superarts
commented
3 months ago League mechanisms vs gold drop
I tried some of the league mechanisms, and most of them were very disappointing.
- Blight: it's good source for blighted maps; recycle tower was very disappointing. Gold was OK but it takes too long. When I didn't finish my build, I was at 2M DPS and couldn't handle full lane of bosses. But hexblast is not the best build for it because of random projectile one-shots.
- Expedition & Harvest: good source for income and can yield some golds without heavy investment. I keep them on one of my atlas.
- Essence, strongbox: meh. Good for hexblast to run, but it's just similar as killing a rare mob / pack. Hexblast usually doesn't care elemental reflection but it may be insta kill when opening a strongbox.
- Breach, legion, abyss: very few gold dropped, comparing with now many mobs killed. I suspect there's a hidden multiplier that punishes gold drops for these contents.
- Beyond: terrible gold drop. Not sure why, and it can be rippy for hexblast. Avoid.
- Legion: looks OK and I may try it later.
- Beast, incursion, betrayal, rogue exile: can be rippy and annoying to run so I just avoid. Gold drop seems to be pretty bad too.
- Torment: my main strategy now. A torment soul is at least a unique mob kill, and the touched mobs can yield some return.
So I run 3 torment scarabs and 2 fragments for cheap, with 100%+ quantity maps from T17 drops, and use 6 portals as my main defense mechanism. Eater is the best comparing all 3 but all are doable.
I had some shipping at 2-3M value and it seems to be pretty bad, T16 50% quantity auto mapper is pretty bad too. Maybe we need all level 10 mappers / shippers to run t17 / ship 200M value in late game? But it's just too annoying to farm gold, and since it's not tradable, it's more toxic to run gold farming services cuz fuck TFT.
Geared up my Hexblast Sanctum runner (20M+ DPS)
Also leveled up Kingsmarch to level 11
The experience
Everything went according to the plan, after finishing campaign, ran logbooks to farm currency (Hexblast is not good for Heist, and Expedition is more fun), ran blight maps to level up and get free high level maps, then basically mapping at tier 1, then tier 5, then 10, then do the exarch and eater quest line. I spent too much time doing league mechanisms and it didn't really pay off, basically I just wasted my time farmed and managed resources, get all facilities to lv 11, recruited map and ship crews to lv 7 to lv 10, then put it aside. It's really annoying to farm gold.
I'm building power charge stacker occultist and the biggest challenge this league is the price of Ralakesh boots. I was running all rare gears and was at around 2M DPS, and finally after I was able to afford Ralakesh at 26 divines, the rest was easy. Sandstorm was the last expensive piece (I bought at 14 divine I think, and the price kept dropping). Eventually I reached to 20M DPS and was able to run lv 83 sanctums at ease. It's annoying to run stone golem blessing but I only use it to burst bosses down in 2-3 seconds (a trick in sanctum is that you can insta logout when you are hit to save your run, there's no penalty unless you may logout right after killing a boss then you'll lose your reward, but it rarely happens). I'm running 10 reveals currently but relic stacking would probably be better.
This build is a 6 portal build while mapping. I didn't watch any guides, and I'm running torment for some extra gold. I can only get 15k-20k gold per map in average, TBH it was more fun to build Kingsmarch then actually profit from it (sanctum is more fun to play).
Atlas strategy:
Skills:
PS: I don't think I'm going to keep playing much in this league anymore. I was mainly curious how good Hexblast was in terms of league start, and it turned out to be pretty good.