Path of Exile 3.0 (the other Diablo clone)

[Drasius]

Soul of Arakali gives -DoT damage, and, if one can reach t14 maps and capture the Shadow of the Vaal boss, 25% chaos res vs degens.

Which is just ugh. DoT's are basically the only thing even slightly threatening to my gladiator (5.3k hp, 65% block/spellblock, 10k armour, 25ish flat phys reduction, MoM) and GGG went and put that Soul at the end of the atlas.

Throw a poison curing flask on there and call it a day. Or are you full of unique flasks trying to chase the DPS?

How do you get divine vessels, by the way?

I'll have to try and fit some chaos resist into my gear.

Divine Vessels are just a random drop in maps.

Be aware that they're pretty rare though. I reckon I'd have plowed through maybe 200ish maps and I've only seen 2 so far.

Also worth nothing that the Pantheon upgrades (and the pantheon itself) are character specific rather than league specific like the atlas though, so you're going to have to choose carefully if you want to have multiple characters with pantheon upgrades.

[Chen]

Be aware that they're pretty rare though. I reckon I'd have plowed through maybe 200ish maps and I've only seen 2 so far.

Also worth nothing that the Pantheon upgrades (and the pantheon itself) are character specific rather than league specific like the atlas though, so you're going to have to choose carefully if you want to have multiple characters with pantheon upgrades.

Poe trade has them at around 3 chaos each so that shouldn't be too big an issue to obtain if you want them.

[Sian]

*scratches head* ... Is this supposed to happen, just got "The Silverwood" Prophecy which asks to kill someone wearing Silverbranch (low level bow) on my Harbinger character ... while the only Silverbranch I have is in Standard

[Siosilvar]

*scratches head* ... Is this supposed to happen, just got "The Silverwood" Prophecy which asks to kill someone wearing Silverbranch (low level bow) on my Harbinger character ... while the only Silverbranch I have is in Standard

Yes, you can get the prophecied uniques at any time. Just seal them and wait for one to drop (or let the prophecy sit, or buy the unique, or sell the sealed prophecy, or whatever else you want to do with it).

[Tome]

Silverbranch is currently like two chromatics or something to buy, while Silverbough is going for 3 chaos. Could be worth it if you're set up to sell stuff.

[Drasius]

Yes, you can get the prophecied uniques at any time. Just seal them and wait for one to drop (or let the prophecy sit, or buy the unique, or sell the sealed prophecy, or whatever else you want to do with it).

I rarely find myself with a huge excess of silver coins, so I let the crap prophecies sit there so I can't get them again and just work on the 1 or 2 that aren't terrible. It's like sextant blocking for prophecies. More relevant to SSF though since you can always just buy whatever prophecy you want, or just buy more coins if you're trading (though I understand that they're a bit more expensive now since everyone is still using them to get zana 8 for breaches).

[lord_khaine]

A couple new questions. I have been rather compulsive in collecting anything unique i have found. But is there anything useful i can do with the less usefull uniques?

And whats the best gems for boosting an animated guardian?

[Siosilvar]

A couple new questions. I have been rather compulsive in collecting anything unique i have found. But is there anything useful i can do with the less usefull uniques?

Vendor them. Or wait for the 5-to-1 prophecy and vendor them for something that might be better. Or let them sit in a stash tab priced at an alch until some random person decides Prismweave is best-in-slot for their build (which it somehow is for my build).

[Drasius]

A couple new questions. I have been rather compulsive in collecting anything unique i have found. But is there anything useful i can do with the less usefull uniques?

And whats the best gems for boosting an animated guardian?

If they're ilevel 70+, save them for the 5-1 prophecy. If you're SSF, Keep 'em for new characters, otherwise, I'd probably just vendor them.

Best gems for Animated guardian is to not use animated guardian are minion life (so you don't lose your items), minion resists (so you don't lose your items) and minion speed (so it can keep up with you and hand out that leercast aura). You could maybe put minion damage in there instead of speed or maybe resists if you are already a minion build, but I doubt it would really be that noticable to be honest.

[lord_khaine]

Vendor them. Or wait for the 5-to-1 prophecy and vendor them for something that might be better. Or let them sit in a stash tab priced at an alch until some random person decides Prismweave is best-in-slot for their build (which it somehow is for my build).

Ahh.. it was a prophecy you were speaking about there. I heard you talking about something, and kinda hoped there might be a relevant vendor recipe to use them in. Guess i will just save the most relevant ones for a new summoner or something.

Best gems for Animated guardian is to not use animated guardian are minion life (so you don't lose your items), minion resists (so you don't lose your items) and minion speed (so it can keep up with you and hand out that leercast aura). You could maybe put minion damage in there instead of speed or maybe resists if you are already a minion build, but I doubt it would really be that noticable to be honest.

Hmm.. yeah alright.. with minion resist it turned out to get decently tanky. But even with multistrike and something else it still got outdone by a unsupported fire elemental.
Kinda sad honestly. Because it is the sort of minion micromanagement that i like.

Also, got my first Vaal wind prophecy now. That was kinda a funny mini-game, jumping around to hit the red clouds before killing anything. Did get me a few interesting pieces of corrupted gear. But not certain anything will fit in my build yet.

[Sian]

Sit on them till you get Ancient orbs to use on them?

[Drasius]

Hmm.. yeah alright.. with minion resist it turned out to get decently tanky. But even with multistrike and something else it still got outdone by a unsupported fire elemental.
Kinda sad honestly. Because it is the sort of minion micromanagement that i like.

Animated guardian is not for damage, it's for abusing unique items, usually in a party based aurabot or summoner set-up. The one that immediately springs to mind is leer cast - a unique mask that gives a +15% damage aura but imposes a -30% damage malus on the user (which goes down to -15% since the aura affects the user as well). Jam it on your animated guardian and enjoy your free damge boost. Think Iron Golem from D2, but you can jam it full of equipment like your own mini-exile.

Another use is to jam it full of MF gear and use a unique (or a gem) that gives it culling strike, letting you benefit from stacking MF while not hindering your own life/resists/damage. Not as reliable as you'd like lategame though, but for anyone already investing in minion life, it's a nice way to get "free" MF, though if you're doing minions, you probably don't have the sockets free, so meh.

[Drasius]

... I've got a Doomfletch's Prism raider Ranger in Act 5 who was/is finding it much harder going and very squishy despite having 1.5k life, phase acro and decent evasion. For the life if me I can't figure out why she feels so terrible when she's got 5 times the damage output of any of my other characters at that point along with more life?

Lack of leech maybe? I know I picked up a decent amount. My life was about 1k-1.3k for Act 5, 60-65% evade chance and capped resists, so nothing particularly amazing and I only really felt squishy once, when facing the ACT 5 final boss.

Don't think so, I've got 1.x% life leech and some life gain on hit in barrage and am sucking down mana pots like an addict to power it. Even on a pair of 4 links I should be able to feel OK, but she just doesn't. Maybe I need to run a blasphemy? Temp or enfeeble I guess, though proj weakness might let her breach that crucial DPS barrier that means nothing really makes it into range to threaten her (not going to fix ranged issues though)? Will have to give it a bash and see how it goes.

Turns out I was too heavy on the ele conversion too early. Picked her up again, went though the rest of A5 and a gave tukohama the run around and then remembered I still hadn't done normal lab (on account of feeling so squishy). Went in and while it took far, far longer than I would have liked, she picked up the first raider ascendancy, dropped some old gear (including Hrimburn) and bam, she magically transitioned into the powerhouse I was expecting, running around 1 shotting trash like I was expecting. Still can't live without life gain on hit in barrage, but can't power barrage without the mana leech from split arrow, but the potion drinking has mostly stopped except for tough bosses, so I'm calling it a win.

My Dark Pact Necro summoner has started mapping and disappointingly, despite all her focus on skele life, she still pumps out more damage and clears faster by just self casting dark pact with zimbie/spectre back up. :( At least skeles are safer now that she's mapping and stuff is actually dangerous. I must say though, I've never seen anything completely and utterly trivialise bosses the way a summoner with Vaal Summon Skeletons and Flesh Offering does. Hooooooooooooly crap.

My EQ Jugger has also moved on to mapping and is a solid if uninspiring machine. Squishier than you'd expect before he gets those charges up, but then it's just a strong and consistant facerolling of basically anything and everything.

My cyclone/lacerate slayer dinged 90 and has gone back on Atziri duty until the Uberlab has another nice layout and the crashing issues go away and I can use up the remaining offerings. He's unlocked up to T13 for me, but the red maps just don't want to drop at the moment and he's getting a bit boring anyway to be honest.

[SlyGuyMcFly]

Throw a poison curing flask on there and call it a day. Or are you full of unique flasks trying to chase the DPS?

Do poison flasks grant immunity to chaos degen ground effects? I don't think they're treated as having the Poison keyword. Things like Caustic Arrow Grandmasters and map mods are the issue, I've got enough block that nothing can put all that many Poison stacks on me. Mind you, now that I've got the 2% regen enchant on my boots and 50 chaos res on gear I'm feeling a lot better about tanking degens in general.

Be aware that they're pretty rare though. I reckon I'd have plowed through maybe 200ish maps and I've only seen 2 so far.

Also worth nothing that the Pantheon upgrades (and the pantheon itself) are character specific rather than league specific like the atlas though, so you're going to have to choose carefully if you want to have multiple characters with pantheon upgrades.

Yeah, I'm finding them very rare as drops too. But on the bright side, they also cost like 2c each. I guess demand is pretty low. Not surprising, most builds only really benefit from a small number of souls.

[N810]

Amethyst flask are the Chaos resist ones.
(or at least they use to be)

[Siosilvar]

Sources of reduced DoT taken that aren't on the pantheon:

Solaris Lorica (chaos damage only)
Essence of Delirium on body armor (chaos damage only)
Leo level 5 on shield or two-hander, good luck with leveling him

And I'm pretty sure that's it, but not 100% confident.

[N810]

Seriously I have a lvl 70+ character and I still can't get past lvl 2 in the arena (Leo). :P

[lord_khaine]

Thats hardly surprising?
Im level 70. And i have not yet completed the main campaign.

On another note, defeating the act 9 bosses made me wonder. What the heck does melee builds do to survive boss fights?
I can see i got it fairly easy with Essence drain, doing more dot damage in chaos than my main hand weapon skill. It means i can focus running around dodging all the crap on the floor, and only need to land a hit every 3-4 sec.

But how does melee classes do any damage then, when there is so much you need to dodge?

[SlyGuyMcFly]

At long last, my first Guardian kill!

Spoiler: Trophy screenshot

Show

The astute observer will take note of the map mods and wonder how long it took. The answer is, of course, forever. But hey at least it was deathless. A brutal slugfest, but I slowly ground him down into paste with little risk. As long as I kept my endurance charges up, I barely even noticed the special moves. We just stood there trading blows to little visible effect. Eventually he hit 10% and my Culling Riposte blew him up. Satisfying.

The add phases were a little scary. The cobra miniboss very scary, as the poison DoT would sap all my mana with 2-3 stacks. Curing flask woulda helped a bunch, but I was going in semi-blind trusting my general mapping setup. JackStabbington, if anyone is curious. I'd appreciate any feedback regarding the tree and advice on upgrading items. Say I've got 100c to spend (I don't, but let's pretend). Rare phys axe? Soul Taker? Couple of jewels? Maybe a Lion's Roar/Rumi's? 6-linked chest would be suuuper nice, but that seems like a stretch goal on this caracter, pending some crazy-good loot drop.

[Drasius]

Im level 70. And i have not yet completed the main campaign.

Be aware that there's a drop rate and XP penalty for being in areas you're overlevelled for. Not that it should worry you if you're finishing up act 9, but you'd be getting close. anything (for you, at this point onwards) 7 levels below you will give less XP and less quantity dropped. It's not a huge hit, like, only 98% of normal to start with, but be aware that it's there and that it escalates.

On another note, defeating the act 9 bosses made me wonder. What the heck does melee builds do to survive boss fights?
I can see i got it fairly easy with Essence drain, doing more dot damage in chaos than my main hand weapon skill. It means i can focus running around dodging all the crap on the floor, and only need to land a hit every 3-4 sec.

But how does melee classes do any damage then, when there is so much you need to dodge?

Remember when we were discussing why Vaal Pact is so much better than everything else? This is why. Anything that doesn't kill you instantly is of minimal concern. To be fair though, it's actually fairly easy to tank through the story bosses with half decent equipment and a stack of life. The other option is to do as below and stack armour, block and resists and make everything do tickle damage.

At long last, my first Guardian kill!

Spoiler: Trophy screenshot

Show

The astute observer will take note of the map mods and wonder how long it took. The answer is, of course, forever. But hey at least it was deathless. A brutal slugfest, but I slowly ground him down into paste with little risk. As long as I kept my endurance charges up, I barely even noticed the special moves. We just stood there trading blows to little visible effect. Eventually he hit 10% and my Culling Riposte blew him up. Satisfying.

The add phases were a little scary. The cobra miniboss very scary, as the poison DoT would sap all my mana with 2-3 stacks. Curing flask woulda helped a bunch, but I was going in semi-blind trusting my general mapping setup. JackStabbington, if anyone is curious. I'd appreciate any feedback regarding the tree and advice on upgrading items. Say I've got 100c to spend (I don't, but let's pretend). Rare phys axe? Soul Taker? Couple of jewels? Maybe a Lion's Roar/Rumi's? 6-linked chest would be suuuper nice, but that seems like a stretch goal on this caracter, pending some crazy-good loot drop.

'Gratz on the kill, especially if you didn't read up on him beforehand. Not sure that you can do tooooo much better with your gear setup nor your skill tree. Any of the things you listed would be nice, though I suspect you might get more out of a fatter weapon than the other things (though JtA is still pretty good), though I suspect a Lion's roar would also be a very solid option too. I would have thought your block would already be more than good enough for the Rumi's not not be such a big upgrade, especially if you can facetank chimera. One note though, you appear to be missing a master craft on your gloves, or am I going mad?

[SlyGuyMcFly]

One note though, you appear to be missing a master craft on your gloves, or am I going mad?

You're not! I'd completely forgotten I was debating over crafting evasion or mana leech on the open prefix. I crafted the mana, and swapped a mana leech node for another life node. Thanks!

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Babby's First Labyrinth Crawl...

Ugh. What an annoying, asinine piece of garbage crawl. The boss fight is right after the first zone, so you'd figure you were done, right?

No. Because the annoying little trials weren't annoying enough, although fairly simplistic enough, let's go build whole zones on a similar tactic, and if you die anywhere on ANY of them, then you have to start ALL OVER at the FIRST one.

I know, veterans are probably chuckling at this point, but I am simply frustrated. Time to go play a different character for a while and chill.

[Sian]

If you're not certain what to expect, take your time, observe the traps, learning their pattern.

That said, Normal Labyrinth is probably still ever so slightly overturned if you consider the target 'audience' new players ...

[Drasius]

Babby's First Labyrinth Crawl...

Ugh. What an annoying, asinine piece of garbage crawl. The boss fight is right after the first zone, so you'd figure you were done, right?

No. Because the annoying little trials weren't annoying enough, although fairly simplistic enough, let's go build whole zones on a similar tactic, and if you die anywhere on ANY of them, then you have to start ALL OVER at the FIRST one.

I know, veterans are probably chuckling at this point, but I am simply frustrated. Time to go play a different character for a while and chill.

Just wait 'till you have to do a proper lab in merciless or uber, that's when the real "fun" starts.

Also, a well known but little talked about bit of wisom used to be wait until you were ~10 levels over the lab level to make it significantly less painful. These days it's somewhere between 0-5 over, but Izzy is still a serious pain for many players.

On the bright side, the labs are all more forgiving than they used to be (except Uber, that's the same hell as always) and once you've been through a few times and get a bit of a feeling for what little signs mean what, it's actually not too bad for most characters and can be easily farmable for certain ones. The ascendancy benefits and lab enchants are worth the hassle though.

[Tome]

Babby's First Labyrinth Crawl...

Ugh. What an annoying, asinine piece of garbage crawl. The boss fight is right after the first zone, so you'd figure you were done, right?

No. Because the annoying little trials weren't annoying enough, although fairly simplistic enough, let's go build whole zones on a similar tactic, and if you die anywhere on ANY of them, then you have to start ALL OVER at the FIRST one.

I know, veterans are probably chuckling at this point, but I am simply frustrated. Time to go play a different character for a while and chill.

It's generally recommended to overlevel the Labyrinth by quite a bit for your first run, specifically because it is pretty difficult. Try coming back at level 43~.

Beyond that:

• The traps do damage proportional to your life, so you can't outgear or outlevel them. Physical damage reduction (or chaos resistance for the poison darts) does apply though. They also do like a quarter damage to energy shields. A CI build barely even notices them.
• Try bringing a precision movement skill, like lightning warp or blink arrow. The uber lab will have partial countermeasures, but earlier labs can be dealt with pretty easily by just teleporting past the traps.
• Some traps you just have to run through, brign a quicksilver flask to minimise time in contact with them and something to cure poison and bleed.
• The vast majority of the time trapped areas aren't necessary to complete the labyrinth. Check all other possible routes before trying to navigate a trapped area, it's quite likely they're just guarding loot instead of the way forwards.
• Izaro introduces a new mechanic in each encounter. If you disable/kill said mechanic, it will stay disabled. Conversely if you don't stop whatever mechanic he brings then he'll retain it for future encounters and drop an extra treasure key at the very end.
• The areas with the little circle inside their symbol on the labyrinth map hold a special chest that drops an item to help disable Izaro's extra mechanics.
• Izaro's third and final encounter will include traps inside the boss room, as well as a green circle attack that can teleport you into them.
• The Labyrinth will stay the same for the entire day, for everyone. It'll be re-randomised the next day. If you want, you can look up todays layout online.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Izario wasn't bad himself. He was quite beatable once I realized his 'gimmick'. In fact, quite easy on the sunder build with life on hit because I was healing faster than his minions were doing damage, so it was just a matter of dodging his big attacks.

The problem were some of the trap areas took me from full to ded in less time than it would take for me to hit a potion. Not because of the dudes, but the traps. Second time I got further, but still got caught.

I did find an area talking about a 'silver key', but that was where I died before I could figure out where it went.

The problem isn't the boss, the problem is boss then a series of zones you have to just plow through in an endurance run with tons of 'lolded' traps everywhere. And dying anywhere means going back to the beginning.

[Tome]

Izario wasn't bad himself. He was quite beatable once I realized his 'gimmick'. In fact, quite easy on the sunder build with life on hit because I was healing faster than his minions were doing damage, so it was just a matter of dodging his big attacks.

The problem were some of the trap areas took me from full to ded in less time than it would take for me to hit a potion. Not because of the dudes, but the traps. Second time I got further, but still got caught.

I did find an area talking about a 'silver key', but that was where I died before I could figure out where it went.

The problem isn't the boss, the problem is boss then a series of zones you have to just plow through in an endurance run with tons of 'lolded' traps everywhere. And dying anywhere means going back to the beginning.

The traps shouldn't be killing you quite that quickly. So long as you were on full health and not running in the same direction as the trap, or through the very centre of the hover discs.

Maybe this guide will help?

[lord_khaine]

Remember when we were discussing why Vaal Pact is so much better than everything else? This is why. Anything that doesn't kill you instantly is of minimal concern. To be fair though, it's actually fairly easy to tank through the story bosses with half decent equipment and a stack of life. The other option is to do as below and stack armour, block and resists and make everything do tickle damage.

I did remember Vaal Pack. But it did not seem like it would make a viable difference. With the 4k dps i got, or assuming someone more specialised with 5k, and with perhaps 4% life leached?, then its still only 200 health per second. Thats less than 10 % of my total health. I cant even see how Vaal Pact would be relevant here.
Also kinda shocked about being able to tank though the story bosses. Whats the actual definition of half decent equipment?

Also, a well known but little talked about bit of wisom used to be wait until you were ~10 levels over the lab level to make it significantly less painful. These days it's somewhere between 0-5 over, but Izzy is still a serious pain for many players.

I was kinda surprised at the difficulty drop in the new 10 act version myself.

The problem isn't the boss, the problem is boss then a series of zones you have to just plow through in an endurance run with tons of 'lolded' traps everywhere. And dying anywhere means going back to the beginning.

I kinda think the main problem is in attitude here. Its not an endurance run, and you cant plow though the traps. You need to watch their pattern, and find the holes in them. Getting some flasks with instant recovery on low health is also a good idea.
And for movement skills, then i found Charged Dash to be a huge help myself.

[Sian]

I kinda think the main problem is in attitude here. Its not an endurance run, and you cant plow though the traps.

Don't you mean it's not an Speed run?

[lord_khaine]

Don't you mean it's not an Speed run?

Its also not a speed run

Anyway, do people think its worth using item rarity support?
And if i uses it with for example Decay support and a movement skill to place a dot on my enemies, will that dot then also trigger the increased item rarity?