Strongboxes used to be pretty dangerous but I have managed to get a Divine Vessel drop and picked up the “cannot be frozen” trait from the Brine King. A pretty tanky boss spawned out of it and dropped a few unique items as a result. One of the cooler things that I have encountered in my running base maps, is a unique strongbox. My favorite mechanic is probably still Expedition, which is in part why I have gone so hard into it with the tree, and haggling seems to be a solid source of cool stuff. Breach might be cool but with a brand build I always end up getting overwhelmed and dying to those mechanics when I get overwhelmed. Metamorph in its current state just does not feel worth my time given that the bosses you end up creating are super tanky and take forever to kill. Blight is essentially tower defense and I have always disliked those sorts of encounters. Those are just league mechanics that I do not enjoy. The only things that I have shut off completely are Breach, Blight, and Metamorph. Right now I have gone hard into Essences, Strongboxes, and Expeditions.

I’m finding it shockingly lucrative to run just white and yellow maps without any modifiers, and I think in part that is thanks to my Atlas tree. It has helped me at least to feel like I am making forward momentum, ticking off each map as I finish it. It took me forever to finish out yellow maps and I would have struggled to finish out white maps were it not for some help from Ace. Group play sucks… but it is worth it to help someone complete a hole in their maps. The theory is we can also maybe share the wealth if someone is missing some gaps in their progress and we have maps that can fill them. That way the handful of us that are playing together can tick off maps as we clear them. Shocking to probably no one that has been around my blog for long… I created a spreadsheet to track our progress. There have been so many maps where a chain death spree reduces whatever progress I made to nothing. That is probably one of the most annoying things about Path of Exile is how brutal death is to your leveling. Essentially I seem to be alternating between grinding low-level maps for experience and pushing progress because deaths really hurt. I’ve been trying to farm whatever I could from Kirac, but once we entered red map territory the requirement of having to have a corrupted map has made him less than useful. At this point, I am sitting at 83 out of 115, and the majority of what I have left in front of me is red maps and uniques. I’ve talked about it before but my goal for this season has been to clear the atlas map. I feel pretty lousy, and as a result, spent most of the extended weekend chilling out and playing a mix of Diablo III and Path of Exile. I find it highly unlikely that I do not have COVID unless she just had a very light viral load. My wife had to scramble and prepare for a sub for this week as she is out until Friday.

Other than that most of what I am experiencing is just general “allergies” or “hay fever”. Basically, I feel like I got hit by a truck and everything aches… almost like when you have the flu. Thus far mine have come up negative but I am having what I am not sure are symptoms or not. We assumed it was allergies, but Saturday night my wife took a COVID swab test, and came up positive. Hey Folks! I’ve spent the entire weekend being paranoid because my wife and I had both been sickly for the last week or so.

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