My 3.6 Plan

[Chadvoluted]

Tonight / Tomorrow Morning:
Don't freak out if you see me in Standard. I'm going to go through and get my standard stash in order, and then head over to Synthesis. (mainly just so I don't get stuck with a bum Map Stash Tab, the way I did last time). Having a garbage Map Stash Tab that you can't do anything with sucks. Having to buy another one to fix it, sucks more.


After I get that handled:
I'm going to go with a Scion Molten Strike to start the league. I've been building a POB of how to approach it since I enjoy MS, but (and I know this is silly) The Model of the Marauder is just... Not my thing. Too big, too bulky. Biggest reason I never played a Tauren in WoW.

This is my level 90 plan. (Pastebin link)

The gear is a mixture of shareable gear I've saved, and stuff I have on my 'rauder right now. I'm planning to use a few different items in a new league as opposed to Standard.

1.) Shield.
Price checking Lioneye's Shield in Betrayal at the end of the leauge, it stayed far more expensive than what it was in Standard. Alternatively, the shields needed to craft Magna Eclipsis are farmable, so I should be able to (if nothing else), buy my way to Magna Eclipsis faster.

2.) Chest
I'm not planning to go the "flavor of the month" route and go with the 6L from the Elder head, and rock a Kaom's Chest. I am not planning to have that kind of Orb sitting around. It's taken me quite a long time to amass the "small" amount of Orb I've stocked up in Standard.

So, I'm going to plan to use Shroud of the Lightless, at least to start. Getting a 1 Abyss, 5L, should be pretty easy. If nothing else, I can just buy one, and save the orbs up to 5s / 5L it myself.

Yes, the support given by it is "technically" not as good as a 20/20 Fire Pen but with my play time, it should be easier (and cheaper) to get the 5L Shroud as opposed to something else at 6L.

I think the hardest part about getting the build going, will be getting a Poacher's Mark ring later on, and then a Xoph's Neck. I don't even have it in Standard, and I do OK, so I'm planning to deal without having one.

So, I guess I'll see you all in Synthesis, begrudgingly.

[Chadvoluted]

Impressions of Synthesis League so far:

1.) They need to tune the low level Fragments better. Sometimes, when you enter from encountering Cavas you can get cratered immediately after interacting with the memory portal, from the sheer number of Mobs VS the level / gear that you have. But, that seems to be the way new leagues go on release.

2.) They need to address the storage capacity on memory fragments for use in the Nexus. I'm now 10 levels higher than the main quest line, and I'm really not doing extra.

All I'm runing:
Masters Quests.
Ascendency / Lab attunements.
Memory Fragments when I run into Cavas (I'm NOT going out of my way to find him)
Running The Nexus when my Fragments reach capacity. General 4-5 fragments to give me some room so that I don't have to go back.
Once I max out my Sulphite, I'll have to mix in Delving with this, so that I'm not wasting Sulphite / grossly overleveling the delve areas.

There is so much in the game, that it just seems like the main questing areas are worthless to run.

3.) Scrolls of Wisdom (at least for me) seem to be in short supply. I'm following my normal loot pattern. Loot Scrolls, Loot Orbs, Loot Chromable gear. Loot Rare Gear, Loot other things that have the potential to be upgrades to gear I'm wearing. I am continuously vendoring Transmutation Orbs so that I can ID rares / possible upgrades.

4.) Gearing up, and playing the game from scratch isn't as terrible as I thought it would be, though some of that is from the fragmented / synthesized loot, and the fact that it vendors for quite a bit.

Speaking of Fragmented loot, It would be REALLY awesome if there was a way to drop more of it, or control what drops. After Synthesizing a few pieces of loot, I've got a general idea of how it works, and while they've made the Item Level penalty "less" for this than other tools in the game, Ilvl is still pretty important. While leveling, it feels more like junk loot, than something exciting.

5.) The build / Character. Scion Molten Strike is coming along great. I used the Jugg Marauder "TANK EVERYTHING" build in the forums as a "blueprint" to build the POB for this. I used that as the basis for my 92 Marauder in Standard, so I figured this would be an easy way to build a Scion, as well. I'm 8 points away from completing the first "Leg" of the Tree.

After that, I'll be headed into the Marauder / Duelist area, where I will have to refund points later on to just come off the marauder starting area.

6.) Here is my char, MatsuTuri
Pretty pleased with the gearing so far, now that I'm out of the low level Fragments, and have had time to actually get some supports / gear, I'm not getting destroyed in the fragments.


Impressions of 3.6 in standard so far.
I started out going over, and dumping my maps, vendoring what I could, and getting the Map Stash sorted before it ended up unusable the way my first tab did post betrayal.

I ran an old T13, and got most of my atlas progress back in standard.
I then vendored anything that I had 3 maps of to upgrade them to the new series. I ended up with ~115 - 120 Maps from 3.6's pool.

The frustrating part, is that I have 120-130 maps from the 3.5 pool left that are just 1's and 2's, with about a dozen of those being Unique Maps. While I get what they are doing with the Atlas for leagues, they are going to need to get this figured out for Standard. While running my new Char through Synthesis has been an ok distraction, but I'm itching to get back on my way to killing Shaper, Uber Atziri, and other content that I've not seen yet, and have little faith that I'll finish by the end of Synthesis. I'm going to give it my best shot, but if I don't end up getting closer than what I am in Standard, this is probably my last league for a good long time. If they continue to break the atlas in Standard every 3 months, It'll probably not be long before I stop playing completely. I love the game, and I love the end game system, but getting completely reset every 3 months on the way to the end game content is not something I'm interested.

[Concillian]

Impressions of Synthesis League so far:

1.) They need to tune the low level Fragments better.

2.) They need to address the storage capacity on memory fragments for use in the Nexus.

They just published a blog that has these items listed as things they are working on. Also being able to delete fragments (as you tend to need very specific orientations to properly maintain the nexus with a lot of connected memories.) When you get a long chain (which I don't yet have) you basically need 5 or so specific pieces to replace those you're running along the way to even start doing anything.

There is so much in the game, that it just seems like the main questing areas are worthless to run.

I agree, from anything below super hardcore, playing 6+ hours a day there's a LOT of things to spend time on. You kinda have to pick something to ignore.

3.) Scrolls of Wisdom (at least for me) seem to be in short supply.

Dunno, this wasn't a huge issue for me. I did vendor some transmutes early on, maybe Act 2 or so, but after that things started getting better. You just have to be okay with not being able to ID everything. Once I filled my Sulphite and went into the mine, I had plenty of scrolls. I always get tons of scrolls & flasks in the Delve mine.

4.) Gearing up, and playing the game from scratch isn't as terrible as I thought it would be, though some of that is from the fragmented / synthesized loot, and the fact that it vendors for quite a bit.

Glad your gearing and character are working out well. Alch shards! I have so many alchs for being at level 69. I only farmed Blood Aqueducts like 4-5 runs, not even enough to get one Humility card and have ~25 alchs... I mean the one thing is normally I'd have been like leve 65-67, the nexus gives a lot of XP, but it gives way more alch shards than I'd otherwise have. Alchs weren't a problem for me last league, but you mentioned having problems sustaining alchs... Looks like that won't be an issue in 3.6.

After Synthesizing a few pieces of loot, I've got a general idea of how it works, and while they've made the Item Level penalty "less" for this than other tools in the game, Ilvl is still pretty important. While leveling, it feels more like junk loot, than something exciting.

Synthesis of items is a bit of a letdown, mainly because as mechanics are becoming known, it's becoming obvious that it's VERY RNG unless you scour + regal + annul multiple items, and then it's still RNG, but not as RNG... so you have to spend like an exalt or two just getting "a good chance" at an implicit you're after.

So the mechanic just feels like for someone not going to those lengths, it's little more than getting a free chaos orb re-roll on a rare for every three fractured items. I mean it's slightly better than that, but not really much.

FYI --- the mechanic appears to: take the ilvl of the highest ilvl item & # of implicits = average of the number of fractured mods on all three & the pool for the implicits is insanely random, because it can come from any modifier, though it weights prefixes more from the leftmost item, and suffixes more from the rightmost, and also weights the fractured mods higher. So doing 4-6 mod rares, results in a pretty wide variance of possible implicits. You almost have to scour + regal + annul to get anywhere near a decent chance at any one particular implicit.

I can see why they'd limit the numbers of fractured items, as brute forcing rare implicits would be easier, and the no lifers would do that and flood market and power creep anyone trading, but the alternative is that people who don't play 60 hours a week are basically going to be lucky to get 1-2 decent implicits all league long.

My progress went well. SynthConc is my Occultist.
I learned how bad DOTs are for ES characters. Died a few times along the way, mostly by playing too fast. The only boss I died to was Solaris / Lunaris sisters @ end of Act 8 shortly after I swapped to CI and had effective health a little on the low side and just not avoiding enough of the curve-ball spinny Lunaris blades. Realistically I should have pipped in CI for Doedre, then refunded it, but I felt like just keeping on. I guess that's a side effect of the softcore death penalty being so small. Doedre with CI was ridiculously easy though, so there is that.

It's kinda fun making stuff work with garbage gear. Had an Icetomb body armor drop in like Act 6-ish... that helped a lot, and it feels good to get a useful item.

Impressions of 3.6 in standard so far.

They have effectively killed standard until they come up with a reasonable atlas / map tab solution. I didn't even bother trying. I imagine by next league they'll have some kind of solution that at least won't require a few hundred / thousand clicks at the vendor (but will likely still destroy ~2/3rds of your maps "upgrading" them)

[Chadvoluted]

Level 58, and I'm starting to get my level back in line with the questline. I'm into Act 7, getting ready to go after Maligaro's Map. Still about 7-8 levels ahead of where I am leveling, But as a bonus, The RNG Gods felt nice enough to drop an Ex in a Memory Fragment.

I'm hoping that I'm to mapping by the time I'm done playing on Saturday, but that's going to depend on how many times I run into Cavas between now and then, and how many times I have to run memories to keep my inventory down.

Still operating on just a 4 link. I have a 5 socket chest now, but I'm not anywhere near confident in trying to fuse it. I don't have that many fusings, and I've never had much luck in trying to get links greater than 4. I'll probably just save up, and buy a decent chest once I'm ready to map.

I'm really bummed by Synthesis. It's not nearly as fun as interesting as I thought it would be. I had hoped that the beginning of Delve was an Anomaly, and that they had learned how to balance leagues at start since I last played a league (Rampage / Beyond).

Delve was broken in multiple ways, and early delving was awful.
There are still broken parts of Cavas's Nexus, and the paths. After 2-3 Zones, I have to Alt F4 to leave, each time.

I'm going to keep going forward, and I'm hoping that things get better, but between the frustrations / lack of "Cool" factor of Synthesis, coupled with the desire to actually GET to Shaper, Standard is calling me.

[Concillian]

My 5L bow was 1 alch... Are there any 5L chests that are similar. I know you'd prefer to do on your own, but Last league I bought a white 5L and hit it with a +life essence and went with that. Spending fusings on 5L is a bit of a waste, IMO.

On the other hand, 4L is probably doing alright for you at that point. Wildfire comes so early that you're probably doing fine, but MS is a little slow going.

After getting into the league mechanic for a while, it seems VERY top heavy. I mean you get lucky every once in a while, I got a scarab chest on a memory in the nexus, and that dropped a sulphite scarab worth just under 40c, but in order to do significant things with the synthesizer is looking like it requires specialized inputs that you need to spend currency on to get a ~15-30% chance at the implicit you're after. And if you're after the high tier implicits, you need high tier bases as inputs, so maybe an exalt or so for each gamble. That's a bit disappointing.

It looks like for bows it might be okay. I think I figured a way to get ~30% chance at +1 bow gems implicit for much less investment, maybe 20c-ish, so I'm going to be testing that out. and possibly end up with a +4 bow this league instead of a +3 bow.

[Chadvoluted]

If I'm going to buy a chest, I'll probably just buy a white 6L. There are a ton of them up for less than 30 Chaos. Since you start over with the Recipes on the crafting table, I'll probably try and find a AR / ES chest to make Chroming it easier (4R / 2B). Though, looking online right now, there is a 4r2b 6L chest with "decent" stats that is corrupted pretty cheap. I may see if I can just snag that. Low on Armor, but It's better than chests that I have on chars in standard that clear T8/9 maps, so it would definitely help out as a long term solution. Just hard to pull the trigger on a purchase like that so early in a league when I'm still trying to amass "some" wealth.

Wildfire made a big difference, for sure. I'm struggling "a little" with damage right now, but that's mainly because of my lack of a decent weapon. I had been using a low level sabre that I couldn't seem to replace, purely because of the Attack Speed that it had. I finally upgraded it to a claw, which still isn't great DPS, but it's an improvement.

I'm going to wait to make a final decision until I hit mapping, but I am leaning towards just going back to standard at this point. I don't know. The extra orbs from Memories are cool, but other than that, I'm just sort of "Meh".

[Chadvoluted]

Still in Act 9, and level 69. The Synthesis content is just too much to do next to the normal content, and stay even close to on track.

I'm about 1/3 of the way thrugh A9, and then with all of A10 to go, I have to think that I'm going to be about 73-74 before I get Kitava down. Now that I'm in A9, I have to contend with balancing

Niko
Einhar
Jun
Alva
and Cavas who is in every zone. I only run him if I see him. I don't go out of my way to do it.

I will say, that gearing is coming together pretty well. I picked up a 5L with decent stats pretty cheap
I picked up a Chernobog shield for 1 Alch
My absolute Favorite Leveling / Early Mapping Helm in the game dropped for me in A9. Skullhead I think this is probably the least appreciated unique I've run across.
The rest of the gear is pretty "Meh", but it's getting me through content.

I'm just irritated with the amount of time to get through everything, to make sure that you aren't wasting things.

[Concillian]

I'm just irritated with the amount of time to get through everything, to make sure that you aren't wasting things.

I struggled a bit mapping and did quite a lot of T1 and just a few T2 before the hotfix to increase map drops last night. Now I am gaining a supply of T3s and a few T4s.

Memory Nexus for me has been relegated to spawning bosses and little else. Occasionally running a chest node if it's close, but I ignore memory modifiers completely now, just not worth the time at all. There are 20 max reward nodes, and 1 of those 20 is reserved to be a boss node, so if you keep 19 other nodes, the 20th node is always a boss node. So I place / delete 2 way memories until I get a boss node, then plan a route to it with more flexible 3 and 4 way memories.

That keeps one of the "chores" to a minimum of effort.

Working on my +1 bow skills implicit, I have 4 bases ready, only found 2 regals. Once a 3rd drops I will have my first chance at it. People have caught on and appropriate bases are now either 10c each or sold immediately. Live search has got me the last two I got. People aren't really selling many fractured items as an appropriate base looks like it'd be completely worthless... And most base items with worthless suffixes are worthless.

As for the others, I find them reasonable to manage. Once you get a few max sulphite increases, Niko happens a lot less often than every 10 maps, Alva is rare too, there's no danger in running safehouses often... from the looks I won't even get the first safehouse until I'm >level 90, so once you figure how to manage memories, the rest are pretty reasonable, I think.... It's just the 10 maps --> nexus puzzle REALLY slows things down. Only worrying about boss nodes or the occasional chst node speeds that part up significantly.

[Chadvoluted]

I've been reading about people doing the boss spawn plan, and guess I'm not understanding.

I place 19 memories, and then the 20th I place is a boss node place?
Then, I can delete everything that I want that isn't the boss, and create a path to just that?
Am I understanding this?

I'll be downing Kitava tonight, or in the morning. I'll be 73 when it happens, as I'm going to go ahead and run my 3rd Lab tonight before downing Kitava, because hey, why not take advantage of being at max resists first?

A couple of things that I've figured out about my build so far:

1.) I used to think that Grelwood Shank was the most important Item to get. It's not. It's an amazing item, and it's still BiS, or close to BiS for the build, but It's definitely soemthing that I can hang off on getting, and keep punting on the few sword nodes I pick up, since my DPS is more than adequate now, and the Leech / On Hit from Claws are pretty awesome.

2.) I toyed around with Reckoning + CoH + Poacher's mark for a little bit. That's a pretty interesting way to apply the curse, and seemed to happen at least as often as keeping the curse in a CWDT setup, and gives me the flexibility that I could use the Weapon sockets to hold that combo if I end up with a better block shield than what I have now, and / or possibly working on "crafting" a synthesized / Jun Modifier block shield later on.

3.) I think that the style of MS that I'm playing (Based on a Streamer's MS Jugg that I used as a framework for my 'rauder), works far better as a scion than it does as a marauder. At least for leveling purposes, I'll keep comparing as I get into mapping, because I'm very pleased with how this is working, now that I have "some" gear. I am still 100% positive that I'm going to go Elementalist with my final Ascendency Points from Uber Lab, as the one thing that always makes me irritable is having garbage modifiers on maps. The Ascendancy tree will give me a fair amount of defenses, while also making sure that my accuracy issues are moot.

[Concillian]

I place 19 memories, and then the 20th I place is a boss node place?
Then, I can delete everything that I want that isn't the boss, and create a path to just that?
Am I understanding this?

There is a limit to the number of reward tiles that can spawn (20)

Each reward tile can be one of three things: Memory modifier, Chest reward, or a Boss.

there is a minimum of one boss tile in the 20 tiles. There's probably a minimum of others as well, so you can probably force whatever type of reward tile you want.

If there are 19 combined Memory modifier tiles + chest reward tiles, then the only reward tile that can spawn will be a boss tile.

The last requirement is that you have to have completed a special memory, which happens as a part of zana's quest line around T5 maps.

When you place & activate a memory tile, the nexus takes it's "turn" and has a chance to spawn a reward tile. So you can place & activate a memory tile then delete it and repeat until you get a boss tile, then plan your route to the boss tile. This makes "memory management" significantly quicker. You just clear out most of your nodes so you have places to put new tiles, and then it takes just a few minutes to see if you get a boss tile, then you know what types of tiles you need to make it there as well, so you can make sure you complete the right memories to get there if you don't have the right ones.

Try out Wild Strike in a 4L with your current spec and gear. I bet it's much smoother mapping with WS in a 4L and MS in your 5L than using MS all the time. MS maps 'fine', but WS is so much better, and they scale similarly enough that it doesn't matter that WS is not optimal, since you can use MS for the single target.

[Chadvoluted]

I think I'm just about done with the League. I know, they claimed to have fixed the Map Drop Rates, but I'm not seeing it.

I ran all 15 T2/3 Maps that I had built up, and I now have 11 T1, and 2 T2 Maps. I'm not seeing any variety in the maps that are dropping either.

Memories aren't fun.
The only master that I'm finding on runs is Alva

I logged into Standard, and put my Smite Shadow back together, using some of the defensive tricks that I've learned through running Molten Strike so much, I was able to run a few Standard Maps, and the content was at least more fun (and the drops incredibly nicer) than trying to run through Synthesis Content, and just getting more frustrated with the lack of Drops.

I'll probably just bounce around my Chars to clear up the rest of the 120+ Betrayal Maps I have sitting in my stash, and if I get them built up, I'll go ahead and start running towards Shaper on My Marauder, and just deal with my distaste for the size of the Model.