Trade League

Bel Does Penance

by

Good Morning Folks! I talked about this plan in yesterday’s blog post, and last night I actually started down the path. During Crucible League there was a wildly overpowered build that involved exploding totems that could face-roll pretty much all content in the game. I had somewhat been kicking myself for never building that out while it was a viable build. In this league, there is a wildly overpowered boss killer centered around one of the new gems, Penance Brand of Dissipation. I like playing Inquisitors and I like playing Brand spells… and in theory, this ability will probably be reworked by 3.24 so I thought I should get on that bandwagon while the getting was good.

Normally speaking trade makes everything easier and I thought I would be able to pick up a level one Penance Brand of Dissipation Gem for relatively cheap and level it with the character. That was wrong. Right now a level 1 version of this gem with no quality is going for over 4 Divine Orbs. This opens up an interesting arbitrage system for someone who does not hate Labyrinth… but a rough situation for me who is just a cheapskate. While I have the divines to buy this… I just can’t bring myself to spend so frivolously when there are relatively easy options to acquire it myself.

So as a result… most of my evening was spent rocketing my way through the first lab all for the purpose of flipping fireball gems into transfigured gems. The very first lab seems to have a guaranteed instance of the craft that turns any gem into a random transfigured version of the same color. The problem with this is that there are more Blue gems than any other color… so when you flip a gem you are presented with a choice of three different gems from a pool of roughly seventy possible gems. As a result it honestly takes quite a bit of time to luck into the specific gem you are wanting. For me, it took roughly twenty labs in order to finally get Penance Brand of Dissipation. However, along the way I did pick up Storm Brand of Indecision which I leveled for a bit with and is a phenomenal ability.

So when I finally got started, I had about an hour and a half until I normally head to bed. I managed to speed through the first three acts of the game in that time while also spending a lot of time in the league mechanic trying to unlock the Primalist ascendancy. I’m currently on the step where I need to kill 500 of the blue juice monsters which always takes a while to whittle through. I don’t care enough to stop my forward progress and just grind out a single zone over and over until I finish it, but I am going to drop into the league mechanic in every new map. I gotta say this is maybe the fastest I have ever killed Dominus because I cast a brand on him… then frost blinked over to the spot where he spawns during the second phase and by the time I got there he was spawning there. Then before he had a chance to cast anything he was dead and I was talking to Diala and moving into the aqueduct.

I am loosely following the Manni/Zizaran guide and have a pretty sweet six-link WWWWBB Thousand Ribbons that I am using as a twink chestpiece. I’m using the leveling unique suggestion and just ripping through the levels and content with 57% movement speed and permanent onslaught. If I actually get some playtime at lunch, I might legitimately be into maps by bedtime. This is a truly silly build and what it lacks in clear it makes up for just deleting anything that is even the slightest bit tanky. This would have been an amazing boss rush/essence/beast farmer. Mostly I am hoping to get enough levels to be able to comfortably start deleting Guardians with it and eventually start farming bosses. I need to do some research into how folks are playing this build. I might pick up an Oriath’s End just to make big explosions and help with the clear.

All in all, I’m having a blast and this has breathed some new life into the game for me. I really do like the leveling game honestly. I also know that today is the launch of Diablo IV Season 3, so at some point, I will probably be checking that out as well in the coming days.

If You Give a Chieftain a Cookie

by

Hey Folks! I am getting around to writing my “morning” post in the afternoon… or at least it will be after noon by the time I finally publish this thing. Yesterday was the official end of our private league that lovingly became known as “Bel League”. I think this was a very interesting experiment and I think that for the most part, it was a success. I created three highly viable characters during the league and one failed character. I made my way through all of the maps save for one that never would drop… the Unique Twilight Temple map, but I still consider that a win in spirit. In the experience ladder my characters sit for perpetuity at First, Third, and Fifth place which seems like a solid performance. The character that did not work was my Volcanic Fissure of Snaking build, but I pivoted that character into what has become one of the more enjoyable Righteous Fire characters I’ve created. Now that I am over in Trade League, my characters are showing up on POE.Ninja so for anyone at home you can check out the state in which I managed to get them all.

As soon as I got access to the trade economy… I of course started fiddling with my characters. The problem with reaching a point of stability with a character is that it is almost like trying to renovate a house of cards. As you swap a piece of gear for something else… you create a deficit that you then have to patch elsewhere. In all of my time in the private league, I never found a single viable Elder influenced helm and since we are playing in a hyperinflation league… I did not want to pay 20-30 Divines for a pseudo-six-link helm to put Righteous Fire in. My first purchase was spending 5 Chaos on a level 85 base Pig-Faced Bascinet that I then proceeded to pour a bunch of fossils into before making do with Level 20 Burning Damage and Level 18 Concentrated Effect. This however meant that I would be losing my +1 to Maximum Fire resistance on my influenced helm. So I got around that by picking up a Rise of the Phoenix with +2 level of Socketed Aura Gems… which bumped my 21/20% Purity of Fire to the next breakpoint and made up that missing Maximum Fire Resistance allowing me to stay at 90% to all elements.

If I was moving Righteous Fire to my helmet, that meant that I needed to either recolor my existing Lightning Coil or purchase a new one. Having access to trade meant that I could find a better-rolled one that was also corrupted and had the +2 to Level of Socketed AOE Gems on it… meaning that my 21/20% Fire Trap gains +2 from the chest, +1 from a leveling Empower, and +1 from my Sceptre for a grand total of Level 25 and soon to be 26 once I gain another level on that Empower gem. Since I am converting 50% of my physical damage taken to Lightning Damage, I thought while I was at it I would pick up a reasonably rolled Taste of Hate to add 15% of physical taken as Cold. I thought these flasks would be much more expensive but I picked it up for 10 Chaos. I am guessing all of the magic find is producing more than the market can absorb.

This left me with one last problem to try and fix. I’ve always had negative chaos resistance on this character since the swap over to Righteous Fire and I really wanted to at least attempt to resolve that problem. Given the high number of uniques that I am using, that left me with three slots that I could swap out pretty easily to try and at least make a dent in this problem. So after some fiddling around I found a new pair of boots, gloves, and an amethyst ring that combined take me close to the cap in spite of not quite hitting it. I’m at least up to a positive 67% which is far better than I was before starting this process. I could in theory swap my necklace out… but given how much I am relying on it to make up attributes I would still want +1 to all fire skills… I figured that would be a more tricky replacement. I would love to be able to run Defiance of Destiny that I lucked into yesterday… but I would need to probably swap over to a full cluster jewel setup in order to make that happen. I’ve rapidly run into a Ship of Theseus problem… where I am not quite certain how much of my build remains the same.

The last thing that I swapped out was my two Ursine charms for slightly better-rolled ones to increase my regen and strength… that will give me some additional health. In the end… I’m about the same armor-wise… down about 200 life, and 200 life regen… but am converting 15% more damage to elemental and have enough chaos resistance to not be completely trashed by any modifiers that deal chaos damage. I also picked up a bit more damage from the swap of Righteous Fire and Fire Trap so am killing things faster…. which ends up making the build feel better as a result. All told… it was a good series of moves that cost me around 5 Divines in total. If I decide to push this build any further… it will involve almost entirely respeccing the character and stacking on a bunch of cluster jewels. For now, however… I am going to let things alone for a bit and just play the damned game.

AggroChat #462 – Copying Homework

by

Hey Folks! Happy New Year and Welcome to Season Eleven of AggroChat! We are back after the holiday break and are delaying our Games of the Year Show until a bit later in the month.  This week we talk about the Dave the Diver Dredge Crossover, Super Mario RPG and Thalen’s child plotting an interesting course through the game, and a return to Monster Hunter World. With Bobby Kotick leaving ActiBlizz, Bel has stepped back into World of Warcraft and talks a bit about his thoughts so far and the inspirations taken from Guild Wars 2.  From there we talk a bit about missing trade league despite how much of a capitalist nightmare it is and how it makes the players focus entirely on short-term gains. Bel talks a bit about how he has shifted his Chieftain into Righteous Fire and how it is a reasonable replacement for RF Juggernaut.  Finally, some breaking news while we are recording…  we talk a bit about the new FFXIV job Pictomancer, and the new limited job Beastmaster.

Topics Discussed:

  • Dave the Diver Dredge Crossover
  • Super Mario RPG Remake
  • Monster Hunter World
  • World of Warcraft after 3 Years Away
    • Influences from Guild Wars 2
  • Path of Exile
    • The line goes up, and the financialization of everything in another inflation league
    • Righteous Fire Chieftain
    • Missing Trade League
  • Final Fantasy XIV
    • New Dawntrail News
    • Pictomancer
    • Beastmaster
  • OrcaCon

Sometimes its Bricked

by

If you have followed me over the last few days, you have watched me playing around with one of the new transfigured abilities called Volcanic Fissure of Snaking. My idea behind the build was to go with Chieftain which gives me easy access to lots of resistances as well as Hinekora, Death’s Fury for big explosions, and Tawhoa, Forest’s Strength for what is essentially a form of melee-based spell echo. Instead of leaning into scaling a bunch of physical damage, the idea was to convert all of my physical fire damage and instead scale that, chance to ignite and ignite damage with proliferation. The hope was that I could run around with a mace and shield, which would give me extra defenses, and then paint the room in firey eruptions. Leveling through the campaign this felt excellent and after crafting a few clusters it seemed to solve my problem with single-target damage.

However when I swapped over from the campaign to tier 1 unmodified maps… I had some significant damage problems. Ash urged me to grab one of my spare boneshatter axes and throw it on the character, which meant swapping around a ton of points that I had put into shield defenses and attack damage while holding a shield. This however killed my defenses and meant that I saw the “rip” screen quite a bit more. So I am living in this middle ground between having enough defenses and having enough offensive power to make up for not having said defenses. I am only level 74, and I know that levels could help solve this problem… but I am not really sure it is worth the uphill battle and the constant flow of regrets to try and salvage this character. The only positive is that I didn’t really go out of my way to acquire gear for the character and most everything I am wearing is stuff I had lying around in my bank already.

On top of the ascendancy benefits, I went chieftain because I thought starting on the left-hand side of the screen near all of the fire and physical damage buffs would help me. The problem is… it is sort of hard to scale both physical and fire damage while also adding enough defensive layers to make the whole mess viable. Then there is the problem with the ability Volcanic Fissure of Snaking itself… because using it with a two-hander means that it is almost comically slow. So that adds a whole other thing into the mix, that I would in theory need to blend in a bunch of attack speed to try and make the mess feel a bit better. There are other ascendancies that might be better served for this sort of build, but I fear that they would have to rely on clusters even more than I currently am. I keep thinking that Physical to Fire Melee Ignite is more viable than it might be currently.

Ultimately I wanted to play around with one of the new abilities and I had a lot of fun with it… until I didn’t. I think there is a build here, but I feel like I am maybe not capable of building it. At a minimum, I think this might be one of those things that is a bit harder to build without easy access to some specific uniques that would make the one-handed version viable. Again I am annoyed at the restrictions of SSF, but I might shelve this until I finally do migrate out of the private league. I think I am going to low-key start trying to farm things that I know I can turn into currency when the transfer to trade takes place. It will be very hard coming from behind over a month into the league and trying to gather up the currency needed to finish my builds. I feel so hamstrung by not having access to trade that while I have enjoyed the communal nature of the league… I am not sure how up for this I will be in the future. Maybe as a short-term 10-day league, but never one that goes on this long.

I think I figured out yesterday what it is that I like so much about trade leagues in Path of Exile. In a game like Diablo III, loot is so plentiful and there are truthfully a very limited number of possibilities that it is a foregone conclusion that you will see a given item. Enough time put in and it will absolutely with certainly drop, and often in even an ancient legendary version and maybe if you are super lucky a primal. Path of Exile however has a much wider loot pool and it is absolutely possible that you can spend an entire league grinding away and never actually see something… for example, we’ve yet to see a Profane Proxy for Kodra but in past leagues, I was chucking these into Loreweave recipes because we had spares. Trade League allows me to convert the things I am getting, or even the things I enjoy farming the most… into the items that I am now seeing drop. Everything that I do feels like I am working towards some deterministic goal and I like that a lot.

This is a similar problem I am having in Last Epoch, I have run countless helmet nodes in the Monolith and still have no Herald of the Scurry to show for it. I also have a slew of Necromancer drops that I have never seen and have no real deterministic way of farming them. It makes me question my thoughts about the trade league going into that game, and whether or not I would feel happier playing with access to buy items from other players. Path of Exile and the trade league I think have skewed my feelings about this in ways that I did not expect. I just get frustrated with the inefficiency of waiting around for a specific thing to drop, rather than just converting other items into currency and buying exactly the item you wanted instead.

I didn’t expect to be so vehemently turned into a “trade league enjoyer” but I guess that has happened. I am not sure what I want to do at this point. I might take a bit of a break from Path of Exile and go back to Baldur’s Gate III and try and wrap that up before the end of the year.