Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[Blaine]

Sure, but relative difficulty between bosses within the same difficulty should be at least somewhat similar across all difficulties, if more exaggerated.

Cruel has if anything been a breeze so far compared to the first two acts of Normal (which was already quite easy), but I suspect that will change a bit once I reach Act 3 and 4.

Anyway, someone (I think it was lukaszek or T. Reich? I'm still having trouble syncing Codex username/account names -> character names in my head, because what I end up remembering is the character name and then that fucks me up) ran me through Labyrinth today.

It was exactly what I expected, an all-out sprint for the end, and I knew my role was to be quick and not die. Really puts my 3-4 hour slow, cautious solo crawl to shame. It all comes with experience, I'm sure. I've been in the veteran's shoes before too in online games.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Blaine]

cruel is always easiest and is just time sink. Good thing its going away. Some time ago those planning CI would consider taking it as early as cruel a3. Somehow now chaos dmg is not an issue. Cruel used to be a place when terrible builds would get a hint to try something else. Now you just stroll until... merci a2 I guess? Devs were speaking about them disliking a1 becoming easier than a4 on previous diff.

Oh, is that what someone was talking about the other day, 4 acts becoming 6 and then it'll be Normal 1-6 and Merciless 1-6? That's actually going to be pretty sweet.

Resistances are my bane right now because I'm new, ignorant, and not good at planning gear. I managed to torture ~54-64 resistance (all elements minus Chaos, before penalty) out of my gear with a lot of sorting and some currency to make sockets fit. Wasted 7 Jeweler's and a Fusing on a certain item and ended up with the same exact sockets I had when I started, haha. I know I should use poe.trade and just buy some shit, but I'm hoping this (and flasks) will carry me through Cruel and only then will I have to start being a real grown-up.

lab runs are cancer. Some layouts are terrible time sink. Sometimes 3rd form of izaro on higher diffs can be tricky with traps taking most of the space and having to avoid his attacks. Hard luck for melee builds...

I think the one yesterday was much longer than today's, because I checked an online daily Lab map and there was no way to get to the end yesterday in as few rooms as we did today, shortest route.

 

[Ismaul]

Resistances are my bane right now because I'm new, ignorant, and not good at planning gear.

Purity of Elements aura is your friend while leveling. I have often not worried so much about optimizing the gear for resistances before merciless. Some uniques also help out with that, notably Goldrim.

 

[Zdzisiu]

cruel is always easiest and is just time sink. Good thing its going away. Some time ago those planning CI would consider taking it as early as cruel a3. Somehow now chaos dmg is not an issue. Cruel used to be a place when terrible builds would get a hint to try something else. Now you just stroll until... merci a2 I guess? Devs were speaking about them disliking a1 becoming easier than a4 on previous diff.

Oh, is that what someone was talking about the other day, 4 acts becoming 6 and then it'll be Normal 1-6 and Merciless 1-6? That's actually going to be pretty sweet.

Resistances are my bane right now because I'm new, ignorant, and not good at planning gear. I managed to torture ~54-64 resistance (all elements minus Chaos, before penalty) out of my gear with a lot of sorting and some currency to make sockets fit. Wasted 7 Jeweler's and a Fusing on a certain item and ended up with the same exact sockets I had when I started, haha. I know I should use poe.trade and just buy some shit, but I'm hoping this (and flasks) will carry me through Cruel and only then will I have to start being a real grown-up.

lab runs are cancer. Some layouts are terrible time sink. Sometimes 3rd form of izaro on higher diffs can be tricky with traps taking most of the space and having to avoid his attacks. Hard luck for melee builds...

I think the one yesterday was much longer than today's, because I checked an online daily Lab map and there was no way to get to the end yesterday in as few rooms as we did today, shortest route.

The successful run on normal was with me. The fireballing witch. And yes, it comes with experience and practice. I am not the biggest fan of lab either, fuck the traps there, but I still run it like 200+ times between my different characters.
The best tip I can give, if there is no golden door, the most likely place where the exit is is in the north-east corner. Walk towards it and in 90% of cases, you will find the exit.

 

[Blaine]

Resistances are my bane right now because I'm new, ignorant, and not good at planning gear.

Purity of Elements aura is your friend while leveling. I have often not worried so much about optimizing the gear for resistances before merciless. Some uniques also help out with that, notably Goldrim.

I'm aware of Purity of Elements, but I'm running Anger and Herald of Thunder, so I'll use it only if/when necessary. Fortunately it should become available from the vendor at a decent starting level soon, so that's good. I'm not having any trouble so far.

The successful run on normal was with me. The fireballing witch. And yes, it comes with experience and practice. I am not the biggest fan of lab either, fuck the traps there, but I still run it like 200+ times between my different characters.
The best tip I can give, if there is no golden door, the most likely place where the exit is is in the north-east corner. Walk towards it and in 90% of cases, you will find the exit.

Yeah, one of the irksome things I've noticed about PoE is that oftentimes (I'd say 70-80% of the time on the campaign map) exit locations roughly correspond to the adjacent node layout on the world map/plaque... but sometimes they don't. So far, I've found the forested areas in Act 2 to be the most obnoxious in this regard. Lab no doubt follows a similar pattern. You start from the west and work your way east, and the map is isometric, so a bias toward advancing through the NE is a logical result.

When I was playing Warframe, the main thing players wanted to do was go fast, for the exact same reasons you want to go fast in PoE. It's always obnoxious when you're in that mindset and the developers design stuff to arbitrarily slow players down (although it should be noted that GGG are far more than Warframe's crew). The traps are a cool challenge if you're new, and it's proper design that they're fairly deadly, but after X runs I'm sure they're a huge pain if you have no desire to stop moving for even a moment. At some point you're going to get unlucky or press the wrong key and die, wasting that precious time.

The game's options and possibilities are slowly beginning to come into focus for me, even though I'm playing a pre-planned build. It's a whole different ballgame than during closed beta, although I don't remember CB terribly well either. I'll tell you one thing though, GCPs were sure as shit worth more way back then than they are now.

 

[Jason Liang]

Summoners have a lot of fun endgame options. I love the Occultist ascendancy passives more, but Necro has way cooler endgame gear to choose from.

Speaking of which, my Scion has found a ton of cool gear now after a week of grinding Dried Lake. I found a Touch of Agony so everything dies quickly now. I'm testing Blade Flurry cwc Summon Skeletons now (instead of Storm Call). It's a lot better than SRS, although I can't say yet if it's better than Storm Call- it's safer though, since it doesn't lag my video card like storm call does. So right now I have skeletons on cwc and storm call on spell totem. Not sure if that's best or if I should reverse them. On the one hand, Skeletons can share melee damage support with blade flurry, on the other hand, storm call I get proc off kills. But anyway, skeletons are way better than SRS for cwc since they summon where I'm pointing and they summon and attack faster than SRS.

So the permutations:

Spell Totem/ BF cwc + Links
1. Skeletons/ Storm Call + Concentrated Effect and/or Increased Area, Culling Strike
2. Storm Call/ Skeletons + Melee Damage Support, Faster Attack
3. Storm Call/ Storm Call
5. SRS/ Storm Call + Concentrated Effect or Increased Area, Culling Strike
4. SRS/ Skeletons + Melee Damage Support, Faster Attack (I guess this would be better for a Witch summoner than scion)

Not sure which of the first 3 is best.

Also I am trying to see if I can work in Righteous Fire somehow. Actually that's the biggest question since if I can't get a Shav's I'll have to abandon low life for CI.

Finally, I started a Witch summoner to make use of the Piscator's that I found.

 

[Blaine]

Someone in the guild (character name Burak-something) told me that finding my own gear as I play rather than buying it from poe.trade shouldn't present a problem, provided I know what to look for. As far as I can tell, this is incorrect unless I'm willing to spend currency to alter my drops, which more likely than not would end up costing me far more than just buying something from poe.trade.

My items need to have +life and adequate resistances primarily; energy shield, spell damage, and casting speed secondarily; and mana and mana regeneration tertiarily (my build reserves 75% of my mana, so ignoring mana entirely isn't an ideal option). Most also need to simultaneously have a decent number of linked sockets of the appropriate colors.

Right off the bat, I can say with utter certainty that dropping a rare piece of pure caster gear with 3-4+ linked sockets and 4-5 affixes that aren't junk (or too low) and are called for by my build hasn't happened the entire time I've been playing the game. (I'm not even counting socket color as a factor, because that's one of the easier things to change since I only need a smattering of red sockets among blues.) I might be inexperienced, but an upgrade like that would be completely obvious. A number of drops have come close, but they'll be missing a socket and/or a link or two; or if they have good links, they'll have a junk stat or two, or else too-low or low-priority stats. The found drops that I'm wearing required currency (and probably too much of it) to add sockets, add links, and to change colors. They're not perfect, either, and they're getting long in the tooth.

Long story short, dropping ready-made ideal (adequate ideal, not end-game min-max ideal) gear is very rare and if you do get one, it almost certainly won't be for the build you're leveling.

My options therefore (aside from poe.trade) are to use rarity-manipulating currency on the white gear that drops with good linked sockets, or to use socket- and link-manipulating currency on the rare gear that drops with good stats but bad sockets/links, keeping in mind that even these two things are quite rare aside from 3L-only stuff like wands. The third option is to use master benches, which again can be very expensive compared to buying stuff from poe.trade.

So to sum up, I'm 90% sure it'll be far faster and cheaper to buy stuff from poe.trade when I eventually hit a wall.

 

[T. Reich]

> finding my own gear as I play rather than buying it from poe.trade shouldn't present a problem, provided I know what to look for
Relatively true. Relativity = depends on your build, depends on your definition of a "problem", depends on your mastery of the game.
Definitely not true for new players. Very true for veterans.
One of my favourite let's plays of the game was one guy completing it all only with blue items. On HC. Pre-masters.

> this is incorrect unless I'm willing to spend currency to alter my drops
That is correct. You can't really expect to beat merciless (and probably not cruel either) unless you expend some currency.

> which more likely than not would end up costing me far more than just buying something from poe.trade
This is ALWAYS true, at any point of the game.

> dropping ready-made ideal (adequate ideal, not end-game min-max ideal) gear is very rare
Hello, cap'n!

Here are some protips:
1) Alchs are great for rolling items. Essences are even better.
2) Buy dem 4-links from vendor and then alt+aug-spam + master-craft them for life+res, or gamble with alchs/essences for even better results.
3) There are some awesome vendor recipes that allow you to get decent leveling gear relatively easily.
4) Rolling sockets + links on gear is only worth it if it's an awesome unique or some seriously good rare that will last you a long time.

I recommend you watch some SSF speedrun vids on youtube, RaizQT did quite a few with commentary.
Most importantly, you can see what gear they opt to use and when (and if) they use orbs to manipulate it.

 

[ArchAngel]

Someone in the guild (character name Burak-something) told me that finding my own gear as I play rather than buying it from poe.trade shouldn't present a problem, provided I know what to look for. As far as I can tell, this is incorrect unless I'm willing to spend currency to alter my drops, which more likely than not would end up costing me far more than just buying something from poe.trade.

My items need to have +life and adequate resistances primarily; energy shield, spell damage, and casting speed secondarily; and mana and mana regeneration tertiarily (my build reserves 75% of my mana, so ignoring mana entirely isn't an ideal option). Most also need to simultaneously have a decent number of linked sockets of the appropriate colors.

Right off the bat, I can say with utter certainty that dropping a rare piece of pure caster gear with 3-4+ linked sockets and 4-5 affixes that aren't junk (or too low) and are called for by my build hasn't happened the entire time I've been playing the game. (I'm not even counting socket color as a factor, because that's one of the easier things to change since I only need a smattering of red sockets among blues.) I might be inexperienced, but an upgrade like that would be completely obvious. A number of drops have come close, but they'll be missing a socket and/or a link or two; or if they have good links, they'll have a junk stat or two, or else too-low or low-priority stats. The found drops that I'm wearing required currency (and probably too much of it) to add sockets, add links, and to change colors. They're not perfect, either, and they're getting long in the tooth.

Long story short, dropping ready-made ideal (adequate ideal, not end-game min-max ideal) gear is very rare and if you do get one, it almost certainly won't be for the build you're leveling.

My options therefore (aside from poe.trade) are to use rarity-manipulating currency on the white gear that drops with good linked sockets, or to use socket- and link-manipulating currency on the rare gear that drops with good stats but bad sockets/links, keeping in mind that even these two things are quite rare aside from 3L-only stuff like wands. The third option is to use master benches, which again can be very expensive compared to buying stuff from poe.trade.

So to sum up, I'm 90% sure it'll be far faster and cheaper to buy stuff from poe.trade when I eventually hit a wall.

Only point of currency is for trade or making your end game gear that is exactly as you want it (needs godly amount of currency and it is done only by super rich people). While you level up you use whatever and only use an alch or few alterations to get good phy roll for weapons if you are going that route. For casters lots of caster wands or scepters drop and can be uses as they are.

Using and making your items for leveling up is only worth it if you started current league on Day 1 when everything on poe.trade is expensive. After that, everything is dirt cheap. And there are still people mid league that sell good stuff for 1 alch to 1 chaos. At start of merciless you should buy a complement of rings/amulets/belts with high resists for 1 chaos each so you can top up your resists to counter the -60% res penalty.

Also don't expect to buy items with socket numbers and colors you want from poe.trade. You can easily craft that yourself using Masters, or more precisely Master Vorici. As soon as one of your Masters hits lvl 3 have him create a Hideout for you. Then invite Vorici into this hideout. Masters in your hideout get a daily missions that gives you more XP with them when you finish it. They level up faster and give you better options on their crafting table.
Vorici can cheaply create sockets, link them and color them.

 

[Blaine]

That is correct. You can't really expect to beat merciless (and probably not cruel either) unless you expend some currency.

I'm at Malachai's doorstep now, and I've only used a small bit of currency on a couple of my gear items. On the other hand, I also have the uniques you guys have been dumping into the guild stash. I'm glad you did, because I want to suffer through as far as possible in terms of available currency and levels before I go for an upgrade, so that it's up-to-date in terms of implicit/inherent stats and so that I can afford to customize it adequately. I have about 75c worth of currency and I'm sure that will be enough when the time comes.

It's been getting pretty frisky though with Normal-tier health and energy shield affixes, and I finally died versus Daresso, my only death so far in Cruel. No amount of Quicksilvering, Flame Dashing, and health potting stopped him from teleporting up to me and whomping off pretty much all of my health. My minions were gone up in a puff of smoke pretty early too, which is unusual even for a boss fight. Suffice it to say I'm slightly nervous about Malachai, but I'm going to win eventually one way or another. I'm fairly sure I can get far enough in Merciless to at least hit 65 and ~90c, and when I do hit a wall I'll stop and take stock.

Here are some protips:
1) Alchs are great for rolling items. Essences are even better.
2) Buy dem 4-links from vendor and then alt+aug-spam + master-craft them for life+res, or gamble with alchs/essences for even better results.
3) There are some awesome vendor recipes that allow you to get decent leveling gear relatively easily.
4) Rolling sockets + links on gear is only worth it if it's an awesome unique or some seriously good rare that will last you a long time.

I recommend you watch some SSF speedrun vids on youtube, RaizQT did quite a few with commentary.
Most importantly, you can see what gear they opt to use and when (and if) they use orbs to manipulate it.

I've occasionally used Alchemy orbs and Essences hoping for something good on a nice linked item, although they all ended up going to the vendor with shit affixes like physical damage and so on. For planning Merciless gear, I'll be much more willing to spend more.

I appreciate the protips and slowing down (well, I'm already slow, but you know what I mean) to actually learn shit is on the agenda in the very near future.

At start of merciless you should buy a complement of rings/amulets/belts with high resists for 1 chaos each so you can top up your resists to counter the -60% res penalty.

Yeah, resistances are one of my chief concerns for Merciless gear. Currently, I have this (shown with no penalties):

Also don't expect to buy items with socket numbers and colors you want from poe.trade. You can easily craft that yourself using Masters, or more precisely Master Vorici. As soon as one of your Masters hits lvl 3 have him create a Hideout for you. Then invite Vorici into this hideout. Masters in your hideout get a daily missions that gives you more XP with them when you finish it. They level up faster and give you better options on their crafting table.
Vorici can cheaply create sockets, link them and color them.

I already have a medium hideout with Eloreon, Catarina, Haku, and Tora. If I end up needing to fire one of them to get Vorici, I suppose that's what I'll do. It might be a while before I can get him to level 3, though. The 4L recipe is very reasonable, but 3 guaranteed colors is way out of my league; not that it matters, because getting 4Ls to the right color the normal way usually isn't too bad provided the item is caster-type.

I need to read up more on masters in general (knowing the limits of prefixes/suffixes etc. is going to be important if buying from poe.trade or vendors) and I'll be doing that sometime this week.

 

[ArchAngel]

Also don't expect to buy items with socket numbers and colors you want from poe.trade. You can easily craft that yourself using Masters, or more precisely Master Vorici. As soon as one of your Masters hits lvl 3 have him create a Hideout for you. Then invite Vorici into this hideout. Masters in your hideout get a daily missions that gives you more XP with them when you finish it. They level up faster and give you better options on their crafting table.
Vorici can cheaply create sockets, link them and color them.

I already have a medium hideout with Eloreon, Catarina, Haku, and Tora. If I end up needing to fire one of them to get Vorici, I suppose that's what I'll do. It might be a while before I can get him to level 3, though. The 4L recipe is very reasonable, but 3 guaranteed colors is way out of my league; not that it matters, because getting 4Ls to the right color the normal way usually isn't too bad provided the item is caster-type.

I need to read up more on masters in general (knowing the limits of prefixes/suffixes etc. is going to be important if buying from poe.trade or vendors) and I'll be doing that sometime this week.

You should kick one of those and get Vorici instead.

As for knowing mods and what to enchant learn to use this: http://poedb.tw/us/mod.php
Each non jewel item can have 3 prefixes and 3 suffixes. Master's enchants also use one of those free slots.

 

[Veelq]

Or just use a command /claim_crafting_benches that gives you all possible benches w/o invite/kick stuff.

 

[ArchAngel]

Or just use a command /claim_crafting_benches that gives you all possible benches w/o invite/kick stuff.

But it does not give him a daily quest for Vorici.
Vorici and Zana are two must have Masters, everyone else is just useful.

 

[T. Reich]

Regarding masters, I recommend you to level them mostly equally. What I mean by that is that while you should focus on 1-2 masters, it's best if you rotate masters as soon as they reach a level higher than the rest of the masters.

Over the leagues, this has become my master leveling routine:
1) As soon as you get a master of lvl3, make a h/o and do their daily. If they hit lvl4 - dump them for another master.
2) Also, invite any lvl2 master, do their daily let them reach lvl3 and dump them immediately after. Repeat for each lvl2 master. This way you can do much more dailies in a single day without losing much progress per individual master.
3) Keep 1 master and level them consistently without kicking them out. The aim is to level them to lvl7 asap to unlock the largest h/o. It should be either Elreon or Haku - they have the lowest exp requirements + the most useful mod selection + they are very popular, so if you get into doing master daily rotations on /global 820, you will have little trouble finding a rota.
4) For other masters, keep doing the thing from N2 - as soon as master reaches a new level, you kick them and get another master that has the lowest current level of all masters. The aim is to get them all to lvl5 asap.
5) The most useful masters at lvl6 (in that order): haku, elreon, vorici, catarina.
6) Only elreon and catarina offer REALLY valuable new mods at lvl7, other masters can be left at lvl6 without much problems. It's recommended to get haku to lvl7 as well though, for his "remove master mod" for armor pieces.
7) [mapping] Get Zana to lvl2 ASAP. It's easily done via getting her on /global 820. Finding her on her own during mapping can be a crap shoot. Zana becomes areally valuable as soon as you start mapping, but is of limited use before that.

 

[Blaine]

Huh, I'd read that masters can't de-level by being dismissed, but hadn't thought of aggressively rotating them.

If people are getting together via a chat channel to do master dailies, then obviously the master XP can be shared with party members. I Googled /global 820 and actually found an in-depth etiquette guide.

I'm going to Google around for player-made lists of other special-use chat channels, since there seems to be little way to simply discover them as a new player unless someone actually tells you.

 

[T. Reich]

AFAIK, there's only global 820, which is THE channel for master/challenge sharing (supposedly free or for collective farming, but there are huge numbers of leechers/LF'ers and a smaller but still significant number of people who try to sell masters/challenges).
Then there's trade 820, which is actually super awesome because it's 90% focused on what it was meant to do - buying and selling challenge completion services. Very little bullshit, straight to the point. And it's a HUGE profit if you figure out what challenges sell and how to sell them properly.
At different points of this league so far, I sold 8mod map completions, essence claims, warband leader kills, invader kills and talisman boss kills. These things have VERY low cost to acquire, and if you price them right and offer them at the right time, they sell for good $$$, which is lke 90% profit.
There's also global 5055, which is supposedly a "reddit global", but IMO it's not much different from any other random low # global where plebs congregate.
And I have no idea if any other channels exist, which is highly unlikely.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Blaine]

And I have no idea if any other channels exist, which is highly unlikely.

I found this via Google:

The Global Chat Channel #820 is the official Masters Group Questing Channel.

The Global Chat Channel #100 is the official Guild Recruitment Channel.

The Global Chat Channel #150 is the official Mapping Chat Channel.

The Trade Chat Channel #800 is the official Currency-Only Trade Channel.

Channel Global 100 is probably listed at the top of PoE's guilds subforum.

for few c buy 130%+ elemental resistances on rings and amulet. It will easily cap your elemental resistances.
depends on how much you are willing to spend you can add es and life too.

What I do usually is i spend 1c for each piece and cap my resistances in merci. I get something more fancy once i hit maps.
If you rely on ES, you can get cheap chest with high ES and no resistances(you get them from jewelry) and no slots. Item with +lvl of gems with 4 links will get you going for quite a while.

Dont be afraid of spending currency to buy dirt cheap stuff

Like these? (Except for the part about not using other rings, obviously....)

With bonuses from my passive tree plus jewelry like this, I should end up with about 60% elemental resistances in Merciless, more if I start running Purity. Not sure about Chaos, but I have 20% from passives.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Blaine]

Like these? (Except for the part about not using other rings, obviously....)

when you query poe.trade there is option [pseudo] total elemental resistance. It will make it easier to find highest values in budget.
Use explicit resistance typ only when you look for last piece of eq and need item that meet specific resistance criteria

Checked just now and you can get 130+% total rings for 1c

Ah cool, cheers.

 

[Blaine]

Got this asshole in my hideout now at level 3, which is enough to craft 4L.

His dailies range from difficult to impossible for me, because Firestorm and minions are totally indiscriminate and if I dismiss minions and use a more discriminate spell only, the regular monsters will clobber me because minions and killing quickly is my defense.

I'm not too worried about it for now though, because the only need for more than 4L is for superpowered Firestorm and I can't afford 5L/highly specific socket colors anyway.

 

[T. Reich]

And I have no idea if any other channels exist, which is highly unlikely.

I found this via Google:

The Global Chat Channel #820 is the official Masters Group Questing Channel.

The Global Chat Channel #100 is the official Guild Recruitment Channel.

The Global Chat Channel #150 is the official Mapping Chat Channel.

The Trade Chat Channel #800 is the official Currency-Only Trade Channel.

Turned on both trade 800 and global 150 to see what's up.
Results were pretty predictable - not a single message in either for over 30 mins. Same with global 100.

 

[Blaine]

It's a shame. Global during closed beta was actually pretty cool, from what little murky memory I have of it... for a game chat, anyway. Now it's just typical nonsense.

I imagine many decent-sized guilds now use voice comms in some capacity, especially since the advent of Discord, which is free and high-quality.

 

[Hyperion]

I have pretty fond of memories of Global during closed beta. There was usually a decent conversation going on at any time of day, and we were mostly left to ourselves to settle disputes. Now it's price check spam, streamer gossip, and shitty memes. Mods have recently gotten ban happy too, when they used to be there to mostly shut down spammers. Got muted for a week for calling some guy autistic, because he sperged out in chat. It's in-game Twitch chat. I'd rather play in silence when my bros aren't on now.