Path of Exile Questions Thread - May 08, 2019

Questions Thread - May 08, 2019
Enemies have too little health and deal too much damage: a discussion.
How I made phat bank using cheap prophecies over the course of a couple weeks
He gave me the card. Pretty cool cosplay don't you think?
[Fun/Hideout] The maze maker is back ! Come try my MAZE in my hideout made with decoration ! (10-15 min average solve time)
[LNB] Flashback League - 5 Solid League Starters
GGG stole my vaaled T15 map :(
PSA: fractured rings with that are worth 50+ex
Spectre Book
[Guide] CI Storm Burst Trickster Build 15M+ DPS
POE Beat Invitational Season 1 - Kitava Race Series
Check out the alt-art Demigod's Immortality up for grabs in this weekend's Flashback Event!
Bex - "Yesterday’s tweet has sent people into a frenzy about whether Path of Exile’s upcoming league is called Carnage. My tweet has people convinced it both is and isn’t the league name based on my trollish history. Schrodinger’s league name. I guess the ritual of teasers has begun!"
Poe flash league starter
[SSC][Item Showcase] Synthesized HoWA and Shaper's Touch replacements
Is the enemy explode suffix from shaped mace the same as the synthesis implicit mechanically-wise
Make Scorching Ray Fire Exposure at 1-4 Stage
Is Dynamic Resolution broken or something?
So um, is this a base that's good? I don't see any other comparable magic bases anywhere.
delve rooom
Stash in Templar Laboratory

Questions Thread - May 08, 2019

Posted: 07 May 2019 05:07 PM PDT

Questions Thread - May 08, 2019

This is a general question thread on May 08, 2019. You can find the previous threads here.

Remember to check the Wiki first.

You can also ask questions in the #any-question channel in our official Discord.

The idea is for anyone to be able to ask anything related to PoE:

New player questions
Mechanics
Build Advice
League related questions
Trading
Endgame
Etc.

No question is too big or too small!

We encourage experienced players to sort this thread by new. We'd like to thank those who answered questions in the last thread! You guys are the best.

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Enemies have too little health and deal too much damage: a discussion.

Posted: 07 May 2019 09:06 PM PDT

The game is currently so fast that it's causing problems in multiple areas. I do not think that our movement speed or attack/cast speed is a problem - having high movement speed and attack/cast speed helps the game feel smoother and more enjoyable. The problem is in how quickly we kill things and how quickly we can be killed. It's causing problems in the following areas (and likely others that I've not thought of, too):

Melee

So we all know that melee's in a bad way. GGG will supposedly be fixing it in 3.7 (although it remains to be seen what approach they take). However, melee's biggest issues are simply monster life and monster damage.

Monster life is a problem because the game is currently in a state where everything that isn't a tanky rare or a boss gets one-shot. We currently spend more time running to the next pack than we do fighting them. This is especially impactful for melee characters (and even more so for "true melee" characters who use single-target or small AoE attacks) because they have to spend even more time travelling to enemies, making their clear even slower. If monsters had significantly more health then the gap between melee and ranged characters would lessen significantly. Melee also feels bad in comparison to ranged characters because ranged characters can accidentally off-screen enemies, again due to our damage being so huge compared to enemies' health.

(I can't see GGG doing anything to address this problem in 3.7)

Monster damage is also a problem for melee. Monsters do a lot of damage in high-tier maps, or while delving. Melee characters have to be far closer to their enemies to deal damage, so they're far more likely to take damage. However, the defences just aren't there to enable melee characters to take that level of damage:

Armour does nothing against non-physical damage (and elemental or chaos damage is often the most deadly), and the way it scales means it's least useful against big hits when you need damage mitigation the most.
Fortify is a great idea in theory, but it doesn't make up all the defences a melee character needs, and, although against the spirit of it, casters often gain access to Fortify, too, so it doesn't really stand out as an advantage for melee characters. I suspect that Fortify support may see some changes in 3.7 so that it becomes a desirable support gem for main skills, although I don't think this would be the right approach - I'm not a fan of support gems that you feel you have to take.
Life. Characters in the bottom left of the tree do get access to more life than other areas of the tree, but it just isn't all that significant. It wasn't an incredible amount before this patch, but it really pales in comparison to all the ES that casters have access to now (or rather, that casters have always had access to, but has recently become much more usable for non-CI/low-life builds thanks to changes to Eldritch Battery and the ES Leech support gem). I imagine there will likely be more life added to the bottom left of the tree. It's a decent enough bandaid, but I'd rather monster damage be lowered instead for reasons I'll go into later.

Melee characters just don't have the health/sustainability required to balance out the fact that they have to get so close to enemies.

Ailments & status effects

Ailments and status effects just aren't in a great place either, again due to enemies dying so quickly. I'll go through them individually:

Shock - excluding builds that either use Inpulsa's and/or are Elementalists, when was the last time you factored in shock at all? It's not particularly valuable while clearing because everything gets one-shot anyway, so you have no use for the increased damage. It's not great against most bosses because you can't do enough damage to shock them anyway. Unless you're using Inpulsa's/Elementalist, it's often not worth trying to shock at all - just using Elemental Focus support will be both higher and more reliable damage. If regular enemies had more health then shocking them would actually be useful and could speed up killing them.
Chill - this is nice against bosses, but it's not often while clearing that you'll have any desire to chill enemies. Why chill them when you could just one-shot them instead?
Freeze - probably the ailment in the worst place. You want to freeze enemies to trigger Herald of Ice explosions and to shatter corpses, but when was the last time you wanted to freeze an enemy without it being for one of those reasons? Bosses are mostly immune to freezes due to their high health pools, so they're not useful there. It's so rare that an enemy has a small enough health pool that you can freeze it (and not one-shot it) but also is enough of a threat that you want to freeze it. Freeze as an ailment (as opposed to as a Herald of Ice or corpse destruction enabler) is basically useless in the current state of the game.
Burning/ignite - I'm grouping these together because they're functionally the same. DoTs in general are in a weird place - again due to enemies dying too quickly; there's no point inflicting DoTs to compliment your hit damage because you can just one-shot with your hits instead. When we're killing as fast as we do, DoTs have to kill effectively instantly or they feel bad in comparison. There are a couple of ignite builds that feel okay at the moment, but even then, you have to hit the enemies and rather than them dying instantly you have to wait for their health to drain, so it's slower than a hit-based build. There's never a moment in the game in its current state where you're playing a hit-based build and want to ignite an enemy for the extra damage it deals (the ignite damage itself, not for indirect damage due to Combustion support or whatever). The damage is a) irrelevant because ignites suck at the moment without investment, but more importantly b) irrelevant because 99% of the enemies will already be dead from the hit.
Poison - it's a similar problem to ignite's: the enemy has to survive for the ailment to even do anything. Poison suffers even more, though, because it relies on multiple instances so it takes far longer for damage to ramp up. Poison has its own issues on top of that, with Assassin being the only way to really make it viable at the moment, but even if it was more accessible for other ascendancies it's just bad for clearing, where you want upfront damage in the current meta.
Bleed - I almost forget to add this (it's the very last thing I'm typing). Yeah. So bleed exists. It's not particularly good, in large part because elemental and chaos damage are so much stronger than physical damage at the moment, and (again) because upfront damage is so much better when monsters die so quickly. It can be okay if you get a very well-rolled weapon and invest into bleed, but it doesn't feel great for clearing.

As an aside, seeing as I've mentioned the state of DoTs a couple of times: cold DoTs and chaos DoTs are currently very strong. However, this is mostly because they kill so quickly that they might as well be considered one-shots while clearing. They do feel different while bossing or against high-health enemies, though, which they should - they have very consistent sustained damage and allow for much more focus on positioning than hit-based builds, however, their damage can't be pushed as high.

Dying to one-shots

Monster damage is so high relative to our health pools that we usually only die to one-shots, or to multiple hits in such quick succession that it might as well have been a one-shot. When was the last time you died by attrition? Or got beaten down into submission (not just hit once), to the point where you had to back off and recover? Deaths are so quick that a half-second lag spike can kill you, and it's not uncommon for players to not even understand what killed them. Monster damage being so high also means that investing into defence just isn't worth it beyond a certain point for most builds; you need to meet a certain threshold where you can survive small hits but, beyond that, the best defence is for everything to be dead. Some enemies will one-shot you (or as good as) whether you stack defence or not, so the best thing to do is just dodge their hits and kill them as quickly as possible.

Flasks

Flasks suffer, both due to how quickly we clear and how susceptible to one- or two-shots we are. Most players use an instant health flask because if you survive a hit, you're likely to be on such low health that you need to recover instantly before another hit comes in that finishes you off. It's only really at the beginning of a new league on your first character where life flasks have any kind of interesting interaction - you can sustain if you manage your flasks properly, but you can't just spam them because you'll be using charges more quickly than you can generate them. Combat feels far more tactical and engaging at this point in the game, where you're having to fight enemies (rather than just exploding them and moving on) and they can be dangerous to you but not lethal if you manage it all properly. Whereas late game, you press your ~~12345 key~~ 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 keys every five seconds and don't even think about flask charges unless it's a boss fight.

Solutions

The obvious solution is to increase monster health and lower monster damage (it's especially obvious that I'd suggest it seeing as my whole post is on the topic of problems that are caused by low monster health and high monster damage!). Ideally, it'd need to be pretty huge changes - I'd personally start in the region of 4x health, 1/4 damage and work from there - but it'd need to be gradual so the community doesn't backlash too much. I would love to see GGG run short - perhaps two weeks - mini-leagues as a testbed for broad changes like I've suggested. We know how important community feedback is to them and their design process, and it'd be a great opportunity for them to get wider testing done.

Anyway, yeah, that's my essay for now. I'd love to hear thoughts from everyone else on the topic.

submitted by /u/SkorpioSound
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How I made phat bank using cheap prophecies over the course of a couple weeks

Posted: 08 May 2019 10:00 AM PDT

So I was really enjoying Synthesis league and got 2 characters to 100 and spent a ton of currency gearing them out. I profited well over 300 exalts using just cheap prophecies (and maybe some luck?) in like 2 weeks of just mapping/nexus. Thought I'd share some of my strategies with you guys if you're interested.

Not really sure how many of these are "secrets" but the amount of profit I was making is better than just simply not using them.

Kalandra's Craft

You can buy these for like 1-2c each and then rush a nexus boss and activate this prophecy before you kill him. The nexus bosses seem to always drop a fractured item with 3 fractured mods and Kalandra's Craft will always drop 3 additional mirrored copies of said item. You can either re-sell them if you hit a sick base, or synth 3 out of the 4 of the items for a chance to hit something good. The item will always have 3 implicits. Out of all the ones I ran, the most expensive base I sold from these were triple fractured sorc shoes at 5 ex per base, as well as hitting some good gloves with lightning damage conversion that sold for 6 ex, and an explode implicit sceptre that sold for 45.

Vaal Winds

I was playing a self-curse temp chains build with solstice vigil, so the buff from the tempest lasts an insanely long time, instead of 5 seconds. I was buying these at anywhere from 9 to 15c per pop and when they triggered I was pulling out anywhere between 4-9 divines in a 2-man group per proc. Divines retailing back out at 21c per, so a net profit of almost an exalt per proc when it hits. Seems to have the same proc rate as any of the 30% quantity tempests so they hit pretty often.

Bountiful Traps

These are about 2c per prophecy and when you hit a 500% quantity strongbox sextant on a map, I'd throw one of these into my queue and hope that it hits. The amount of times you'll get Diviner's and Arcanist's from this is pretty huge, but even when you don't hit them, simply having 500% extra quant from the monsters that pop out of them is enough to easily bolster your map pool which you can then re-sell. You can combine this with An Unseen Peril for more gains.

The Dreamer's Dream

2c Prophecy that when it hits guarantees that the map boss drops a rare map. I haven't done an extraordinary amount of testing with this and earlier impressions were much better than it might be in reality. I ran these pretty much all day today and was 5 for 5 with T16s from Elder UGS, after running them more and more I realized that it wasn't actually a guaranteed chance to drop a T16 and was just getting insanely lucky. After running 49 of them, I ended up with 14 Elder maps back from them, so about a 28% chance to hit a T16, and if you sell them for 17c each, you're making more than double the investment back, not counting other tiers of red maps that drop. The best part is that this prophecy doesn't conflict with other prophecies, so you can have Rats/Frogs/Tempests/etc going on at the same time you're doing this one. Might be worth testing more.

Overflowing Riches

You can get literal quad tabs full of these from people who are spamclicking prophecies for profit at a cheap bulk deal. I'm not sure how much I was making on average from these but it was more than I was spending on them for sure. You can hit annulment orbs, divines, exalts, red sextants, etc from these and just proc them whenever. Pretty good prophecy but requires a lot of micromanagement.

The Hungering Swarm/Cursed Choir

Basically a budget alternative to Rats and Frogs. Additional monsters is additional density which is a higher zana beyond spawn coefficient.

The Four Feral Exiles

This one is a little bit RNG but you can specifically attempt to target farm unique jewels. Inspired Learning are over 7 exalts each, Unnatural Instincts over 20. The way it works is by hitting the "Rogue Exiles drop an additional 2 jewels" sextant, throwing Four Feral Exiles prophecy in, as well as a Reliquary Scarabs (which are dirt cheap) in an attempt to get many many rogue exiles per map that all drop jewels with the possibility of being unique. Did some of this and got some pretty okay unique jewels from it, as well as an Inspired Learning. Unsure about how good this truly is, but it's worth a shot if someone wants to do more testing. Scarab market is a bit dry.

I'm done with the league until Flashback so I figured if you're not going to be doing that, then you can attempt to mess around with those. Most of these were done in a 2-man group. Have fun.

submitted by /u/Arkuzah
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He gave me the card. Pretty cool cosplay don't you think?

Posted: 08 May 2019 01:31 AM PDT

submitted by /u/Fandalf
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[Fun/Hideout] The maze maker is back ! Come try my MAZE in my hideout made with decoration ! (10-15 min average solve time)

Posted: 08 May 2019 05:40 AM PDT

Hello! I've been doing some maze in previous league and i'm back ! Bigger hideout and more decoration since last time, so it's much funnier :)

If you want to try the maze, it's in the Synthesis league, and you have to whisp : Kyorah

Here's some picture how it looks like :

https://imgur.com/ZSfDVAM

https://imgur.com/VO0qS5H

https://imgur.com/m8XYLG4

https://imgur.com/yaopByR

https://imgur.com/E57dmuH

https://imgur.com/BK86cLx

https://imgur.com/WvCDFKB

https://imgur.com/vlnVqFi

So if you want to have some fun and make a break in your leveling/looting or want to do in this end league, come try it :) !

BTW no movement skills are allowed ! ;) Wouldn't be fun otherwise

Just whisper : Kyorah

It's on the forum right now : https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2500817

submitted by /u/Clarove
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[LNB] Flashback League - 5 Solid League Starters

Posted: 08 May 2019 10:49 AM PDT

submitted by /u/Ryant12
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GGG stole my vaaled T15 map :(

Posted: 08 May 2019 09:05 AM PDT

submitted by /u/EmreEpe
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PSA: fractured rings with that are worth 50+ex

Posted: 08 May 2019 05:07 AM PDT

The only viable way to attempt triple +1 charges (+1 end, +1 frenzy AND +1 power charges as implicits) is with a three fractured implicit ring with t1 #x to all attributes, 14-16. This can be any ilvl that t1 attributes can drop.

I can't think of any other combination that has the potential to be this valuable.

submitted by /u/jiblet84
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Spectre Book

Posted: 08 May 2019 10:10 AM PDT

I've played multiple summoner builds and I always go back to Summon Spectre - I have just in many years grown tired of that I have to keep going specific zones to resummon minions or if I want to switch spectres.

My suggestion is if you spec necromancer you get a book either through a hotkey or specific new slot or hell I would even carry it in my inventory.

That store spectre you have summoned and you can switch between those you have found and summoned kinda like beastiary book - also you can see the current active spectres level and what skills they use.

Am I the only one that would love such an addition?

(This is literally just a toilet thought)

submitted by /u/sinstardk
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[Guide] CI Storm Burst Trickster Build 15M+ DPS

Posted: 08 May 2019 03:23 AM PDT

submitted by /u/TriHard_from_france
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POE Beat Invitational Season 1 - Kitava Race Series

Posted: 08 May 2019 03:25 AM PDT

submitted by /u/ColPow11
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Check out the alt-art Demigod's Immortality up for grabs in this weekend's Flashback Event!

Posted: 07 May 2019 03:34 PM PDT

submitted by /u/Bex_GGG
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Bex - "Yesterday’s tweet has sent people into a frenzy about whether Path of Exile’s upcoming league is called Carnage. My tweet has people convinced it both is and isn’t the league name based on my trollish history. Schrodinger’s league name. I guess the ritual of teasers has begun!"

Posted: 07 May 2019 01:40 PM PDT

submitted by /u/Ryant12
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Poe flash league starter

Posted: 08 May 2019 08:29 AM PDT

Looking to do a scion totem build Looking for some help I want to play a divine ire totem Will this be effected by channelling speeds nodes and gear or is it just cast speed, Hierophant and chieftain for me ascendancy

submitted by /u/darby812
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[SSC][Item Showcase] Synthesized HoWA and Shaper's Touch replacements

Posted: 07 May 2019 11:20 PM PDT

submitted by /u/PSR3
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Is the enemy explode suffix from shaped mace the same as the synthesis implicit mechanically-wise

Posted: 08 May 2019 02:19 PM PDT

I mean i know one is 5% fire and the other 3% physicial, but even inputting mob resist, comes down to about the same damage. do you get the same chain explosion from both of these?

submitted by /u/borfa
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Make Scorching Ray Fire Exposure at 1-4 Stage

Posted: 08 May 2019 06:16 AM PDT

I've played a lot of RF guard build, and i feel that i deal not that good damage without exposure. At Uber Elder you have to dodge Shaper balls. You can't apply it on bosses, that you have to dodge.
P.S. Is this fair that frost bomb instantly applies cold exposure?

submitted by /u/RGBplayer
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Is Dynamic Resolution broken or something?

Posted: 07 May 2019 06:16 PM PDT

Been using Dynamic Resolution since it's been introduced, and it has been great.

But I've noticed something strange this league... It doesn't seem to be working anymore.

It used to be that I would run into huge packs with lots of effects and my frame rate would stay smooth, while the resolution would lower, sometimes to hilariously fuzzy resolutions but still playable and recognizable. Great. Always at 60fps at least.

This league? I haven't seen it properly trigger even once. I go into crowded Epilogue town, and my framerate just hitches, dives to 20-30, and stays there with my regular resolution set. My game hitches and freezes, framerate tanks whenever I enter maps or encounter large packs. I'm not even talking about the Syndicate lag that everyone knows about.

I've tried disabling and re-enabling the Dynamic Resolution feature, changing all my settings up, changing my resolution from and back to my main res, etc.

It just seems to have stopped working. Anyone else notice this?

EDIT:

DxDiag: https://pastebin.com/HgijmQkS

Game Settings: https://imgur.com/a/V2VFKYN

submitted by /u/mooseofdoom23
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So um, is this a base that's good? I don't see any other comparable magic bases anywhere.

Posted: 08 May 2019 05:34 AM PDT