Friends! I have completed my Atlas! I have essentially resorted to the behavior that I always end up resorting to, and purchased the last 5 unique maps from the trade market. There are two that are always grossly expensive because they unlock two exceptionally powerful meta-crafting recipes, so combined they were around 100 Chaos. The rest were dirt cheap in the 2-5 Chaos range, but having them done… means more to me than any currency that I had to spend to finish this off. I did manage to get all the way through the normal maps the “old fashioned way” which is either running adjacent maps and hoping for one to drop, or using the 3-to-1 Vendor recipe to try and convert three lower-tier maps into the one that I was missing from a higher tier. I think it took me a bit longer than usual, but this league did see me do a week one re-roll so that probably caused some manner of delay. I should probably keep track of when I accomplished various feats in a spreadsheet or something… so I can ponder them later.
My focus has very much shifted from mapping to Delving, and I am essentially only poking my head up above ground in order to regain Sulphite needed to keep diving deeper. I am essentially hovering around the 150 depth level… and quite honestly for me traditionally the 150-250 range seems to be the sweet spot. I cleared out four Delve Cities last night and fought a Lich boss in the Abyssal City biome. That one took me a bit by surprise and I forgot that I could not in fact stand in the laserbeam star thingy that they spread around the room. Truth be told… I find so few Liches as compared to Vaal and Primeval bosses that I am not near as seasoned at that fight. Doing the bosses in general feels like hopping back on a bike after a few years of not riding it… as the season goes on I get better but I am always a bit rusty at the start.
In other news, I started a third character for the league and am enamored with Lightning Tendrils. This is really cool ability and given that I can pretty much get through the campaign on ANYTHING… I’ve started choosing abilities that I have never used before to at least do the early levels. Lightning Tendrils is essentially a channeled frontal cone lightning attack that is shockingly powerful… pun intended. I’ve already transitioned to using Wintertide Brand, which is the halfway point before getting Storm Brand later… but I plan on keeping Lightning Tendrils as my burn spell to help out the brands a bit. I am sort of yoloing my way through a build while looking at what players are using in the endgame for Storm Brand through POE.Ninja. Essentially I filter out players with a Mageblood because while I am running Crimson Temple when possible, I have no illusions of ever actually having one of those. This is a bit of a redemption arc for the character I played during the Kalandra League, and I want to see what that build would look like knowing what I know now.
Lastly, I wrapped up Old Man’s War, and everyone who suggested I read this book… starting with my friend Vernie… was completely right and I did in fact love it. So much so that I pretty much finished it and then immediately started the second part of this series. This is pretty much my jam when it comes to science fiction, and made me realize how much I enjoyed this sort of genre in general. I also now understand why when I was reading The Last Watch by J.S. Dewes, a lot of the comments compared it to this book. Very similar genre, and if you like Old Man’s War then I highly suggest you check out that series as well. I’ve read the first two books and anxiously await the third one that I think is coming out at some point later this year. I’m about a fifth of the way through The Ghost Brigades and I figure I will be consuming it just as ravenously as I did Old Man’s War.
Now that I am getting back into the swing of things, I thought I would mention Bookwyrm again. Essentially it is a federated platform for tracking your reading, and if you are on the Fediverse/Mastodon you can follow my Bookwyrm account. I somewhat wish that a lot of these ancillary services like Bookwyrm, Pixelfed, Peertube, and even OwnCloud had the ability to have some sort of account hierarchy so that my Gamepad.Club accounts could use the services, but not have to maintain separate credentials. I get that it mostly defeats the point of how ActivityPub works, but it would be nice if there was some form of identity sharing between platforms. It used to bug me that people might reply back to me on one of these services that I don’t really use AS social media… but when I stopped caring about likes and boosts… it stopped bugging me very much. I guess the shift to Mastodon as my primary platform has come with it a shift away from caring about being seen… and more about the utility of what good these services bring to my own life.
Anyways, I hope you are having a most excellent week. We are nearing the end of Blaugust and I am preparing to do the likely all-day job of tallying all of the participants. Essentially expect my Friday post to land a bit later in the day than usual, because I will be scrambling to catalog the over hundred participants. I really should devise some sort of a self-reporting system, but that is perhaps a challenge for another year given that it is a bit late to shift gears this year.
Good Morning Friends! The Crucible Challenge league is coming to a close in Path of Exile and I thought I would spend some time this morning talking about the various builds I played. The crucible mechanic itself was a bit cumbersome and lackluster unless you were willing to go extremely deep into the system and attempt to craft the perfect tree. I was not willing to do this, but I did interact with it at a very surface level. This was the league of completely insane builds that we will likely never see again, in part due to the crucible weapon tree allowing for some complete nonsense. The fact that there were nodes that allowed an item to vendor for a unique version of that item base, led to drops in prices of things like the Aegis Aurora selling at one point for as cheap as 60 Chaos instead of the usual 1-2 Divines.
What this did do was cause me to set up several tabs where I just chucked bases that I cared about into them… and then when I was bored or looking for something to do I would run maps and reveal trees. The problem with this plan however is that it was EXTREMELY rare that I went through a map and did not get one of the bases that I cared about to drop… so my supply never seemed to deplete. I should probably spend the next few days unlocking the trees that I already have revealed that sell for currency. Essentially I spent a lot of time fishing for a better tree to them try and merge with my assorted weapons… and never really had much luck. I think this was probably better for map blasters than someone like me who tended to favor Heist and Delve… two league mechanics without Crucible forges.
Crucible was easily my most active League and during it, I completed a large number of builds. I have to be honest… this is maybe my favorite part of Path of Exile. I like trying different things, given that there are so many years worth of content and so many skill gems that I have never really explored. More than anything this league was a bit of a redemption arc for characters that I had tried in the past and never really managed to get working. The only problem with trying out a bunch of different builds is that I never really elevated any of them as far as they could really go… before shifting gears and trying something else. I guess let’s review some of the builds that I played in this league.
Righteous Fire Juggernaut
Another relatively new thing about this league is that I recorded a lot of short videos talking about various builds. I’ve recorded several with my Righteous Fire Juggernaut, but here is one where I did some delving which is honestly how I spent most of my time on this build. Righteous Fire and more specifically the Juggernaut variant is just one of those comfy builds. You end up being super tanky and can mostly laugh off most incoming damage. I managed to clear 3 of the 4 Void Stones on this character and make it all of the way through mapping without much issue. I never really took this build as far as it could go because I essentially needed to complete the swap from Fire Trap on the pseudo-six-link helm to my six-link body armor and I never really wanted to mess with recoloring my Brass Dome. Additionally in a true endgame variant, I would have figured out a way to make myself ailment immune without Purity of Elements.
That said the version that I ended up with felt extremely good and served as my pillar for pretty much all of the rest of my shenanigans last league. I love this so much that even though I am not planning on starting Righteous Fire… it is pretty much a given that I will end up building one for delving. Here are the details behind the build.
This is the first build in what I call my redemption arc of past builds. I had tried a few versions of Toxic Rain during the Sanctum league, and never really landed on something that I enjoyed. Mostly what I landed on was that I had been trying to convert to Toxic Rain a bit early for my tastes and that in past iterations I was not running both Toxic Rain as a self-cast ability and on Totems. Additionally, I have learned that I really hate Focused Totem Support, because I do not want to be responsible for triggering my totems. Sure Focused Totems are a clear dps win, but you also lose the quality of life of not having to constantly aim them in order to get anything from them. I had a lot of fun with this character, but the negative with a Pathfinder is the reliance on constantly hitting your life flask to keep your regeneration rolling.
I am not sure if I specifically followed any single build guide, but probably the most comprehensive version available is the one that Zizaran produces for each league. This is really the build where I discovered POE.Ninja and their Builds section and I was able to compare and contrast a bunch of successful Toxic Rain builds in order to land on something that felt good to me. Admittedly this is sort of a more advanced process, but learning that I could adapt builds to fit my needs was a real game changer for me.
One of the things that I love about Diablo-style ARPGs is how getting a specific item that drops… often generates a desire to build around it. In my travels on my RF Juggernaut, I stumbled across a helmet with four gems on it… Burning Damage, Concentrated Effect, Minion Damage, and Minion Life. After spending a chunk of the Sanctum league playing a Summon Raging Spirits build… I had this desire to build around this helm and more specifically pivot into Minion Instability with a Fire Explosive Raging Spirits build. For the most part, this worked well, but as is the case with many of my builds… I was unwilling to focus on it enough to really sand off some of the rough edges. This could have been a great build on its own and would have been perfect cromulent as a main build. Its critical flaw… is that Toxic Rain and Righteous Fire were just better. Unfortunately, this character no longer exists in this state, because I recycled it into a later build.
There really is not a direct guide that I followed, but again spent a lot of time on POE.Ninja looking at other Summon Raging Spirits builds that utilized Minion Instability. If you want to go down this path, I did find a decent enough guide you could follow.
This is another build in my redemption arc because the very first time I attempted to follow a guide was back in the Sentinel League and attempting to play Explosive Arrow. I had no idea what I was doing, and going back earlier this league and looking at my old characters… it was painfully obvious. I had no real defensive strategy and made zero effort in attempting to cap my resistances. So knowing what I know now… I wanted to make an attempt at creating a better version of this character. Originally I thought maybe Zizaran’s definition of “Tanky” just did not match my definition of that word. Turns out no… Explosive Arrow Champion is EXCEPTIONALLY Tanky… almost to the point of being similar in feel to my RF Juggernaut. I had so much fun with this character, and unfortunately… it RAPIDLY eclipsed my Toxic Rain Pathfinder in the amount of time I spent on it. This is the build that I most associate with Zizaran, so of course I would suggest someone following his guides. If you have any questions however with this build or any of the other ones I have talked about… my comms are always open.
On the ultimate redemption arc build… we have Wintertide Brand Occultist. Back during the Sentinel League, I made an attempt at following Pohx’s guide for the Righteous Fire Inquisitor. However, I stopped short… and pivoted into undiscovered territory when I decided that I really liked Wintertide Brand. This led me to try Storm Brand for my Kalandra league starter, to mixed experiences but it also started a mental obsession with wondering what a proper Wintertide Brand build would feel like. So this League I decided to repurpose my Explosive SRS Necromancer and respec it into a Wintertide Brand Occultist. The only negative about this build is that I tried to do it on the most shoestring budget ever… which meant that I reused as much gear as I thought I could get away with from the previous build. The end result… works shockingly well and quite honestly in the time that has passed since I recorded the above video… I have gotten much better at playing it. I spent a good chunk of last night zipping through Tier 16 Red Maps with a decent amount of juice applied and it performs like a champ.
I honestly considered just league starting this build for Ancestor League, it is that stable. With enough attention and focus, I think I could resolve any of the existing survival issues. Namely, I need a lot more block but levels and investing in some good jewels for my passive tree would solve that. Sadly I don’t really have a guide for you to follow. The only thing I can truly provide is my POB. I pieced this build together on my own by looking at a bunch of folks who were doing something similar on POE.Ninja. Wintertide Brand is sort of an offshoot of the much more popular Cold Dot Elementalist.
My Sixth build of the league was extremely haphazard and a bit of a mess. I normally do not care about Achievements in video games but for some reason… I do in Path of Exile. There is an achievement for killing Dominus in Act 3 with every base class in the game, and the fact I had never done this with a Scion was bugging me. So I rolled a Holy Flame Totem/Flame Wall Scion entirely with the purpose of killing Dominus, and after doing this… I mostly felt fine with walking away from that character. As the league wore on, and I was feeling the itch to play some more Path of Exile I dusted this character off and made a pivot from Totems to Brands, and decided to roll with an Armageddon Brand setup. I successfully got it up to maps, and with enough time and investment, I could have probably made this an enjoyable character.
However one of the lessons I have learned… is it is okay to walk away from a character because it is relatively trivial to run up another character. I actually enjoy leveling through the contents and I find the process of “building” a character to be extremely therapeutic. Unfortunately, again there is ZERO guide here, and mostly just a lot of me winging it as I went and searching the passive tree for anything that I thought might be useful that I could path to easily. Do I suggest anyone follow my character? Hell no. Do I really like Armageddon Brand and want to give that ability a proper redemption arc in the future? Hell yes.
Now we get to what is technically my eighth build of the league. There is a Righteous Fire Inquisitor that I never finished because I decided that I really do not love the Inquisitor variant of that build and will probably always choose Juggernaut. Essentially this was my first time doing a “league start test” where I tried out a build to determine if I wanted to play it at the launch of the Ancestor League on Friday. I had noticed over the last few leagues that there are a lot of folks who play some variant of Lighting Arrow as a league starter, because reportedly it requires no gear to function. After playing it I can in fact verify that it does not require much in the way of gear and can map on four-links. The most popular variant of this is played with a Deadeye and is exceptionally squishy. I opted to go for a way less common variant that uses a Raider that is significantly less squishy… but also is nowhere near anything I would consider “tanky”.
I am league-starting this because I really enjoy leveling on a Ranger, and also… I really want to do some of the content that is facilitated by having a character that can explode an entire screen at once. I know at some point I will crave a tanky character to do some delve or similar meaty content… but I am looking forward to seeing how the mapping phase goes with this character. I managed to survive low-tier red maps without any investment and only some minimal bench crafting to at least partially solve my resistances. My goal is to see how far I can get without touching the trade league to help solve my problems, and mostly turn this into my mapper for the league. The nice thing about Ranger is that I will be able to pivot into a bunch of popular builds if I decide I get tired of Lightning Arrow.
While Crucible as a league mechanic was a bit “bleh” in that it didn’t really give me a fun repeatable activity that made currency… the “sandbox” state of the game was phenomenal. It is easily my favorite league of the four I have played thus far, but largely because this is the league where I felt like I finally grasped some of the nuances of this game. Of the builds that I tried this league… I would absolutely play RF Jugg, some form of Toxic Rain, Explosive Arrow, Wintertide Brand, and some form of Armageddon Brand build again. Probably my favorite build would be the Wintertide Brand Occultist because as time has gone on in the league I have played it more and more as my “not RF Jugg” build. Wintertide Brand just feels cool and adding in all the other cold dot mechanics feels super satisfying.
As we go into the Ancestor league I have a handful of builds that I want to try a make happen:
Poison Summon Raging Spirits Juggernaut – This is a staple of hardcore and I am curious if I can make a version that feels tanky enough to do delve. It is simple enough to pivot into Righteous Fire if it doesn’t work out.
Shockwave Totems – I still want to find a totem build that I enjoy, and since Shockwave Totems wrecked Sanctum the first time around… I am curious about this one as maybe a Hierophant build.
Exsanguinate/Reap – I played seismic totems for a bit during Sanctum, and I really liked Exsanguinate far more than I liked the actual Seismic totems. I know there are versions of this build that use Juggernaut for Hardcore, and others that use Scion for Softcore. I want to research this and try and make one that feels good.
Something with Cyclone – I love Whirlwind and its spin-to-win play style. Righteous Fire sort of scratches a bit of this itch of being able to just roll over the top of your enemies. I do however want to try and figure out a way to build around Cyclone and make it feel enjoyable… maybe a cold conversion.
Armageddon Brand – I enjoyed Arma Brand enough with the Scion to try and give it a redemption arc. I figure this is probably going to be best played with either Hierophant or Elementalist, but will need to do some research.
This is one of the things that I love about Path of Exile is that I always have projects within projects. I know for example that I will likely create stash tabs devoted to each of these ideas so that as I find gear that might be useful I can start gathering it up while I am playing my league starter. I sincerely doubt that many of you are going to make it down to this point in the blog post because this one is pretty massive. If you have, however, thanks for sticking around even though I tend to get hyper-focused and obsessed with a single game at a time. This has become more of a thing the older I have gotten.
Anyways I hope you have a most excellent day and I will see you tomorrow for more nonsense.
Hey Folks! I spent some more time yesterday tweaking and leveling my Wintertide Brand Occultist. I’ve dialed up the defensive layers a bit and I have a Watcher’s Eye that should also help whenever I can get the free passive points to allocate a jewel socket for it. This is never going to be a bossing character for me, so with that in mind, I am largely leaning into comfortable mapping clears while upping the survival. Essentially I think my next play is to pick up another strength travel node, which should allow me to drop a +30 strength node and then use that point to allocate the socket for the Watcher’s Eye.
I had a Dawnbreaker laying around in my vault that I picked up off Searing Exarch, and I decided to give it a spin. Sure I lost some damage by dropping the caster shield with +1 to cold gems, but I also gained a number of defensive layers baked into the shield alone. Essentially what this is doing is splitting some portion of the damage I am taking and then making it resolve against my Fire Resistance. Sure my Fire Resistance is not amazing and nothing like the 90% that I have on my Juggernaut… but it is enough to sort of blunt the blow for all other attacks a bit. The shield alone is worth almost 2000 armor by itself and has a small amount of life baked into it along with a 46% block chance. While it doesn’t make a ton of sense thematically… so far I am thinking the Dawnbreaker is helping.
I recorded another video yesterday afternoon of me playing the class and talking through some of the decisions that I am making. Now this video was recorded before I made a number of tweaks like the Dawnbreaker last night but still shows the general state of the build. If you want to look at the state of my tree here is a POB, but note that I currently am muling a new wand with my Juggernaut to level it because I can handle crucible progress so much faster with that character. In the grand scheme of things, I am pretty happy with where things are so far. Sure it is weaker than most of my other builds but I am actually enjoying running around with Wintertide Brand again. Would I start that build in another league over RF Jugg? Probably not. That does not mean however I am not enjoying myself.
Now that the weather is warmer, my wife has been spending a lot of time out in the backyard in the evenings reading. Around 8 pm I decided to go out and check on her, since often she comes in way earlier than that, and found that Greybie had decided to hang out as well. He’s been coming around to the backyard more often lately and it is pretty great. So I spent about an hour out there petting him and trying to coax him up onto my lap. He is still a little too skittish for me to actually lift him up and place him there… and expect him to do anything other than run away. When not actively getting attention he would set up shop underneath one of our chairs and just lay there.
All the while we were back there Tripod was over on the concrete patio off our kitchen… some 15 feet away. Greybie and Tripod seem to tolerate each other, but I am not certain they are actually friends yet. She kept coming closer to us… like she wanted to come over and get attention as well and then would retreat back under the patio table rubbing up against the chairs. I feel like she is on the brink of being more sociable, but I am not entirely sure how to tip her over. Our thought is maybe if she watches us petting Greybie… and him being seemingly happy about it… that she might realize that she too can get love and attention. I would honestly love it if Greybie set up shop in our backyard as well because at least knowing those two cats are relatively safe and happy would be a load off my mind. He lives somewhere down the cul de sac but given that he spends MOST of us time in the orbit of our house… I don’t think he has another family.
I really need to start taking my Steam Deck out into the backyard with me and playing something while just chilling with the feral cats. Last night was delightful but other than when I was actively playing with Greybie I was somewhat bored. You can only screw around on your phone so much before it is no longer interesting.
Hey Folks! Yesterday I went down yet another rabbit hole of trying to figure out what exactly I wanted my exit condition to be for the Crucible League. The problem with Path of Exile is there is a nigh endless amount of goals that you can have, and at the same time it is perfectly reasonable to complete none of them. A Diablo III season is far more clear-cut in that you have a single seasonal journey with fixed rewards at the end of it, and a clear “finished” point where it is pretty safe to walk away from. With Path of Exile it all depends upon your core activities, and this league for better or worse has been a league of me revisiting old builds and trying to make them work. I did this with Toxic Rain Pathfinder and then again with Explosive Arrow Champion. Then there was the somewhat meme build of Explosive Raging Spirits where I largely created the build entirely around a single pseudo-eight-link that I found in my travels. It worked well enough, but I also didn’t really enjoy it enough to keep the build around for long.
So yesterday I set my sights on completely changing this character up and revisiting one of my first builds that I fell in love with… Wintertide Brand. Now my first Wintertide character was actually a botched attempt at Righteous Fire. I really enjoyed the brand gameplay and I leaned into that rather than actually transitioning to RF when I should have. More modern Wintertide brands tend to focus around the Occultist ascendency, and it is easy enough to respec my Necromancer into that as a result I set out doing just that yesterday with increasingly misnamed BelNecroSrsly. I did not necessarily follow a guide for this transformation but instead went out to my favorite source for the research of builds that are actually being played… POE.ninja. If you set the search parameters to Occultist and the main skill to Wintertide brand, you can see a rundown of what is actively being played.
Now the highest dps version of the build had a Mageblood and a corrupted Loreweave… so I decided that I needed to set my sights a little lower than that. The next one was running Chaos Innoculation which again… not exactly something that I wanted to mess with for the time being. Eventually, I decided to go with the level 90 build for a character called Frosty_Lady. I figured that I could tweak that to my tastes which gives you a POB that looks a little something like this for my current path forward. ultimately I was trying to make as few changes as possible so essentially I needed to swap out my gloves because they were minion damage based, but there really was nothing else special about those. I needed to pick up the remaining resists that I needed off my Necklace since I would be dropping the unique I had been using for SRS. The key unique to make the build feel good was a corrupted Rime Gaze with a Labyrinth Enchant on it giving Wintertide Brand +4 Maximum Stages. Lastly, I swapped out and sold my expensive SRS shield for a more standard Spirit Shield with +1 levels to all Cold Spell Gems. Technically I spent probably 3 Divine Orbs assembling the specific components of the build but then made back way more than 3 Divine Orbs selling the gear that I was using for Summon Raging Spirits.
I have some problems to work through but for the most part, it feels really good clearing maps… considerably less good clearing bosses. I’ve gotten very used to the Juggernaut and Champion that can largely laugh off most incoming damage. This is absolutely a squishier build as a whole, and there are some tweaks that I would probably do to make it feel better. Firstly I would like to get my Armor and Regen up considerably higher. Next, I would love to figure out a way to stack some blocks considering that is not yet a really viable means of defense. The only reason why it feels as good as it does is because cold damage is in itself a defensive layer. Wintertide Brand slows and ultimately freezes mobs around you making it so that they are either not dealing damage to you… or are moving slow enough that you can easily avoid them.
My defenses are honestly pretty puny at the moment. I only have roughly 3500 health and a little over 600 regeneration which combined with only 69% physical damage reduction from armor and a measly 24% block chance… and all of my Energy Shield going to Eldritch Battery… means that when I get hit I get hit it lands extremely hard. My resists are also not amazing… because while capped I don’t have much that is increasing my maximum resistances. So essentially I need to evaluate my tree a bit to see where I can drop some damage and gain some additional life and defensive layers. This will never be a bossing character for me, so in theory I mostly just want to make it feel good for mapping purposes, and as it stands Wintertide Brand already decimates trash mobs so I can afford to lose some damage to gain some a bit of comfort level. I am sure I will probably record one of my dumb videos showing the current state of the build.
After fiddling around with the Wintertide build and getting functional, I decided to spend some time clearing out influenced maps that I had sitting in my bank. This ultimately led me to acquire another set of Shaper Fragments. So I decided to test my mettle against Shaper on my Explosive Arrow Champion, and much to my surprise, it was way easier to do the fight than on my Righteous Fire Juggernaut. I managed to get through the fight without any deaths and acquired the last Uber Elder fragment that I was missing. So here we are… organically arriving at being able to potentially attempt defeating the memory of The Elder in the Shaper’s Realm that has been haunting my sidebar for a month.
For this fight I opted to go back to my Juggernaut, and took a few deaths in the process but ultimately defeated “Uber Elder” which means I acquired my third void stone… and now all of my maps drop significantly higher. I think the lowest level map can drop for me now is 14, giving me a much wider range of things for farming purposes. I have to say that mechanically on some levels the fight was easier than doing The Shaper or The Elder by themselves. I took deaths in part because I was not prepared to dodge specific mechanics happening at the same time. I think given enough iterations of this fight, I could probably go deathless once I got used to everything. Mostly my key problem with boss encounters in Path of Exile is that they take so much effort to be able to even attempt. If I could run them back to back I would ultimately memorize the patterns and get really good at them. However, doing these once every few weeks… means I lose a lot of progress each time I drop into the encounter because I am going to be rusty each time.
Ultimately though I guess I now know what I have to do to get through this league. I am going to set my sights on beating The Maven encounter, which admittedly feels much easier to get to than Uber Elder given that you just have to chain-run invitations until you get enough fragments to face her. At this point, I am at 8 of 10 fragments so I should be able to burn through this pretty quickly if I actually set my sights on accomplishing it. My hope is that I can take her down by exercising the fact that I have six portals… because I sincerely doubt I will successfully complete a memory game phase. Having three void stones means I am officially further along in this league than I have ever been before. It just feels like Uber Elder was such a pain in the ass that I have to get through Maven now just to finish the job.
I also plan on devoting some time to making Wintertide feel a bit better. Feeling confident enough to tackle this mission is its own accomplishment in my progression through Path of Exile as a whole. I guess the next major achievement would be to go after a build of my own design, without specifically following anything active in the meta. I still feel like I am years away from that accomplishment even though I am well over a thousand hours into this game now. I have no real clue WHY Path of Exile is so engaging for me, but it feels like it is this puzzle that I must solve and each time I clear something new… it uncovers a whole series of other puzzles to be solved just beneath that surface. I will probably spend some more time researching various Wintertide builds on POE.Ninja in order to see how they are solving the survival challenges so that I can devise my own path forward.
