Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Path of Exile: Summoner Decisions

Randy commented on yesterday's posting saying how much he liked eldritch battery+mind over matter and suggested also taking a look at the skill arctic armour. For some reason I'd confused that skill and tempest shield and thought it was going to reserve 25% of my mana and that's all pretty much committed to auras making my zombies better. But now that I see that it doesn't reserve any mana at all I'm pretty keen on giving it a spin. I don't really need to cast spells so my mana regen can go to keeping that up without much trouble at all.

So I slept on it, and I decided to give it a spin. Then I went and actually took a look at what I'd need to do to make the changes and it wasn't looking good. I only have 5 respec points left and would need at least 10 regrets to get rolling. I don't have that many, so I'd need to go out and buy some. Even if I did have that many, 10 regrets is actually worth a fair amount. Saving up to get a Tabula Rasa item is probably a better move than changing my spec at this point and 10 regrets is about 20% of the cost of that item.

Tom also pointed out that having access to double curses is actually a big deal on some of the harder map boss fights. My problem is I didn't think I'd be able to survive long enough to cast the curses in the first place. Looking over my gear it's still pretty terrible, and I am still near a bunch more life nodes if I wanted to pick those up instead of running all over the tree to get mind over matter. The really big concern is if it doesn't work out well I'd end up being out more than an exalt to get back to my current state and that doesn't actually feel very worthwhile. So I'm probably better off just leveling a new character with the right build. That actually wouldn't take all that long!

At this point there are four ways to make my character better. I can level up my gems. I can level up my character. I can farm better gear. And I can change my spec to something better. Two of those things my current character could actually be doing for a new character. I do feel like my gear is pretty bad right now, and it could very well be that with better gear (and with arctic armour) my current spec will end up working out just fine. Even if it isn't good enough, the other spec definitely needs better gear too so time spent getting better gear now is not wasted at all. And the gem levels are really important for my minion power.

There's also the fact that none of my gems have any quality on them, and one way to get max quality on a gem is to take a max level gem and reset it to level 1. So my current plan is to keep playing my current character. If I die a bunch then I die a bunch. The gems will keep getting experience regardless! Then when my gems hit max level I'll make a decision on how the spec is working out. If I want the different one I can start a new character with the level 1 gems and level them organically on a new character with max quality.

And this way the guild keeps a high level dual curser around just in case it's needed.

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