Path of Exile

It's what was in the leak basically, which is ok.

It's POTENTIALLY a nerf to skeletons and spectre builds, because those nodes were very strong, and a nerf to popping zombies dead(which barely anyone did since skeleton was better anyway but could have been a thing with new RF support). For the rest it should be a big buff, and even for these it's not entirely clear just yet what goes on. They rolled a bunch of stats on the actual gems(zombie slam cooldown, multi skeleton summon+base move speed) but haven't shown spectres yet, you lose damage here and there but if you get Plaguebringer you get a 10% more damage multiplier that will even out a fair bit of things(with 30% minion aoe too which can be good for certain spectres) and the +2 gem should help balance out some of the nerfs(for non spectres, although it's possible they made spectre not shit with levels). You can also cap accuracy on minions rather easily after all the recent changes, with Precision aura+the minion accuracy nodes(which aren't like garbage or out of the way, you kinda take them naturally even if you don't need them).

On the flipside, there's much stronger defenses, and some options for sustain which was one of the clear necro weakpoint(short of Baron builds). Essence Glutton in an ES and/or EB build is a lot of sustain and Bone Barrier is pretty solid too(from GGG Natalia, the Bone Armour skill is basically the new instant Stoneskin but it affects your minions also).

The spec also works a lot better with less orthodox summons like Animate Weapons(with the Chain of Command or the masochist self cast way), Heralds if you wanted to not play the herald ascendencies or Phantasms with Soulwrest, and obviously SRS. Should also work better if you want to do the "ALL THE SUMMONS" build variation with spectres+zombies+skeletons. Just a bit hard to pick the right skills I think, the buffed Mistress of Sacrifice feels nice, Commander of Darkness is comfy, Plaguebringer is very potent as long as you desecrate shit around but you also kinda want both Bone Barrier and Essence Glutton together for max defenses and then Unnatural Strength looks pretty nice too. Hell even Corpse Pact looks nice, can keep shit perma shocked by just using desecrate every 4secs.

Looks fine to me at least.

That's accuracy on spectres only. Any gem that says "Minions have x" is only for the minions from that specific gem. It'd say like provide an aura to other minions or whatever. It's good for melee spectres and shit though, probably won't even need precision for them, just the minion accuracy % nodes which were ok anyway. But minion accuracy isn't too much of a concern as long as you make room for Precision since you get like 70% accuracy on the tree from common nodes and you could get a bunch more if you really wanted, just need a source of flat accuracy like precision/banner/the abyss gloves(expensive as fuck). That's why the loss on skeleton ascendency isn't that big of a concern, it isn't like pre 3.6 or whenever it was they did the minion shenanigans with guardian rework and you HAD to use lycosidae necro aegis to make skeleton/SRS even work decently in high tier maps, it's very easy currently to hit accuracy cap on minions with fairly minimal investment.

Vanderhoof said:

I was messing around with Slave Driver spectres recently and noped out when I remembered how big of a pain in the ass resummoning them was every time you went up a map tier.

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You can kinda find someone who lets you use remaining shaper portals or an abyss area in a T16 map or Oba Trove(iirc) and just summon them once and never again(until they die).

Also you don't really need to get them every map tier, both because map tiers don't go 1 level per map tier, and also because you don't actually need high lvl spectres until you hit late yellow/early red maps or so. Their damage is high enough baseline that you don't really need equal level spectres to the map you're in, shit that's like 7levels lower will do just fine.

New system is great though and you can just resummon shit in your hideout too so you don't have to sift through dozens of types of corpses when resummoning(especially shaper was fucking terrible for that). Remains to be seen if spectre level is still snapshotted or not. If it is, you'll want a special set of gear for summoning spectres that increases minion level and you might even have to spec ascendency nodes for it. You'd basically put everything into a +1 or +2(skin of the loyal) chest with empower 3(4), dual wield +2 wands, get the +2 ascendancy(and drop it after if you don't use anything but spectres, can save you 2 points) then summon these 21+10 to +1 spectres and stash that shit and hope they don't die so you don't have to redo it. That's lvl 91 to 93 spectres though, which is quite the powercreep.

Trading is basically entirely 3rd party(well it's run by GGG but you have to get out of the game). You use Trade - Path of Exile search for what you want with the many many filter options, then it'll display all the items that fit and their prices. You click the whisper button and it'll copy a premade message in your windows clipboard, then you switch back to the game, open a chat window and ctrl v paste the message and it'll send the person an automated messages like Hi, I'd like to buy your x for y currency. Generally the only interaction past that is either silence(guy is afk, is a bot, doesn't want to sell, whatever) or the guy will send you a party invite. Accept the invite, right click their portrait and select "Go to Hideout" to go to their hideout. Open a trade with them or wait for them to open trade(I personally wait since most people will be looking at their shit to find the item), trade the currency you said you'd pay(prepare this shit beforehand if possible, also you can't split currency once the trade window is up), make sure to double check what you're buying is what's in the window and done, leave the party and go back to whatever.

It's a pretty annoying process but if you don't trade too often, it's not so bad to do and once you're used to it and the seller/buyer isn't a retard, it takes like 20-30secs total(with a SSD).

To sell, the easy way is to buy a premium stash tab, which can be set as a sale tab, where you select the items and fix a price, and they'll be picked up by the trading API the websites use. However if you don't want to spend money, then you need to install a 3rd party program like Acquisition, which will list your items in normal stash tabs on the trading forum, which is also picked up by the trading API(but slower iirc). You could technically do the forum posts manually if you don't trust the 3rd party programs, but it's even more a pain in the dick to do.