Good Morning Folks. I am still feeling under the weather, but last night I continued plugging away at my Storm Brand of Indecision Surfcaster in the Legacy of Phrecia Event. There are a few things… firstly this is one of the more squishy builds that I have played. Essentially I have no life and no mana… all of which is being used for reservation auras. The only defenses that I have are roughly 3000 Energy Shield, 20k Evasion, and Ghost Shroud. I can soak the stray hit here or there, but if anything actually gets in contact with me and starts beating away… I am going to drop quickly. Last night I got to the point where I felt comfortable swapping to a Melding of the Flesh setup, and now have 82% Elemental Resistance to all resists. Ultimately my goal is to stack enough +2% max lightning resistance jewels in order to get up to 90% all eventually.
I made a bunch of updates to the build, namely swapping out unique helm and gloves for rares with a large amount of Evasion and Energy shield on them. Essentially having high evasion is a requirement for making Ghost Shroud not feel awful, and the more Energy Shield I can get… the bigger the buffer. I also swapped over to Nebulis which gives me 15% Increased Cold Damage and 20% Increased Lightning Damage per 1% of resist over 75%. So this alone is giving me 105% Increased Cold Damage and 140% Increased Lightning Damage. At some point I want to try and find one with 20/20 on the boosts but for now this one works well enough. I also swapped over to the Headhunter I already had, mostly for the addition buffs which helps make mapping a little bit more smooth. However at some point I will probably swap to a well rolled Crystal Belt to add a bit more defense.
In my adventures yesterday, I noticed a bit of potential unintended interaction. In order to stack more Damage and Critical Chance, I have been leaning heavily into Large Cluster Jewels and Medium Cluster Jewels. I had a bunch of these sitting in my bank and used Harvest elemental re-rolls in order to craft some with reasonable stats. There are a bunch of these that I mostly just settled for anything that looked interesting. One of these abilities was something called Thunderstruck which gives me +20% Lightning Damage, 30% increased Critical Strike Chance, and then the text “Your Critical Strikes Knock Back Shocked Enemies”. This is not a chance to knock back… but if you crit they get knocked back 100% of the time. I did not really expect there to be a significant interaction and largely just went with this notable because it gave a lot of crit and some damage.
However when I started playing with it… I noticed some nonsense happening. I recorded a clip of me fighting a map boss so that you can see what is happening. Essentially Storm Brand of Indecision is constantly attaching and detaching from the target… something that is happening essentially every 0.16 seconds. How this actually plays in a map is that effectively it pushes a mob away from you… rapidly… in an almost comical manner. This reminds me a lot of the nonsense that players were doing with Knock Back and Totems during Trials of the Ancestors to effectively stunlock the mobs and keep them from doing anything. This does not prevent mobs from casting… but it does seem to confuse the shit out of them while they are being rapidly pushed in one direction.
I am also using freeze proliferation and cold exposure on my gloves… which combined with Herald of Ice produces big pops. If you are going to use Heralds… you gotta use the Automaton MTX to make big pretty splashes of course. I am in a weird space with this character because I like it a ton… but also it is way the hell more squishy than any character I normally play. I am not sure how far I will push this character. If I can get it to 90% all res, and maybe swap out a few other pieces for more defenses… it might get to a comfortable place. However it will never be as comfortable as something like my Righteous Fire Scavenger or my history of Chieftains will ever be. Evasion/ES just is never going to feel quite as good as Armor+Block+Max Res+tons of Regeneration.
All in all though, I am pretty happy with Storm Brand of Indecision Surfcaster. It was a lot of fun to pull together and will only get better as I keep poking at it. This is ultimately going to be the last character I probably play of Phrecia because I will obviously be at least giving the Path of Exile II Dawn of the Hunt league a shot. I am likely going to be playing something on the Smith of Kitava first. I just don’t really know what abilities I am going to go with. Maybe whatever that fire spear attack was that was shown in the presentation. Probably pairing a spear with Chernobog’s Pillar shield and then going all in on buffing fire damage as best I can.
Good Morning Folks. I am fighting some generic respiratory crud and as such feeling pretty freaking awful. However here I am sharing my nonsense with you all. Yesterday I finished the campaign on my Storm Brand of Indecision character built on top of the Surfcaster ascendancy. I legitimately have no real idea where I am going with this character, nor is there a major consensus of builds over on POE.Ninja… so I am kind of winging it for the moment. I am currently playing pretty much a pure energy shield build and then using Zealot’s Oath to turn my life regeneration into Energy Shield regeneration. I have no clue how well this is going to work and for how long… but for the moment it feels shockingly comfortable for being low effective health. I already have a phenomenal character that I have taken pretty much as far as it can go… so any joy I get out of this character is just a placeholder until Last Epoch Season 2 drops.
The main draw of the Surfcaster is Stormy Seas. This ascendancy keystone converts all of your Lightning Damage to Cold Damage and makes it so that your Cold Damage can Shock, allowing you to effectively double dip both Cold and Lightning Damage while Chilling, Freezing, and Shocking with it. This gives me the ability to use a really fast ability like Storm Brand of Indecision and make it feels as comfy and safe as Wintertide Brand. Glacial Wave reduces incoming hit damage and buffs your damage, Sea Legs gives you a way of scaling Crit and Evasion, and then Ghosts of the Deep is just a generically good buff. All combined you end up with a package that just sort of works for the Storm Brand play style remarkably well. I know this is also being played more commonly with Penance Brand of Dissipation, but I prefer the pacing of Storm Brand a bit more.
What is wild about the current state of my build is that I am almost exclusively using unique items. Essentially the only gear slots that I am using rare items in are my amulet and both rings… all of which are items that I had laying around in my stash and or recycled from earlier versions of my RF build. The only uniques that are really purposeful at the moment are Shavronne’s Wrappings so that Chaos damage does not go straight through my Energy Shield, and Ralakesh’s Impatience for permanent charges. Everything else I just sort of made an audible on while I was leveling… and then largely just stuck with it and it somehow has kept working in maps. Immortal Flesh was pulled in pretty late into the process when I swapped to Zealot’s Oath, just to make the regeneration a bit more comfortable. At some point I plan on probably replacing all of this with Rare items but I am just sort of rolling the dice to see how long it works.
I can pretty comfortably do yellow maps without much issue, and while I successfully completed a red map… it was a bit rough at my current level. Swapping out some of my uniques for rare gear with more survival on them would probably help. Essentially I need to swap out everything that I do not absolutely need for high evasion and energy shield items… because right now I am running around with the effective hit point pool of 2000, whereas I am way more used to running around in the 5000-6000 level with my Righteous Fire characters. Essentially the next few levels are going to be building out another Lightning Cluster with dual Brand Clusters to see where that gets my damage output. If you are curious you can see the current state of my build with this POB.
There was another Dev Interview yesterday with Jonathan and Mark of Grinding Gear Games hosted by Darth Microtransaction and Ghazzy TV. It is two hours long, but if you are just wanting a quick summary Raxxanterax released a 20 minute video covering pretty much all of the important bits. I am still not entirely certain that the game that I want to be playing, is the game that they are envisioning in their heads. There are certain aspects of Path of Exile that they seem to have considered failures, and are trying to right those perceived wrongs… but how many things can you change while still capturing the same magic. The current version of Path of Exile II isn’t really quite right… so we will see if 0.2.0 brings things closer or pushes them further away. Like it is hard to quantify what I personally want, but going back and playing the Legacy of Phrecia event has made me realize how much magic was lost with POE2.
It is very clear that Legacy of Phrecia was intended as a quick filler content league, but ironically they have accidentally crafted one of the most enjoyable POE experiences. I still feel like they need to keep expanding Phrecia until 3.26 launches, but it seems like GGG would prefer that we all swap to playing Path of Exile II instead. That said I will be checking out the Dawn of the Hunt launch on Friday, just not sure how much I will actually be playing and for how long. Supposedly we are going to see patch notes potentially on Wednesday, and I feel like I should get a good idea from those how enjoyable I am going to find the first POE2 league. If things went too far in the wrong direction, and I can tell that from the patch notes… I might just make a hard skip until Last Epoch in a few weeks.
Good Morning Folks! This weekend I was all over the place when it came to gaming. First up I finished up leveling to 100, which completed the Gear Grinding Goals achievement. Hitting level 100 on a character is a weird place because you suddenly no longer care about taking deaths. Up until this point even when attempting to progress, there was always a subtle tension there in the background because losing experience feels bad in your late 90s. Getting to level 95 is trivial, and honestly it does not feel too terribly bad until level 98. However that level 98-100 stretch is pure tedium with you either needing a relatively immortal build, or a lot of luck to keep from taking a stray death. Weirdly Delve ends up being one of the safer players to level because there is a sweet spot in the 150-200 depth where the incoming damage is not too bad, but the experience gained is pretty stable. Dipping back into maps to fill back up your sulphite however… that is where the danger arrives.
I also completed the achievement for crafting using one of every Settlers of Kalguur rune allowing me to knock out 34 of 40 and matching what I got to last league. This means I have another tall totem pole in my hideout to go along with all of my stubby ones. Essentially I have been earning a Totem every league since Sanctum. I could probably push forward with trying to knock out 40 of 40… but I just have not had that level of drive. It also involves doing a lot of bossing content that I do not necessarily enjoy. I could in theory start running my mappers more often and if they get abducted there might be a chance of knocking out one of those objectives and getting achievement 35 for the league. I am pretty happy with where I am, and honestly… I was happy with 32 of 40 until I came back for the Phrecia event and thrived in it.
With no fear of death I did a few t17 maps, and a few other sundry things that I had been avoiding due to the danger of taking an experience loss. However I feel like I am probably “done” with my Righteous Fire Scavenger. Sure there are a lot of things I could tweak on it… and swap out various gear pieces for even better versions. However I feel like I am pretty happy with where I got and don’t have ton of drive to push it much further. That is the irony with dinging level 100… is that I also lose a lot of my drive to keep going. I am not enough of an “Economy Andy” to really appreciate trading for trades sake. For me it has always a means to an end, that I want to trade items to get currency to be able to do more things. However once I lose the push of levels… I just sort of lose my drive to keep playing that character.
Instead I spent a chunk of my weekend playing other games. On Saturday I dove into Atomfall, which is a Bethesda game by a company other than Bethesda. We saw this with Avowed where they created a perfectly cromulent Elder Scrolls game set in a different universe. However that made a lot of since given that it was from Obsidian, a company with a long history of working with Bethesda on games like Fallout New Vegas. Atomfall however comes from Rebellion games, the folks behind the Zombie Army and Sniper Elite series… and they do a shockingly good job of replicating the feel of a Fallout game. The setup is considerably different… instead of a Nuclear war decimating the planet, you are inside an exclusion zone where things are going haywire. However the trappings are much the same… roaming gangs of very British outlaws and spore infected Ghoul like Ferals both fill the roles of the normal antagonists of a Fallout title.
There are a lot of things that work differently. For example it is not nearly as “If you can see it, you can go there” as the Bethesda titles… but I also don’t necessarily think that is a bad thing. Everything that exists that you can travel to… exists for a reason, and as a result there are way fewer barren stretches with no reason for existing. There are similar crafting systems, but items break down into raw resources as soon as you loot them, rather than having to dump through the hoops of needing to salvage them as a separate step. Effectively… both Avowed and now Atomfall feel like Bethesda games that have been evolved past some of the busywork that some systems designer thought was really cool. The spirit of the game exists and it is close enough for me to effectively lump them into the broader Bethesda-like genre.
Sunday on a totally different whim I started playing Hero Siege, which feels very much like a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 more than anything else. It is doing some of the same things that Chronicon does, but feels much more polished. I started playing a Viking and have gone all in on this big earthquake smash thingy. So far it seems to be doing a good job of stunning enemies and also whitting down large groups because with a twohander I can hit everything at once. Large packs of purely ranged mobs though seem to be the bane of my existence, and as a result I have had to learn to dance around a bit in order to deal with them. I want to try this with a controller, because it seems like it would be the ideal game for SteamDeck. All in all though I am pretty pleased with what I have played of it.
However by the time Sunday evening rolled around… my brain worms had convinced me that rolling a brand new character in the Legacy of Phrecia event was a good idea. There is something about the fleeting nature of this event and having entirely new acendancy classes that we may never see again. As such I decided to roll a Shadow which I then turned into a Surfcaster and am going all in on Storm Brand of Indecision. For now I am largely patterning my build off this character that is sitting at level 99. Given that all of the brand nodes are nowhere near the Shadow starting position… most of my talents have just travelled across the tree to unlock the meat of what I needed. Now that I have all of those brand nodes and a few elemental nodes… I am now going back and fleshing out the build with what I pathed through previously. I have a six link Shavronne’s Wrapping sitting in my bank wanting on my 60s when I can actually equip it. The build I am loosely following uses Melding of the Flesh to achieve 90% elemental resistance to all, which is something I have never played with before and am interested in seeing it work.
Good Morning Folks! While I still have quite a few things that I want to tick off before I am completed with it, I feel like the 3.22 Trials of the Ancestor League is starting to wind down a bit. You can see this in the community as the various streamers detach from the game and start playing other things. I know personally I plan on giving Diablo IV Season 2 a shot tomorrow, and seeing how I feel about that game. As far as objectives go, I have 4 pips of experience to go from level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut which will be a first for me in a season. Apart from that, I want to knock out at least one more objective so I can get a sad little totem pole for my third league in a row. So I know that I will still be playing quite a bit, but I am finding my desire to build new builds waning.
As a result, I thought I would spend this morning reviewing my builds for this league and talking a bit about them. This is mostly going to be me posting links to videos that I have recorded throughout the current league, and talking about my feelings regarding the build and how successful it was. This grading will be governed by my own personal feelings about how best to approach Path of Exile. I like tanky builds and I am learning that even when I play a successful build… if it feels too squishy it ruins the experience for me.
Vaal Lightning Arrow Raider
Toward the end of last league I did a brief test to see how it would feel to league start Lightning Arrow, and honestly, the leveling process and early maps felt extremely solid. This prompted me to commit to league starting this build for Trail of the Ancestors and for the most part it went smoothly… until I hit a wall around red maps. Knowing what I know now… this is the point where I should converted my tree over to the critical strike variant, but I did not… and floundered greatly. This built felt amazing when it came to clearing maps… and then struggled significantly with map and atlas bosses. I thought that Raider would give me some additional defensive layers that would make it feel better… but it just was not enough.
The positive of the build is that it allowed me to farm up enough currency to pay for my swap over to Righteous Fire. The negative is… I could have easily just league-started Righteous Fire. This build would essentially color my league experience because I spent a lot of time frustrated that this did not feel good to me. I am not a map blaster and I do not love playing builds that feel like they have paper-thin defensive layers. For those who are curious, this is what the POB looked like at the time of recording this video.
Personal Rating: C Tier
Righteous Fire Juggernaut
So after the feelings of failure regarding Lightning Arrow Raider, I rolled right back to the old familiar and comfortable in the form of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut. With this build it is a cakewalk to finish your atlas and get your first two voidstones, and it also allowed me to set up shop in delve and start producing raw materials in bulk. I think I have come to the realization that I am going to want an RF Jugg in every league given how much I have bonded with the playstyle, and given that it enables me to spend a large amount of time down in Delve. I did not record a video on this build until fairly late in the league and after I spent some currency on getting a Hinekora, Death’s Fury setup with Forbidden Flesh and Flame jewels. Once I ding 100 hopefully this week… I am going to shift over to trying to knock out all of the bosses with this character. I get into this pattern of not wanting to risk a death when I am gaining experience given that it slows down so much after level 95.
You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.
Personal Rating: S Tier Plus
Summon Raging Spirits Guardian
The Trial of the Ancestors League saw significant reworks of two Acendancies, the Templar Guardian and the Marauder Chieftain. In a desire to play with these, I decided to roll a Summon Raging Spirits build as I have often done in past leagues, but play it instead with the new Guardian Ascendancy. This build… is a miraculous powerhouse. This entirely rests upon the shoulders of the fact that the Guardian unique minions are so damned strong. From the very first Labyrinth, you end up getting something with the relative power of a Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and it can essentially carry you from that point forward. There is a reason why Guardian is the most popular Ascendancy in Ruthless League, making up over 14% of the player base and even higher if you get into the hardcore modes.
What I was not expecting necessarily is how good this felt mapping, because essentially you are using Convocation to keep dragging your pet RF Juggernaut as you shield charge through the map. Summon Raging Spirits always feels great when it comes to killing bosses, but the Sentinel of Radiance pet really makes the map clear in general feel so good. If this does not get nerfed… it is a strong contender for starting “Bel League” because after playing this in the Toucan Treasure Hunt, it can be functional with zero gear.
You can find my POB over on the POE.Ninja page for this character.
Personal Rating: S Tier
Storm Brand Inquisitor
It took me a few leagues before I reached a point where I truly understood how to build a character in this game. During Kalandra League I tried Storm Brand Inquisitor, and apparently thought that things like capping your resistances were a suggestion rather than a requirement. Last league, I gave the Explosive Arrow Champion a bit of a redemption arc, as I revisited the character I attempted to play in the Sentinel League and made it feel amazing. So this league I really wanted to do the same for Storm Brand Inquisitor to see what that build could do if I actually built it correctly. The end result… was pretty disappointing. Can it do a T16? Technically yes. Does it feel good doing a T16? Absolutely not.
There is admittedly part of me that wants to poke this with a stick until I figure out how to make it work. I might revisit it in future leagues and try and build it out to be a bit more viable. That said… doing what I did with Explosive Arrow and taking the same build, but just fixing my resistances… did not solve the problems with this build. The disturbing thing about it is that I actually did spend quite a bit on the build to get it to the sorry state that it is in currently. I’m sure given enough time I could get it feeling better, but I am just not sure it would ever feel the way I want it to feel.
For those curious you can see the POB at the time I recorded the above video.
Personal Rating: D Tier
Fire Shield Crush Chieftain
Since there were two ascendancies that changed with this league, and Guardian was so freaking amazing… I decided that I wanted to create something with a Chieftain. The obvious choice would have been Righteous Fire, but I did not really want to recreate that and eventually, I just stole the best node with forbidden flame/flesh for my main RF build. Another build that I have been wanting to play for some time is something built around Shield Crush, so I crudely banged these two build concepts together until something emerged. The end result was an armor-stacking fire damage conversion build that focused on igniting things with Shield Crush and waiting for them to explode with Hinekora, Death’s Fury.
In truth… it is a pretty fun build hampered a bit by the fact that I refused to spend the currency to take it to the next level. The best armor stackers tend to be built around the Duelist class because they can double dip in both Armor and then also convert Evasion over to armor which produces bigger numbers. Stacking armor directly relates to additional damage. The other problem is that the ideal chest piece for this build starts around 20 Divine and has the ability “Armour is increased by Overcapped Fire Resistance”. As it stands my armor is over 100k with my flasks up, but with a chest like that, I could probably double that. All in all, it is a fun build, with a good map clear… but completely falls apart when it comes to killing bosses. If I were going to change anything, I would find a way to work in Vaal Breach as it would give me waves of fodder which would then hopefully proc Death’s Fury explosions helping me take down bosses faster.
During the Toucan Treasure Hunt private league, I opted to level up a SRS Guardian, just because that seemed so strong without needing to rely on any gear. There was a period while leveling where I was messing around with the Absolution skill, which while technically a minion ability is mostly just a big lightning strike that spawns minions that do similar lightning strikes. This prompted me to want to give the build a shot so I rolled a Witch and leveled it with Vaal Absolution eventually turning it into a Necromancer. First comment… I played a Necro because after playing two Guardians… I was reluctant to roll another one. That said… I feel like Absolution would be so much stronger if played with a Guardian mostly for the free elemental buffs and the chonky tanky fiery boi. That said the Necromancer version is quite a bit of fun and felt extremely comfortable clearing maps. If I were willing to put the same level of investment in this build that I had in other builds in this league, then I am sure it would be quite solid.
That said… the playstyle of standing still while you cast Absolution with Spell Echo left something to be desired. I didn’t really have any problems with taking Deaths while I was casting, but it did feel a little awkward and went afoul of my “always stay moving” sensibilities. I am not sure if I would ever play this again, but I certainly found it interesting.
Sometimes I get something stuck in my head, and this league… it was a general sense of frustration over my league starter not feeling amazing. As the league was beginning to wind down I decided to go big instead of going home… and poured roughly 40 Divine Orbs into converting my build into the Magic Find variant that so many players were having good luck with this league. The end result has been an interesting experience. Deadeye is in fact the best choice for this sort of build with the Ranger class… but it is way the hell squishier than I am comfortable playing. Sure I can do pretty much all of the content and stack as many eldritch altars as I want… but if I fail to kill something before it looks at me… I fall over rather spectacularly.
Magic Find is also way more subtle than I would have expected. While I managed to make back a ton of currency largely in the form of Blue Altars that handed out Divine Orbs like candy… I didn’t really manage to find any big-ticket items apart from enough copies of The Fortunate to turn in for a couple of Divine Orbs. While I have run many Crimson Temples… I have yet to see a single Apothecary and I’ve not pulled four Headhunters or Magebloods like the magic find YouTubers would lead you to believe. Is it worth running Magic Find with this sort of build? That is highly likely because I made back the 40 Divines Spent on the build in roughly a week. Is playing a squishy glass cannon character doing it for me? Not really.
You can find the POB over on the POE.Ninja Page for this character.
Personal Rating: A Tier
Vaal Lightning Arrow Champion
You would think that the whole magic find exercise would finally push Lightning Arrow out of my brain, but you would also be wrong. When I started my Raider version of this character, I thought long and hard about going with Champion. Champion is the “tanky” class for building a bow character, and I really loved my Explosive Arrow Champion last league. As the AggroChat crew is talking more and more about “Bel League” I decided I wanted to test a theory… that theory being that Champion would have made a much more drift-compatible version of Lightning Arrow than anything I had tried to date. So last week in a day and a half I leveled a new Champion character with Vaal Lightning Arrow and by Friday evening I had it geared and mapping.
This is a great character. It has all of the tankyness of a Champion with all of the killing power of the traditional Lightning Arrow builds. It suffers from the same challenge taking down bosses, but the sturdy nature of the build gives you plenty of time to dance around while waiting on your Artillery Ballista to burn the boss. Over the weekend I mapped with basically nothing but this character, and there were several times when I managed to run enough T16 maps to completely refill my sulphite without taking a single death. That in itself is huge, and I’m already sitting at level 90 and fully expect to be able to smoothly ascend past that level as though I were playing one of my Righteous Fire Juggernaut characters. I will absolutely build another one of these in “Bel League” pending there are no major nerfs to either Lightning Arrow or the Champion Class itself. I’ve also played this with Tornado Shot and Ice Shot… and while both are strong I just don’t enjoy them anywhere near as much.
As I said at the start of this post, I think I am probably done rolling new characters for the rest of this league. I have a solid stable of characters and at least three of them that I enjoy greatly. I want to finish out level 100 on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, and I want to knock out a few more achievements toward the league challenges. I’m currently specced heavily into Ritual on my Atlas, so it should not take terribly long to reroll 25 more favors or get 4 more Blood-Filled Vessels. I could just buy the latter from the market, but I never really like doing that. I know starting tomorrow I want to spend some time playing Diablo IV Season 2 and giving it a fair shake. After that, I still want to pop into New World and see what the expansion is all about, and mostly level the new Flail weapon. Combined, these will likely take me all the way until December when the next league starts and we properly begin the “Bel League” private league thing. If there is a lull in the middle somewhere I might pick back up Baldur’s Gate 3 or Starfield… or potentially even start a new Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough to see all of the changes.
This morning however I wanted to give a proper rundown of my thoughts on all of the builds of the league. If I end up doing anything further, I might steal the Magic Find gear from my Deadeye and see if I can make something that still feels sturdy with the Champion. Anyways! I hope this week is great for you all. If you have made it this far in the post, I thank you for reading because I am certain there are folks out there who get very very sick of my nonsense.
