Trials of the Ancestors

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.

Minion Guardian is Phenomenal

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Good Morning Folks! After yesterday’s more heavy topic, we are returning to my regularly scheduled Path of Exile nonsense. This morning I am revisiting the Summon Raging Spirits Guardian build because quite honestly… this might be my favorite build of the league. I will always love Righteous Fire for its chill delving potential… but Guardian SRS sorta rips. This has become my swiss army knife character for doing all of the content that is perfectly fine on RF, but just a bit slower because that build is not exactly a damage-dealing powerhouse. When I recorded a video earlier this week I had reached a point where I was mostly staying in T13/T14s because T16s felt a bit rippy. Since then I have learned that after a dozen levels… I can do pretty much even the worst modded T16 map and be able to accept a slew of bad Searing Exarch altar mods to boot.

So this morning I recorded a very quick 9-minute reprisal video showing off what the build looks like doing a simple Rare 5-Mod T16 map. I get stacked with a number of time-consuming league mechanics like Syndicate, Expedition, and Ritual… so I mostly avoid these to keep the video run time short. I promise however that I have zero problem with any league mechanics on this character. Even Legion feels great as my army of tiny skulls can spread out and break out all of the frozen encounters. I still mostly zoom around looking for clusters of boxes, but in the end I will have broken out most of the encounters during the time limit.

Legitimately… pending Grinding Gear Games does nothing to screw up this build by the time 3.23 releases… this might end up being a phenomenal league starter. This is still lagging behind Necromancer significantly with only 519 characters cataloged by POE.Ninja running the combination of Guardian Ascendancy and Summon Raging Spirits. Conversely, almost 3000 characters are running Summon Raging Spirits with the Necromancer Witch Ascendancy. Across the board in the Ancestor Trade league, only 2% of players that have been cataloged are running any form of Guardian. I do sort of wonder when the zeitgeist is going to realize how strong this build really is… and adopt it en masse like they did Poison SRS a few leagues ago. The thing is… this build requires ZERO specialized gear to work. The uniques I am running are all nice to haves and you could run this with trash yellow gear without any issue. This is evidenced by the fact that SRS Guardian is currently the most popular build in Ruthless.

Now that my SRS Guardian is essentially a “solved problem”, I’ve shifted my focus back to my Storm Brand Inquisitor. I am working on this to make it feel better, but honestly… its survival is currently sort of shit. I’ve failed at the second Labyrinth several times now. I have an inventory full of better gear that just needs levels to equip, so this might be one of those characters that I make it all the way to the second Kitava fight without having done any of my ascendancies. The first ascendancy that gave me consecrated ground any time I am stationary has helped, but not enough to make up for the fact that I just get wrecked anytime something makes contact with me.

I remember this build being frustrating the first time I played it, and quite honestly… if I ever get the inkling to play a brand build in the future I think I will likely stick to Wintertide. I remember having a lot of survival issues during Kalandra with this build around the same level range I am in currently. I am shifting what I can for the moment, but essentially I am just death-zerging my way through some of the encounters. I need levels so I can start equipping the correct items for the build, at which point I think my damage output will make up for my tissue paper defenses. The entire purpose of playing this character was to give it a bit of a redemption arc… but I gotta say… I still feel like this build is sorta shit. I am sure it will be fine once I get some proper gear on it and can fix my defenses but ugh… this is a bad build to league start. My assessment of it back then was not super generous and even knowing what I know now… I still feel like it is an awful leveling experience.

All of that said… I am still having a heck of a lot of fun with at least two of my four league characters. Righteous Fire Juggernaut is always a winner, and SRS Guardian is so much better than I thought it would be. Now I have to admit… part of me wants to play something with the Chieftain changes after seeing how big and beautiful those 5% explosions can be. I also want to maybe try Shockwave Totems or something similar to that. If my Storm Brand attempt continues to be shit… I might respec it to Heirophant and embrace the totem lifestyle instead.

Slow Motion Righteous Fire

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Sometimes I get something stuck in my head, and presently it is making a Summon Raging Spirits Guardian. In this league, there were a number of changes to the Guardian Ascendancy, not the least of which was adding two extremely powerful minion nodes. Starting from your first Ascendancy you can have a very very very slow minion that follows you around and does a Righteous-Fire-like aura that covers half of the screen. Because this minion moves so slowly, you have to use an ability called Convocation which summons minions to you. The end result is what feels like a really weird slow-motion stagger step Righteous Fire build as you move ahead, summon your big boy, and repeat until you have cleared the map.

When you add to this the fact that you can summon 20 Righteous Fire Minions, and have any other assortment of additional minions… you have this rolling ball of death. This is my first time really experiencing the Carrion Golem and I have to say… it is pretty great. I did not realize just how well that single minion shotgunned packs of mobs as it sprayed them down with bone flechettes. For the moment I am running with Zombies but I am not sure if I will keep this in my final configuration. I really really really do not want to run Animate Guardian, so I am going to try my best to find a solution that works well without it. I hate that you lose all of your gear if your animate guardian dies. I hate the whole process of equipping gear on the animate guardian. I want to see how well I can do without having to deal with it.

At the moment I am level 71 and am sitting near the end of Act 9. With ease, I will be wrapping up the campaign this evening and then working on gearing my character properly. I’ve snagged a few build-defining pieces already, but generally speaking, I wait to do the whole “balance my resistances” thing until I actually kill Kitava for the second time. I am still not entirely certain how I am going to survive on this build. At the moment I am running Eldritch Battery, and contemplating picking up Mind Over Matter which I believe will allow me to use my Energy Shield once again as a defensive barrier. I need to run my third Labyrinth soon, but given how fast the first two were, I feel like it is highly unlikely the third one will give me any trouble. So far this build is most definitely in the “stupidly powerful”
department. Right now I am running Purity of Elements to make the campaign easier, but I am going to try my best to gear out enough resistances to not have to run it in the final configuration.

All in all… I am enjoying this character and I am really interested to see how it feels once I have finished gearing it.