TOTA

Cresting the Chasm

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Good Morning Folks. I am not entirely certain that Magic Find as a concept is for me. Running the same two maps over and over is exceedingly repetitive. I guess the good news is that I am “over-sustaining” maps, meaning that if I hop back and forth between a Crimson Temple and a City Square, I am always walking away with more of those two maps than I went into the process with. The bad news is… I have the layouts of both zones and most of the variants memorized at this point. It feels to me that magic find as a concept involves trying to sand down all of the rough edges on the map running process and then speeding through them as fast as humanly possible in the hopes of winning the jackpot.

When you DO win the jackpot it feels absolutely phenomenal. I hit yet another Divine Orb dropping map last night and it was only tarnished slightly by the fact had I gone down the right path first instead of the left path… I would have also hit a duplication altar to go with my Divine Orb dropping one. However, any map you walk away with eight Divine Orbs feels phenomenal. The only negative is thus far I have yet to really see anything exceptionally rare. I still have zero Apothecary cards, and while I have gotten a couple of copies of The Fortunate… I’ve not really seen more than I did previously. I guess I expected to start seeing better uniques than what I have gotten to this point but that hasn’t really worked out. I am not expecting to see a Headhunter or a Mageblood drop, but I did expect to start seeing more tier-three uniques and maybe a few tier-two ones.

There is no denying however that it has made a sizeable difference. If you look at my PoeStack this morning, I have officially dug myself out of the hole created by pouring forty Divines into this build. Granted a lot of currency is locked up in pools that are a bit harder to liquidate, but still, I am almost back to the same amount of raw Divine Orbs that I was previously and have enough Chaos to comfortably cash it into Divines as well as a haul of Delve merch that I could sell quickly. It isn’t so much that Magic Find… at least doing so outside of a party who is also magic finding… is that dramatically different from other methods, it is more than it adds up over time. I am consistently getting more of everything which also means that I am seeing more rarer items as a result.

I still greatly prefer Delve to Mapping, but I’ve always had to at least rely somewhat on maps to fill back up the Sulphite tank. Now instead of just running a bunch of random maps, I am approaching the sulphite refill process a bit more methodical as I burn through the maps quickly on my Magic Find Lightning Arrow character. I do somewhat wonder how viable it would be to try and build a Magic Find character in the Guild SSF private league we are considering. The core magic find items are common enough, that I would just need to devote a tab to collecting them for the three to one recipe until I wound up with something good. I do wonder if Deadeye and Lighting Arrow are going to eat a bit of a nerf considering just how wildly popular that one build was in this league.

In other news, I ran my first Trial of the Ancestors in well over a week and was rewarded with a Divine Orb in the next to the last round. I guess that means I might be getting up high enough to start seeing good rewards. Kodra has managed to run a Sanctum all the way through, and that is one thing Magic Find has produced more Sanctum Tomes. I am contemplating trying one out with the state of my Lighting Arrow character to see just how fast I can burn through it. It is really good at making things explode and is also VERY fast moving. I feel like my POB is probably underestimating how much damage I am dealing because other than tanky bosses… I am pretty much making entire screens evaporate.

Anyways! Tuesdays are hard. I hope you all have a great day and are having a pretty great week. The weekend seems so far away at the moment.

Lightning Struck Friends

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If you have read this blog for any length of time, you probably are expecting this post. I talked yesterday about wanting to try out Absolution… so last night I started a brand new Witch and got it through the start of Act 8. I decided to go with a Necromancer in spite of Guardian actually representing over 70% of the folks running Absolution or Vaal Absolution in this league. Guardian is really powerful as evidenced by how easy of a time I had with no real gear during the Toucan League. However, I opted to go back to the minion-loving roots of a Witch, largely because at this point I had already leveled 2 Guardians and an Inquisitor in this league and was a bit tired of the old man in a diaper that is the Templar. I can’t necessarily call mine a Necromancer because in spite of being over level 60… I’ve yet to take the time to do my first Labyrinth and actually ascend.

While technically this is a minion build… it feels absolutely nothing like MOST minion builds. Essentially you run around nuking things with a giant orbital strike of lightning damage and that then spawns up to three Sentinels of Absolution that also cast the same big lightning strike attack. More specifically I am using the Vaal version and thanks to Trade League I picked up a dirt cheap level 1 version with 20% quality on it so when finished I will have a 20/20 Vaal gem which is a bit of a challenge to actually get. Added to the mix are Spectres and Zombies with Feeding Frenzy support and Herald of Purity summoning up four Sentinels of Purity. Because everything seems to lag behind, I end up casting Convocation quite a bit to keep them grouped up on whatever target I want them to attack. The mix of me casting a giant nuke, and then having a swarm of minions… feels supremely odd and I am not entirely certain what I think about it yet.

I am following a guide, but at the moment it feels like my tree is spread out all over the freaking place. At some point, I am certain I will apply a measure of my own personal touch to this build, in order to make it a bit more tanky. This is going for Eldritch Battery, which means I am entirely losing my Energy Shield as a defensive layer. I should then in theory probably stack armor bases for various slots, but given that I mostly need blue sockets… that becomes its own nightmare to get colored correctly. What worries me at the moment is just how low my health currently is. Part of this is because I have been leveling with a 5-Link Thousand Ribbons and a handful of other uniques that made the early game a breeze… but have largely outlived their usefulness.

Almost 50% of players running Absolution are running a specific unique chest piece called Doryani’s Prototype, and I am really not sure if I want to go down that rabbit hole. Essentially the tech behind this body armor relies on you getting your Lightning Resistance as low as possible… for the best builds out there it can be as low as -200%. Then when you attack mobs they have the same lightning resistance as you do… allowing your lightning attacks to do outrageous damage against them. In order to keep from dying, you need to stack as much armor as humanly possible because the chest piece also allows you to soak lightning damage from hits as armor, but this makes you extremely vulnerable to any lightning damage over time attacks. I just do not feel like I want to play this game nonsense game of trying to juggle resistances and make sure one is bottomed out, while the others are high enough to matter.

At least for the time being… I am not going to do this nonsense. Instead, I am going to utilize the fact that we have a truly ridiculous number of six-links in the guild bank. I hand-picked a crusader chainmail that I was able to get 5 Blue/1 Red on pretty quickly through spamming chromatics. I am going to buck the popular advice and just build some measure of normal guild for the moment. I don’t really want to spend much currency on this build especially considering I am not even sure I am going to like how it feels. The only thing so far that I have bought is a Replica Dragonfang with Absolution on it which itself was less than 100 Chaos, so something I can make back rapidly just by selling off some delve stuff. Tonight I am certain that I will wrap up the campaign and start poking my head into early maps to see how this all feels.

I will probably try and knock out the first two Labyrinths over lunch so I can officially call myself a Necromancer. Probably the biggest expenditure I will have is buying a bunch of botched 20/20 corrupted gems in order to jump-start myself to a baseline of power rather than waiting to level them all.

Ancestor League Staying Power

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Hey Folks! This morning I was struggling to find something to write about and I thought I would Trials of the Ancestors league has been going for me so far. We are now forty-six days into the league, and it shows no real signs of slowing down. Generally speaking after the first month there is a massive drop off in players, and based on Steam Charts we’ve maintained at least 40k players for the average concurrency. As compared to this point in the Crucible League the numbers were down to around 16k, and in Sanctum around 21k. There are a lot of factors that are likely generating this. Firstly the base state of the game is amazing right now, and there are so many viable builds available. While Deadeye is currently dominating with 17% of players on the ladder… there is a pretty decent spread among other ascendancies with some reasonable build diversity within each of them.

The other thing that is happening right now, is a bit of an abandoning of the Diablo franchise by content creators and players. Diablo IV was initially well-received but really had some issues. I have talked about this at length on my own blog but the truth is the game was not designed for the Core ARPG player audience. What this has translated to is a massive influx of players trying out Path of Exile and Last Epoch for the first time, and oftentimes realizing that they enjoy it more. Final Fantasy XIV went through a similar glow-up when World of Warcraft was floundering, and we are essentially seeing the same sort of effect happening now in the ARPG market as folks move away from Diablo. The biggest shock for me however is when I saw Raxxanterax essentially announcing that he was going to be moving on to other games. He was the core pillar of the Diablo III Youtube community, and is the CEO of Maxroll.gg so to see him abandoning Diablo IV was rather telling.

Similar to during the great migration from World of Warcraft to Final Fantasy XIV a few years ago, I started seeing a number of videos gaining traction like the one above where someone who played a lot of Diablo tried out Path of Exile for the first time. Even more than that… I’ve seen a broadening of the community as more folks try their had at creating content for the game. As a Path of Exile enjoyer, it has been extremely cool to see essentially a broadening of the base. I think the next few years for the game are going to be exceptionally strong as we get the launch of Path of Exile 2 and see just what the release cadence of a two-game experience is going to look like. I think more than anything I am thankful that Path of Exile is going to keep running because no matter what happens with the second game I am always going to be able to return to the first.

As for me, I am still having a blast churning through content and trying out assorted builds. I recorded a new video this morning that shows off my Righteous Fire Juggernaut in its current state. Mostly I recorded it because I realized I did not have a video for Righteous Fire Jugg yet in this league. As far as my other builds I have played Lightning Arrow Raider, Guardian Summon Raging Spirits, Storm Brand Inquisitor, and Shield Crush Chieftain. I have this problem where I get excited about a build… pour some currency into getting it stabilized… and then start wanting to move on to the next build. All of my builds could be so much better than they currently are… if I were playing it and tuning it as my only build. I really like screwing around with new builds and figuring out what makes them tick, and ultimately this has been a huge part of my learning process with the game as a whole.

So of course I am now eyeing the “next” build. While I was leveling an SRS Guardian in the Toucan league over the weekend, there was a short stint where I was trying to weave Absolution into the build. I mean I was doing it completely wrong, but I had enough fun with the ability that I would like to try and build something around it. Seeing as I have now leveled two Minion Guardians and have no Witches yet in this league, I was leaning toward building on that class. I’ve been out looking at what folks are actively playing on POE.Ninja but have not really landed on a final build. I was an altoholic in MMORPGs and it seems like I am even more so in ARPGs given now many individual builds I wind up making in a given league.

I get that Path of Exile is not the game for everyone, but I have enjoyed watching folks warm to it. Closer to home I have been enjoying watching Kodra get the swing of things. What seemed to really cause him to begin to grok the game was the Magic the Gathering Analogy that we talked about on the show some weeks back. It has been a joy to watch him dive into various concepts of the game and assimilate them into his own game style preferences. Every league I seem to learn something new, and this league has been about getting into Blight and Legion more than anything else. There is just too much content in the game to sort of grasp all of it at once. I am where I am today because I have been doing this for five leagues and gathering bits of information along the way. Path of Exile is not a game that you master in a few hundred hours, but instead, one that you keep learning thousands of hours into the gameplay.

Anyways. I am still having a stupid amount of fun. I think maybe Trial of the Ancestors has been my favorite league thus far. They’ve all been on an upward trajectory since Kalandra. I do really wish that particular league mechanic would get its own glow-up and return to the core game. I thought building Lakes was deeply interesting, but the mechanical state of the game was rough. Anyways… I have no clue who actually makes it to the end of one of my Path of Exile posts but I figure it is a small group. Thanks for sticking around as I continue to obsess about this nonsense.

The Next Ugly Duckling

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One of the things about me and Path of Exile is that it seems like I always have to have some project that I am tinkering with. In this league, I have had two resoundingly successful builds, and two that are probably way better than I am giving them credit for. Righteous Fire is essentially a guaranteed banger at this point, and I have tweaked it further than I have in previous leagues. There are still places I could go with it but it would involve a significant respec of my tree and figuring out a way to deal with ailments. Summon Raging Spirits Guardian is way stronger than I would have expected it to be, and it legitimately is on the same tier as Righteous Fire in my mind. Lightning Arrow did what it was supposed to do and helped me fund the switch to Righteous Fire, and then there is my Storm Brand Inquisitor that honestly gets better the longer I play it. Now I feel like I want to venture forth into undiscovered territory.

Two ascendancies saw massive reworks, the Guardian and the Chieftain. So I knew that I wanted to do something with Chieftain just for the hell of it, and so that I could experience the Hinekora node before it likely gets nerfed in the future. An ability that I really like but have never built around is Shield Crush. I played with it a bit on Ruthless, and remember seeing an interesting-looking Juggernaut build from Jorgen that was a deep delver. So I got it in my head that I wanted to try and take that concept and transplant it to the Chieftain tree and then focus on Physical to Fire conversion with some Ignite damage. Normally in this situation, I would lean on POE.Ninja to see what other builds are out there in the wild trying to do this thing. Unfortunately… there are two folks trying this in trade league and one in hardcore… and they are all somewhat doing something different with it.

One of the things that I have learned while playing Path of Exile for several leagues, is that just because something is not in the meta does not mean that it is bad. The challenge of course is that I just have to figure out how to make this combination of abilities feel good and strong enough to get through the campaign. There are some very specific uniques that I have already acquired that should make this feel great… but I have to get to the other side of the leveling gap before I can really utilize them. At the moment… I am sort of making it up as I go along and hoping that given a sufficient number of regret orbs, I can eventually shape this into something that feels great.

I’m currently in Act IV and desperately in need of an upgraded shield and preferably an upgraded sceptre that I can actually equip. My intelligence however is in the dumpster, so I am struggling to find something that is both a sufficient dps upgrade and that I can actually equip right now. For the moment I am running around with a hammer and that seems fine. The shield is important since shield crush scales off armor and energy shields. Mostly I want as much armor as I can reasonably get on the shield, but I’ve yet to see a new base for several levels. Unfortunately, the vendor in High Gate doesn’t seem to have anything to offer that would really help me out. I can do sufficient damage, and I am pretty tanky… but it just is a bit slow going at the moment. I feel like I am going through the ugly duckling doldrums for this build but I am going to push my way to the other side.

I’m not to the point of sharing a POB because I am not entirely certain what changes I am going to need to make in order to improve this. I took Avatar of Fire, and I think maybe I did so a bit too early. Between it and a few other abilities I was converting 90% of my physical damage to fire… but I think maybe it would be better off to also have access to other damage types for the time being. That is probably a late-game choice if I end up making it. I was looking at a build that was trying to do this back in 3.19… at least the fire conversion shield crush but the tree has changed significantly since then. It will be interesting if I can ultimately turn this into something fun.