Video Games

Toxic Rain is Weird

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Good Morning Friends! It is technically correct by the slimmest of margins because I am posting this just before noon. I am very much in vacation mode currently because as of yesterday I am off until the third. We are going through a bit of a cold snap which means we scurried around yesterday in order to get some shopping done and be ready to just stay indoors for the next few days. Our concerns turn to the outside ferals that we feed. I’ve not seen any of them this morning, but they seem to have hidey-holes to go into in order to stay warm. Tripod in the backyard seems to be able to get down into a rabbit burrow when the weather turns frigid and I am hoping Greybie and Tabby out front have something similar. I’m putting food out just in case but I feel like it is unlikely that we are going to see much of them on the camera.

I’ve been playing around on Beltoxrain my fledgling toxic rain trickster and I am not yet certain how I feel about the build. Right now it deals a ton of damage but sort of has shit for survival. The fact that I am using a Tabula Rasa to level doesn’t exactly help that fact because the chest piece is generally a good source of survivability. The killing power is most definitely there but I can very easily run out of mana which means I am running clarity to help try and solve that for the moment. We will see how I fair when it comes to the first Labyrinth that I am getting close to running. I am nearing the end of Act III and still can pretty much shred anything that comes up to me. Toxic Rain feels so freaking weird to use, that I am not entirely certain this is the build for me in the long run. I might try to pivot to building something for Explosive Arrow Balistas instead.

I did get enough porcupine cards to get a six-link short bow and now am using my Righteous Fire main to try and farm some dread essences so that I can hopefully get a good roll with attack power and bonus to bow gems. At this point, I am honestly thinking of this more for Explosive Arrow than I am for Toxic Rain because I have a feeling like I will be starting another character at some point before the end of this league. One of the things that annoy me greatly about builds in this game is that most of the creators tend to consider “50 divines” as a “cheap” build. I’ve yet to see ANY divines drop let alone enough of them to be able to afford something like that. At the moment I tend to focus any currency that I do have on improving Righteous Fire because it seems to be what I am clearing most of the content with.

I’ve struggled a bit on mapping progression, only because I am finding it very hard to get the right maps that I need to drop. I could of course just buy my way to victory but that sorta feels like cheating a bit. For the moment I am running maps in the near vicinity to the ones I need to drop hoping that maybe I will get the ones I actually need for bonuses. The other challenge that I have is trying to get a corrupt that I can actually run. I’m pretty close to dinging 91, which makes me not really want to risk losing progress on a bad map combo. Essentially maps that fuck with my Elemental Resists, Reflect Elemental Damage, or screw with my Life Regeneration is undoable. I get that corruption is supposed to be something unpredictable but I do wish there was a bench recipe to scour a corrupted item that had scouring and Vaal orbs or something, or required a heck of a lot of harvest materials.

It isn’t that I am not seeing a ton of maps dropping… it is just that they are mostly white maps which are significantly less useful currently. I should just burn through a bunch of these hoping for the best honestly because right now I have gathered up a rather large treasure trove of them. I could of course sell them off in bulk, but I try not to engage with the trade league any more than I have to. I know I still have a very long way to go until I start getting t16 versions of everything. I need to kill all of the bosses in order to finish unlocking my atlas. I am still having a heck of a lot of fun, but I am not loving feeling like I stalled out at some point.

The Righteous Fire play style is probably the favorite I have experienced in Path of Exile so far. The problem being in order to move from where I am now to be able to do much higher content it feels like I either need to get lucky or spend an awful lot of currency. A lot of the things that I need now however include price tags that are multiple divines, which I just don’t have yet. I might have to swap up what I am doing in order to figure out a way to make better currency. Essentially I am going to keep plugging away as is hoping that I finish things out the Atlas and then see what it takes to finish up with the bosses. Once I ding 91 and secure that level, I am going to run a map and see how functional I can be just turning off Righteous Fire and leaning entirely on Fire Trap. I have 3 gems for Fire Trap and Righteous fire each leveling currently, and my hope is to do the 20% quality swap and then level them again and attempt to get some corrupts. I know Fire Trap in a level 21/20% quality version sells for a few divines so that might be an option to make some money if I get lucky.

In the meantime, however, I really need to work on catching up on some of my data. I’ve done a poor job of keeping track of the games I have played this year. I normally do a rundown of the games played and I won’t be able to do that normal end-of-the-year stuff if I don’t start tabulations soon.

Tabula Rasa Farmed

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I talked about setting forth on a dumb adventure that was trying to brute force my way to farming a Tabula Rasa. For those unfamiliar with Path of Exile, the Tabula is essentially the perfect starter item that you can equip at level one and has six linked white gem sockets, allowing you to basically get your spell links faster than usual. The catch however is that the item has no stats on it other than the six gem links. There are a number of ways to farm one of these up but I specifically chose Blood Aqueducts zone because Waterways is not in the Atlas this league and Waterways the other map that can drop it is a tier 13 and I’ve yet to see one. Blood Aqueducts is also largely a straight line, which means I can zip through there relatively quickly making the total clear time of each reset extremely fast.

I set down this path initially because I wanted a Tabula to start the Toxic Rain Trickster that I am working on. However, what set me down that path was picking up a Replica Quill Rain from a Grand Heist. However, while farming the Blood Aqueducts I managed to pick up a legitimate Quill Rain that is probably better for the build overall due to the higher attack speed. Both are currently five-links, so will take some effort to push them to six-links. I have to say I got a shocking amount of loot from farming this one map over and over. In total, I found four six-link chests, one of which will do nicely for the Toxic Rain build once I get it high enough for that to matter and one that would work well for the character that Ace is leveling and that Thalen is leveling. I’ve also filled the Guild Bank with minor uniques that I had already seen a drop, probably the most significant that I got was a Call of the Brotherhood which is not expensive but is used by a number of builds.

So around 7:20 yesterday evening I got my last Humility card to drop as pictured in the first screenshot. In total it took me somewhere around four hours to farm the remaining Humility cards, but I went into this adventure having already found three of them in my travels. Had I started with none, it probably would have taken me somewhere in the neighborhood of six hours total. So I guess the question is which is worth more to you… the six hours of farming or the ten chaos that the item regularly seems to cost. I mostly did the farming method so that I could prove to myself that it was something that could be done relatively easily. Additionally, it is also something that you can do without having a maxed-out character that is heavily geared. You essentially have to get a character to act nine and then can farm this up freely. I personally used the time to work on leveling a set of 3 Fire Trap and 3 Righteous Fire gems for attempting to corrupt later for a level 21 gem of each.

As far as Toxic Rain Trickster goes… it is weird and is going to take some getting used to. Essentially the bulk of my damage comes from the spectral archer that hangs out attached to my head raining down bad stuff on the baddies. So I have to stop and channel for a moment to begin that process and then can run around like crazy avoiding taking damage. I’ve picked up a second copy of Toxic Rain that I have kitted out with Balista Totems so that I can drop those as well for additional unattended damage. Mostly I went down this path because I had already done an Explosive Arrow build and wanted to try one of the other “archer” staples. This also allows me to knock out a few achievements because I have never played a Shadow of any kind before. As of this morning, I am level 15 and have completed Act 1 entirely, and am moving on to Act 2. This is very much going to be a side project when I don’t want to do serious content on the RF Juggernaut.

In Search of Humility

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Good Morning Friends! Welcome to the week that heralds a bit of a break for me. As it stands I have today and tomorrow and then I am off until the third. I am hoping you all can have a solid break this holiday season as well. I am still irrationally engaged with Path of Exile as one does… which honestly has not left much time for anything else in my life. We did manage to take care of some big purchases which move me closer to actually being prepared for the holiday, but at some point, I am going to have to stop playing… and finish things up. Having a non-zero amount of gifts purchased is doing better than our usual track record, so I am going to count that as a win for the moment. In the game, my big achievement is that I now have my resists to a point where I could drop the Purity of Elements aura and still maintain caps. I am still so far from being chaos capped but sitting at 25% is better than a negative resist!

Progress on the Atlas has slowed a bit. When I last checked in I was sitting at 43 of 115 and now am at 68 of 115. Basically, I am having trouble getting maps to drop to fill the slots that I am missing in the yellows and reds are always going to be a massive pain in the ass to get. At the moment I am paused from doing any hardcore mapping because I really want to ding level 90 since I am so close again. The last time I was this close I had the bright idea of running a T14 map… that I had corrupted to get credit for it… and got some bad resists on it. I watched my level go from roughly 85% of a level down to less than 20% of a level as I died my way across the zone failing to get credit for the final boss who was effectively one-shotting me. I still have no clue what exactly was causing me to take that much damage but alas the complete and total lack of logs often makes that a problem.

As far as my Atlas Passive tree I don’t so much have a strategy other than “I would like to see more of these things” with those things being breaches, essences, lockboxes, heist chests, and going extremely heavy into getting Ritual Altars. I’ve had a lot of good luck with Ritual this league in getting cool stuff and I know the last league I managed to pull a few divines in this manner so I figured I would focus on improving those. I’ve also put some points into making god-touched mobs show up a bit more frequently and have a chance for killing large packs to spawn beyond mobs. I am sure there are much better options on the whole but I am happy enough with what I have seen so far. I did have some points invested in Kirac missions but in truth… now that I am in red maps those become way less viable given I have to have a corrupted map to get credit.

One of the nice things that I pulled from a Ritual Altar was one of the tokens required to run Labyrinth for the fourth time and finish out my Juggernaut passive tree. It seems like there is a bug happening where the trials are not spawning in higher-tier maps unless you specifically get a Kirac mission that forces one to spawn. Luckily I encountered one of these Kirac maps as well, so since I one-shot my fourth “Lab” I chucked the spare token into the guild bank to help pay it forward. I am hoping this bug gets fixed posthaste because it will be really annoying for everyone coming up behind me trying to finish out their passive tree. I shifted things up a bit toward better survival since it didn’t feel like I needed the slight DPS boost of Unyielding quite so much. I’ve also been encountering a lot of maps where mobs steal endurance charges… which limits the effectiveness of that trait.

Last night I set forth on a nonsense mission as I often do. I’ve been wanting to roll an alt this season, specifically a Poison Toxic Trickster. I’ve been sitting on a 5-link Quillrain and a 5-link Replica Quillrain and I thought, the one thing that would go really well with this plan… is a Tabula Rasa. I had 3 of the 9 cards needed to get one, and I thought I would try my hand at farming one. Basically, you can run Blood Aqueducts, which is a pretty chill zone, and occasionally one of the cards will drop. After a few hours of chill farming while watching stuff on television last night I am up to 5 of 9 cards, so I feel committed to the nonsense at this point. It is also causing me to flood the guild bank with spare uniques because I am getting a truly shocking number of them… occasionally more than one per clear. They are all fairly low-tier uniques but I might start selling the extra extras… once I have a copy in my bank and a copy in the guild bank… then I guess I might as well try and flip it for chaos.

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in Heist, clearing out my lower-tier maps as well just to keep those from stacking up quite so high this season. I’ve unlocked all of the companions and I think I have all of them at least to rank 2 in their abilities. This mission honestly started because I began getting a few of the “green” missions that you can’t remove from your inventory that I did not have the skill to run yet. This started me down a path of running lower-level missions in order to buff up those stats so I could clear the missions out of my inventory. They do serve as an excellent source of small currency and the occasional chaos. I really like heist and it is probably my single favorite game mode. I need to spend a night working on Delve however because I am once again capped on the magic dust required to make that mode work.

I am having so much more fun than I had in the last league, and a large part of that is how good the Pohx Righteous Fire build is. I still need to invest some more currency into it, but I am at the point where any further gains are going to be extremely expensive. There are a few things that I could potentially craft but I am going to need to get deeper into the Atlas tree before I start getting the currency I need for those crafts. The other thing I have shifted up recently is I have begun to see the wisdom in Pohx running Shield Charge over Leap Slam. Leap Slam scales off attack speed, and I just do not have any real sources of that in my build… which means Shield Charge can move so much faster than I can with Leap Slam especially when mapping. Especially now that I am farming Blood Aqueducts for cards I am able to move so much faster through the packs of mobs than I could with Leap Slam.

Path of Exile continues to be a complete nonsense game, but I kinda love it. It however is the sort of game that I would never really recruit someone else to play. You have to have the strong desire to play it on your own first in order to make your way through the absolutely obtuse processes required to actually figure things out. I get that GGG does this on purpose, but I do with it was a little more friendly to new players.

Spending Some Chaos

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Good Morning Friends! It has been a few days since I last updated my progress in Path of Exile, so this morning is going to be one of those posts. At this point, I am finishing up white maps and well into yellow maps. Initially, my first goal is to finish out my Atlas so that I can get all of my passives for mapping purposes. After that, if I still have solid momentum, my goal is going to be to finish each of the “uber” fights. All told I am enjoying this league a heck of a lot more than Lake of Kalandra, though I did enjoy the “Lake” Mechanic more than I enjoy the Sanctum Mechanic. It feels like the base game is just in a better state than it was during the lake, but I do want to spend some time testing out the feel on my old Stormbrand build over in Standard to see if this is more a case of Righteous Fire just being extremely strong or if the game itself is less punitive.

It has been three days since I last posted a screenshot of my currency tab, so you can see a lot of progress on various currencies. At face value, it doesn’t look like I have gained a lot in the liquid currency department aka Chaos, Exalts, and Divines. However, I’ve made 27 Chaos worth of purchases which would take that the liquid assets that I have found up to 2 Exalts and 49 Chaos which isn’t too bad. I’ve yet to find a Divine, which at this point in the last league I had… but it dropped in the Lake so I am not sure if that counts. I am however seen a much more steady trickle of Chaos getting at least one in almost every map that I run.

One of the biggest complaints from the last league was how hard it was in general to “sustain” the “alch and go” style of mapping. What that means is getting enough raw map drops, alchemy drops to turn them into rare maps, and scouring orbs to reset the maps you can’t run with your build. The biggest improvement this league has brought is access to rusted scarabs almost immediately. It took a long time last league before I started seeing scarabs of any sort, and earlier I lucked into a single mob that dropped ten gilded scarabs which I chock up to a kooky algorithm that went in with Kalandra. However, I have seen way more alchemy and way more raw maps than I did the last league which means I can really never stop running maps. If anything this is the “alch and go” league which is extremely enjoyable.

I guess let’s talk a little bit about some of my Chaos expenditures. The first thing of course is trying to get a six-link in the correct colors. I had been searching for a while for pure armor base, that had relevant stats for my build and the prices ranged pretty wildly from 10c to 1 divine depending on how good the rolls. I managed to snag this one for 15c which seems entirely reasonable for having pretty much everything on it be useful to a Righteous Fire build. I would have loved to have had it not be corrupted just to open up some wiggle room for later crafting, but for the price tag, I am willing to take having it set in stone and potentially upgrading again later in the season.

The next thing I picked up was an Immortal Flesh belt, which adds on a ton of life and regen at the cost of elemental resistances. The thing with Immortal Flesh is it is a search to try and find the belt with the best benefits and the least negatives. The hard pill to swallow is the hit to your resists on top of the already 60% hit you take from defeating Kitava twice. So essentially my goal was to get as close to the -15% minimum as I could, and I jumped on -16% as “good enough”. The other thing I was specifically looking for was a minimum of 250 Life per Second regeneration, so when I found this belt for 2 Chaos I figured it was about as good as I could get for the time being.

This last pickup is probably my least needed of the items, but after many attempts to get one of these myself and picking up every Void Sceptre I came across… I decided to just buy my way out of the frustration. Essentially I was looking for 40% Elemental Damage, a minimum of 30% Spell Damage, and a minimum of 15% Fire Damage over Time Multiplier. The rest of the stats are mostly useful except for 10% Attack Speed, but I can live with an almost perfect item for awhile. This cost me 10 Chaos, which seemed like a deal considering other sceptres I had been watching were considerably more and would have required me to get a 3 link.

At some point, I need to probably look at my boots and gloves and maybe try and pour on some more chaos resistance. I have a good chaos ring but it, unfortunately, drops some of my other resists to the point of not having any wiggle room. As far as the atlas goes I’ve completed 43 of the 115 bonus objectives which put me absolutely completed with the first three tiers of maps and missing a map each in tiers four and five. I am not doing great in yellow progression mostly because I have not hit a mass influx of yellow maps but that will probably be coming soon. For anyone who is interested, I use a spreadsheet to keep track of my map progress and I have created a blank copy that you can clone here.

All told I am having a blast this league but I did run into a rather nasty bug last night. Essentially I put in a map, that thankfully I had two of… and hit a hard stall bug that is unrecoverable. This is apparently a known problem and I’ve found evidence of this dating back to at least last year. Anecdotal evidence from one thread makes it seem that maybe it takes place more often with adding Betrayal to your maps, but that isn’t necessarily certain. I know when it happened to me last night I was running a map and trying to add Betrayal to it, but I’ve also seen signs of folks encountering this with Delve. I am probably going to land on the side of only adding mechanics to maps that I can afford to lose and don’t need for completion purposes. Once my atlas is complete though, all bets are off.

All in all, this is probably my favorite league so far and has really sold me on being a permanent player of Path of Exile. Sentinel was a good league and Lake was a little shaky, but Sanctum so far has restored my faith. I am hoping with the addition of Ruthless mode, that GGG will stop trying to make the base game more difficult and leave it more or less as is. Are you playing in this league? What build are you running? What are your experiences so far? Drop me a line below.