Path of Exile

That’s a fair point, as the last few leagues really have highlighted a few specific revamps. But to my thinking, it’s really not that much different from just reading the game forums for build posts. Which you’re welcome to ignore, just as you don’t have to play the FOTM build that jumps out from the patch notes. I’m doing a hybrid myself, using the new summoning gems but not with the Guardian and in conjunction with old-school summoning. I’m sure it won’t be as good as the “obvious” version but I’m having fun experimenting.

Decided to play some Arc Elementalist to see what all this chain lightning fuss was about, and it’s pretty hilarious. I haven’t even bothered putting together proper sockets for anything other than Arc in a self-found 4L chest. Bought one overpriced jewel, one scepter, and good ol’ Nomic’s Storm but that’s it.

Absolutely trashing everything to a stupid extent. I’ve definitely never had an easier leveling experience. Faceplanted once against Kitava as is tradition, but everything just melts. I am amused. Don’t see why this won’t be pretty decent through at least mid-tier maps, where I tend to burn out anyway.

WanderingAttackSnails brought her army to Kitava and smoked him. (Video proof!) Level 71 by the time I got there largely because I’d been doing delves every time my fuel meter filled up, and all that extra XP adds up.

Boss damage is certainly the weakest point of Dominating Blow. That 10% chance to summon a dude on hit is pretty wimpy, even with crazy fast attack speed, plus it doesn’t work at all when you’re running for your life instead of attacking. So I went with the old tried-and-true Tukohama’s Vanguard spectres for single target damage. (Path of Building pastebin here for anyone interested.) Working thus far, we’ll see how it holds up into maps now.

Oh, don’t worry about end game viability, I think quad arcs have it! :)

Smoked A10 Kitava @67 in a 4L with 3k life. And at good clip too, maybe quicker than my Ancestral Warchief Champ. That’s also without 14 totem/lightning damage nodes, no power charges, only a single jewel slotted and still merc and uber lab to complete. Yeah, it will kill.

Need a map?

Most of 'em up to tier 10. I have a collection of reds that I’m running, but if anyone needs a specific one let me know and I can drop it in here.

Thanks, I stole some and replaced some, but was tapping out at tier 7ish at the time.

I don’t like delve as a mechanic even a little bit. Miss by ggg IMO.

Really? Why not? Better than Incursion for me. Loot is very good so far, but I am only down to 140 or so due to fairly sporadic play. It is probably build dependant, I imagine some melee toons would suck due to darkness mechanic perhaps limiting mobility, but for totems it’s a blast. Breaks up the mapping monotony and the rewards seem pretty good. Not used many resonators yet though.

On a side note, I have a Timeworn Reliquary key drop during levelling and did not think much of it at the time. I am sure I checked poe.trade and they were like several C, now they are up over 4Ex! Run it or sell it!?

If they were several c that was probably people trying to price fix. They’ll put some up for “sale” but never actually sell them, trying to get folks to sell theirs at that price.

I haven’t played much this league, but I’d never sell one. The loot is the point, why not see what you get?

And while I didn’t play much this league (only got to delve 80 or 90), it’s not because I didn’t enjoy it, I just got distracted by newer stuff. I too prefer Delve over Incursion, easily. I really hope it goes core and is fairly easy to run regularly.

I tend to play a lot one league, then cut back the next and unfortunately I put quite a bit of time into Incursion. Wish they’d been reversed.

Delve is interesting, but I liked the “build your own temple” aspect of Incursion more. Following the crawler around is pretty standard “kill all the things and do it fast” PoE play, and the rewards are pretty good. I particularly like the currency nodes, of course! But I think they did a poor job with the flares-in-the-dark mechanic. I regularly die whenever I try to go off the crawler path, my life being drained away even though it looks to me like I’m standing right on top of a flare. Upgraded the flares, tried to drop them right at my feet, doesn’t seem to matter…still only works maybe 2 times out of 3. I’ve learned to work around it by dropping multiple flares and/or simply running away when I can’t tell why I’m dying, but it’s not a good gameplay experience.

What bob said. It creates a sense of pressure in a bad way to me. Arc witch is a great build for it and everything, I just don’t like the experience. And it sucks that I’m leaving all kinds of ez loots on the table by ignoring it.

The bugs are annoying. That’s the one bit of delve I don’t like and I hope they get straightened out. I will grant this was the buggiest league that I can remember. Others may have had worse starts but they got fixed fairly quickly.

But the risk/reward of darkness diving is the best thing in PoE to me. I don’t have the skills to do high end bosses; I’m getting too old to dodge 7 things while also positioning carefully. I never made it to the delve boss and I assume I won’t be able to handle them if I ever do.

I can, however, dive off into the darkness and make quick decisions about light management or logging out. It’s a dangerous mechanic that doesn’t one shot me and as long as it doesn’t bug on me I can always say “that death was avoidable and my fault”. I don’t feel I can do that with the end bosses because I’m getting slow enough now that avoidable is beyond my skillset.

Nice little interview from RPS about Delve design.

I’m in my “burned out, no more PoE until next major update” phase but I still read the occasional news item.

The private league thing sounds interesting, though I’m not sure how popular it will be. More intriguing to me is the 3.5 announcement coming up in a week or so.


I may give it a try out of curiousity, never tried the XBO version.

Edit: I think they’re adding some new voice acting.

Still f2p, different accounts I would imagine? I’ll probably check it out just out of curiosity.

Yeah, sounds like entirely per-platform accounts and the same cosmetic / stash monetization model.

Works for me. I’m sure I’ll give it a shot at some point, it’s not like I’m lacking in HDD space on my Netflix box.

Oh man, here we go.

I keep thinking “maybe I’ll skip the next league” and then they release something that looks awesome. Got 24 days to build up willpower to resist…

Hah and they haven’t even released the new league details yet.

A few things from listening to ZiggyD on stream/watching his video:

  • There’s a flask option under the Mastercrafting UI filter. At a glance I think the UI looks good, where you can filter by item type and then prefix/suffix.

  • Uniques with Veiled Mods give you choices just like other items. Ziggy thinks the choice is based on the type of item but isn’t 100% certain. Regardless of whether you use an item, unveiling and selecting a veiled mod always gives you the ability to master craft it. One assumes you’ll have to re-discover veiled mods each new league, assuming this all makes it in (but it isn’t league content, rather expansion).

  • Lots of questions on how exactly delve is going to work. Ziggy doesn’t know any more than we do. He expects that when you find Nico in the wild, or do a daily, Nico will hand over a bunch of sulfur. Also Chris has said that he’s thinking we’ll get to do 1-3 Incursions when you find a wild Alva. Personally, since master crafting is no longer based on leveling, I hope the new masters appear more frequently than their forsaken counterparts. I like a lot of that content.

  • Not sure if favor is present or gone or what.

  • Einhar missions send you to an area with multiple beasts to capture and there’s a garuanteed red skull spawn. And yes he goes with you and yes he handles the netting (he also shoots a crossbow).

  • The secret to EInhar’s bravery? He does not think!