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Mirage Reveal Stream

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was the launch of World of Warcraft Midnight, and given that I have been talking about WoW in general for several days, it probably seems likely that I would be talking about it this morning. However, you would be wrong, because yesterday was something way more important to me. We got the full reveal stream for Path of Exile 3.28, the Mirage League, and holy crap was it a banger of a league announcement. I highly suggest you watch the 40+ minute content reveal trailer yourself, but this morning, I am going to talk about some of the highlights and lowlights. Much like last league, this is a league where we are filling some of the gaps in lore between Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2. I am fully on board with this, and I feel like this is happening in part because, apparently, Kitten Cat Noodle is how working for GGG as a Narrative Designer. For those not aware of her work, she was essentially the maintainer of the best lore resources that we had for the game, as she went act by act and league mechanic by league mechanic, explaining the lore behind them.

The league mechanic itself is pretty wild. Essentially, you will be able to enter imperfect copies of sections of the current map, and in them, every single mechanic will be duplicated in one form or another. It might not be the exact same strongbox, but there will be a strongbox in the mirage. When entering, you will be asked to choose one of three wishes that will mutate the results of the miraged area and stack with the existing map modifiers that you already have in place. Some of the ones that they showed off were the ability to have it so that all wisdom and portal scrolls dropped as some other form of currency, or that you gain the Souleater buff for the entire time you are in the miraged area. This should lead to some weird and wild juicing strategies, but since I am mostly an alch and go andy… this is just going to mean I have more mechanics on my map, which will be a welcome addition for certain.

The miraged areas can drop a currency that allows you to corrupt your gems to add an additional modifier to them. This is probably the piece of the league that I am the most excited about, and honestly, part of why I am contemplating going Righteous Fire again. I am curious what having a seven-link fire trap and a seven-link righteous fire are going to feel like. That applies to pretty much anything, though. It seems like the extra support is only going to be level one, so you are going to need to make sure you get specific supports instead of just anything viable. For example, with Righteous Fire, I will probably want Efficacy support if at all possible, because that is one of those gems that levels matter less than others. The only thing that concerns me is if the list of available supports is going to be pretty limited based on the combinations that GGG thinks should go together, not necessarily what players actually use together. I am thinking about the POE2 suggestion system, for example, where a lot of the links that you want on your build are not suggested by the UI.

The Atlas is also being entirely reworked. I was a Sentinel League baby, since that was the first time I got through the campaign and saw maps. As a result, I have never known anything other than the current Atlas, and while I know some other things existed before… I have never played with them. Essentially, the Atlas is being divided up into quadrants and then we will be able to apply influence regions within that quadrant. Each influenced map you complete increases the juiciness of the next in the cluster, all of which seems really cool. More importantly, though, they are splitting map tiers from maps on the atlas, meaning you can run any map at any tier at any moment. This feels essentially like a much better version of the POE2 waystone situation, but instead of relying on random maps on a Delve like endless atlas… we get to run whatever maps we want. The voidstones no longer elevate tiers of the map, and instead apply buffs to the map. The voidstones themselves are changing, and it seems like you will be able to get to three pretty easily, with the fourth still being the maven grind. I will likely continue to pay for a carry there because I hate having to do that many witnessed maps when I could be running altars instead.

So let’s talk about some of the bad things… nerfs. Some of my go-to builds have been Storm Brand of Indecision, Penance Brand of Dissipation, and Ice Trap of Hollowness… and all three of those ate some pretty significant nerfs. First off, Elementalist, which is the base that I would have built around, lost its increase to the Golem buff effect, meaning that every single Golem buff is just a little bit weaker now. Next up, Storm Brand and Penance Brand ate some pretty massive top-end nerfs across the board, making them way less viable to play. My most recent Ice Trapper build was a Golem Elementalist and relied on two Foulborn uniques… both of which ate significant nerfs. Double explode Berek’s Respite rings are no longer a thing… and Foulborn Tulborn can no longer roll with +4 cold gem levels… so I am losing a single gem level there. My other go-to build is Righteous Fire, and Chieftain explodes now deals less damage but procs twice as often… which Pohx thinks is going to be a net positive. Foulborn Red Dream, however, is going to provde 25% less life gain per Fire Resistance node… but still it is probably one of the best options we can slot into the tree. The total health levels of a Chieftain, though, are going to be a bit lower as a result.

There are a whole bunch of new Holy Skills going into the game, which I honestly think is probably a beta test for the Paladin class going into Path of Exile 2. I have to admit a lot of these look really interesting, and it is highly likely that I am going to roll some form of a Guardian before the end of this league and dive deep into maybe the Holy Slam skill. Kodra, right now, is eyeing some sort of Holy Damage minions build since one of the new abilities spawns temporary minions that he can then buff, and also run Herald of Purity for more holy minions. Since it ate zero nerfs, I still feel like Poison SRS is going to be strong, but unfortunately, Servant of Arakaali did not go core as I had hoped. Per Ghazzy, Minions apparently were buffed in general, so it might be a really good league for minions. If you can get level 30 Raise Spectres, they now become level 85 instead of level 81. To get there, though, you have to rely on a bunch of probably expensive corrupts.

While I am exceptionally pumped about the league in general… I am torn as to what I want to play. A couple of the things I considered starting ate nerfs, so essentially I will either go Minions or lean back on good old familiar Righteous Fire. I honestly kind of want to see what the Hinekora procs feel like and if they really do make mapping feel better. That means I am more than likely going to roll an RF Chieftain again and then branch out from there and make a Holy Slam Guardian and maybe a Poison Minions character. Sentinel of Radiance got some significant buffs, so Fire Damage Guardian SRS might be the play as well. In theory, once you get your first lab… You will be a monster and be able to face roll the rest of the campaign. That is mighty freaking tempting, especially now that I know how to build a proper block character and make them feel really damned tanky. I am sure I will be indecisive right up until the point that I roll a character late Friday evening… at which point I will probably just make a gut choice and run with something.

Are you excited about 3.28 Mirage League? What are you looking at playing? Drop me a line below.

My Best Minion Build Ever

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Good Morning Folks. We’ve gotten a timetable for the release of 3.28, which is going to drop on March 6th, with the big reveal stream taking place on the 26th of February. It is super fucking rare that I am still playing Path of Exile when the new expansion drops, but for better or worse, the Legacy of Phrecia event has held my attention. BelLovesArakaali might be my favorite minions character ever, and this is the first time I am playing with Spectres or Animate Guardian since they did some major quality of life improvements. What has surprised me about this character is just how much damage it deals… allowing me to focus on more survival. This might be the tankiest minions character I have ever played. Granted, I am still in the process of “breaking into” delve, but I am doing shockingly well down in the mines. It is not like resonators are really worth much of anything, but I still enjoy Delve even if it is not worth tons of currency.

Right now, I am mostly going horizontal at 100ish depth so that I can collect Azurite and start building out the rest of the trappings of Delve. I have reasonable resistance and light area for this level, and am slowly starting to increase the amount of sulphite that I can carry. Once I get a bit more unlocked, I will drop down to the 200ish depth so I can hopefully start getting Primordial Cities and maybe Aul fights. I really should be focusing on bossing with this character because that seems to be its true strength. When all of my minions are focused on the same target, it just sort of melts. I am curious how the Eater of Worlds and Searing Exarch go when I unlock them, because the earlier fights aka Blackstar and Shrek, did not even get to a transition phase. I am going to do my best to get my four voidstones on my own, because I think Maven, Shaper, Elder, and Uber Elder are going to melt.

I really need 21/20 gems for Animate Guardian and Raise Spectre, but both are sitting at stupid prices right now. I am not making a ton of currency, so I can’t really afford either. Which means I probably need to pick up a good six socket staff and level up 3 guardians and 3 spectres at a time, and try to corrupt my own 21/20. I hate leveling gems, but if I start doing that… and also keep playing content, I will either get the divines needed to buy the gem outright or get gems to corrupt, either way. I am bad about not leveling gems in the weapon swap set, and I should really be better about that. While I play in a trade league, I greatly prefer being as self-sufficient as I can possibly be. One thing that I wish they would change in POE1 is make it so you only get 4 quality items to max out quality on a gem socket, or a flask. That honestly is the most painful thing about leveling gems: needing to get the gemcutters’ prisms.

Speaking of corruption projects, I picked up a second Foulborn United in Dream with unholy might on it, and tried corrupting both my current copy and my new copy. One of them managed to hit 10% chance to Gain Onslaught for 4 Seconds on Kill, and this does, in fact, count minion kills. So this allowed me to drop my Onslaught flask and swap over to a Gold Flask for some additional rarity. Onslaught doesn’t really do much of anything for me except for the slight speed boost, but I am still happy to have it. I wish it applied to my minions. I wish there were something akin to Spiritual Aid that made buffs on me apply to the minions. That, however, would likely make everything highly broken, since you can target way more buffs at yourself than you can at your minions easily. I am really hoping that Foulborn Uniques stick around for standard, because they have added a lot of really cool interactions.

I am now trying to figure out where I want to go on the passive tree. I guess the next obvious choice would be to go after any jewel sockets I can make my way to easily enough. I need to redo my bandit choice since I have plenty of resistance, so that will give me one more skill point, and then I have seven left. However, I sincerely doubt I’ll level this character higher than level 95, just because of the sheer slog that it becomes then. Last night I picked up Fearsome Force when I dinged 93, which finishes out the minion crit wheel. I could always pick up various other nodes in the meantime and then respec to pick up jewel sockets as I get more points. In theory, I could spec into my minion damage cluster jewel that I have, but I don’t really have enough points left to do much of anything meaningful with it. Really, I am not sure how much it matters at this point because I feel powerful enough to do any content I would want to do.

I am continuing to slowly chip away at Atlas progression, and I think my goal for Phrecia will be to get 115/115 and 4 Voidstones. If I can get there before the launch of 3.28, I will consider myself really good. I do not really want to burn myself out ahead of the next league launch, but I am also mostly finding everything I am doing really chill. Once I hit maps, the Gauntlet style modifiers seemed to evaporate, and life was fine. Even the enrage mechanic doesn’t seem to come into play that often. I think I am doing t13s right now, but really, there is not a big jump between those and t16s, so I should be able to make it all the way up without much issue. I am still running a set of idols that is producing a ton of maps, so that I will have plenty to run as I slowly unlock my way to the top of the atlas. I have been so out of it lately that, honestly, I spend more time talking to “Erasure” or staring at the middle distance than actually playing POE.

The medical woes have been a real drain on my emotional and mental health. Hopefully, today when I get my MRI, I will start to get some answers. I think once I have a path set, whatever path that ends up being… I will be doing better. I hate the limbo of waiting around for something to happen, all the while it feels like I have a ticking time bomb in my body.

Web Slingers and Life Gain on Block

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Good Morning Folks. While I am not the biggest fan of the Gauntlet mechanics mixed in with Phrecia, I am still playing Path of Exile because I don’t have the mental bandwidth to pick up something else at the moment. My Servant of Arakaali Poison SRS build seems to keep trucking along swimmingly, and thus far feels like maybe one of the sturdiest builds I have played for minions save for maybe my Guardian from several leagues ago. That is one of the things that I love the most about Path of Exile is that you are constantly learning new tricks, and each build is better than the previous build because you have learned something in the process. For example I learned some tech that is new to me that I can see using in the future. Essentially one of the common things that you can do with a Rare Wand for minions builds is automate your desecration and offering via the enchant that auto casts whatever is socketed into your wand. However I am using a Unique weapon which takes away that functionality, but apparently you can do the same thing with a four socket arcanists brand setup. So now I have a little bit of tech in my back pocket for whenever I need it the next time to work around a constraint of a build.

Some big changes since the last time I talked about the build is that I managed to pick up a Covenant and then six linked it with a Black Morrigan. I am still using my Foulborn United in Dream with unholy might on it, which I picked up early in the league for a single chaos orb. Yesterday I bought a decent shield base with shaper influence and then threw reforge chaos harvest crafts at it until I lucked into a roll with recover life on block. This is not an amazing roll but was good enough to start using it, and at some point I will probably pick up another shaper influenced base and try and craft one with at least 5% recovery on it. This is one of the tricks that I learned over the last several leagues is taking the “good enough” craft and then replacing it with another craft later. I find that I enjoy my characters far better if there is always some upgrade that I can be working towards.

I had to respec my tree a bit in order to pick up Eldritch Battery so that I could afford the costs that The Covenant adds to all spell casts. I have enough life regeneration though to make it feel pretty comfortable. There are a lot of versions of this build that are going blood magic, and I did not really want to deal with the reservation nightmare or going low life. Low Life is fine and dandy if you are also going petrified blood, but I did not want to have to mess with that. I would far rather have my tasty 4500 life pool with good regeneration, and some defensive reservations. When I switched to Eldritch Battery though I dropped Clarity and replaced it with Tempest Shield for more spell block, and Flesh and Stone for more damage reduction.

I’ve also picked up my fourth labyrinth finally for Silk Dancer which causes webbed mobs to deal 20% less damage and have 20% less to all resistances. Since pretty much everything that my minions touch has webs via Aspect of the Spider, it means this is largely just a flat 20% damage reduction. I do not know for certain if this stacks since I believe you can apply multiple copies of the spider webs debuff to the same mob. Since I am doing nothing to scale duration though I am not sure how much overlap I am actually getting. I know that it is being applied constantly however because it has a very clear visual tell when a mob has webbing on it. I almost went down the path of summoning more minions, but since I am still running zombies, and am in the process of leveling a spectre and animate guardian gem to bring those online at some point soon, I am probably going to have more than enough minions especially when you throw in the four breach spider things that I get from doing offerings.

Defensively I no longer have a negative amount of Chaos Resistance, which already helps considerably. I am sitting at 73% attack block, and 65% spell block… which combined with a recover life on block shield feels pretty comfy. The thing is by not having to take Glancing Blows to get to this level of block, it means I am not giving up the complete negation aspect of that defensive layer. I need to get Aggressive Bastion on my necklace so that I can start picking up additional endurance charges which will go a long way towards feeling more defensively comfortable. Again these are all tricks that I have learned over the years by playing other builds that relied on block as a defensive layer. I am not sure who first made this comment but essentially defenses in Path of Exile are like slices of swiss cheese, and if you stack up enough of them you negative the impact of the holes in any one particular layer. Some people play glass canon builds and rely on six portals to succeed, but I really prefer to play builds that simply don’t ever die.

I have still not really made a ton of progress but have largely completed almost all of the white tier maps, and am about to start into yellow maps. With everything going on in my life I have not been able to give this the devotion that I normally I would during a league start scenario. However I am still having a lot of fun chipping away at progression. While the Gauntlet aspects still annoy me, I feel like I chose the right league start character for this event, because so far at least it is working beautifully. I might run into some roadblocks as I hit Red Maps, but I am hoping that spectres and animate guardian coming online around that time will help immensely. Right now my biggest challenge is that I just don’t have much in the way of currency. That will come over time from running more maps, but I could really use a few lucky divine drops to keep my progression from stalling out.

Difficulty is a Weird Kink

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Good Morning Folks. Last Thursday was the launch of the Phrecia 2.0 event, and last Saturday during the podcast I finished the campaign and got to maps. I had so many issues early not… not the least of which was the fact that I was using a level 1 Summon Raging Spirits until 34. However there are a lot of annoyances with the current state of the game because we are not only playing Phrecia which comes with alternate classes, but also playing under the Gauntlet ruleset which adds increased difficulty to the game in general. I kind of hate it. What I think most people wanted was a vanilla Phrecia league built on top of Keepers of the Flame, and that would have been pretty amazing. Instead we got Gauntlet plus the permanent mod that causes everything unique to enrage and rip your faces off. Grinding Gear Games has this weird kink about difficulty in games, and I really wish they would leave that shit for the hardcore game modes and leave us poor softcore players out of their player death goonfest. I get the point of the Gauntlet ruleset in that it was supposed to test the mettle of players in a hardcore single death ruleset… but on softcore it just feels annoying as you throw your body against the dumb shit until you eventually brute force your way through it.

I might be just salty because I made an attempt at my 4th labyrinth this morning and an enraged Izaro took me from 4400 health to zero in less than a second, so much so that I have no clue what even hit me. Izaro was not even standing anywhere near me. I have a second Goddess token so I will give another attempt at this over lunch probably, but it still annoys the shit out of me. Phrecia should be about the fun of building around new ascendancies, not some uber deathmatch scenario. It just annoys me that GGG constantly keeps adding their kink into places where it is not wanted. This is not the first time that they have snuck the Gauntlet ruleset into an event league, and it will likely not be the last. On some level I curse Zizaran for suggesting that this nonsense be created. Having Hillock witnessed by The Maven is novel exactly one time, but it overstays its welcome and the thought of grinding up another character to try some other build becomes thoroughly unappealing. Sure I can just keep rezzing my way through fights, but it rapidly feels like tedium.

I will be brutally honest, at this point I have a partially functional character. As of this morning I am wearing pretty much a bunch of gear that I got from the tree, including the six link that I am currently using. I have seven empty sockets, have zero spectres, and no animate guardian. I could improve immediately by doing those things, but I have been able to progress well enough through early maps that I have not felt the drive to do so. I did however get a pretty lucky Gruthkul’s Pelt drop so I could probably cobble together an Animate Guardian set reasonably since that tends to be the most expensive part. When I do this thing I think I am probably going to go with Temp Chains on hit gloves, since I do not believe that Despair on hit exists. I figure Temp Chains + Aspect of Spider is going to make things a lot more cozy overall. I suppose it is well past times to actually finish sorting out my build and gear before I make that second attempt at labyrinth four.

Defensively I am doing pretty okay with overcapped elemental resistances across the board, 4400 life, almost 700 regen, and 76% attack block and 41% spell block. I really want to pick up a life gain on block shield at some point and maybe trying to cap my spell block as well. At some point i will have to deal with the process of capping chaos resistance, but at least for early mapping it is generally fine to be in the negatives here. Pretty much all of my gear right now is complete crap and should be replaced. I am trying to decide if I want to stack Armor and Energy shield, or if I want to try Evasion and Energy Shield and then picking up an extra defensive layer in the form of Spell Suppression. In truth Armor + Energy Shield + Block + Regen + Life Gain on Block should be more than enough to feel comfortable, especially once I gain some additional damage reduction from the fourth ascendancy point. I’ve run around with less defensive layers on minion builds before at least.

So this is the point where I tell you about another critical flaw in my run so far. As I got to the end of the campaign on Saturday it seemed really fucking weird that I had not seen a single map drop. I was level 75 as I went into acts 9 and 10, and normally by this point I would have started seeing the occasional T1 map drop so that by the time I hit maps I had a stash of them to run. This was not the case, and even weirder… as I started running maps… I was not seeing any drop. At first I chalked this up to the Gauntlet ruleset, but had not been seeing anyone else complain about this. Then it dawned on me… this is the Keepers League, and during the tail end of Keepers I modified my Neversink filter to up the strictness of my filter and turn off any map drop that was not t16 or t17. Sure enough I had just been hiding every single map that dropped and gleefully running past them. I had been farming Kirac in order to get early unlocks, and lord knows how much progress I sacrificed by this stupid move.

Suffice to say I am not super far into progression at the moment with only 21 of 115 maps finished. I’ve been having to farm other maps that I have already gotten credit for in the hopes of getting maps that I need to unlock progress. White maps have been perfectly fine for progressing so far, and while I do take the random death here or there to enrages… I am able to them down in six portals without much issue. Mostly I am trying to build up enough currency to be able to buy what I need to improve my build. My next big target is a six link Covenant, and the prices on those are coming down steadily. I’ve contemplated trying to mix in some Delve since resonators tend to sell well enough because someone out there is always looking to craft something. I don’t have anything resembling a cohessive strategy on my idols, so I am slowly trying to work on that as well. I would not mind doing Vaal temple generation again, but I need a bunch of incursion idols to really make that work, and some initial capital to buy the required scarabs. Harbingers is apparently printing currency, but I am sure those idols are already priced out of existence for me.

I got my first Divine Orb from the tree but it is unfortunately not the windfall that I would have hoped. Normally at this point in the league I would try and sell a divine orb in order to get some much needed chaos for other things. However right now it is only 114 chaos to the divine orb, so I am probably better off holding onto this for the moment and then trying to get a few more so I can pick up a linked covenant. Ultimately I just need to spend more time playing and more time grinding, but I have been all over the place lately. So much shit has been going on in my life that I have lacked the will to really push forward here. Today is going to be exceptionally stressful, and tonight is probably going to be sibling time in Destiny Rising, so it might be a few days before I actually grind again. Tomorrow I have a very early doctors appointment so it is unlikely that I will blog tomorrow morning to add to the litany of things going on. My life feels like it has been turned upside down, and I am going to need some things to click into place before I can right it again. Too many things out of my control and game progress is just one of the things that has suffered as a result.

Anyways. I hope you are having a wonderful week. We are thawing out finally and the snow is almost entirely gone. I hope the same is true for you. If I don’t see you tomorrow, I will be back on Thursday.