Good Morning Folks! I did something silly this weekend. In Path of Exile, there is the concept of a private league, where you can pay to essentially play the game in a bubble with your friends. I’ve contemplated trying to do a small private league amongst my handful of friends who play the game regularly, mostly as a way of creating a sort of “Guild Self Found”. The idea is where you can still trade items freely but only amongst a smaller group of people giving you that Solo-Self-Found type experience of needing to actually find things, but also being able to rely on and help out your friends. There are a handful of streamers who run events throughout the year that are specifically associated with private leagues. The most popular of these is probably The Gauntlet, which is very much a much harder mode experience. There is another event called the Badger Private League where folks compete as teams with other teams of players.
SirGog one of my favorite POE information sources, also has one of these leagues that he has run a few times now called the Toucan Treasure Hunt. The idea is fairly straightforward, private leagues expand the lifecycle of a given Path of Exile league by allowing players a renewed focus on the fundamentals and an alternate way to play the game. There is a simple rule when it comes to private leagues, they cannot make the game easier and if you change the rules it can only be to make the base game more difficult. Toucan League for example is focused on crafting and the challenges that it provides. On Friday the league started at 7 p.m. my time and I decided to give it a shot. Specifically, the Toucan League had the following rules associated with it.
- All Items Drop Scoured, so everything is essentially “white” quality and all you are really looking at is item bases and sockets.
- All Players Start with -20% Resistance across the board, so you immediately need to try and dig yourself out of that hole.
- Acts 1-3 have increased difficulty.
I decided to use this opportunity as a way of testing the SSF viability of Guardian SRS. When I was playing my Ancestor League version of this build, I noticed that for the most part, the uniques weren’t really “enabling” that build. They were buffing the strength of it, but they were not doing anything that a set of basic rare gear wouldn’t. Sure enough that has largely worked out as expected and now that I am level 81, I am mapping exceptionally smoothly. With only using some Alchemy Orbs and some Chaos Orbs to re-roll items I was able to land at over-capped elemental resistances thanks to Purity of Elements, but have thus far had no real hope of solving my Chaos Resistance problem. However, as I have learned several times… you can map pretty well with no Chaos Resistance at all. I managed to take my character up through early yellow maps yesterday afternoon and I think I took a single death doing so.
In the Discord associated with the event, there have been daily stretch goals that involve all sorts of things. I’ve largely been ignoring these, but I will say that more than anything I want to at least achieve the bronze-tier goal for the entire event. I’ve already passed level 80, and now I just need to complete my fourth ascendancy and I will feel fine with my progress for the league as a whole. I sincerely doubt that I will accomplish any of the further goals because more than anything this league has taught me a few things about my enjoyment of this game. Firstly I am not really that into the crafting system. I will use it when I need to in order to make serviceable gear, but I just don’t enjoy crafting as an endgame in itself. Secondly, I really hate that items being dropped scoured bricks an entire system that I have leaned on heavily for early gear. Essentially you cannot get crafting patterns from Betrayal as when the items drop, they drop scoured without veiled mods on them.
More than anything else… I am a loot-driven player. I like seeing loot. I like checking loot to see if it might be useful. Sure I can freely admit that 99.9% of rare items that drop on the ground are useless… but in Ancestor League I have made a pretty brisk trade in selling the items that I found in my travels that were NOT useless. For example, I spend a lot of time checking rings and amulets for resistances, and now my only real option is to attempt to brute force craft the resists that I need. Because everything drops scoured… mapping just feels bland and meaningless. I’ve run over a dozen maps, and I am largely just running them for completion sake. I know going into them that the only worth anything that I am going to walk away with, is maybe a few chaos orbs or other assorted bubblegum crafting materials.
I think easily the most interesting aspect of the event though, is it gave me a way of testing to see just how strong Guardian is on its own with absolute dumpster-tier gear. If you want to check out my POB, you can see the level of gear that I currently have. I am still using a level 20 helmet because I just happened to randomly chance my way into a +1 to all minion skills. I am using The Anvil as a necklace, mostly because it was the only unique that I got that actually halfway made sense for my build. I rolled a decent enough Convening Minion damage wand, and am now pretty much stuck with it because I don’t have the base Intelligence to move up to a Convoking wand. The lack of Betrayal crafts means I can never get my auto cursing/offering setup off the ground which means I am losing a lot of efficiency with the build.
Still, however… the build is perfectly playable and I am having little to no resistance progressing through maps. A lot of this is due to the fact that Radiant Crusade and more importantly the Sentinel of Radiance is so damned overpowered. I feel like there is no way that this build survives into 3.23 without at least taking a significant nerf to the amount of damage that the sentinel deals. We talked about this a bit on the podcast and Ash suggested that they might flip the order in which you get Radiant Crusade and Unwavering Crusade so you are at least getting it a bit later in the game. As it stands… Guardian SRS has been the best feeling Minion build I have played in Path of Exile. The fact that I have been able to get it up and running and feeling great with garbage gear only serves to underline this fact.
Alternately, I think I have learned that while I find the concept of the Toucan Treasure Hunt very interesting… I just did not enjoy myself nearly as much as I hoped I might. The lack of good loot really hampered my enjoyment. I’ve known for a while that the only reason why I ever raided in MMORPGs is because I wanted the shiny loot that was exclusive to it. It seems that I am only really into ARPGs because of the constant rain of potentially interesting loot. Don’t get me wrong I absolutely enjoy them mechanically, but mechanics alone are not enough to keep me engaged. Do I regret trying out the Toucan League? Nope! It was worthy of a shot, and I greatly appreciate Sir Gog for running the event. However, I think I will probably take a hard pass going forward because it just did not flip the right switches in my brain.
