Settlers of Kalguur

Belghast Bleed Bro

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Good Morning Everyone! Yesterday I was off from work, and wound up starting a character that I had been meaning to start. During the Settlers of Kalguur league, they completely reworked the Gladiator Ascendency along with a number of changes that improved melee. As a result, Bleed Gladiator is really freaking good and I’ve been wanting to create one with maxed block chance and recovery on block for a while. I upgraded the shaper shield I had been using on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut and plan on using that hand-me-down on this character paired for the time being with a maxrolled Jack, The Axe. If I really love the build I might look at picking up a better itemized Rare weapon but for now the Unique slots in nicely and does not require much in the way of thought.

I’m level 51 and just a little bit of the way into Act 6. I’ve already completed my second Lab, which means that I have a 100% chance to inflict bleeding on hit, all of my bleeds are treated as aggravated damage, and when something dies that has been bleeding it causes a nice explosion. While I am a bit on the squishy side for now, at least until I go block-based… I am dealing stupid amounts of damage. Pretty much everything gets one shot. For now, I am largely a Bleed Sunder build following the tree from Zizaran’s league starter video, but at some point, I am going to pivot into something more along the lines of this. Zizaran is really focused on right-side builds and right-side defenses, and I am personally way more comfortable on the left side of the tree and as such I plan on pivoting in that direction. I will likely wear a lot of Armor/Evasion gear but plan on taking Iron Reflexes to convert all of that to Armor. I’ve personally never found Spell Suppression to be that amazing of a defensive layer but I know Ziz loves it and as such his build goes for 100%.

In other news, I have now maxed out my town and have upgraded everything that can be upgraded. This means I will no longer be draining large chunks of gold at once for upgrade purposes. I did another one of my Photoshop jobs showing everything sitting at rank 11. The only thing that is not ranked to 11 is the recombinator but it caps out at a much lower level. The big thing that I need to do still is go shopping for workers and upgrade some of the options I currently have available to me. I also need stupid amounts of ore, and I kind of wish there was some atlas support to increase the amount of ore you get from mapping. I am growing crops at a good rate, but I always feel like I am out of ore.

They released a patch on the 13th and it has been a bit on the controversial side. Namely this specific block:

Reworked how shipping Thaumaturgic Dust affects Shipping Risk and Rewards. Previously, it was multiplying the shipment value and having a disproportionately high impact on risk compared to rewards. Now, it simply adds to Shipment Value and scales the amount of rewards based on the other goods being shipped. This means the way Thaumaturgic Dust affects Shipment Value/Risk now directly correlates with the amount of rewards you will receive, and in almost all cases this is a buff from before.

In my experience, this has been true. Folks who had previously worked out some system other than what I have been doing… it is apparently not true. This seems to negatively impact folks who were shipping massive shipments. For the most part, I have shipped some items that were requested… maybe 1000 of each, then 55 of each other crop, and 8300 Thaumaturgic Dust. So far this seems to bring reasonable rewards and over the last few days, I have pulled four Divine Orbs doing this. It is very much not an every shipment sort of thing, but maybe one in three or one in four shipments. I might simply have hit a lucky streak of “Bel Luck” as my friends call it, but whatever the case it seems to be good.

The thing that I have noticed however is a massive increase in interdictions. During the entirety of this league until the patch, I had only seen a single instance where the Pirate Admiral waylayed my crews. Since the patch, I have fought him five more times. Don’t get me wrong I largely consider this to be a huge net positive because it is a fairly easy fight, and worth a huge chunk of gold. However, there are a lot of folks who are not terribly amused by this. The biggest problem is that if for some reason you disconnect in the middle of one of these interdiction fights, you lose your entire crew. You only get a single portal and when you disconnect it counts the encounter as failing and the fail condition is always that it is 100% wipe of the team that was abducted. This is especially tragic for folks who have a maxed-out crew of map runners. For me… none of my workers are terribly min-maxed so it would suck but not that much.

A lot of my focus right now is knocking out the low-hanging fruit when it comes to League Challenges. At the moment I am sitting at 21 of 40, and there are a number that would not be terribly awful to complete. Just mapping will eventually finish Overwhelming Opposition and Peddler’s Produce requires me to either craft a Grasping Mail or a Loreweave… both of which I have a tab full of rings for and it is only a matter of time before I complete one or the other. I am still missing a Doryani’s Machinarium map, but when one drops I can finish off Remarkable Realms. Sublime Starlight is doable but requires me to craft a bunch of enchants that are largely going to be throwaways, the hardest being Power Runes which are currently going for almost 4 Divine Orbs each. The cheapest enchants take at least three of them as well as a bunch of other runes. So for shipping purposes, I am probably going to focus on running things back and forth between Kalguurian ports for the chance at getting runes.

All told I am still having a lot of fun with the league, but I definitely feel like I am in the mindset of trying to wrap things up and get as far as I can before I lose steam. I want to push up the Gladiator today and see how fun of a build it ends up being. I am looking forward to the shift over to Lacerate of Haemoragging, which honestly I should chuck into a spare gear slot to start leveling now.

Friends Save the Weekend

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Good Morning Folks! Sunday was amazing and helped rejuvenate my batteries quite a bit. Last week was fucking awful… full stop. Saturday was also sort of awful because I woke up and went to go get donuts like I always do… and my truck would not start. I was able to get it jumped but after a bunch of run around trying to get the battery and alternator tested, I wound up dropping it off at the shop next to our neighborhood and walking home. Sunday though… was phenomenal. Because of the generally shit week that I had, I missed out on running the raid fights on Tuesday night, and because Saturday was awful too… it got postponed to Sunday. This means that I got to hang out with Ace, Ash, and Thalen and have a generally amazing time doing all four raid fights… all of which were one-shots… though some of them were a bit on the rough side, and then unlock two expert dungeons for Thalen afterward.

We need to do this thing that we did way more often, and maybe Sunday is a day that works for everyone. I was also able to complete all of the left side pieces of 710 normal raid gear, which means I am mostly after a few more pieces of jewelry. This is the first time since Heavensward that I have ever been current with my gear. That should tell you something about how good Dawntrail has been that it has managed to keep my interest and despite largely spending all of my time in Path of Exile, I am still returning at least once or twice a week to hang out with friends in Eorzea. I would love to do the Savage version of the raid fights, but I am not sure that is in the cards for me… since I am not sure I want to do them through Party Finder.

In other news, I watched the Borderlands Movie… in part to see if the wide panning of it by both fans and folks who know nothing about the series was warranted. It was. This is maybe the worst video game adaptation I have ever seen… and retroactively makes the Uwe Boll slop from the 2000s look better. Everything looks like Borderlands but feels way more like one of those high-budget live-action commercials that video games seem to love to film… and less like a cohesive movie experience. I feel like this was probably a film assembled in the editing room because there is a lot of voice-over exposition. In fact the movie opens with a solid ten to fifteen-minute plot vomit of extraneous details that don’t actually matter to the core story of “vault hunters want to find the vault”.

Worse than all of that is the fact that everyone save for Jack Black seems to be phoning in their performance. No one seems like they want to be in this film or care at all about their character or what is going on. Tiny Tina is fine, and originally I thought we were just seeing the traditional child actor thing at work… but also this same actress played a perfectly cromulent young Ahsoka Tano…. so I am just guessing it was a bad script and bad direction. Is it a movie that is worth raging about and making the lives of those who created it hell? Absolutely not… and it is never okay to do that. However, you should probably not go out of your way to see this. The abomination that was the Monster Hunter movie was better than this. It was kind of cool to see Kevin Hart in a role where he was not the constant bumbling fool that was the brunt of everyone’s jokes however. Maybe he should do that more often.

Over in Path of Exile land I beat my first T17, and have now unlocked my sixth map device socket. It turns out that T17s are in fact totally reasonable… if you just so happen to spend a bunch of chaos orbs on rerolling them until you land on non-toxic modifiers. Like I can’t say that they are actually fun. I’ve done two now successfully and I did not enjoy fighting either boss at the end of them. I could see maybe running the mapping portion for fun, and skipping the boss… but then again… maybe it is just better to sell them. I can easily get 70 Chaos for a single t17 map… and there is no way in hell I am going to get 70 Chaos worth of loot or enjoyment out of running them myself. I still think T17s are just a “not for me” mechanic because I am all about zooming around and blowing shit up, and for the moment they get in the way of me doing that. I am happy I was able to get my map device slot without buying a carry, but also I doubt I will be doing any more of these.

I spent a good chunk of my available Divines on an Oriath’s End flask. This will be the second league in a row that I have used this item and while it isn’t necessarily revolutionary it does make up for not running maven boots anymore. Basically, I am already all about exploding things with Hinekora, Death’s Fury and this just adds an additional layer of explosions when I charge into packs. Usually, if a map boss spawns in a room with a lot of adds I can charge in and one-shot the boss with all of the subsequent explosions that are triggered. It is a bit of an extravagant expense given I had to pay ten divine orbs for it… but it also feels good when it triggers an entire room full of explosions. Last league was really the first league I invested a ton of effort into my Righteous Fire build after whatever it took to clear t16s and I gotta say this flask was probably my favorite addition. For as lauded as Mageblood is, it is actually sort of a boring option.

There is a challenge that requires you to have cleared 400 Depth in Delve, and for some reason on Saturday afternoon, I decided I was going to do this thing. At that point, I was sitting around 150ish depth and I thought it would be a quick jaunt down to 400. I was wrong. I am currently at around 300ish depth and it has taken me several days and several loads worth of Sulphite to get there. Now that I have set forth on this path… I guess I am going to do it. I’ve never been to 400 depth before and I might go all the way down to 500 while I am doing this thing. Basically, I am in the mode of trying to wrap up some challenges so I can get my totem pole because ultimately that has become my major goal for each league. I doubt I will finish as many challenges as I did last league, but it will be good to at least get another doodad for my hideout.

Tomorrow my schedule is going to be fried. I am not even sure I will get a blog post out, or if I do… it will be tomorrow evening. I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. Mine started out like shit, but it is amazing how much hanging out with some friends can help to improve things. I’m hoping that we can make the whole Sunday raid day thing happen more often.

Elemental Hit Widowhail

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Good Morning Folks. Last night I got my baby Elemental Hit of the Spectrum Deadeye up to a high enough level to try out my Widowhail nonsense. For the uninitiated this is a unique bow that has no real damage stats of its own… but instead inherits whatever stats you have on your quiver and then multiplies them based on a value that ranges from 150% to 250%. During the campaign on my RF Chieftain, I wound up getting a 240% version to drop… which started my gears turning. Now if you look on POE.Ninja this is a bow mostly used for damage over time bow builds as you can get a lot of stats that are very difficult to get on a bow otherwise. Almost no one appears to be using this for hit-based attacks, but given you can get a quiver with all three elemental damage types… and Elemental Hit of the Spectrum only cares about elemental damage… I thought maybe it might work.

So far it seems to be pretty freaking great, but I am also still in the campaign. I went from it taking a few hits to take most mobs down to essentially one-shotting everything but tankier rares. I spent 5000 harvest juice to flip the quality to increasing attack speed instead of physical damage… given that again we do not care about physical damage at all. Right now I am using Behemoth Brand and it feels great while firing 6 arrows at a time, which fork and chain and ricochet before returning back to me… which ends up shotgunning down most things. Given that I am dealing three types of damage with every hit… I have 100% uptime on Trinity Support and I am freezing, igniting, and shocking pretty much everything in my path. I have a slightly better-suited quiver to upgrade to when I hit 67 and I am curious to see what sort of damage boost I get then.

I am also not really following a meaningful build guide at this point. I’ve played several different versions of Lighting Arrow/Elemental Hit and know more or less what the shape of the build looks like. I was going to try and do some unnatural instinct shenanigans but unfortunately, right now those are going for like 8 Divines. Thread of Hope is pretty cheap right now, so I might try my hand at working one of those into the build. I am contemplating being super lazy and just running Purity of Elements so I do not have to care at all about ailments. Basically, right now I am super glass cannon, and as I get to where I can start equipping some of the well-rolled shipping gear I have set aside for the build, I am hoping I can have a decent amount of armor and evasion. I’ve also contemplated throwing on a tiny bit of ward as a defensive layer when evasion fails.

I have zero clue if this is going to work, but I am interested in the ride at least. If it sucks, it won’t be the first character that I have leveled only to fall flat when I hit maps. I think in theory it might be good, but I am just not sure it will be able to compete with a 1000 elemental DPS bow for example. I am not sure it will require a level of min-maxing on the quiver that I am just not prepared to engage with. For the moment, it feels really damned good in Act 7. I am sure I will be able to blast through the rest of the acts and I will probably do the second lab tonight and see how more deadeye nonsense helps things out. I believe it should add two more arrows to the mix so that will be firing eight at a time. That is a heck of a lot more damage output. If nothing else this should be fun for farming low-tier maps and setting up something like essences.

If this actually ends up working… I will of course drop a POB.

A Week of Recession League

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Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I did my obligatory “First Day of Blaugust” post and today I am back to my usual nonsense. As of today… specifically about seven hours from now… it will have been one full week of playing Settlers of Kalguur League in Path of Exile. During that time I have made a ton of progress and quite possibly made it further in a shorter period of time than I have ever in the past. The League mechanic slowed me down a bit and it took me roughly 20 hours of play to get through the campaign into maps. It has taken me an additional 42 hours to reach the point where I feel like I am fully ready for endgame shenanigans. Path of Exile players hit these games freaking hard… and I have put in time before work, at lunch, and many hours after work to get where I am now.

At this point, I have completed all sixteen tiers of normal maps and a number of the unique maps leaving ten more of those to go. Two will be rather expensive as they always are because they unlock some meta crafts… but my mappers brought back Poorjoy’s overnight so that is another one I should be able to knock out quickly. I also have my four voidstones and as a result, most of the maps that are dropping normally and not through specific league mechanics will be dropping at the t16 level meaning I will have lots of stuff to farm with soon. I have all but four of my favorite map slots and currently, they are all set to Glacier which is probably my favorite map of the pool that is available this league.

It is wild that I have as strong of a build as I have, given how poor I feel this league. I think across the board everyone is feeling this because this league is the recession following the insane boom leagues of Affliction and Necropolis. Affliction had nonsense levels of juicing coming from the Wildwood Wisps and Necropolis had all manner of ways to force scarabs to spit out hundreds upon hundreds of uniques per map. This league dialed back a lot of the ground loot strategies and the death of magic find as we knew it previously… where folks focused on scaling the quantity of drops, is pretty much dead. Big group juicing parties are declaring group play dead, but ironically in spite of all of this… I am probably having more fun than I have in a long while. Sure I can’t buy bargain basement headhunters for 4 divines… and squires for a handful of chaos… but the league mechanic is actually producing legitimately useful gear.

I’ve recently shifted up my build to go into the block-based Righteous Fire as Pohx has done this league, and I gotta say it feels really great. Crafters are understanding this is the direction everyone is going to go and as a result have wildly inflated the prices of these shields. The stat that you care bout the most is that 5% life gain on block and to get a shield with decent armor and decent life you are looking at 3 divines or more. What I did instead was pick up a shaper-influenced base for 40 chaos and then do reforge life harvest crafting until I got something that looked halfway decent. At some point, I want to upgrade this but for now, it works. Similarly, I was able to snag a pseudo-link elder helm for 1.5 divines… which was a bit of a steal considering these are mostly going for 3 divines or higher. Maybe when I make a bit more currency I can upgrade this but for now, it works and was a huge boost in damage.

The Light of Meaning is a prismatic jewel that is technically new to this league, but it largely replaces the craftable version from Necropolis league called The Perandus Pact. It has all of the same rolls that you could craft and largely works in the same manner. I picked up the +6% increased fire damage version again and worked it into my build in the same location as the last league. Where it is placed currently it is hitting 18 nodes for an additional 108% increased Fire Damage. According to POB, it is adding roughly 50k damage to my build. However when I drop the Spiritual Aid nodes for a cluster jewel that will take it down to only hitting 16 nodes and 96% additional Fire Damage but probably still worth it. I picked up a cheap cluster jewel base and am trying to roll a large cluster with Burning Bright, Primatic Heart, and Widespread Destruction… since I can’t really afford to buy it outright. For now, I am using reforge fire Harvest crafting, but if I go back into delve and get some more fossils and resonators I might just do single socket scorched fossils and yolo it. Once I hit the large I will start trying to craft my mediums.

Admittedly part of the reason why I am so poor at the moment is that I have not been Delving. I am full up on sulphite and ready to go… but have been focusing on finishing out my Atlas and gathering resources for my town. Delve is a great place to get gold… but has zero way of getting any of the mined ore to feed the smelters and shipments. Now that I am through all of the baseline maps and have my voidstones, I am probably going to shift up my focus and dive down into the dark. I’ve only made it to depth 115 and would like to get down to around 200 before I start farming horizontally hunting for cities. I also need the bulk maps that come from Delve to feed my mappers. So this weekend is probably going to be me returning to the virtuous cycle of map until full on delve juice and then burn through it in the mines. This should help me considerably in bubblegum currency and also having resonators both to craft with and bulk sell on the currency exchange. I got a quick shot of 300 chaos yesterday when I sold all of my resonators off in about 15 minutes through Faustus and the automated trades.

Speaking of mappers… I thought I would share what they look like right now. I’ve not been heavily focused on them that much and have not poured a ton of resources into leveling them up. Right now I have a single party with a level 6, level 5, and two level 4 mappers. This allows me to burn through white maps pretty reliably without risking losing them. That does not mean that they 100% complete every map but they do bring back a lot of random stuff, most of the gear I feed into the disenchanter. Last night before going to bed I made sure I had two shipments going and twelve maps in the hopper, and this represents what the mappers brought back. It isn’t phenomenal loot but it also isn’t nothing. Since I was never going to bulk sell my maps, this allowed me to turn a resource that was rotting in my bank into a non-zero quantity of usable items. There is an achievement for running t14 or higher maps with the mappers so at some point I will upgrade to where I can do that.

Similarly, I have been keeping shipments going pretty much as much as I can swing. Essentially I have one boat that I have dedicated to the longer route that takes about 2 hours per run, and another boat that takes the shorter runs at around 45 minutes each. Last night before going to bed I set up two shipments and the left side of the above image shows the returns from each. Again it is not spectacular loot but produces a lot of bubblegum currency that is still useful. There is a Kingsmarch Wiki page that maths out all of the details around sending items, what sorts of rewards they bring, and what the various breakpoints are. Right now I am filling whatever I can towards the items that are being asked for from the port as I am trying to level the hidden faction system for every destination. Then I will add 55 of each other crop, and 8104 Thaumaturgic Dust because it acts as a multiplier to the entire load and that specific number is the 200% more breakpoint. 55 for dust is the 100% more breakpoint, and I am largely just using it as a number for crops. Sending multiple types of crops seems to increase the total yield in currency… so I am just winging it and it seems to mostly make each load worth the time and gold expenditure.

I think my focus over the next few days is going to be gold acquisition. There are a lot of upgrades that I want to make for my town that are going to require forty thousand gold or so each. If I am delving more… I am generating less ore that requires workers to work… and when they go idle they stop draining my coffers. So I am probably going to shut down shipping and mapping and just focus on building up a nest egg for the next phase of development. I have a quad tab full of rare items that I can feed my disenchanter to at least keep it running during this interim. I’ve been running a lot of maps with my Ritual/Einhar/Beyond atlas in the hopes of maybe just maybe either lucking into a Black Morrigan or an Omen of Connections because I am still using a five-link chest piece. I have a second Cloak of Flame that is better rolled that dropped while mapping, that I have been using to try and link and then eventually swap.

All in all, I am having a blast in Recession League, in spite of what the hardcore juicers are saying about it. I’ve made a ton of progress in a single week and now my focus is on subtly improving my build. I really need to swap out my weapon for something a bit better with at least +1 to all fire gems on it. I have a fractured base that I am crafting into a new pair of gloves and am just now trying to get elemental proliferation implicit on them before wearing them. I have a side project of trying to level a bunch of Purity of Fire gems so that I can hopefully get a level 21/20% quality gem out of the batch. I guess I feel like I have so many projects that I want to devote time to, and that is keeping me in the hype cycle of enjoyment. Eventually, that will slow down, but for me personally, this is one of the best leagues I have ever played in.