It would not be much longer till I'd be spending many late nights grinding away at the Atlas farming maps. First, I still had a few acts to get through in the main storyline before I'd be there.

By Act 5 things were still going great. High Templar Avarius got owned so hard that the only thing to slow me down was him entering his shielding phases. It was not even a close call. The funny thing is I still had not yet fully understood the build I was playing.

Every once in a while I'd add a new skill gem the loadout of it. Some of them I've never used before. Others just quickly reading what they were was all I needed to jog my memory. Of them, I should have read a little closer to get a better understanding of how they were working with my overall setup.

Still, without everything going at 100% I was crushing it. I was starting to get rather tired of leap slam by this time. I was also hoping it would have been strong enough all I needed to do was leap slam around the screen from one side of a zone to another leaving a wake of destruction.

Anytime I'd leap into a pack of monsters there were always survive. Even more so if they were magic or higher rarity. I kind of expected rare monsters to have survived. I however was having to stop a lot more than I would have liked.

While I was running from zone to zone getting deeper into the acts and storyline of the game. I started to think about what kind of things I wanted to be running when I got into maps.

One I have always enjoyed a lot has been expeditions. It seems I can’t stop running any of them that I come across. I'd quickly scout them out to work out where I wanted to set up the explosives I got. Then detonate the explosives and take out anything that came up from the ground.

I’ve yet to get anything of high value. I have at least made a couple of chaos orbs on the way while leveling. That will come quite in handy once I start to buy some gear from other players to quickly increase my overall setup on the cheap.

To my surprise act VI was quite easy. This is usually where I expect things to get a bit hard. The biggest thing I noticed going into Act VI was the fact my resistance was already decently high. Not high enough to hit the cap but rather decent for how little focus other than getting new weapons I had been putting into gear.

I did end up making my first stop in my hideout to do some quick crafting before hitting the next act. I had found a new weapon that happened to have an open slot for me to put some attack speed. I also went over and added some fire damage.

While I was at it I ended up adding some further resistance to some of my gear. Along with some dex so I could keep leveling up some skill gems. I was kind of shocked by the lack of dex nodes anywhere near me on the skill tree. I was hoping to resolve that issue without needing to use gear for it in the short term.

Part of the fun of the higher acts in the game is taking a break from pushing forward to slay some minor gods. All the major ones are part of the end boss for each act. They usually reward a passive skill point for taking down the minor gods. With how easy they have been to deal with I felt I might as well take them out while passing by; instead of, coming back at a higher level and doing it.

Act VII is when I started to notice the little things that would end up becoming huge issues. While running my first map as part of the storyline I noticed I was still downing things like bosses without struggle. It was however my defense that was becoming a bigger challenge.

This would end up morphing into a much bigger issue. Even more so once my damage was no longer quickly taking anything down in my path. It was also around this point when I started to take back some of the time I spent being over-leveled.

I was taking things at such a slow pace I was in some areas nine levels above it. While It’s not like my gear level was 9 higher in the areas I was clearing out. I did however have quite an advantage from my passives and level for each area.

This is when I decided to fully send and quickly leap across zones. Unless I needed to do something for a mission I more or less skipped over it. There were however some expectations. Such as expedition sites and farming ores for the current league.

I’m just glad my cruel labyrinth run still felt as easy as the first one I did. I was picking up some important berserker nodes for war cries. Once I made it into maps have five war cries running. Which in theory should have helped boost my damage while reducing the amount of damage I was taking more than enough to provide me quite a soiled level of defense.

Defeating the boss in Act 9 was perhaps the last easy act. Things went quickly downhill from here. It was also around the time when my level was almost caught up to the zone level.

I make it to Act X I am always just hungry to go run maps. There are a bunch of side quests that I ended up putting off for a little while. I made up a lot of time and just made a run towards the final boss. If I did not need to do it to progress the main storyline I did not.

Once I downed the final act boss. I took a look at my resistance and I got to say I was rather impressed in how well they looked. I even had two of them capped already. With some minor changes and a little bit of crafting later all three elementals were almost maxed before even hitting maps.

Final thoughts

I quickly rushed towards running the first map before jumping into my hideout to run an all-nighter of maps. I barely finished the first map and got almost crushed in the next map of my own that I ran.

It was quite clear I was going to need to make some big improvements to move forward. Even after I addressed a rather large mistake on my end in the build I was using. My character would just get wrecked in maps.

They are always that period when just getting into maps where you get murdered. It seemed however I was not going to be moving away from that time for a while. Any of the bigger upgrades I could make were also going to be expensive. Even as early into the league as it was.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Path Of Exile.