summon raging spirits

Exploding Your Friends

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Good Morning Friends! Last night was the culmination of a “bad ideas” project that I have been working on for a bit. I leveled a Necromancer up through Kitava and geared it out yesterday, then tested the sort of content that it could do. You might remember that I played a Fire-based Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer some last league and enjoyed it quite a bit. This league as my third character I decided to go down that path again but take a slight detour into “Minion Instability” land. For those unfamiliar with that keystone, it makes it so that Minions explode when reduced to low life and deal 33% of their maximum life as fire damage to surrounding enemies. So essentially I am using Summon Raging Spirits to create bombs, which then nuke my enemies with a baptism in flames when they get low on life.

This entire build started when I stumbled onto a helmet in my travels. I was looking for a better version of my pseudo-six-link helm that I use for Righteous Fire when I came across this monstrosity for 5 Chaos. I snapped it up because my brain immediately went to using it for some sort of Explosive SRS build. While I would have liked it to have higher than a level 16 Minion damage gem, the important bit for the explosive goodness is that level 20 Minion Life. Essentially this makes it so my Summon Raging Spirits will have the following setup:

  • Summon Raging Spirits
    • Burning Damage
    • Concentrated Effect
    • Minion Life
    • Minion Damage
    • Fire Penetration
    • Combustion
    • Lifetap
    • +2% Critical Strike Chance

Generally speaking for a Necromancer build I would have looked to get a good Skin of the Lords with a useful keystone on it. However this league Skin of the Lords starts at 5 Divine Orbs for one with a crap keystone, and the only one available with Eldritch Battery is 59 Divine Orbs. This caused me to pivot and just lean into a bunch of gear with Armor and Energy shield. Other than the fancy shield that I just added last night, in total all of my gear could be purchased for a single Divine Orb, and you would probably still have some change left over. The pseudo-eight-link helm for Summon Raging Spirits allowed me to shift my chest to effectively become 3 four-links summoning different alternative summons.

  • Zombies / Spectres / Stone Golem
    • Minion Damage
    • Minion Life
    • Feeding Frenzy

This leads us to bad ideas item number two for this setup. Tavukai can effectively replace Infernal Army as a way of shuffling my angry skulls off this mortal coil as it deals them 20% of their maximum life as Chaos Damage per second. That gives my SRS a maximum duration of 3 seconds which is just about long enough to fly into range of the enemies and explode. When I was shopping for a Tavukai I noticed a number of them were corrupted with various abilities, and one had Golem Commander which gives me 40% increased buff from my Stone Golem and lets me summon two of them. So all told that gives me a maximum load of the following minions:

  • 7 Zombies
  • 2 Stone Golems
  • 2 Spectres
  • 8 Raging Spirits (largely limited by how fast I can actually click the button)

I geared my character out before taking down Kitava in Act 10, and pretty much instant-phased that fight. Then I went over to the Uber Labyrinth and while I did not get the achievement for insta-gibbing the boss I did burn through each of the Aspirant Trial phases super fast. From there I opted to test my mettle against a T1, T6, T11, T15, and finally a chain of T16 maps. I also decided to try a couple of fully juiced metamorphs in the laboratory as well, and for the most part other than a couple of dumb deaths to lockboxes I breezed through the content. I would say this character is extremely comfortable to run content on in its current state and could probably be scaled to do a lot more damage once all of my gems are actually level 20 and I have the rest of my passive tree points. This is what my build looks like as of today.

There are some glaring problems that I could fix given the time and desire to do so. Namely, I would like to get my block chance up much higher so that it properly acts as the defensive layer that it should. Additionally, there is the problem that I am not elemental ailment immune, and unfortunately, I don’t have enough mana reservation for the easy button way of fixing that with Purity of Elements. I am overcapped on my resistances but I am not really sure how I could fix that without regearing entirely to remove some of those resists, but it just means that I don’t have other stats on my gear to replace them. All said though I am pretty happy with this “bad ideas” character or at least happy enough for my third viable character of the league. The biggest immediate issue is just my low life pool of only 3500 health.

I have to be honest… this was more of a thought experiment than an actual character that I intended to do much with. Right now Toxic Rain and Righteous Fire are just stronger in their current state, and could be even stronger if I spent more currency on upgrading them. I mostly just wanted to see what this would do, and now that I have… my curiosity is satiated. My side project interest turns to a discussion I had with Ashgar yesterday about maybe trying to build a Wintertide Brand character, but I am not sure if that will actually happen. I would like to get a Scion up if for no reason other than getting the achievement for clearing Act IV with that class. Other than that I would like to finish getting my void stones this season, but that either requires a lot of farming T14 or higher maps looking for guardian map drops… or just buying the fragments I need to summon the fights.

This has easily been my best league so far, but it is a bit sad given that so few have dropped off the game. However, I’ve come to realize that the grind of Path of Exile is enough to keep me happy for the time being.

Hunting Aul

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Friends… I thought this would be the week that I started to distance myself from Path of Exile. Between adventures in Grim Dawn and starting to fiddle around with Lord of the Rings Online, I expected to dial back my gameplay. Yet last night I was back on my bullshit happily plugging away at the same stuff I have been plugging away at for a while now. I guess the heart wants what the heart wants, and my heart is seemingly not quite done with Path of Exile. My main strategy continues to be running maps on my Fire Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… largely because I don’t care about her level… and then once I have filled up my Sulphite going back down into delve and hunting for the last rare thing that I have not seen… Aul. I think maybe once I finally fight the Crystal King this will lose some of its stickiness for me but I really want to see that encounter at least once.

I wish there was a good gauge numerically on how far to the left or right of the main column I have gone, similar to a depth reading. Essentially I seem to be moving around in a band between 150 and 170 in depth and am six or seven screens away from the central column at this point. I found a very tasty Abyssal City last night as well as a nearby Primeval Ruins but sadly no boss nodes in either. I think I have fought the Vaal boss three times, and the Abyssal boss twice… but have yet to see Aul even though I am poking around in the range where it is reported to find those nodes. I need to dive a bit deeper, but you are sorta at the mercy of the map when it comes to how you can travel. As I dive down I keep hitting dead ends and having to backtrack my way up to higher depths.

One thing I have to say about Delve City farming is that you end up with a truly staggering number of maps. You can see for some tiers I am sitting on over 100 maps and a large chunk of these are coming from the cartographer’s chests that I am pretty regularly finding one or more of in each city node. I currently have Primordial Blocks as my favorite map, not necessarily because I love the layout, but because I am trying to get the hideout to spawn in it so I can collect that for my account. For whatever reason, Primordial Blocks seem to have a higher-than-average spawn rate of Metamorph as well, and as such, I can use it to collect parts. Granted this could just be me running this map over and over and my Atlas tree triggering, but even before I specced into Metamorph I seemed to get that mechanic here more often than not.

Speaking of Metamorph, it continues to pay off nicely. I quietly stockpile body parts and then run through several metamorph spawns at once whenever I get a moment. If I stack currency nodes in every body part, it seems to often produce Divine and Exalted Orbs. This isn’t exactly going to win any divines per hour races, but it is a nice residual impact of me doing the things that I was already going to do in order to fuel my delve addiction. At some point, I am going to need to spend some time selling off undesirable body parts in an attempt to get the ones I am missing because a few of the slots in my metamorph tab are filling up rapidly. That is the most annoying thing about this mechanic is that the body parts are heavily skewed toward a few specific slots. For me, at least the most common part is Heart and Brain and the least common are the Lungs and Eyes. You can sell 3 body parts for a random part, so I need to cull Hearts and Brains in an attempt to fill the other slots as I am completely out of eyes at the moment.

Lastly here is a bonus image of sleepy cats. I wasn’t sure where else to fit this one in, and I know it is awful quality. Essentially the other night my wife snapped a quick photo in the dark because she knew I would not believe her. This is Josie snuggling with Gracie, and this is important because we have never really had cats that would actively snuggle with each other. I am not sure if Josie was even aware that Gracie was there or not, but I did what I could to try and enhance the image so you could see more than a blurry mess. Gracie is damned determined that everyone must love her, and she adores her big sister so I am happy to see this. I noticed Gracie grooming Josie the other day, but I figured it was a fluke.

I hope you are having a most excellent week, and we will see if I actually do something other than Path of Exile.

Projects within Projects

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Good Morning Friends! I hope you are ready for another Path of Exile post because that is what you are getting! I realize that when I dive down into the esoterica of a particularly detail-oriented game I lose many readers. It is shocking that anyone reads me to be honest given that you have suffered through a deep dive into Guild Wars 2, New World many times, and a couple of Path of Exile leagues in the same year. I am way more in my element this league and have branched out into a bunch of side projects. I am thinking that is really what I need to start doing rather than beating my head against a particular obstacle until it yields. I encountered a bit of resistance in the Righteous Fire Juggernaut which lead me to run up the Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer… and resistance there has led me to dust back off the Toxic Rain Trickster. So essentially I have three major projects going at once and seeing an incremental increase in all of them… which makes me way happier than grinding my face against the walls I was hitting the Juggernaut.

At some point, I will get around to updating my Game Tools page for Path of Exile, but I thought I would take a moment this morning and talk about a few things that I am finding useful. The first is Better Trading for Path of Exile, which is a Chrome extension that adds a bunch of functionality, not the least of which is showing a history of things that you have searched for before. You can pin these as favorites if you find yourself going back to the trade website periodically to look for specific items. I use Firefox almost exclusively, but the extension is no longer being updated there so it is useful enough to make me do all of my POE Trading in Chrome. The guide that I followed for SRS even had importable links so you can find the gear that ticks the right boxes rather easily and import those saved items directly.

The other tool that I have been using is a replacement for the Overwolf-based POE Trading overlay called Awakened PoE Trade. This offers a bunch of functionality like the ability to flag specific attributes on maps that you don’t want to run and have it warn you when you mouse over maps with those specific attributes. However, the most useful thing to me personally is that I can hit Ctl+D while hovering over an item and it will pop up a details screen showing me what the current market price for an item like that would be. It was through doing this that I realized I was sitting on a 3 Divine chest piece that I should probably be using instead of my current Righteous Fire chest. If nothing else this is helping me to understand what elements make something valuable and at some point hopefully I can evaluate them myself.

I had been using the chest piece on the left for a while now and picked it up for 15c when I hit mapping and needed six links for Righteous Fire. At some point, I picked up the chest on the right and held onto it, because I knew the Astral Plate base was really good for Righteous Fire and that the colors were very close. It originally dropped as a six-link RRGGBB, whereas I currently need RRGBBB. In my many travels, I acquired a stash of tainted currency which you can use to modify corrupted items. I figured if it was worth 3 Divines with the wrong colors, it would surely be worth more if I fixed the colors and managed to hit it in 3 Tainted Chromatic Orbs. Then I got the quality up to 16% with some tainted armoring orbs… and at that point, I figured… I might as well give it a shot.

What it did for my Righteous Fire build is it took me over 50,000 Armor, which seems to be a significant break point. I went from getting wrecked by The Hydra to being able to largely face tank the fight. It has not fixed ALL of my problems but it has taken me a good step towards progress. It is weird how a single piece of gear that takes you to a specific breakpoint… seems to have that much immediate difference. So Righteous Fire Juggernaut is back on the menu and I spent quite a bit of yesterday just zipping around and clearing maps for fun and profit.

Another project that I need to devote some more time to is Delve and getting further down in progression. It bugs me that I am constantly capped on yellow delve juice and purposefully avoiding Niko missions. Basically, I need to spend a few days doing nothing but Delve because in truth I enjoy the heck out of it. Similarly, I have a massive stash of contracts and blueprints that I need to burn through over in Heist as well. If nothing else that seems to be the name of the game this season is fixing sustain problems. It is rare that I don’t get at least three or four maps out of a single map, and it is similarly rare that I don’t walk away with at least one contract. There is way more that I could be doing that I would enjoy doing… than I actually have time to do of it. This is a far better situation than the beginning of the Kalandra league when it felt like I was running out of every currency and not really able to find ways to get any of it.

Over on my Summon Raging Spirits Necromancer, I am in the process of making a number of changes. Currently, as things stand I can pretty comfortably wipe White and Yellow maps but struggle quite a bit with reds. I am not actually using the final configuration of the build and it is going to involve me either muleing a gem or to or just buying level 20 gems from the market. I need to sit down and properly map out what I want gem-wise on each piece of gear and then set forth to recolor as needed. It is shocking how much more comfortable I am with swapping resists, links, and colors on gear than I was in past leagues. Essentially one of the biggest changes that I need to make is to get rid of my Zombies and migrate over to Animate Guardian.

This is a rather big change because Animate Guardian works wildly differently than the other minion summons. Essentially you have to “build” your Guardian like you build a Follower in D3, but with a way more obtuse system behind it. Thankfully Ghazzy did a video on how this works, but essentially you “consume” items while mousing over and hitting Animate Guardian. Then from that point forward, your Animated Guardian is using that item. Luckily there are a bunch of bulk Uniques that I have laying around that apparently make up the suggested “low investment” build for an Animated Guardian and I’ve set these aside at the ready. Essentially you need a two-handed weapon, two one-handed weapons, or a one-hander and a shield combined with a helm, chest, gloves, and boots. This specific combination apparently gives a lot of buffs to both the player and other minions. So I’ve set aside the following items to be consumed once I get a level 20 Animated Guardian:

The challenge is that there is no way to get back any of these items once you have consumed them. However, they do stay “equipped” on your account in a sort of hidden Animated Guardian inventory. This is one of those deeply obtuse systems that could be improved with a UI around it. Similarly, the way that Raise Spectre works is equally dumb and involves me summoning corpses in my hideout and trying to raise one specific corpse… the Carnage Chieftan each time. Thankfully they rarely die so I don’t need to do this super often, but it is still tedious and if for some reason I end up overwriting the corpses available with desecrate… then I have to go back to The Old Fields in Act II and get new apes.

Then you of course have the Toxic Rain Trickster that I dusted off yesterday, set back up, and managed to clear Dominus and get the achievement for Shadow. I think right now I am missing Ranger and Scion and I will have completed the full gamut of classes through Act III. I’ve also got a truly stupidly geared level 6 Shadow sitting in the first map that I am trying to get the Beginner’s Luck achievement with. Seriously you should take a look at “BelginnersLuck” on my character list and how stupidly geared that is for a character that has never made it to Lion’s Arch. I am legitimately curious about what level I will be when Hillock finally drops a unique item. I’m to the point where I can take him down to half health with a single hit, then when he pulls the sword out and regenerates it takes another two hits to finish him off. The energy shield, health regen, and mana regen are overpowered at low levels… just saying.

Tomorrow I will be plumbing the depths of my play history for this year and doing my big round-up post. I hope you are enjoying your break and apologies for being quiet on social media. I tend to ignore the world when I get hyper-fixated on a specific game.