You survived a merci vall lightning with only 25% resistance? Very very lucky. Lightning has a huge damage range and you got the super low end. That thing can hit for around 2500 damage vs 75% res, (so 7500 vs 25% res) on a high roll. And let's not get into crits and shock.
Path of Exile
- Thread starter Jim Russel
- Start date
Joeboo
Molten Core Raider
- 8,157
- 140
Been playing this off and on for the last several months around other games. I haven't played very much since the last wipe and major change to resistances(being nerfed in higher difficulties).
For those of you that are playing, what would you say is your general distribution between offensive and defensive skill point distributions? 50/50? More defense heavy? Pre-resistance nerf I had a character up in the 50s on the 3rd difficulty, and I was starting to struggle with deaths & exp loss, but I had gone probably 90% or more offensive, basically a glass cannon build. I'm hearing that's a horrible idea anymore and problems with it will set in even sooner.
Also I haven't done a ton of research or theorycrafting on this game, but is there a general consensus on whether you are better off going all armor, all evasion, all energy shield, or some mix of those? Just curious on how to get the best general survivability(especially if I create a hardcore character at release, which I plan on doing)
For those of you that are playing, what would you say is your general distribution between offensive and defensive skill point distributions? 50/50? More defense heavy? Pre-resistance nerf I had a character up in the 50s on the 3rd difficulty, and I was starting to struggle with deaths & exp loss, but I had gone probably 90% or more offensive, basically a glass cannon build. I'm hearing that's a horrible idea anymore and problems with it will set in even sooner.
Also I haven't done a ton of research or theorycrafting on this game, but is there a general consensus on whether you are better off going all armor, all evasion, all energy shield, or some mix of those? Just curious on how to get the best general survivability(especially if I create a hardcore character at release, which I plan on doing)
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Well thinking about it I had more than 25%, 25% was my cold resist on merveil but I had even less lightning, 8% or something so I thought I wouldn't force it and equipped a 30%lightning I had in my stash, so must have had 38%. Still I got hit for only about 1500dmg or so, my full ES was 2300 and I lost slightly more than half hp. I didn't know it was supposed to do that high dmg, I know you don't want to get hit twice in a row because of the debuff but assumed base dmg was lower, so guess I was lucky.
Joeboo in general most of the successful builds I've seen have a good amount of defenses, however there's a few ways to go "defensive" for example warlord's mark+blood rage means you lifesteal a lot, add rings and weapons and maybe even a lifeleech support gem and you can increase your EHP by increasing your damage and lifeeleeching more. I see a lot of DW builds working like that. They still get a decent amount of defensive nodes though but I'd say it's like 40%defensive/60%offensive. Most other builds tend to be the contrary or even bigger. In general, you don't really need any damage nodes besides a few very strong ones that it'd be stupid to skip to do good damage, skills alone with the right supports and gear will take care of it.
As for the survability stat, evasion is the worst on its own because well it's random, so as long as you evade you're good and then splat. Armor works weird so apparently people have theorycrafted that you either want 5k(which is a fairly small amount, you need a bit of armor % nodes but not too many) or 50k for it to be worth it, but 50k can't be attained in a normal build I believe. Armor is further devalued due to Granite Flasks which give 10k armor for a couple of seconds so you have on demand armor. Energy Shield is arguably the best of the 3, however it tends to require a fair amount of points invested in energy nodes and work very well in combination with others(which is why templars body and soul nodes are very strong since they give both armor and ES, granting a large increase of EHP). Overall though the most important stat seems to be health, unless you do a CI build obviously. You want around 80-100% additional health from nodes.
In the end all of the defensive stats are useful but pure evasion is probably the shittiest even with all the major passives. In fact it's probably better without Acrobat which is designed as THE evasion passive, since it removes all your armor and ES, making you very squishy. There's probably a viable evasion/block/armor build to be done but it's stretched thin and that means less damage which means you have to tank longer which isn't good.
You can also balance your passive build out with active skills. Decoy Totem for example is a great tool to reduce incoming damage, Auras and Curses can also majorly reduce the damage taken(Enfeeble curse for example reduce dmg by 25% at rank1 and scales up to 35% along with crit and accuracy reductions), the Blind support gem can be very strong too once you have enough attackspeed and so on. While you can completely fuck your build over and make a char that becomes impossible to play at high level, there's many ways to make viable chars too.
Yeah it seems like that is the only ladder to be found with him on it from legacy. I am not sure what him and Chris were referring to then. They were talking about his first 1-week race where he came in 2nd in the low 80's. But yeah, what you found seems to be spot on.
I can't participate in these races though. I don't have the time or the patience to put the hours in for the grind. Kripp isn't going too hard. He is doing 10-13 hrs daily right now. So he is being pretty efficient. But some of these guys go like 16-20 hrs at a time. That shit is just too much for me anymore.
From what you and several others have said both here and on the PoE forums, group synergy and planning out your maps seems to be what will be the deciding factor in the end. If you run out of high end maps, you are pretty much screwed.
Someone mentioned that they seem to drop in tiers. Was mentioned that once you start consistently running lvl 63 maps, you will get mostly lvl 63-66 maps and then once you get a decent amount of those saved up you should start those and will get plenty of the higher lvl maps, provided you just don't run into some serious bad luck. Any experience with this?
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Well that's one of the reasons you want to run in full group, you get more drops in a full group overall and since you still only need 1 map for the whole group, you want a group to maximize drop rates on maps so you never run out.
I just read though that there's a major factor in the current race that makes it a lot slower than the previous ones though, it's the fact they massively nerfed the alchemy orb recipe recently. Before, you could match rares based on suffix/prefix to get alch orbs but the recipe was a lot easier(only needed 2 and something about being less combinations) but now it's a lot more complex because you either need 3rares or you need 2 with a combined quality of 20+% which means you need armorer scraps too for this one. In return it means Alch Orbs are a lot more rare so you can't pop them on every map you get like they did in the previous races, and alch orbs maps are apparently a lot more efficient.
As a side note for people who didn't follow, this race had quite a lot of drama. There's this guy named Cybrix who has a reallly obnoxious personality and he was in Kripp's group for this race. Guy was a douche the whole time I mean I didn't watch that much other than the start to see how they were doing it(I watched like their whole normal and cruel runs) and during that time he bitched at least 3 or 4 times about drops, asked for loot he couldn't even use/was barely an upgrade compared to someone else, didn't want to grab quest rewards to benefit other people and shit like that. Greedy lootwhore type of guy, you know the type if you've played MMOs for a bit.
So anyway a few days ago, when they reached maps and stuff, he got into an argument with Kripp, something about how he gave Kripp a map and he wanted all the maps that dropped inside the map he "donated" because he was to hold all the currency items or whatever the fuck. Nonsense shit but anyway they fought for a bit and he got muted on vent. Then a bit later, he said he was sorry and stuff(all of this on the stream btw including his own stream) and they started doing maps again, until another problem arose, not sure what cause I didn't follow but this time he was kicked for good. After that he tried to compete with Kripp for #1 and was fairly close but he went to sleep for like 12hours and fell behind. Anyway, he died yesterday at lvl 74 or something. He was playing way careless and he eventually ran into like 3 poison snakes thingies(might have been champions but looked like normals) with his ES already down from a previous fight and a vulnerability curse on him. Died almost instantly. Karma or something. Anyway the whole thing was pretty funny.
muiy
Molten Core Raider
- 32
- 16
They started off solo grinding the lowest level maps (I think?) as a way to spread out and get as many higher level maps as possible, which they would do together. The rule was that if you provided a map that the group did together, you would get all the map drops, but anyone who was online would do them together anyway, so not a big deal, just a way to make it simple. Cybrix had the best luck getting the low level maps, and at some point, everyone else was close to running out, so Cybrix loaned three maps to Kripp (to do solo) so he could keep going. Fast forward to later and Kripp is providing the high level map they're running, and Cybrix starts grabbing maps that drop, talking about how his "insurance policy" was the only reason they were even in that map.
It was the whole "if I didn't give you maps earlier you wouldn't have these maps now" line of results-oriented logic that sounds intentionally stupid to anyone with a modicum of analytical sense, but that makes complete sense to the average retard, which Cybrix seems to be.
This was the first incident afaik. If they made up later and something else happened it must've happened quickly.
It was the whole "if I didn't give you maps earlier you wouldn't have these maps now" line of results-oriented logic that sounds intentionally stupid to anyone with a modicum of analytical sense, but that makes complete sense to the average retard, which Cybrix seems to be.
This was the first incident afaik. If they made up later and something else happened it must've happened quickly.
My current character is level 62 right now. I had to convert from my melee build to dual totems, totems are really easy mode, it's basically no risk. Since switching to totems I haven't even come close to dying or being at risk, although I haven't cleared the pyramid or kill Vaal yet, but I still feel that it's extremely easy and overpowered compared to what I was doing before.
Playing hardcore of course, I started as a Templar and went for health right away without any sort of damage. I got pretty lucky with rolls on gear and had an extreme amount of armor through most of my pre-Merciless leveling so I never really came close to dying even then. I think the closest I came to death was like Normal or Cruel Weaver's Lair. During I think Ruthless I decided to go caster and respeced into dual totems. It didn't take a ton of points to do, I basically just diverted to the Witch tree instead of the Marauder tree.
Right now I seem to be doing alright, this is the highest character that I've had. I have about 4.5 to 5k HP and ES combined and a couple thousand armor. My damage seems to be a bit behind. I'm not really sure what to link up with my totem to increase it from what I have. I used most of my Fusing Orbs to try to reroll a chest into 5 or 6 links but ended up getting 0 links lol... I need some new gems for sure, it seems like all of my drops are for melee gems instead of caster gems and I haven't traded at all yet.
What gems do you guys use for totems? I have a quality Arc and a plain Spark that I use right now. To support them I have Added Lightning Damage, GMP, Fork, and that's about it for DPS caster gems I think lol. Pretty lacking. It seems like I should get Faster Casting and maybe Chain?
Also let me know if anyone wants to group on Hardcore. Mostly I just level up solo and I'm currently collecting maps (I have 6 or 7) so I plan to start doing those for the first time after I gain a few more levels and kill Vaal.
Playing hardcore of course, I started as a Templar and went for health right away without any sort of damage. I got pretty lucky with rolls on gear and had an extreme amount of armor through most of my pre-Merciless leveling so I never really came close to dying even then. I think the closest I came to death was like Normal or Cruel Weaver's Lair. During I think Ruthless I decided to go caster and respeced into dual totems. It didn't take a ton of points to do, I basically just diverted to the Witch tree instead of the Marauder tree.
Right now I seem to be doing alright, this is the highest character that I've had. I have about 4.5 to 5k HP and ES combined and a couple thousand armor. My damage seems to be a bit behind. I'm not really sure what to link up with my totem to increase it from what I have. I used most of my Fusing Orbs to try to reroll a chest into 5 or 6 links but ended up getting 0 links lol... I need some new gems for sure, it seems like all of my drops are for melee gems instead of caster gems and I haven't traded at all yet.
What gems do you guys use for totems? I have a quality Arc and a plain Spark that I use right now. To support them I have Added Lightning Damage, GMP, Fork, and that's about it for DPS caster gems I think lol. Pretty lacking. It seems like I should get Faster Casting and maybe Chain?
Also let me know if anyone wants to group on Hardcore. Mostly I just level up solo and I'm currently collecting maps (I have 6 or 7) so I plan to start doing those for the first time after I gain a few more levels and kill Vaal.
Regarding planning your maps: The drop rate is the same regardless of group size. You get more ob drops in groups and from IIQ gear, and more rare drops from IIR gear. The only thing that increases the map drop rate is the implicit IIQ on the map.
Maps can drop 2 levels higher, so if you are in a 63 you can get map drops in the 60-65 range, but you are going to get a lot more 60s than 65s. This is sort of my system..
You need to keep running 60 maps until you hit the level that you decide to run 61s. At the earliest this should be level 68, but depending on how many 61s you have, you might want to stay in 60s until you are level 73. Then run 61s until 75, 62s to 77, 63s to 79. This is because you can get enough low level maps to sustain this (with luck) and you are trying to reduce your xp penalty as much as possible. 79 is the highest I got as unfortunately I had 6 deaths in a row and decided to quit (desync and bad play). I did test the character on some higher level maps, it could just about handle 69s, but you had to be very careful. You do not want to waste your 63+ maps until you are level 79+.
To sustain same level map drops (let alone higher level), you need to run maps with good mods. This is where your MF gear and groups is useful. The more orbs you have or can make, the more times you can reroll your map mods. You end up spending far more orbs on maps than you do on gear. You will quickly come to appreciate just how valuable mid level maps are as most people want to level up, and you just cannot do it on low level maps.
Maps can drop 2 levels higher, so if you are in a 63 you can get map drops in the 60-65 range, but you are going to get a lot more 60s than 65s. This is sort of my system..
You need to keep running 60 maps until you hit the level that you decide to run 61s. At the earliest this should be level 68, but depending on how many 61s you have, you might want to stay in 60s until you are level 73. Then run 61s until 75, 62s to 77, 63s to 79. This is because you can get enough low level maps to sustain this (with luck) and you are trying to reduce your xp penalty as much as possible. 79 is the highest I got as unfortunately I had 6 deaths in a row and decided to quit (desync and bad play). I did test the character on some higher level maps, it could just about handle 69s, but you had to be very careful. You do not want to waste your 63+ maps until you are level 79+.
To sustain same level map drops (let alone higher level), you need to run maps with good mods. This is where your MF gear and groups is useful. The more orbs you have or can make, the more times you can reroll your map mods. You end up spending far more orbs on maps than you do on gear. You will quickly come to appreciate just how valuable mid level maps are as most people want to level up, and you just cannot do it on low level maps.
Do not GMP spark. GMP should only be used on a spell that has a base of 1 projectile. With a non qual spark I would run faster proj, faster casting and fork. In some cases pierce or iron will can be used. With a qual spark you can drop the faster proj.
I advise that you just stick with 4l now and buy a 5l chest from someone, then roll mods on it. Trying to roll a 5l can be very expensive, and I would only do it on a high level base item and only if I had hundreds of fusings.
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In order of importance for spark totem it's obviously totem+spark then fork, faster cast, faster projectile, elemental proliferation. You can replace either of the last 2 with GMP, LMP, Reduced mana(not so useful on totems but if you run too many auras you might not have enough to even drop the totem) and probably other stuff. Overall though, Fork is the most important support, the build is often called Spork for a reason. The thing with Fork is unlike the others it creates a lot more projectiles, since each sparks split into 2 more sparks and since you already cast 3 base, that ends up giving you 9sparks(the first 3 then they split, assuming they all hit). In comparison GMP will only give you 7sparks(3base+4from it) and LMP 5. Faster cast is very important to really spam those sparks everywhere then the rest is icing on the cake, I ran my totems with only 4Ls with totem spark fork fastercast and it raped absolutely everything anyway.
If you want to run Arc totem too, use Chain for the support as LMP GMP and Fork don't work on it cause it's not a projectile. You can probably just add Arc to a 5L with your spark and save yourself a lot of slots though and while not the most efficient it'll work fine, but I don't really think there's point. If you want to actually cast it consider a mana reduction or a mana leech(leech tends to be better endgame), spamming arc with cast speed is expensive and even more so if you add mods. Also definitely should put an elemental proliferation on it as Arc has a good shock chance. Make sure to use Conductivity too for more damage and more shock procs.
For passives and stuff make sure you have Static Blows and the minor under it to get 20% more chance to shock but other than that you shouldn't really need anything more. Get some crit damage nodes when you can and use diamond flasks to get 100%crit when you need it(or all the time if you don't have mana issues), you'll basically stack shock on everything on the screen almost instantly which means everything will die right away.
You should try trading for spells you want, you can only get so many spells from quest rewards and you're missing out on a lot especially supports. On my witch I have like 4 unclaimed quest rewards from Ruthless and Merciless because it's always the same fucking support gems and I didn't need any of them.
If you want to run Arc totem too, use Chain for the support as LMP GMP and Fork don't work on it cause it's not a projectile. You can probably just add Arc to a 5L with your spark and save yourself a lot of slots though and while not the most efficient it'll work fine, but I don't really think there's point. If you want to actually cast it consider a mana reduction or a mana leech(leech tends to be better endgame), spamming arc with cast speed is expensive and even more so if you add mods. Also definitely should put an elemental proliferation on it as Arc has a good shock chance. Make sure to use Conductivity too for more damage and more shock procs.
For passives and stuff make sure you have Static Blows and the minor under it to get 20% more chance to shock but other than that you shouldn't really need anything more. Get some crit damage nodes when you can and use diamond flasks to get 100%crit when you need it(or all the time if you don't have mana issues), you'll basically stack shock on everything on the screen almost instantly which means everything will die right away.
You should try trading for spells you want, you can only get so many spells from quest rewards and you're missing out on a lot especially supports. On my witch I have like 4 unclaimed quest rewards from Ruthless and Merciless because it's always the same fucking support gems and I didn't need any of them.
Yeah I have 3 or 4 Spell Totems and Reduced Mana Cost because none of the rewards seem that great anymore other than for backups if I die. I also have at least one each of the other rewards, Blood Magic, Iron Will? (I think it's Will), etc.
Anyway I traded for a Faster Cast gem and I picked up the crit talents in the little circle on the north edge above the Templar area. The totem pretty much kills everything now, I haven't used my old melee stuff in the past couple of days and I doubt that I will again until they nerf totems lol. Right now I use a Spell Totem-Spark-Fork-Faster Cast link. I use Arc just as my normal cast to pick off random mobs and to add to the DPS from the totems but it isn't really necessary. I have just a bit under 3k HP and 2k ES, nearly 5k total. My armor has taken a dive as I haven't really found any upgrades, my resists are 60-75 for fire and lightning and around 30 for cold.
I'm wearing several blue items still, I guess I'll just trade for some upgrades to max out my resists and gain a bit more HP/ES, maybe a 5l armor as was suggested, then I could use Added Lightning Damage or something like that to my totems. After that time for maps! I haven't killed Vaal yet, I guess I should just do it and not worry since the stupid totems are going to own everything while I avoid the lightning and rocks.
Which auras are you guys using? I have a lot of them, the evasion one, the resists one, Vitality, melee ones like Anger and Wrath, etc. But I'm using only two, Clarity and Discipline. Is there an aura that I don't know about that ups caster DPS? I'm sure there are just to balance things out.
Anyway I traded for a Faster Cast gem and I picked up the crit talents in the little circle on the north edge above the Templar area. The totem pretty much kills everything now, I haven't used my old melee stuff in the past couple of days and I doubt that I will again until they nerf totems lol. Right now I use a Spell Totem-Spark-Fork-Faster Cast link. I use Arc just as my normal cast to pick off random mobs and to add to the DPS from the totems but it isn't really necessary. I have just a bit under 3k HP and 2k ES, nearly 5k total. My armor has taken a dive as I haven't really found any upgrades, my resists are 60-75 for fire and lightning and around 30 for cold.
I'm wearing several blue items still, I guess I'll just trade for some upgrades to max out my resists and gain a bit more HP/ES, maybe a 5l armor as was suggested, then I could use Added Lightning Damage or something like that to my totems. After that time for maps! I haven't killed Vaal yet, I guess I should just do it and not worry since the stupid totems are going to own everything while I avoid the lightning and rocks.
Which auras are you guys using? I have a lot of them, the evasion one, the resists one, Vitality, melee ones like Anger and Wrath, etc. But I'm using only two, Clarity and Discipline. Is there an aura that I don't know about that ups caster DPS? I'm sure there are just to balance things out.
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There's Haste, attack speed+cast speed% but most people don't use it on casters because of the 40% reserve. Other than that it's mostly defensive auras for casters, Purity is good too but running Purity+Clarity+Disc is generally hard without quite a lot of mana or Eldritch Battery, cause Purity is 40% reserve too then since the other 2 are static if you level them they eat all your mana easily.
Yeah the 40% reserve seems pretty extreme. I do have a good amount of mana though, I might be able to do Purity-Clarity-Discipline if I pick up a few +mana% talents. I think I have 550-600 mana right now, of which Clarity and Discipline eat maybe 400? So I guess it's possible with some passives and mana on a couple more pieces of gear.
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Well if your clarity and disc eat 400, you'd need at least 1k mana. With 1k, purity would eat 400, clarity disc still 400 so you're left with 200mana, which should be enough to get your totems out. I ran all 3 on my witch and I did have about 1k mana to run them(1050 or so, I liked having 250mana instead), I had to take quite a few mana nodes though for that, I had the 8% and 12% at the start of the witch, a 8% random I took for the 50additional mana and the large mana nodes near double curse that gives 3x8% and 18% iirc. And I had a lot of int since 90% of my stuff was in the witch area as well as a bit of mana gear. Still if you went for static blows you're not very far from the large mana nodes over there so it should be fine.
Played a Ranger melee for a bit, god the game is so much harder when you're a melee and especially when you're a melee without a large amount of defensive nodes very early. Rangers have some really good health nodes in their area but you need at least like 10points to start getting some. I like dthe abilities but wish there was more choice for AoE skills as a melee. If you 2H you can ground slam or sweep but otherwise it's pretty much only cleave or lightning strike. Mana was another issue, I'm so used to playing witch where mana becomes a non factor pretty quickly if you flask every now and then but on the Ranger it's like you need a flask for every trash pack because you use 5skills and you're oom and there mana nodes aren't convenient at all. Eventually you can Blood magic but meh.
Overall pretty unimpressed, I really like the single target skills though, Venom Strike is awesome, Flicker is awesome, Double strike is awesome but the fact you can't do any sort of aoe with them sucks. Wish there was like a fork/lmp/chain/gmp/pierce type of support gem for melee skills. You know like Splash: 130%mana cost, hits 3 additional targets around the main target for 70% dmg or whatever.
Delly
Trakanon Raider
- 2,981
- 622
36 hours left in the 1 week HC race. The top 10 are fairly close to each other but the top 3 are going to come down to the wire. A lot of the top players were mentioning playing for the last 24 hours so that could lead to some fun deaths.
While it does deprive sleep and what not, it is exciting for the viewers!
While it does deprive sleep and what not, it is exciting for the viewers!
Agreed on the lack of aoe for melee classes. While I was leveling up I would swap to a shield if I felt that I needed extra resists or defense and not being able to use Sweep just killed my overall dps. Sure single target was fine using Lightning Strike but the lack of aoe is very clear looking back on it after converting over to being a caster. Right now melee seems extremely underpowered to me, not only do they take more risk but they deal less damage to large groups as well. I don't think that I'll be playing another melee unless they buff them (or nerf totems lol) for open beta.
I'm going to go kill Merciless Vaal and then try maps. It's my first character to get that far! Wooo
Deruvian
Lord Nagafen Raider
- 640
- 115
Been playing this on HC with my free time for the last few days or so. It has been very entertaining and addicting, and feels much more like the successor to the Diablo series than D3 does. Just now ended up de-syncing and dying with no mobs within 40 or 50 feet of me. Sort of a bummer, but not as frustrating as the 'you have been disconnected' shit from D3, especially since the gameplay in PoE seems to be a lot more enjoyable so I am actually looking forward to re-rolling.
Delly
Trakanon Raider
- 2,981
- 622
If you were one of the guys racing then you wouldn't be saying that!
The guy that had a really good chance of beating Kripp died to de-sync. They really need to get that figured out.