I never made it past T7 this league, probably only played around the first two weeks or so full on but the mad rush for everybody to get the Herald stacking jewels killed it for me. I started with an Arc Totem build but the damage was very low against the map bosses so it became frustrating very quickly, plus the early league fog enemies were too tough to be taken out fast enough and led to many deaths. I then started a Storm brand build using Herald of Thunder as an extra, I had it with an Inpulsa chest and the gloves that shock enemies on death. That felt much better for clearing, I'd also dropped a couple of decent cluster jewels for the herald stuff quite early on and had been using them for a while, I found my Herald of thunder doing more damage than my Storm Brand at times.
A couple of the combinations I had looked very interesting & powerful so I decided to start levelling an autobomber on the side as a quick farming character, using as many of them as possible, only I restarted a few times after the build didn't really work well. I finally settled on a good skill tree with gear setups from other popular builds and stuck to it. As soon as it started working it was really satisfying and surprisingly powerful, upgrade paths were reasonably affordable as people were still focusing on the mana cost builds at the time. It seemed like it was going to be pretty smooth until the herald stacking stuff came about, It happened at a point where I'd taken a few days off and started to notice reaction videos to it. I checked the items I wanted on trade and they'd gone up in value exponentially, I'd built up about 100c and had an exalt drop which was enough for the items I wanted at the time, now I was looking several exalts for each piece. Then a few days later they were hitting 12, 15, 20ex.
Without better gear I hit my wall at T7 and really started to struggle for cash, in the end I just felt burnt out and haven't touched it properly for a while now. It's done me good in a way as I've managed to play through a few games I normally wouldn't have had time for, including a current playthrough of Borderlands 3 that I now wish I'd played earlier. I'll probably jump back in again next league but I'll need to pick a better starter and be a bit more organised, not having a plan/goals this time around really ruined it for me.
