropping left and right. I now have fourteen T1, one T2, three T3, and one T4 ready to run. In total, I have unlocked six points on the Atlas Passive tree and have several more that I can run that I have not gotten the bonus from. For the moment I am going hard into Betrayal and Expedition since I seem to be getting some cool things from there. Now that I finally understand Betrayal a bit more, I am way more willing to engage with it. Every map mechanic just seems to work better with RF, and I even managed to wreck Blight on one of the maps. I am looking forward to trying Breach since that seemed to be my personal nemesis before. Speaking of Nemesis… ArchNemesis still mostly sucks and I encountered my first proper mob in the middle of a map yesterday. It took forever but was mostly doable.

One of my goals in this league is to spend more time in other game modes. I noticed that I was almost capped on the Delve currency so I finished out my evening burning through some of that and shocking no one… Righteous Fire is also good at this game mode. I started at a rather conservative level, but I expect in the coming days to be cranking this up a bit as I upgrade the various sliders for Delve. All told I am having a lot of freaking fun and it feels like RF opens a lot more doors than the builds I had been previously playing. I am now however looking forward to bossing because this video of Pohx against Maven seems like nonsense. I found out that he is running a “quenching” flask to turn off his Righteous Fire during the degeneration phases but that also means that he can do it only so many times before falling over. This is probably the downside of this build, but considering most of what I enjoy is mapping, heist, and delve… I am probably okay with this. I could always afford to build a bossing character from the currency I am likely to gain doing that content.

I am having a heck of a lot of fun right now, and my current goal is to improve my gear and knock out more of the Atlas Passive tree. Coming from having completed this last league, it feels a little meager but it is progress nonetheless. I guess I will spend some time today and create another spreadsheet like I had last time to track my map progress. Games like this… really suit me. It gives me a bunch of goals that I can chip away at solo and feel like I am making forward momentum. At some point, I need to dust off Guild Wars 2 as well because it similarly has a bunch of solo-friendly micro goals that I can make progress on.

Hopefully, your week is going pretty swimmingly. Mine is largely tolerable but at some point, I am going to have to actually care about Christmas… because we have done next to nothing planning-wise.