Path of Exile: Ultimate Party Buffs?

Path of Exile is a game that can be played in a group of up to 6 players and has a massive number of different options for how one character can do things to help the other characters in their party. Group buffs, enemy debuffs, specialized roles... The world is your grouping oyster!

And yet right now I feel like I get very little benefit from playing with my friends right now. We've all built characters in order to be able to successfully play alone which means they're all self sufficient. They haven't really put any effort into buffing a group (since it tends to be more expensive skill point wise to buff a group than to just find something to buff yourself) and the efforts put into debuffing the enemies will often come into conflict with each other (curses overwriting each other, elemental equilibriuming away an ally's damage, knockbacks, non-magic finders killing things).

So we started mulling over the idea of creating characters actively designed to work well together. If a character is built knowing they're going to get buffs from friends then they can make tradeoffs as they build their character. For example, if I know someone is going to make some really good curses to put on the enemy then I know I don't have to put any skill points into making my curses better. I don't have to waste skill gems on a curse setup. If I know someone is going to focus on doing a lot of damage then I don't have to worry about taking any damage nodes in the tree at all! Everyone can focus on being tough and doing a couple of good things for the group and actually play together without feeling bad about it.

I'm a little hyped, but now I want to make sure I pick up all the ways to help that I can! So I wanted to go through the list of skills and uniques and stuff to see what the different ways of helping out would be. It's important to not try to take too many helping things and end up squishy but it's entirely possible there are some fairly trivial buffs that people could pick up as long as they know about them. So I want to have a list of broad 'roles' and then a list of extra add-ons that could be picked up.

Roles:
- AoE damage dealer
- single target damage dealer (for bosses)
- aurabot(s)
- multi-curser
- magic finder
- super tank

Specifics:
- elemental equilibrium (would need to coordinate to use the right element)
- conduit to share power, frenzy, and/or endurance charges
- consecrated ground
- no stun after blocking from Guardian
- speed buff after warcry from Guardian
- armour, energy shield, physical reduction, life regen from Guardian auras
- attack/cast speed, damage, resists from Necro auras
- maim
- blind
- culling strike (@20% from Slayer)
- taunts (double reduction from Champion)
- damage and move speed from Champion
- bleeds buff Bloodlust support gem
- knockback (reverse with unique gloves?)
- stuns/freezes
- hinder
- warcries?
- corpse consumption?
- vaal auras
- frost bomb (cold resist reduction)
- spirited response jewel (rallying cry -> mana regen for party)
- the vigil jewel (vigilant strike fortifies the party)
- dying breath weapon (curse, aura, damage amp) {animate guardian?}
- shaper's seed amulet (health/mana regen aura)
- leer cast hat (damage amp) {animate guardian?}


Enemy damage increases
- Inquisitor (nearby 16% elemental damage)
- Champion (taunted 20% damage)
- intimidate (Champion)
- Warchief (near totem 16% phys/fire damage)
- maim support gem (10-14% physical damage)
- shocks!
- wither (140% chaos damage)

Path of Exile: Perma-Freeze Bosses

I have been playing a lot of Path of Exile lately. My current character is running the freezing pulse skill gem because they added a unique jewel that buffs it and I had fun with it years ago. The goal of the build is to do a bunch of cold damage and inflict the 'freeze' debuff on all of the enemies. This means they can't take actions, which means they can't do damage, which means I get to be invincible! Mwahaha!

The theory turns out to be better than the practice, however. I can absolutely crush trash monsters but I've been having trouble with bosses. I've been trying to straddle a line of being able to still deal with bosses that aren't frozen so I've ended up with a mishmash of a build where I have some survivability and some freezability but not really enough of either. I will be getting more of both with more levels (both in terms of getting more passive points in the tree and in terms of leveling up my skill gems) but I'm starting to feel like I need to really go all in on one or the other. Running a bunch of curses and instant leech and the like is fine if enemies aren't frozen but if they are then it's not really doing anything for me and maybe I'll be better off without 4 item slots dedicated to doing all my cursing.

Alternatively maybe I'm better off doing all the cursing and leeching without worrying about freezing at all. If I'm building up to being able to leech tank bosses I can do the same for all the trash too and I'd be better off without all the freeze related points in the tree. At that point I may even be better off just using a different spell entirely!

So I think the way to proceed is to work out what I could do to go all in on freezing. See if I think that'd be good enough to freeze some bosses. If so, great! If not, well, probably start a new dude.


Ok, so, freezing... What are the specific mechanics behind freezing enemies? For our purposes only cold damage can freeze and a hit of cold damage will freeze if two conditions are met:

- The hit is a crit OR an inate 'chance to freeze' roll succeeds.
- The hit does enough damage to freeze the enemy for .3 seconds, which at base means doing 5% of the enemy's max health in cold damage.

The first condition is relatively easy to meet. In my current setup I have a 19% chance to crit, 20% chance to freeze, 20% chance to freeze a chilled enemy, 13% chance to freeze a frostbiten enemy, and somewhere from 0-25% chance to freeze based on distance from my character. So while not every hit will meet this check a significant number of them will. If bosses were getting frozen some but not all of the time I would worry more about working on this condition, but they aren't, so I won't.

The second condition is the one I'm getting stuck on. Having to hit a boss for 5% of their health in order to freeze them actually seems a little silly. If I only need to hit them 20 times in order to kill them I don't think I care that they're not frozen. I can kite and/or use flasks for the 7 seconds it'll take to burn them down! Fortunately damage isn't the only way to work on this condition. You can also work to extend the duration of your freezes so that smaller amounts of damage are good enough to hit the .3 second threshold. If you had 100% freeze duration you'd only need to hit them for 2.5% of their max health. 400% freeze duration would mean you only need to hit them for 1% of their max health. I'm not quite sure that would be good enough, and I really doubt I could get that much freeze duration anyway, but I might as well look into it.

Currently I have 60% increased freeze duration, which is every freeze duration node in the tree. There is one 10% ailment duration node which probably also applies, but I don't have. Other potential sources of freeze duration would be:

- jewels which can add up to 16% freeze duration each
- 20%+ freeze duration from quality on a frostbite gem (and maybe more if my curse nodes impact the quality boost)
- elemental proliferation support gem would be up to ~29% freeze duration (and 20% chance to freeze)
- The Halcyon unique amulet has 30% freeze duration (and 10% chance to freeze, and potentially 80% cold damage)
- Southbound unique gloves have 25% freeze duration
- Rashkaldor's Patience unique amulet had 20% elemental ailment duration

And that is all. The last two unique items don't feel very good while The Halcyon runs over 150 chaos to buy. I do have that much, and I suspect I can flip the amulet back if I don't like it, so possibly that is what I need to do if I'm going forward. I can probably grab jewel sockets to get 3 of those jewels, and I can easily get a quality frostbite gem. I currently need my amulet for life and resists, so switching to The Halcyon hurts my health to the point where I probably need to give up on the Kitava's Thirst 4-curse plan. I also _might_ be able to stretch my tree to get that last 10% ailment node at the assassin start location.

All told I can probably get my freeze duration up to 164% without elemental proliferation and 203% with it. That's almost twice what I'm currently sitting at (303 compared to 160) which almost certainly gets me a little closer to freezing some bosses. That's enough that it's probably worth working on...

On top of that, I can also work on doing more cold damage. With all the freeze duration I can manage I only need to do enough damage to hit for 1.7% of the enemy's max health. I'm still not sure if that is good enough... That's 60 hits to kill them, and I attack almost 3 times per second, so it's probably trivializing a fight that would be lasting 25 seconds otherwise? That's actually a lot of dodging... I don't think I can facetank a lot of these fights for 25 seconds with my current setup, so it is probably worth trying. But let's max out our damage too...

Initially my thinking was that if I'm doing a perma-freeze plan I don't want to be relying on the swings involved in crits. So I've taken the node that makes me do 40% more damage if I've crit in the last 8 seconds. This is way better for consistent damage and it saves me taking crit nodes but it's entirely possible I could be freezing some of the time with crits instead of the current none of the time. At this point I'm really committed to this line I think (I'd want a different bandit reward and probably an entirely different class for critting) but maybe I want to create a different character to do crit freezing pulse...

Anyway, with crits totally abstracted away there are really 4 ways to boost the damage of my spell. I can increase the base cold damage of the spell with flat damage (including leveling the gem itself), I can add to the 'increased damage' multiplier in a variety of ways, I can get extra 'more damage' multipliers, and I can lower the enemy cold resistance.

There are so many ways to change all of those things so I went and built a spreadsheet. It was a little surprising to me in some ways, in particular that a level 4 empower gem isn't really worth using. I suspect that's because of how much flat damage I'm adding to the spell via herald of ice? It means there isn't a red gem worth using which makes me sad... I'm going to have to spend a bunch of chromatics to change my 6 link away from BBGGGR into BBBGGG. (I only have a level 2 empower gem anyway...)

At any rate, here's the support gem ordering for different criteria:

30 cold resist (standard boss), freeze duration - controlled destruction > hypothermia > ice bite > slower projectiles > empower (4) > cold penetration > unbounded ailments > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > elemental proliferation > iron will > empower (2) > faster projectiles > faster casting > spell echo

30 cold resist (standard boss), DPS - spell echo > controlled destruction > ice bite > hypothermia > faster casting > slower projectiles > empower (4) > cold penetration > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > iron will > faster projectiles > empower (2) > elemental proliferation = unbounded ailments

85 cold resist (cold boss), freeze duration - controlled destruction > hypothermia > cold penetration > ice bite > slower projectiles > empower (4) > unbounded ailments > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > elemental proliferation > iron will > empower (2) > faster projectiles > faster casting > spell echo

85 cold resist (cold boss), DPS - spell echo > controlled destruction > ice bite > hypothermia > cold penetration > faster casting > slower projectiles > empower (4) > added cold damage > pierce > efficacy > empower (3) > iron will > faster projectiles > empower (2) > elemental proliferation = unbounded ailments


Basically it seems I have enough spell penetration that unless a boss is overcapped it barely isn't worth using the cold pen gem. This is only true if frost bomb is up, and that's not a given.

The spreadsheet wants me to use slower projectiles, but the spreadsheet don't understand that freezing pulse loses damage the longer it travels so slower projectiles has an invisible less damage multiplier in it. This depends on how close I get to the enemies, and it really hurts my trash clear because the size of my attack is based on how fast it travels. Similarly the faster projectiles damage is better than it seems here (but it still seems quite bad).

Spell echo is the best for doing damage, but it's actively bad at freezing a boss. This means I may want to carry one around to swap in on bosses I can't freeze? I suspect I'd rather have faster casting instead for mobility reasons if I can't freeze the boss? Hard to say.

Ice bite looks good, but that's because it's a way to get frenzy charges. If I can get the charges up then it is worth using. If I can't then it's trash. You get them for killing frozen enemies, which will happen all the time on trash and on boss fights with tons of adds but never on a standalone boss.

I think what I'm ultimately going to want to run is controlled destruction, hypothermia, ice bite, cold penetration, and faster casting. It feels like a good setup for trash with a reasonable shot at freezing most bosses. I can swap in a slower projectiles for the ice bite when I can't keep up the frenzy charges and just get right up in the single boss' face. Either way I do want my colours to be BBBGGG so I should get on that.

Path of Exile: Fire and Ice

Many leagues ago Sceadeau and I created characters to level up together. He wanted to test out a unique jewel which increased fireball's radius by what sounded like a ludicrous amount. I wanted to test out using freezing pulse and projectile speed to permanently freeze bosses. Both ended up working out pretty well, and it was a lot of fun to play them.

Apparently there's a new Path of Exile league starting today, and Sceadeau sent me the following snipit from the patch notes.

Fireball: 50% more damage. Ice Spear: 70% more damage.

Ice spear is a different spell than glacial spike but it would probably work about the same in practice and 70% is a really big number. PoE has a history of overbuffing things when they buff them, so I wouldn't be surprised if both of these spells end up being really good. Also the game has a much higher power level now than it did back when we last did this, because of the whole ascendancy system.

So I think we're going to go back to Path of Exile for a while... I really like the game because it simply has so many different ways to play it. It often gets compared to Diablo III and I like PoE a lot more, especially when playing with other people, because the game feels so different when running with different builds.

Now there are two things to figure out... How exactly does ice spear work, and what ascendancy class do I want to use with it?

Ice spear is a spell with 2 stages. The first stage has 100% pierce chance, so it's useful for clearing out packs of dudes who are nearby. After it travels a set distance it switches to the second stage where it no longer pierces but has a 600% increased chance to crit. Considering the spell has a base crit chance of 7% this means the end portion will crit almost half the time without any other investment. Ice spear also has an increased modifier to chill duration, but not to freeze. So it probably isn't as good for perma-freezing things... Except crits also freeze, and this crits a lot, so maybe it still works. Chilling things is still good, especially if you have other abilities that get better on monsters that have an elemental debuff on them.

The first thing this brings to mind is the Inquisitor ascendancy for the Templar. One of the points in that tree is 100% increased crit chance against enemies with no elemental status ailment, and 45% to crit multiplier against enemies with an elemental status ailment. If Sceadeau hits the enemy first it'll have a fire debuff on it most likely, and enemies that I hit a second time will certainly have a debuff from the first hit. So that's already pretty strong. The big point behind that node says your crits ignore elemental resistances and your non-crits penetrate 10% elemental resistances...

Penetrating elemental resistance is a _huge_ deal. The best nodes in the tree for casters in my experience have always been the ones that penetrate resists. I've always supported my spells with resist penetration. So completely ignoring resistances sounds incredibly good. It would have the downside of not being able to use a good support gem or take some good nodes in the tree, but I can adapt to other things.

One other thing that immediately leaped to mind is the node elemental equilibrium. It makes it so enemies you hit get 25% resistance to your element and lose 50% resistance to the other elements. If I'm playing with Sceadeau, and he's casting fireballs, then this node would drastically amplify his damage while only hurting my damage some of the time. This feels really good, but would require putting a huge focus on extra crit chance. And I hate relying on feelings... Let's look at some math!

These numbers assume I crit 75% of the time for triple damage and that both Sceadeau and I would be running 34% penetration unless I'm an inquisitor in which case I have none and he still has 34%.

Mob Resist	Sceadeau EE gain	Inq gain	EE gain	EE gain w/ Inq
0	37%	-25%	-19%	-2%
25	46%	-10%	-23%	-3%
50	60%	14%	-30%	-3%
75	85%	58%	0%	0%
100	42%	58%	0%	0%

What we see here is that my picking up EE boosts Sceadeau's damage by anywhere between 37% and 85%. This is a more multiplier and is an incredibly big deal. Even with nothing special going on, EE would only cost me 19% to 30% of my damage, so overall as a team we'd be doing better if I took EE even with no mitigating circumstances. Inquisitor by itself actually hurts at low levels of mob resist because I won't have the penetration to drive the enemies into negative resists. I will have an extra support gem and other tree nodes, so that's going to be fine, and I'm pretty sure mobs with no resistances aren't going to be a concern one way or the other. Inquisitor is a 58% more damage buff at high levels of monster resist which is insane. Marauders have to take 10% extra damage to unlock their 40% more damage point! I just get it for free! Of course, it's only this high because my spell of choice has 42% extra crit chance on it, and this all assumes I'm cracking hard enemies with the sweet spot...

The best thing, though, is when I compare Inquisitor to Inquisitor with elemental equilibrium. I lose somewhere between 2 and 3% of my damage at low monster resist levels to give Sceadeau a huge boost. I think I'm pretty ok with that.

So assuming Sceadeau isn't also going Inquisitor I am definitely going to try it out, and will take EE to boost his damage by a ton.

Time to play around with the tree tool to see how much extra crit chance and multiplier I can actually pick up...

Path of Exile: Talisman Crushing

The current temporary league running in Path of Exile is called the Talisman league, and the new mechanic added for it is the addition of a new item type: the talisman. You can equip a talisman into the neck slot instead of an amulet. They have the twist that they're all corrupted, so you can't craft them in any way, but their implicit property is selected from a new pool of properties which are way more powerful than the normal amulet implicit properties.

These properties are divided out into 3 different tiers of talismans. The first tier are found sporadically on monsters out in the wild. There are also altars that can spawn which allow you to crush 5 tier 1 talismans into a tier 2 talisman. Or 5 tier 2 talismans into a tier 3 talisman. Or 5 tier 3 talismans into a portal to a challenge boss fight. Kill that boss and scoop up a tier 4 talisman which has two implicit properties!

The level of the resulting talisman is based on the average level of the talismans used as input, with a twist. The highest level one is worth 50% more than it should be worth, and the lowest level one is worth 50% less than it should be worth.

There's a challenge for killing the boss while the boss is at least level 80. The easiest way to make sure this happens is to just use 125 talismans which are all level 80. But that requires killing things in tier 11 maps at the very lowest. Is there a way to abuse the weird averaging to cut down on the number of 80+ talismans I need to find to do this challenge? One talisman is going to be the lowest tier 1 of the lowest tier 2 of the lowest tier 3. That means it's only going to be worth 1/8th as much as a true average talisman. One talisman is going to be the highest tier 1 of the highest tier 2 of the highest tier 3. It's going to be worth 27/8th as much as an average talisman, or 27 times as much as the lowest.

There's also the question of rounding... How does it work? Does a talisman remember decimal points, or is it rounded at each step of crushing? And is it rounded up, down, or properly?

If there is no rounding things are pretty straightforward. Getting a single higher level talisman is worth a ton. An 81 talisman lets your lowest level talisman fall all the way to 53! Unfortunately only one talisman can get such a big benefit. Here's a breakdown of the 125 talismans and how many points they could be worth:

Points	Quantity
1	1
2	9
3	3
4	27
6	18
8	27
9	3
12	27
18	9
27	1

I guess the way to think about it is you can earn points for each talisman above level 80 that you can spend to offset some underleveled talismans. The really common situations are going to be trading 12 points for 4 pointers, so assuming you can get a decent selection of 81s you can afford thrice as many 79s, or an equal number of 77s, or any such combination. But it feels like you really don't want to be using too many very low level ones. You get a lot of 79s, but once you dip down even lower you're paying a lot of points.


Can we actually discount rounding? How can we find out? I guess it's time for some quick testing...

Ok, things are now clear. I crushed 8 talismans (7 sets of tier 1s, 1 set of turn 2s) and things followed very simple rules. Rounding happens the way it should and decimals are not carried over.

This means you can gain or lose some levels depending on how you crush. Ideally you want to always be creating a level X.5 talisman, so it gets rounded up to X+1. Stay away from creating an X.4 talisman.

Adding on to the stuff above, we can shave off a full 5 levels from each 'lowest' talisman in a given transaction and end up in the same spot for free. Or a couple levels off of one of the middle talismans. And since the effects bubble forward, you can actually end up shaving an awful lot off of the talismans that get crushed into the lowest tier 3 talisman.

Path of Exile: Patch 2.1

I haven't played Path of Exile since September 2014 when I hurt my wrist playing the game. I was really pushing to try to win a t-shirt and ended up putting too much strain on my wrist. This apparently combined with anxiety issues (presumably about becoming homeless) to make my hand go numb. But that issue got dealt with via drugs and I've been pretty capable of streaming games for 12+ hours a day without hurting my wrist. I definitely don't want to play super hardcore to win a t-shirt or anything, but I think I can play the game again without hurting myself.

There have been a lot of patches in the last 15 months, with a big one launching today. So many things have changed in the game, and they sound really, really good. Standard things like a new act, tons of new items, better balance... But also some other cool stuff...

An item filter so you can write a text file to alter what loot you see on the ground. You can change font sizes, colours, and add sound effects!

An experience per hour meter!

Revamped map system which keeps all the cool things with end game maps while extending and enhancing things to make them better for more casual play. Map pools are easier to build up at lower levels, and harder at very high levels, but the high maps are worth it.

A card collecting system to trade cards for loot at a vendor, so you can farm specific areas to get specific useful unique items.

Skill gems you can get from quests are sold from vendors so you don't need to create alts or store tons of gems in a guild bank anymore!

Even more customization in the sphere grid system, with new jewels you can stick in the grid!

Integration with Twitch so stream chat is a channel in the game client!


It remains to be seen how good this stuff actually is, but I have really high hopes. I don't intend on playing nearly as much as I used to, but maybe if they still have races and stuff I can get into streaming it... We'll see!

Path of Exile: Tapping Out

The other day while running daily quests in guild I accidentally started one before everyone showed up. I'd meant to click to walk past the quest giver but instead clicked on the quest giver and that started things up. I told them I have a hard time accurately clicking things and Lino mused that accurately clicking things was pretty much the entirety of Path of Exile. While not a perfect assessment of the game it is a pretty good summary and one would wonder why I'd want to play it if I can't click accurately.

I can do things to make it so I do click more accurately. I can grip the mouse tighter and try to make sharper movements. I end up doing the same sort of thing in League of Legends, actually, when I play a champion that requires a lot of precise clicking like Ezreal. Ezreal is probably my favourite champion and certainly the one I'm best at playing, but I can't play him over and over again without my hand starting to hurt from the extra effort I have to put in to controlling the mouse. Which is fine, I guess, since I'll just play someone easier to control to get a break.

In Path of Exile it isn't that simple since it takes many days to level a new character up and pretty much every character needs to click precisely to collect the relevant loot even if they're a summoner and never cast any spells. I leveled someone who uses arc so I didn't need to click on monsters (if you cast arc and there's an enemy anywhere in range it will auto target that enemy) but I still need to click accurately to move around and collect loot. And I'm still holding down right click to cast that arc spell. So my hand is in full on 'be awesome' mode the entire time I'm playing. And if I can only play Ezreal for an hour or two without needing a break what does it say about my plan of playing PoE 10 hours a day for the next two months in order to max my reputation with all 8 masters?

It says the plan is horrendous is what it says. But I didn't want to believe that, so I pushed on regardless. This weekend my body decided to give out. My back, shoulders, neck, and right arm all seized up a fair bit. I could no longer bend my wrist back and it hurt to even press down on a key to type. Path of Exile blew my arm out, and it is not good.

I went out and bought a cold pack, and a wrist support thingy, and some muscle relaxant drugs. I've spent the last couple days not playing PoE, and not playing much at all, and pretty much just being bored. The League of Legends World Championships have been on so I watched those. I watched the WWE PPV. I've watched a bunch of movies. And now I've started rewatching the first season of Heroes. I'm feeling better in that I didn't need to take any drugs today, and I can turn my neck without it hurting, and I don't have a fever anymore. My wrist still hurts a bit, but I can move it around fine and can use the computer in bursts.

So... Probably no long term harm done. But the idea that I could possibly do the challenges in Path of Exile is out the window. Maybe I'll try to play again for shorter periods of time once my wrist really feels all better. Maybe I won't, because I'm pretty sure I have no self control and I will blow myself out again if I give myself the chance to do so. Time will tell, I guess. Time will tell.

Path of Exile: Atziri

The last Path of Exile expansion added an MMORPG style dungeon with a bunch of trash mobs and 3 scripted boss fights. They gave away some prizes to the first people to clear it out and there are some unique items that can only drop from the end boss of that dungeon. That boss (Atziri) is also on the list of unique bosses to kill for the challenge this time around so going in and killing her is a thing that has to be on my radar. You need to collect up a bunch of items to open a portal to this dungeon and they're worth a fair bit to sell to people (1 exalted for 3 sets of items) but if winning the fight is something I can do then just running it has to be better. (I already bought one of the Atziri drops for an exalted, for example.) I have farmed up 3 sets of the items from corrupted zones I've run across so I'm good to go...

We tried the zone once last week because Lino had a set of items and wanted to see what was going on in the dungeon. So we went in pretty blind with a party consisting of a bunch of underleveled or terrible characters... It didn't end well. We died on the first boss fight, though we did get through a good chunk of it so that's something! I didn't want to throw away an exalted worth of stuff learning the mechanics of the fights going forward though so I decided to look the dungeon up and at least see what was going on...

The first boss is two copies of the Vaal Oversoul boss. He gets 2 new abilities (a wide arc ball lightning spell and an ice damage rain of arrows spell) but is otherwise very similar to the regular boss fight. With his numbers all tuned up, of course! When you kill one of the Vaals the other one gets a big haste buff. This is actually where we died when we tried it the other day... We got the first one down and then the second one obliterated us. So you either need to be able to drastically outsurvive the damage from the second Vaal or you need to kill them both at the same time. The main source of damage from this guy is probably the ball lightnings so lightning resist and topaz flasks are probably the order of the day? He summons adds like normal so you can get your flask charges up. This means maybe you can outheal the damage with healing flasks instead of relying on life leech?

The second boss is a three boss fight. It works like the Iron Council boss fight from Ulduar in World of Warcraft. Killing one of the three bosses heals the other two to full and adds some extra stuff to the fight including making the remaining bosses more powerful. There are massive physical attacks, and massive chaos attacks, and some bleeds. So flasks that remove bleeding are important, and granite flasks are important, and being able to move out of the clouds of damage is important. Figuring out the order you want to kill the enemies is probably a good thing to do. Apparently the tentacle lady gets pretty scary if you let her damage get buffed by killing the other guys? And I think killing her causes adds to spawn which is possibly a good thing since it lets you refill flasks?

The third boss is a three phase fight. The first phase is where you can actually hurt the boss. She casts a wide arc of puncture spears, and she casts flame blasts, and she casts storm calls. Every now and then she also casts a set of three overlapping super flame blasts which seemed to hit for ~8000 damage or so (including the ignite) in the video I watched. She is immune to most effects (stun/shock/freeze/ignite) and reflects curses. The second phase she goes immune to everything and summons a bunch of adds from 4 spots in the room. The adds don't attack and just walk towards her. If they reach her, she heals for a ton. It's basically a damage check... Either you can kill the swarms of adds or you can't win the fight. The third phase gets triggered every time she loses 25% of her health. Atziri disappears and summons in 4 clones which carry around a specific weapon. One has a spear and uses her puncture ability. One has a fireball and uses her flame blast ability. One has a lightning thingy and uses her storm call ability. And the last one has a shield and reflects 100% of incoming damage. This phase ends when you kill off any of the clones. Super high damage builds need to avoid hitting the shield add or they die in one hit! So you need to be able to do tons of AE damage for the add phase, but to burn down a single add in this phase. Ruby flasks are probably important for the main phase since the huge flame blasts look like a big problem. You also need curse removal flasks if you're planning on cursing her.

My current character is running with the vaal pact passive so my life leech is instant. I'm hoping that is good enough to live through most of the dungeon... If I was good I could probably use lightning warp to avoid most of the flameblast damage in the last fight but I probably need to get enough health to live through one. I should be able to leech back to full when I get hit so the ignite isn't a big deal.

So mostly I need to build up the right flasks, level up more so I can get more health nodes from the tree, and probably get some better gear with more health on it too. And then it'll be about trying it out and seeing if I actually do enough damage and have the control to avoid the avoidable damage over and over and over again...

Path of Exile: Actual Masters Numbers

Sceadeau pointed me towards a post on Reddit from someone who wrote down all their rep gain numbers from every master they found in a map. They tested all of the levels of maps and did the runs on multiple characters to see if that changed anything. Turns out no. Reputation can be limited if the quest is too low level for you but a quest doesn't seem to be able to be too high for you. Bringing people into the group doesn't change anything. The amount of reputation earned is strictly determined by the level of the zone where you turn in the quest to the master. (So finding Zana in a 66 map will only get you reputation for a level 66 quest even if she opened a much higher level map.)

There's also a table being populated on a wiki with reputation values by level of quest and level of master. It is unfortunately a very sad table. I was hoping that reputation would ramp up a lot when I got to level 7 with a master and that is sadly not the case. My current pace of reputation gain is what I can expect from the same amount of gameplay and it will take 4-6 months to earn enough reputation at that pace. That won't earn a tshirt at all!

The post on Reddit determined that the best way to gain reputation is to run low level maps without enhancing them at all. Just run them white and clear them as fast as you can. 50% of maps will have a master in them (as opposed to more like 1 in 12 regular zones) and once you find the master you can do the quest and leave. So you should get a master every 1.5 maps and if you can clear a map every 6 minutes or so (discount time spent on the quest) then you probably get 5 quests done per hour. You get 3678 rep from a level 66 quest so it would only be 560 hours to earn enough reputation to max them all (ignoring the issue of finding masters you've already maxed). That's only a couple months of playing 10 hours per day... That's at least viable...

Would you be better off running higher level maps? I actually have some clear speed data from last time around when I timed maps on my summoner to see where I was earning gem experience the fastest. I made a quick edit of that sheet to plug in the rep gain for the level of the map and no real pattern emerged. I suspect the level of the zone doesn't matter as long as you're able to do a good amount of damage. What will actually matter is the mods on the map. Temporal chains is going to slow down your 'find the master' speed, for example. But there is a bump in reputation from each level you go up so as long as you're still able to just run as fast as you can murdering everything it can only be good to go up in map levels.

So I guess the actual question is how much do you care about things other than just master reputation? If you're trying to maintain a high level map pool then you're going to be turning the maps yellow and that'll certainly slow down how fast you can clear them. But if you just blue them (or run them white) then there's no way you'll get enough maps to drop to keep running them. Maybe you could just spend a lot of money buying maps from other people and run them white?

I feel like master reputation is the primary thing that matters so aborting out of maps probably makes sense for me. But it feels so bad to be leaving potential map drops and experience behind. I don't think I can convince myself to do that on higher level maps. But I can probably be convinced that maps in the 66-69 range don't matter all that much so I should just plow through them for master rep.

Path of Exile: Five Link Value

My current character started off as one where I wanted to test out the new arc values. I've always liked that spell and it turns out I really like it now that they scaled up how many times it can chain as it level. I ended up going in a different direction with that character and tried out being really tanky. It's fine, but it doesn't do any damage at all. But I do feel like arc can do damage if I spec properly for it, so I want to start again.

I also noticed while looking up the cost of all the challenge uniques that one of the three really expensive items would be really good for arc. I have enough currency to buy a copy of it, and I'm going to need a copy of it eventually, so it feels like I should buy one and then use it. It's a good theory but having spent the last few days browsing the item listings trying to buy one I've come to realize that there's a really big price difference between versions of the item that rolled well and versions that didn't.

The item in question is pledge of hands and it only really has two things on it that can vary. It can have between 120% to 160% increased spell damage and it can have a varying number of linked sockets. As far as I can tell you're probably going to end up at around 420-460 increased damage with arc so the difference between a top roll pledge and a bottom roll pledge is a ~8% damage boost. That's pretty significant. But how much is it worth? There is a currency item (divine orb) that can be used to reroll all random stats on an item so it's probably worth considering the cost of those when considering how bad a low roll pledge would be. You expect to get a 4% damage boost by using one divine orb, or a 6% boost from two... You can get unlucky here and use a ton of divine orbs and keep getting low results but it's pretty reasonable to assume that if you're willing to use 10 of them that you'll end up with a pretty high roll pledge. (You'd be 94% to hit at least one result in the top quarter of possible results.)

Unfortunately divine orbs are not cheap. They're about half of an exalted orb and if you consider the price range on pledges seems to go from 7-10 exalteds it's actually a pretty big jump to expect to use 10 of the things. On the other hand divine orb is one of the currency items you need to use in the challenge so the plan of buying a min roll pledge on the cheap and throwing a divine orb at it isn't the worst thing I've ever heard. And even with a min roll pledge I'm not losing all that much. I like doing 8% more damage but I don't know that I'm good enough at the game to really notice that loss.

The other factor is the number of links on the item. Adding an extra link to your spell is going to add a lot more than 8% more damage! Lightning penetration, for example, will be anything from a 34% damage boost to a 136% damage boost based on the resistance of the enemy you're fighting. I'd much rather have a min damage roll and an extra link! It's also reasonable to work out the cost of an extra link. Vorici will 6 socket an item for 150 jewelers and 6 link it for 1500 fusers. He'll 5 socket an item for 70 jewelers and 5 link it for 150 fusers. He'll 4 socket an item for 10 jewelers and 4 link it for 5 fusers. When you're talking about prices in terms of exalteds the 4 link is essentially free, the 5 link is worth between 2 and 3 exalteds and the 6 link is more than 20 exalteds.

I don't have 20 extra exalteds to throw at this particular problem and even if I did I wouldn't want to. If I did buy a 1 socket pledge I probably wouldn't even use Vorici. I'd throw a bunch of jewelers and fusers at the problem and be thrilled if I hit a 5 link but reasonably settle for a 4 link. But looking at the prices of all these orbs I suspect I'd probably blindly throw a couple exalted worth of orbs at it without realizing what I was doing. I probably have 3 exalteds worth of jewelers and fusers on me, which is actually a little surprising. I guess picking up all those 6 socket items does pay off!

But what this is telling me is that it's absolutely worth paying an extra exalted if it gets me a 5 linked pledge. Paying extra for a 4 link on the other hand is silly because that's easy to settle on.

Before looking at things I had every intention of paying 6 exalteds for any pledge I could find or 7 on one with a decent spell damage roll. But now I think I should be looking at paying up to 8 on a 5 link with a good roll, or 7 on a 5 link with a bad roll and just toss a divine at it. Is that viable?

The answer, at least for those listed right now, is no. A 5 link is more like 9-12 exalteds. I tried messaging some people who didn't have buyouts listed but none of them were willing to sell a 5 link for 8.

And then as I was looking someone put one up for 6 exalteds. 139% spell damage so right in the middle and not worth throwing a divine on. 4 sockets, 4 links, so no pressing need to throw any money at that issue either. Especially now that I've looked at it and got an idea for how much it costs to throw as many jewelers and fusers at the problem! So I think I'm just happy as is.

Path of Exile: Challenge Update

Tom mentioned after my initial challenge post that they'd actually changed the rules for how tshirts are given out this time around. I went on a mission today to figure out exactly what changed. It turns out that the number of tshirts they've been giving out has been on quite the decline (61 to 23 to 14) which is why the challenges this time around felt more attainable. Needing to farm 1/8th the currency to buy all the uniques is a pretty big deal!

There is a catch, however. They made it a lot easier to complete all the challenges for sure and they don't want to have to give away thousands of shirts if it turned out the challenges were way too easy. So they put a cap on it. The first 50 people to complete all the challenges will get a tshirt and that is it in terms of shirts. They're also awarding some microtransaction rewards for people who manage to get 5 challenges done and for everyone who gets all 8 done.

If getting a silver or gold halo to wear is something that really interests you then there's that extra little thing thrown in to encourage you to get some challenges done. I don't much care for the halos myself. And while I was feeling like I could probably put in a good try on getting all 8 challenges done I have serious doubts about my ability to be one of the first 50 to get it done. Getting all the masters to max level felt like it was going to be hard but maybe possible depending on how fast the rep gains accelerate as you level them up. But if that's the challenge that takes the longest (and I think it will be) then it's going to come down to who is more heavily involved in getting quests from other people. And that's probably not going to be me. I'm happy to do my own dailies, and I'm happy to do dailies in a group with people I know, and I'll pick up quests as I'm playing. But I don't think I want to be hanging out in a chat channel with random people and trying to worm my way into their quests too.

There doesn't seem to be a leaderboard for challenge completion that I could see but it is an indicator on the normal leveling ladders for the two leagues. I took a look and there are a couple people who already have 6 challenges done. I have one. *sigh* Both of the people with 6 done are missing the challenges for the masters and leveling the classes. So, yeah, leveling the masters is going to be the gatekeeper for sure.

Eh, I'm not giving up yet, but earlier I'd thought it was looking pretty plausible and now... Not so much.

Path of Exile: 'Tanking'

I often find myself grouped with Tom and Sceadeau to do maps when I'm playing Path of Exile. Tom plays a variety of characters that mostly seem to do cast spells at range. Sceadeau plays a crazy flameblast character that needs to stand perfectly still for a short period of time and then everything on the screen dies. My first character this time around was an ice shot crit ranger that worked great alone but was practically worthless in the group. She revolved around getting killing blows to earn frenzy charges and to keep blood rage running and I simply couldn't do that when Tom would kill more than half of the enemies if it was the two of us and Sceadeau would kill everything with any amount of health with the three of us. But the three of us were pretty squishy, especially Sceadeau, so I wanted a new character that could tank for them.

I've done a lot of tanking in my day. Especially in World of Warcraft where I was the primary tank for most raids my entire time playing the game. On a warrior, on a druid, on a death knight... If there was damage to be taken I was there front and center. Tanking as a role made sense in games like that since they have a controllable way to manage who an enemy attacks and the gear is all designed for that role to exist. Tanking in Path of Exile doesn't make much sense at all. There's one ability in the game that can force an enemy to attack you but it's got a short range, a short duration, a long cooldown, and won't stop all the crazy chaining/piercing/area damage that actually gets people killed. It also won't do squat against damage reflection which is the primary way Sceadeau dies.

Basically every character needs to be tough enough to tank. Sceadeau ended up solving the problem by starting a new character using the same spell but using a really good piece of armour and a couple different defensive spells to be tougher on his own. Great for him! But bad for me in terms of having a character that does anything.

I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to help tank even with no actual way to be a full on tank. Everyone needs to be tough enough to survive normal situations but are there things that can be done to help out in other situations? The way I see it there are 3 things you can do to 'tank'.

• Bring extra bodies to limit the odds any given attack hits one of your friends.
• Make your friends tougher with auras.
• Make the enemies worse with curses/stuns/freezes.

Having extra bodies like zombies and skeletons around helps mitigate some of the damage from chains and leaping dudes. It won't help against poison on the ground or discharge or things like that. Extra bodies feels like it probably makes the average case easier to deal with but the really crazy stuff like rogue exiles and hard map bosses are going to be hard because they use area abilities and make the minions worthless. Still a useful thing to have around I think, and I am tempted to make a summoner again, but I don't think it'll actually help too much on really scary things.

Auras is interesting because you can give up to 4 to maximum resist of an element by running the right aura. Taking someone from 75 to 79 resist is a pretty big deal (it cuts out 16% of the damage they take) and it's very easy to imagine a 16% damage reduction being the difference between someone living and dying. It's even better if they're running the right elemental defense flask because then you could be taking them from 85 to 89 resist and preventing almost 27% of their incoming damage. If there's a fight with a scary element then running the right aura is a big help. But on the flip side it's such a huge help that it's entirely possible everyone should just be doing that for themselves regardless? There are other auras that can help too, with giving extra armour or evasion or energy shield or life regen. There are so many of them that running them all seems hard, but getting a couple people who run a bunch of them is probably pretty useful. Especially when someone is killing all the enemies in one spell it feels like a thing that can help.

They revamped curses in this expansion such that not just anyone can use a curse at optimal power. Someone who really goes all in on cursing will be a lot better at it than a random Jo. Even with no points into making curses better a high level enfeeble will knock off 28% of the damage done by the enemies in addition to lowering their accuracy and crit chance. If you spec for it you can tack on a temporal chains curse to knock off 28% of their speed (movement, casting, and attacking). Get the right gear and you can throw on a variety of other curses to make the enemies take more damage or give out charges or life leech. People will undoubtedly bicker over the 'right' curses to put up and sometimes enemies can be immune to curses but it's pretty clear to me that if an enemy can be cursed then someone who puts a focus onto cursing will be a big help to the group.

This is probably why my summoner last time around felt so good. Lots of extra bodies and I took every curse node and almost all the aura nodes. I also brought other things as well with all the magic find and the culling strike. Man, that character was good!

My character right now that I play in groups put a bunch of points into shocking so I tend to make relevant enemies take 50% more damage. Note that that's more damage, not increased damage, so it is a straight 1.5x multiplier on damage done. I feel like that's pretty useful. It would probably be better coming from someone who did actual damage too, but it's still something. Sceadeau has me thinking about taking elemental equilibrium so the enemies lose 50% of their fire and cold resist in exchange for getting 50% lightning resist. I'm not sure if that would keep me from shocking or not (shock duration is based on damage done so I can't do no damage and keep it up) but in some cases taking an enemy from 75% fire resist to 25% fire resist is tripling the damage done so it could be a fair trade regardless...

I'm also trying to get a lot of auras up but I'm finding even though I have a lot of nodes I can't run more than 3 auras. A few more levels and I get the last couple aura nodes so maybe that will help. I am running the purity of fire to help mitigate reflected fire damage though and a pretty significant evasion buff.

The reason my character does no damage is I ran all over the tree getting defensive nodes. I'm personally pretty tanky since I can't be crit and my evasion is armour and I have a massive arctic armour self buff. I feel pretty tough in general, and I do feel like the shocking means I'm not dead weight in a group. But my goal was to be a tank and that just didn't happen. Oh well!

Path of Exile: Forsaken Masters Reputation

I went looking to see if I could find precise information on reputation gains from the new quest givers in Path of Exile. No such luck. I did find some reasonable conclusions drawn by some guy and I did some testing with Sceadeau and I feel like I have a rough idea of how things work.

To start, you're going to need to earn a total of a little over 10 million reputation to hit max level with all 7 masters. This morning after about a sixth of the available time for the league to end I had a total of 570k reputation. That's 5.5% of the way to completion and there's no way I'll get done at the current pace. But could the pace be accelerating? Doing today's dailies (and a couple of extra quests found in random maps we ran afterwards) got me up to 640k reputation. 19 days got me 570k, 1 day got me 70k. That's definitely an improvement on the past, but even 70 more days at that pace will only get me halfway to the end goal.

Chances are since things have accelerated to this point that they'll keep accelerating from here on out, too. From the testing we did and what I've been reading it feels like each master has a hidden character level based on your reputation level with that character. This hidden level acts as a gate towards how much reputation you earn in a similar manner to the way character level acts as a gate for how much experience you can earn. For example, my Elreon level is currently at 6, and the quests he gives me in my hideout are somewhere around level 54 or so. Elaine's Elreon level is more like 3 and the quests he gives her are more like level 30. So when I tag along on her daily quest the game sees that I 'should' be level 54 and I'm doing a level 30 quest and it drastically reduces the amount of reputation I get from the quest. The same works the other way too, and she's only going to get credit (at best) for doing a level 30 quest when she comes to do my daily instead of the full value of a level 54 quest.

What does that mean? Well, it means people behind the curve want to tag along on as many dailies as possible because even though they're earning less than the other people they're still earning as much as they can be. People way ahead can tag along on low level stuff to help or for fun but the reputation gains are drastically reduced if you're too far ahead. This also means I can't just run through zones on normal mode to spawn as many quest givers as I can because those quests aren't worth anything to me, but if all my quest givers give quests around level 54 then I could actually be running through cruel levels and getting full reputation for doing so.

I don't know the actual factor for penalizing you for being under leveled. It's entirely possible I should still be running through high level zones to find quest givers because they give a little more than the cruel ones? But presumably that's both slower and more dangerous depending on gear levels.

One other thing we found out is you seem to earn a massive bonus for doing your own daily quest. Somewhere between 2 and 3 times as much?

So I do expect that as I level the masters up the rate of reputation gain will also increase. And quite possibly that increase will be very significant. When you're first starting out you're getting 200 reputation from a quest and now I can do quests worth 5k. The jump in experience needed from 6-7 and from 7-8 is around 3.5x as much. If the quests themselves are worth 2.5x as much (so it still takes more time to advance in the later levels but they also get to have huge numbers) then the level 7 quests will be worth 6 times as much as the level 5 quests I'm currently doing. And since I only need to double my current rate to get it done that could be ok.

I don't know that it will be a big boost, but I don't have any real outs if it isn't so I need to just assert it'll be a big boost and move on from there. Assuming it is actually feasible with my current playstyle, what is the optimal way to get all the way to the end as fast as possible?

Well, there's a big boost to reputation gain speed by getting one of the masters all the way to 8. This lets you bring a 4th master into your hideout giving you access to another daily quest. Daily quests are worth double rep for you and you don't need to hunt them down, so that's very good.

There's also a big drain on your reputation gain when you get a master to level 8. When you're at the cap you can't make use of any of those quests that spawn randomly while you're playing the game. You also can't get reputation from your friend's daily quests for that master. And if you get 4 of the 7 up to max level you can no longer make use of the 4 personal daily quests.

This makes me think that ideally you want to get one master to 8 as fast as possible and then you want to spread the rest of them out as much as you can. Since you're never choosing who you encounter randomly the only real way to influence things is by who you have in your hideout and who your friends have in their hideout. So probably the optimal line of play is to have everyone invite the same master as the one you all want to get to 8 first and then spread the rest of them out. Things get complicated a little since one of the masters gives a free high level map each day as her quest but she also requires 74% more reputation to max out as the lowest guys. Everyone wants the map lady, overall reputation efficiency be damned. Sometimes she even gives quests to do someone else's quest in a map so it could be argued that she's the best option anyway.

So really the ideal situation is probably to have everyone invite map lady and one of the two easiest masters as the first two. Then have people invite a mixture of other masters as their third and fourth options to spread things out.

Looking at my reputation levels right now I've earned the most with Zana but my highest level is with Elreon since he's one of the lowest required guys. My third highest reputation gained is with Tora, who happened to randomly be the master I invited as my 3rd quest giver after Zana and Elreon. Tom also started with Zana and Elreon so we've randomly stumbled into what is probably a good plan. His 3rd is Vorici and since he's different than Tora I think that makes me happy.

There's also the slight worry that some of the masters have quests that can be failed. Zana, Vorici, and Vagan have all been failed several times by my groups. I don't think I've seen any of the other four end in failure. So maybe you end up needing to do more of those three just because you don't get the rep every time?

Path of Exile: Challenges!

I went back to playing Path of Exile because some of the changes in the new expansion sounded pretty cool. Having now played for half a month I can safely say I'm once again hooked on the game. The new random quest givers and hideouts are awesome. Carrying forward the lockboxes and corrupted zones from the last expansion adds lots of little bursts of cool stuff without being excessive. There's still a bajillion interesting builds out there to try, and I want to go back to my last build too. So I'm probably going to keep playing the game for a while more... Which brings the question about how viable the challenges are this time around. Could this be the time I get a t-shirt?!?

There are 8 challenges again, same as always, with a similar mix to previous times. A leveling one, a softcore one, a hardcore one, an item collection one, one for using currency... But the devil is in the details...

First up, fully clear all of the zones in the main game. This means killing every single monster on every single level. But you can do it on any difficulty and it doesn't count things like maps and corrupted zones. I actually did this while leveling because I wanted to earn more experience in merciless difficulty. It took a bit of effort so I wouldn't say it was completely trivial but it was definitely easy compared to other challenges.

Then they want you to hit level 65 with each of the 7 classes. This is also easy to do but requires some time. More time than the last one, but there's nothing inherently hard about leveling up to only 65. If you take life nodes as you level you won't get stuck in a death spiral. I have no concerns about getting this done. Especially since I want to play some more builds... I just need to choose different starting classes!

You also need to reach all 13 of the rampage tiers which is the new thing they added for the softcore league. Basically this means you need to kill around 700 monsters without having a window 5 seconds long where you didn't kill anything. Tom already has this one done and I feel like I could get it on my ranger if I ran a level 66 map with pack size and an easy route. Like dunes... I don't have a mobility skill to get over walls but even if I can't do it on my ranger I'm sure I'll be able to on someone else. Maybe I'll have to worry about it as the league winds down if I haven't picked it up by then but for now I feel like I can pick this up.

Once again they want you to use all the currency items. Well, not all of them. I feel like previous challenges included eternal orbs and this time they don't. I expect I'll probably use most of them through regular play and the ones I won't use will only cost about 30 chaos orbs to pick up regardless. I actually have all of them except a divine on me as it is. So no worry here.

The hardcore challenge is to beat up all 13 interdimensional monstrosities. The hardcore mechanic is that when you kill a bunch of enemies in one spot they might open a rift of some kind. Kill more enemies and the rift gets bigger and bigger. Eventually something really tough pops out. I have no idea how easy or hard these things will be. I feel like 'Abaxoth, The End of All That Is' should be a tough dude but I don't know how tough. It is hardcore so trying and failing costs a character... Maybe I should start a hardcore guy up to get an idea of what is going on here. For now I'm going to assume if I just run a solid build (I'm thinking spectral throw) I can probably pull it off but finding out sooner rather than later would be prudent I think.

They want you to level all 7 of the masters up to level 8. I'm pretty sure there are people at level 8 already but they pug the quests with people in a chat channel. I don't care enough to do that and if it turns out that's what you need to do in order to get this done I'll just give up instead. I tried writing down some numbers today to see how much rep I was getting with each quest but it seemed to change based on who started the quest. I'm going to have to do some research on that soon. For now I'm going to assume it'll just happen if I play a lot and tag along on other people's dailies.

You once again need to own a random assortment of the unique items in the game. I went out and priced all the items on poe.xyz.is and they come out to a little under 1000 chaos total for the entire selection. The first time around all the items in the challenge were worth almost 8000 chaos, so the item challenge is significantly easier this time around. 1000 sounds like a big number but we actually had an item drop in a map the other day worth over 700 chaos. I'm pretty confident if we pooled all the items we had on our accounts we'd have more than enough to do the challenge right now. And we're only 1/6th of the way through! The item collectors were really scary in the previous challenges and I thought I'd need to really play the market to get enough money to buy them all. This time around it doesn't feel so bad.

Finally they want you to kill a random selection of the unique monsters in the game. Some of these bosses are in really hard maps which feels like it might be a problem... But it turns out the new quest system can actually send you into lower level versions of some of the maps and I've already killed some of the ones that looked really hard. I only have 7 left to kill. One is the boss of the last expansion, Atziri, and I have the ability to spawn 2 of her zones already once we feel strong enough to give her a try. Five of them are bosses of unique maps. It's interesting to note that one of the quest givers actually opened a portal to a unique map for me earlier, so I may get those without ever seeing the unique maps drop. Regardless, we'll probably have them drop and if not we can buy one of each if we need to. The last is "The First Rhoa" and no one seems to know where it spawns except maybe in a quest from the map quest giver. I feel like all 7 of these are totally doable.

What does this all mean? Well, I need to check out the hardcore mechanic this time around and I need to run some numbers on leveling all the quest givers but beyond that it seems totally feasible this time around. Is it tshirt time? It might be...

Path of Exile: Cast on Critical Strike

There's a skill gem in Path of Exile called Cast on Critical Strike (CoC for short) that has always intrigued me but I've never actually used it. It's a very rare gem (it can only be obtained from the last quest in the game and you can get Cast on Damage Taken from that quest instead) but I recently had a version drop with 9% quality on it. Now I really want to look at what is going on with the gem and figure out if I can make use of it or not...

CoC is a gem that says "Supported Attacks have a x% chance to Cast Supported Spells when you Crit an Enemy" where the x scales from 30% to 68% as the gem levels up. Extra quality on the gem increases your crit chance.

This is tricky to use because attacks and spells rarely have a lot of overlap in terms of things that make them better. You can gear and spec such that you have good attacks, or good spells, but it's hard to find gear or skill nodes that work to make them both better. Then there's also the fact you're using up a bunch of links adding this stuff together. My ranger right now crits almost 40% of the time and that's pretty hot... But I would get a lot more benefit by linking 2 more damage multipliers to my main attack than I would be sticking in CoC and fireball.

One option would be to find utility spells, not damage spells, to link on. That fireball is really going to suck for my ranger, but maybe a molten shell would be good? Grabbing an extra 1000 armour each time I crit seems like it should be always up? But my spec halves my armour and I don't know that spending 2 links on 500 armour is a good idea. In fact I'm pretty sure it's a terrible idea. How about immortal call? It would make me immune to physical damage for a very short period of time. Depending on the order things proc it could be an ok solution to physical reflect? But my main AE attack spell does cold damage, not physical damage, and immortal call doesn't help against that at all.

Ok, that option is out. Next up we could make it so our attacks do no damage at all but our spells are awesome. And then rather than cast the spells directly we instead use a piddly attack skill to cast the spells for us. According to the wiki you can link up multiple spells to the gem at once and each one will have a chance to proc on each enemy each time you crit them. So instead of casting arc or fireball or arctic breath you could shoot someone with a bow attack and hope to cast all three spells at once! Assuming you put a lot of your gear and spec into amplifying elemental damage you could be pumping out a lot of spell damage at once. But that requires 5 links right off the bat... A 6th link would let you pump up their damage, but is it going to be better than just having a really awesome fireball?

I guess that depends on how many of these spells you get to cast for free each time you attack. A bow by default has a 5% chance to crit and probably attacks 1.5 times per second. If your CoC gem will proc 60% of the time you'll get a spell proc once every 22 seconds. And that's actually assuming you hit 100% of the time which is certainly not going to be the case. And with an attack your chance to crit is impacted twice by your chance to hit... You need to hit before you get to roll for a crit, and if you do roll a crit you have to roll to hit again or you don't actually crit. Even if you have 3 spells that can proc you can surely cast a spell more than every 7 second normally. So this is bad as it is. But there are certainly ways to get more chances to proc. You can use an attack that shoots faster, like barrage, which attacks 4 times instead of 1 time. Maybe you stick a greater multiple projectiles gem on them to get another 4 projectiles as welling, getting 8 chances to proc per attack instead of 1. Note that the GMP gem will impact any projectile spells you end up casting, like fireball! Now we're probably getting more than a spell per second, which still isn't great, but is starting to sound pretty good. Stack a bunch of crit chance gear (not stuff to crit more with bows or spells individual but global crit chance) and you're actually getting somewhere pretty cool, and you're amplifying the damage of your spells too.

Or maybe you use a dagger instead of a bow. Daggers tend to have higher base attack speeds and crit chances and they let you use a shield. Make your attack skill of choice be spectral throw and you get a lot of chances to proc CoC since spectral throw pierces and can hit a given target multiple times. Using GMP again seems to make sense and now you're throwing out 5 daggers that go out and back giving a chance to cast 3 different spells each time they make contact with an enemy. You could easily be at a 33% chance to crit after accounting for hit issues with a dagger I would think... That gives a 60% chance each time the dagger makes contact with an enemy to launch out a spell. It won't be nearly that smooth since each attack gets one crit roll so you'll get a bunch of no procs and then every now and then you'll get a ton of procs but it really should end up with a lot more spells being cast than with a casting spec.

But you do need a 6 link item, and you do need a pretty specific spec. And just because you're casting more spells than normal doesn't mean you're doing more damage than normal because these spells only have GMP (or nothing at all) supporting them and a normal spell with have lots of things linked to them...

It does sounds fun though. And it could be viable enough that I think I want to mess around with it and see. I do want to level each class to 65 at least, and I don't have any plans for a shadow, so maybe I should see if I can find some elemental damage and crit chance nodes around the shadow start of the tree and see what I can do...

Path of Exile: Fusing Odds

Yesterday I'd picked up some new pair of gloves and wanted to give it 4 linked sockets so I could use it for a skill combination of some kind. (I think I wanted to link reduced mana to a bunch of auras.) I ended up using 15 fusing orbs to get my links. Then I went to my new crafting buddy Vorici and asked him what he'd charge to 4-link an item. 5 fusers. That sure would have been a better choice than the 15 I spent, but maybe I was just really unlucky? I thought I knew the rough odds of each link result so I decided I wanted to work out the math and see if I should use Vorici next time I want a 4 link or not.

I decided to double check that I actually knew the math and discovered that not only did I not know the real odds, it seems like no one does. I found some discussions about the odds of making a 6 link and one of the head developers has posted that the odds of getting a 6 link are a little better than 1 in 1500 and using the 20% quality trick will more than double your chances. So you should expect to spend a little under 1500 fusers to get a 6 link or if you're willing to use a ton of armourer scraps you can probably get there in more like 600 or 700.

Vorici's charge for a 6 link? 1500 fusers.

I found another thread where people talked about the math behind Vorici's socket recipes (the jeweler odds are known) and he charges a pretty significant premium for his socket recipes. But his link recipe seems to be only a little pricier than the actual odds. And while you could probably fuse cheaper with a lot of scraps that also comes with the extra cost of time. Clicking 21*700 times is a lot more than clicking 1450 times, especially since with straight fusers you can spam shift click while you need to spend a lot of extra clicks changing between scraps and fusers with the quality recipe. And clicking 1450 times is still a lot more than clicking once for Vorici to do his dirty work.

Nevermind the fact that 1% of people who try to make a 6 link will end up spending at least 10000 fusers to get there!

It sounds like most of the time it'll be cheaper to do it the hard way but Vorici is not charging much of a premium to fuse and he saves you a lot of time. Time you could spend having fun playing the game or farming the extra fusers and he comes with an actual concrete goal. 1500 fusers is a guarantee. You won't get unlucky and need tens or hundreds of thousands of fusers. You also won't get lucky and need 5.

People seemed to be claiming that his socket cost premium scaled with number added. If you assume the same mechanic behind his fuser premium then the same sort of logic should apply to all of his fuser recipes.

I think I'm willing to pay that premium on the link recipes. You're probably looking at spending 4.5 fusers on average to get your 4 link so paying Vorici his 5 is just safer and faster. It's certainly my intention to use him going forward for all my fusing needs. He's not high enough level for me to use his 6 link recipe but then again I have 36 fusers in my bank, not 1500, so I have plenty of time to level him up.

Path of Exile: Guild Gem Spreadsheet

We have a big guild bank for our Path of Exile guild thanks to the donations of a wide variety of people. Greenspielers has 24 guild tabs and 3 of those have been dedicated to storing skill gems according to a system I worked out last November. The basic idea is each colour gets a tab, the gems are divided into auras, skills, and support gems, and then they assigned slots in the bank alphabetically. This way if you need a gem you can go check the bank alphabetically for it to see if we have any of them lying around. This system takes up about half of each tab so the other half gets used for 'incoming' gems from people uninterested in checking to see if we need those gems and for overflow since a lot of gems are pretty rare and we'd like to keep extras on hand for when more people need them.

It's worked reasonably well but I was the only one who really knew how many of each gem we 'need' so I was the only one doing the sorting. Which is fine, I actually like doing repetitive tasks like this. While I'm playing the game, anyway... Eventually I get off to playing something else and then the tabs decay. Also, while keeping things clean is pretty easy actually setting it all up in the first place is more effort.

I was slow in doing so this time around so Snuggles asked for the layout in a Google spreadsheet so he could clean things up. They'd added a bunch of new gems that I needed to add to my layout but once I did that it didn't take too much extra time to copy some of the data from my local Excel sheet into a Google one. Snuggles went off and sorted things out and then I bought a bunch of identify scrolls to make the outline again and things are great.

Lino then asked what gems we currently need. Looking at the guild bank you can figure that out with some effort but when you're cashing a quest or when a gem drops from a monster you're not at the guild bank and you don't want to put that effort in. So I figured I could add this information to the spreadsheet, and I did just that today. Now there's a tab for the layout, a tab for the current gems on hand (I wonder if there's an API to get at the guild bank like there is for the personal bank so I could automate this further instead of filling the sheet out manually), and a pivot table showing which gems are 'understock'.

But now the question is how do we define a gem as being understocked? For now I've categorized all the gems by where you can first obtain them via a quest. If you can get it in act 1 normal then the bank only wants one copy. If you can get it in the rest of normal the bank wants two copies. If you can get it from a quest in cruel the bank wants three copies. If you can only get it from the merciless library quest or from a monster drop then the bank wants five copies. And then because auras and support gems are more likely to be used when someone switches characters I add an extra one for each of those.

This seems like a reasonable start, but I'm not sure I like it all that much. Do we need 6 copies of cast on death? Apparently it keeps getting abused so maybe having lots of copies on hand makes sense? But it also keeps getting nerfed... The bank has 4 copies of iron will right now. The formula says we want 4 copies just in case, but I've never heard of anyone ever using that gem. We're probably fine with just 1 of them... And if we only had 3 of them there's no way I'd want someone to take a 4th as their quest reward!

Probably the best thing would be to have someone who knew a lot about the economy and/or character builds to tell us which gems we care about and which we don't. I don't know enough about it for sure. Last season I would have been all in on throwing all copies of multiple traps and elemental proliferation because those seemed bad... Until we had the trap belt drop and then suddenly I wanted as many copies of both as I could get my hands on!

What we have it certainly a start though. Now there's a sheet you can look at to see if we have any of a given gem at a glance. (If the gem is listed on the 0 owned pivot then we don't have any of them right now!) And then you can use the other pivot to see if we need extra copies of stuff or not, too, if that's something you care about.

Path of Exile: Throwing Money Away

Over the weekend I had a rather rare and really powerful item drop for me. Tabula Rasa, a chest with 6 linked white sockets, but no actual stats. In all my time playing Path of Exile I've never had a 6 linked item. 6 links is how you can get some really powerful stuff going... Normally you have to pay a lot of currency to turn something good into something with 6 links. Here you just pay all the stats off your chest. Maybe that's a bad deal. Maybe it isn't. But you get to play with cool spells at the very least.

Then I had a vaal orb drop. Vaal orbs are crazy little things that modify items in bizarre and final ways. Items can't be changed in any way after they've been corrupted. I could remember seeing someone who corrupted their Tabula Rasa and got a mod that added 1 to the level of every gem in the item. That's super powerful! It's also super valuable. Tabula Rasa itself is worth an exalted orb. With +1 to level of gems it's worth 12 exalteds. That's an amount of currency that might make the 'collect a bunch of uniques' challenge doable. Maybe? I haven't actually looked at what items are on that list at this point.

I was thinking I'd start up a summoner with the Tabula Rasa and try out a full 6 linked zombie spell. I never did get a zombie gem up to level 20... Maybe this time would be the time? But it sure would be easier if I had +1 to all gems... Getting it to level 19 is easy!

I knew bad things could happen from a vaal orb, but I decided to take the chance. It would be fun, and the rewards in the best case scenario were really, really good. So I went for it. And the vaal orb turned it into a low level garbage rare item. Goodbye, Tabula Rasa!

I ended up feeling pretty bad about it afterwards. I could have done fun things with the item as it was. Maybe even sold it for the 1 exalted if I didn't like it? Given it to someone else to play with? As a terrible simple robe it wasn't any good to anybody.

So then earlier this morning I was running a map and lo and behold a second Tabula Rasa dropped! Hurray! I'd even found another build that really needs a 6 linked item to work properly. I could start a character up to do that with this Tabula Rasa and be fine. Heck, if I'd had two of them in my inventory I probably would vaal one of them just in case and still be able to fall back on the second one.

And then... In the same map, a vaal orb dropped...

Now I had a choice. I could assert it was the right play to vaal the first one. That means vaaling the second one is probably right too. I still have my current character that doesn't want to use it, after all, so I'm really just risking some future value and the payoff for a lucky result is huge. Or I could decide I made a mistake the first time and just sit on the second one. That I felt bad after the first failure pointed towards sitting on the second one... But I thought it through again and decided even if I was to make a summoner again I really wanted the +1 to all gems. And while I felt bad for a short time afterwards, it is still just a game, and I got over it pretty quickly. If I knew the odds of each vaal orb result I'd be able to make a better decision...

I decided to orb it up again. It turned into a junky yellow again. This time it was actually a decent yellow with a good life roll, 2 resists, and a 4 link. But still much worse than a Tabula Rasa...

And I didn't feel bad about it.

Now I just need to get really lucky and have a 3rd one drop!

Path of Exile: Hit and Crit

My recollection of how Path of Exile worked back when I used to play is that the sphere grid was full of critical damage related nodes and taking them all was the way to do the most damage. I also remember that unless you had ridiculously good gear you couldn't really afford to spend so many sphere levels on crit without getting yourself killed. So it was 'right' to spec into crit if you were rich and/or awesome but otherwise all the critical damage nodes were a trap. There is one node in the tree that removes your chance to crit entirely but guarantees you hit with every attack. If you aren't getting any crit nodes that one was a pretty big damage boost and it had the added bonus that you got to skip accuracy nodes and gear. So you could really focus all your gear on staying alive (with some damage and attack speed thrown in) and completely ignore a lot of the potential damage stats.

This most recent expansion gave everyone more health and nerfed the defensive nodes in the tree. My hope is that this made it so taking damage based nodes was no longer as much of a trap and I decided my first character would just kind of take things that looked good and hope that all worked out. I've made it to act 2 of the 3rd difficulty without much trouble so far and my gear is pretty sketchy so I'd have to say at least for now it seems to be working out fine. I went and picked up the evasion related defensive stuff near the ranger start and then grabbed things that looked good including a bunch of mana on kill and some of the life nodes I could reach. I also ended up taking a lot of crit nodes since a lot of the rebuilt ranger area had crit stuff thrown in with bow damage.

I've probably only got another 25 skill points to spend by the time I hit 75 (if this character lasts that long) and I'm close to all kinds of interesting nodes. Do I want more crit chance? Crit multiplier? Attack speed? Physical damage? Projectile damage? A 6th frenzy charge? More life? Movement speed? Mana? My primary spell does a lot of cold damage, do I want elemental damage? I'm near the shadow start and there's a pretty spicy cold damage and freeze chance node... How does that feel?

A lot of these things are things I've ignored in the past since I always either took the no miss/no crit node or I threw traps or I stood around and watched my zombies attack things. To make things more complicated all of these different sources of more damage interact multiplicatively with each other so how good one is depends on how much of the other ones I have. I can't just take the one with the bigger numbers because I don't know that it'll have the biggest end result to my damage done. (Ok, I could just take the one with the bigger numbers but I won't be happy to do that at all. I want to take the best one!)

The solution, of course, is to make a note of all my current values and build a spreadsheet so I can see what the impact of any given boost will be for my current setup!

*3 hours later*

Man, I'd forgotten just how complicated a lot of the mechanics are in this game. (Your chance to crit is based on your chance to hit unlike in simpler games like World of Warcraft, for example.) And how hard it is to find real numbers for monster stats. But I plugged it all together into a spreadsheet that seemed to be returning reasonable values compared to my character sheet, so I have something to work from. I'm apparently already at 90% chance to hit and it's capped at 95% so I'm pretty close to that cap as it is. I randomly picked up 3 nodes that had 20% accuracy rating each on them and I have a lot of dex to give a good accuracy base. But even without those 3 nodes I'd still be rocking an 85% chance to hit. And to get all the way to the 95% cap I'd need to add on an extra 170% accuracy rating. WHAT? I can get a little more than a 5% damage boost out of 9 extra nodes? And that's assuming I could even find 9 more 20% accuracy nodes. This feels stupid!

At least, I assume I can do better than that with other things? I want to look at what is a reasonable value for each stat for a single node and see what kind of damage boost it would bring...

Using 25% as the 'typical' value for crit multiplier is a little like cheating since there's never any clusters of crit multiplier just lying around. 25% is actually the value of an end node of a micro cluster that starts with 2 25% crit chance nodes. And it looks like those are actually ok but not great value for me? But the multiplier is so over the top good it might be worth taking those 3 nodes anyway. I find it interesting that the 6th frenzy charge is such a reasonable thing, but isn't awesome. I can remember a character last time around that basically just ran around to pick up all the frenzy charges... She wasn't very good. I wonder if it was really worth grabbing the 2 extra ones I already picked up. And if it will be worth taking an extra one from the bandits? Depending on how often I actually use frenzy it's probably a good idea. I'm a little surprised at how good the elemental damage nodes look. Not the 8% ones... But I'm near a node that's 20% elemental damage, 20% crit chance, and 20 int and it looks pretty amazing.

I also found it interesting that the cold penetration gem I have linked to my ice shot is worth 11.4% and 17.7% damage on the two ice shot columns. The faster projectiles also linked in? 5.1% and 4.6%. Cold penetration really looks like a good choice, though for a mana cost multiplier of 1.5 it better look good!

Accuracy nodes certainly look pretty terrible. And given that I'm already at 90% chance to hit I'm starting to question my curse choice. Knocking 42% off the enemy evasion sounded good, and I like life/mana on hit, but poacher's mark doesn't feel very good anymore. Maybe I should look into getting an assassin's mark gem at some point... Or maybe something defensive like enfeeble or temporal chains?

Path of Exile: Stash Tab Sale

I'm just going to throw this out there in case someone is interested in playing Path of Exile and wants to spend some money on it... For some amount of time, probably all day Saturday but I don't know for sure, they're selling a bundle of six premium stash tabs for $16.50 when they're normally $4 each. Not a great discount by any stretch, but also not a bad way to give them some money. It is certainly what I bought when I gave them $20 back when I first started playing. (They use the stupid system where you have to buy in game currency in bulk... I still have 35 points lying around unspent as a result. I understand why they use this system since they got an extra $3.50 out of me but I still hate it.)

I've found some new changes while playing that have made me happy with the game. For one, now when you die you get an option to respawn in town or at a 'checkpoint' where before you had to respawn in town. This makes playing alone so much nicer. It used to be that you could have to run through cleared out zones for quite a long time until you made it back to where you died when playing alone. When playing in a group you'd just have someone else make you a portal back to the fight so no time was lost at all. It's not clear where the checkpoints are (I haven't actually died very often) but getting to respawn at the stairs to the floor in the final dungeon was a lot nicer than having to waypoint back to the gardens and then walk all the way to the tower and then climb all the stairs. I used to run cast on death and portal on my solo characters (possibly the only legitimate uses for both gems) to try to get around this problem and I'm very happy to see it changed.

I've also always run into mana issues on my ranger characters, but this time I have no problems at all. I went and got a single cluster of mana related nodes and now I get 20 mana when I kill an enemy and 2 mana when I hit an enemy. My attack only costs 11 mana and hits everything in a cone so those are some significant numbers. I have 91 mana in my mana pool after running one aura so I do run dry when attacking a single hard target but that's what flasks are for, right?

I went and visited Tom's hideout and while I wasn't able to use his crafting benches I was totally able to tag along on his daily quest. This seems to be a way to let people who are lower level catch up to people who are higher which is nice. On the flip side I was able to invite him to a group when I ran into a quest giver in the world and he was able to tag along and get rep from my quest. (And by tag along I mean he obliterated everything and I just stood around...) So there are ways for low level people to give a boost to high level people as well. Seems reasonable to me!

I also found out while grouping with him that the rampage stack thing refreshes when anyone in the group kills an enemy. I was afraid they'd set it up to screw over parties inadvertently and am happy to see that groups of people will probably get ludicrous rampage stacks as long as someone in the party can find an enemy to kill within 5 seconds. Low mob density is the way I tend to lose my buff as it is so I'm not sure how much it matters? I guess it depends on how far away you can be from your group and still proc stacks for each other.

I'd gone to look up the vendor recipe for how to make a decent weapon since my bow was starting to lag in damage a little. I was waiting until I hit level 35 to get the next type of bow when I found a yellow level 32 bow that is off the charts good. It had 6 mods and all of them are great. A big percentage increase to physical damage, flat physical damage, flat lightning damage, attack speed, cold resist, and life gain on hit. I have a feeling I could probably sell it for a pretty penny, at least if the prices for leveling weapons in a new league are at all comparable to the ones I ran into in the week long race league (which is the only time I looked to buy a leveling weapon).

But even if it is, I don't think I want to sell it. Part of me thinks flipping it into a better weapon when I level up just makes economical sense, but part of me hated that Diablo III launched as a game like that and I don't see a big need to turn Path of Exile into such a game. I really think it's better if I just stick the bow in the guild bank when I'm done with it and let someone else use a stupid good bow for a while. I think the game is fun like that. I still agree with keeping crafting items out of the guild bank because people should be free to screw around with the stuff they find and no one should be subjected to oversight in terms of 'what item justifies using a fusing orb' but at the same time I also don't want someone to randomly throw away every fusing orb I've found on something silly. So use your fusers however you want, and I'll use mine however I want, and we can both be happy! Maybe you use yours to save up and buy something nice instead of crafting at all? Good for you!

I leveled a quest giver up to the point where I could create a hideout and I ended up with one in a graveyard because I happened to randomly get a lot of quests with the necromancer. She buffs items to add on int and mana which sucks for me, but that's who I randomly got so that's what I'm running with. I wonder if hideouts are cross character? I wonder if I can change to a better locale when I unlock more quest givers?

Sthenno asked a question about joining the guild in a response to yesterday's post and I don't know if other people who may have been interested in the response saw the question at all. So here goes... As far as I know all I need to invite someone to the guild is their character name. I think I can send the invite even when they're offline. So if you play the game, or start playing the game, and want to use some left over gear in the guild bank or have people to group with or whatever just send me a message somehow with a character name and I'll hook you up!