I’ve decided I'm going to go big for delve this league. For that, I was going to need to make an alt that will specialize in running delve. The biggest issue for that is delve is quite an old league now and there have been many changes since then.

So, the plan was to go over some data of the top delve runners so far in this league. I then was going to reverse engineer my kind of build-out of what I could. The biggest issue is this involves some massive high-end gear that I've never had. A lot of stuff I don’t truly understand till I'm in middle of the using large parts of the build and seeing what is not exactly going right.

I also don’t have anything other than to go by then the gear they are wearing and the current passive skills they have selected. This made it a bit hard early on to get a feel of what was an important must-have and what I could get away with not having if I was just looking to break my own personal best in delve.

Thankfully my main character and the alt I was going to make were both a marauder. This would come quite in handy as I needed to level the alt high enough to even start to use the end-game gear I'd be getting to run with delve.

I ended up just going with a similar setup for skills. It’s a shame I did not save all my weapons like I've done in the past. It would have made leveling quite easy as when I first ran with my main in this league I lucked out on a lot of crafting for two-handed axes.

I kind of wish I had kept the same starting passive skills. I’d end up switching over to them after a few acts into the main storyline. Things kind of dragged on in the early acts as I was struggling a bit.

At the very least I had a few leveling items in my bank. I also had a lot of currency just to go out and buy whatever items I needed to help me along. This would also make it easy when needing to buy something from a vendor as well or go pick up a skill gem.

I could not go fully with the build I started on my main as it and the passive skill tree had quite a few different nodes. While I could more than afford to do a massive respect. I wanted to avoid doing that as much as possible.

The skill tree for most delve builds is just so strange. Everyone is going for a massive pump into strength nodes. Skipping over some massive damage upgrades early on that would have made leveling easy.

I also noticed with all the high-end gear that I would be getting many unique items that had no resistance on them. Making this an extremely expensive issue later on to deal with. I decided till I fully understood what I was going to or not need to help Alira in act 2 for the 15% all elemental resistance.

This would end up being quite important later on when I entered into maps. I have no idea on the data I have if the top delve builds went with that bandit option. What I do know is it’s possible to reset your bandit choice later on if you need to. At the very least I knew I was not locking myself into a choice I had to make quite early on.

While I knew I was not going to be breaking any kind of leveling records. I was this time around going to be setting a much quicker pace than I had at the league start. As I had some items to help me out. I also got used to playing again.

This time around I ignored all Settlers of Kalguur encounters. This would alone end up saving a bit of time. Even when I got into maps, I was still ignoring them. I just did not need them at the time.

I also was skipping over killing most creatures. Unless I was over three levels below the current zone level I was in. If I did not need to kill something and it was not in a nice massive ball of experience. I skipped over it.

Between that and some other changes, I ended up getting into act V over an hour and twenty or so minutes faster than when I did at league start. While not amazing I've never been a fast at leveling either. So, I was rather happy about that.

What ended up being quite crazy about this run was that I got an actual divine orb to drop. If only that had happened on day one when I was my league starter. That would have such a huge advantage.

Since I was going to need every single divine orb, I could get my hands on. This was more than a welcome sight. I even stopped leveling to go make some trades for items I was selling off to raise some funds as well. I was nowhere near what I needed to get into the build I wanted.

Before I knew it I had Kitava defeated and I was onto the second half of the storyline. Every so often I'd make a run to my stash to check for any upgrades I had in there that I was now high enough in level to use.

At one point I even started to pull some items off my main since for the time being many of the pieces of gear my main is wearing will end up helping the alt out a lot as well. While there were many pieces, he could not wear due to lacking level. There were a few.

I even lucked out and kept my old resistance rings before I upgraded them into something much better. They had quite low-level requirements and came in handy quickly. Helping me push the leveling process.

I also did not struggle as much in the second half of the storyline then I did in the first half. I worked out which nodes on the skill tree would end up helping me out a lot. I’d need to switch them out later on but that was a small cost to pay to level up quicker.

Over time I even started to meet the requirements for some of the gear I'd be wearing for delve. I wanted to get a better firsthand experience and feel for that gear. So I started buying some of it.

It was kind of funny. Before I even hit maps I must have had 10 Divine orbs worth of gear on me. While it sure helped a little bit. It was not as much as one might think. After all most of it was lacking the synergies of other items and even skills being used. They were still upgrades for me now so I thought why not have them anyway.

This also helped me to better understand where I could cut some corners on gear and other stuff for the build I was going after. I knew I lacked the knowledge in farming and crafting at the time to get the end gear I needed. So, I just wanted to get things that were a bit more affordable while learning just how important certain stats were or were not in having down the line.

At one point I had to stop leveling up. I realized I had yet to run a single labyrinth trial. Let alone the two that I could now go and do. I easily knocked them both out back-to-back and went back to leveling up.

While they helped out a little bit. They were not what I feel would be massive improvements. So, I felt it was not a big deal that I put getting the first two done sooner.

I would even be a little late getting the other two labyrinth trails done as well when the time came. I was also thrilled I did not need to run all the smaller trials to unlock each of the labyrinths. I got to just skip over them which saved a little time here or there along the way.

In what felt like a blink of the eye I had Kitava defeated a second time. I now had maps unlocked. I made a couple of gear changes and bought some items to help with my now lower resistance.

The nice thing about being on an alt is I already farmed an insane number of maps. I also have most of the bonus objectives done on those maps as well. My only concern was going to be if my current atlas passive skill tree was going to be too much of a challenge for my lower-level character.

I started on tier-one maps and found those easy. For the first couple hours of mapping if I was matching the zone level to my character level, I felt they were just the right amount of challenging.

Taking on too hard of a map early on would end up getting me killed a lot. Each death would be a chunk of experience lost. That would then end up slowing my leveling progression down.

Every so often I'd need to stop. I did not want to waste any sulphate was getting. While I was earning a lot less on lower tier maps than what my main could get in red maps. There was no need for them to go to waste since that entire system is shared across an account per league.

I then would remove any items I was browsing from my main and switch back to my main to go run a bunch of delve. There did start to become a point where my main character was getting closer and closer to his max depth. I even had to avoid certain areas as they were no longer possible for him to clear through them let alone the node.

After a while the main got to a high enough level he was able to wear my main two-handed axe. While he was doing about half as much damage my main was doing with it. It was such a powerful upgrade that everything in lower-tier maps got flattened.

It also made doing merciless labyrinth on my alt simple. I ended up getting quite a nasty layout from golden keys being in different zones to endless mazes of traps. In the end, the actual boss fight was not a challenge at all between the good weapon I had and the insane amount I was starting to spend on gear I'd be using for delve which I was wearing many parts of it.

Final Thoughts

While I would still be quite a distance away before I'd start running delve into my new alt. I had made some great progress on it in such a short time. I would still need quite a few levels so I kept on pushing deeper into maps tiers.

Information

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