Path of Exile 3.28 - Mirage

[Apteris]

Good news everyone: I am ever-so-slowly figuring out how to search for Timeless Jewels. This being the case, I can now happily report that there are three instances of the jewel I'd like to have: one for 250 div, one for 350, and one for 2 mirrors.

Yay.

 

[Mister E. Meat]

Good news everyone: I am ever-so-slowly figuring out how to search for Timeless Jewels. This being the case, I can now happily report that there are three instances of the jewel I'd like to have: one for 250 div, one for 350, and one for 2 mirrors.

Yay.

POB can help you with this if you didn't already know. On the tree there's "Find Timeless Jewel" with a bunch of parameters to help you find the nodes you want, fallback nodes, how to weight, etc.

 

[Thegn]

That reminds me - I need to figure out how to do minions in PoB. It claims my DPS is ~110k, and yet everything just melts almost instantly when my pack gets in range.

 

[Apteris]

POB can help you with this if you didn't already know. On the tree there's "Find Timeless Jewel" with a bunch of parameters to help you find the nodes you want, fallback nodes, how to weight, etc.

Yeah. I knew PoB had this, but have not used it until now because I didn't understand what any of the words meant. But like I said, I'm coming to grips with this: I've been reading wiki articles and searching using https://vilsol.github.io/timeless-jewels, and now I'm experimenting with the PoB feature as well. Like you say, it's good.

I have been meaning to ask, however, how the hell GGG expects anyone to understand this shit. Five timeless jewel types, three conquerors each, a random assortment of effects for each type and conqueror, with no obvious theme per jewel or conqueror -- though I'd be happy to be corrected on this last point, if you know of any.

I get that some games need to have complexity to be interesting, but this is just ridiculous.

Was this explicitly designed with the goal of promoting neckbeard growth? Did they want us to just pick up random timeless jewels off the ground, stick them in, go "oh, that's neat" and then not worry about it? What was the thinking here, I wonder.

 

[Ladnil]

Timeless Jewels were designed so you'd look up which of the five types/three conquerors you cared about and then you'd just have to get lucky or keep trying different ones to get the bonuses you want from the number value. People just figured out their algorithm for how the numbers transform the nodes, and now you can find perfect ones.

 

[ferzerp]

Before they were solved, we did one of the following

• Pay prices that very few people could ever manage for known good seeds
• Scoured boards of some sort (reddit, tft, etc) for a seller that posted screenshots of semi-okish jewels and pay way too much
• Spend way too much time testing undocumented seeds looking for one that had a useful stat or two and hoping the owner hadn't already checked against known builds for usefulness and was just selling bulk chaff
• Just use the basic power of the jewel

They were really annoying to deal with. Having them solved is far better. If GGG didn't agree, they could have tried to get into an arms race over the algorithm the next league.

 

[Thegn]

I'm having a problem: My spectres are dying.

Now, yes, they can die. That's OK. What's not OK is that they're dying and not being resummoned on the next map, as per the changes that were supposed to be made in 3.27. Three of the four are really cheap, so that's not a problem, but the turtle is ~240c a pop, and I'm not making THAT much dough. So I think I'm going to put aside my witch and see if I can get something else going. Not sure what yet, but I'll burn that bridge when I get to it.

 

[Thegn]

Never mind, I'm an idiot. Realized it was happening when I swapped to my alternate weapon sets and reduced my gem levels from 25 to 23. /facepalm

 

[masonk]

So this build goes insane with headhunter, as planned, but now I can confirm.

Up to 109m DPS with the conservative configuration of 15k mana spent recently and 4 hits per shot. Still managing to almost cap svalinn block, so it's thick.

https://pobb.in/E3EdPq1uckoL

If I could buy my 55div impossible escape and my 80div ff/ff, I think I'd hit 200m DPS. And there is a much higher ceiling available by stacking lightning resistance with the new foulborn choir of the storm.

Strats -

90% of the money came from farming up on legion dunes. Headhunter is not required, but fast clear is needed. Any build that benefits from HH buffs can get one or two Inspired Learnings for pennies and they're insane player power on this strat.

After the patch, I started adding in the buffed Eternal Conflict scarab and one Nemeses scarab. Headhunter is required for this version. I believe it is an improvement on the base strat, but Headhunter is pretty important. Although Apo was doing it reasonably well with the same build but still on Inspired Learning (and no Svalinn either). So it can be done without HH, but I am not sure how much better it is. It yields more value, but it also make the maps take longer.

I am going to try a 20 set of fortress tonight with a scarab strat, but that strat is probably Headhunter Required.

 

[Ladnil]

My bladefall of impaling starter works fine, but doesn't have the clear speed to handle the league mechanic, so I rerolled in early yellow maps.

My reroll was a tornado shot mines (TShot having such a low attack speed now makes it mine bait) deadeye, and it's... fine. Low DPS despite the tree giving a decent 5-link bow, feeling like I might as well go back to the ol' reliable Icicle Mines deadeye. Probably will get a lot better with gear though, so I'm gonna stick with it through this weekend at least.

Overall just really haven't played as much as I normally would. Not sure what it is, just not vibing with the game at the moment.

 

[Thegn]

So much money in this screenshot:

 

[Apteris]

1. Die, load hideout, load map. Die, load hideout, load map. Millions of man-years lost for lack of a "resurrect at my last portal" button.

2. Up until the low 90s, the league mechanic is good for grinding XP, if you feel that's necessary. (After that point, it becomes almost-mandatory to just not die.)

3. Fully-allocated Delirium is not bad for alch-and-go mapping. You get simulacrum splinters, delirium orbs, the occasional T16.5 and T17 map, etc. It's even better if you chisel your maps.

I'd say it works out to ~10 div/hour. Empyrian made a video in which he farmed 20 div/hour with essences, maybe I'll try that too. What are you guys farming?

 

[sauth]

Well, I was swapping between farming logbooks for Tujen currency and selling Alva temples for low investment fairly steady returns, but now I think I just point at the screen and loudly yell "FETCH ME THAT GHASTLY JEWEL" and one of my entourage does it for me?

From the Alva encounter. Vaal Flesh Merchant maybe?

Didn't really pay attention to the league hype cycle this time, started chief RF then went poison golems as a second build. Guess I can start mass-double-corrupting things now? I already farmed up the FF&F jewels for the elementalist golem node. Hmm.

 

[Thegn]

jawdrop.gif

 

[RandomZero]

I haven't even had 5 divines drop yet

 

[Apteris]

Well, I was swapping between farming logbooks for Tujen currency and selling Alva temples for low investment fairly steady returns, but now I think I just point at the screen and loudly yell "FETCH ME THAT GHASTLY JEWEL" and one of my entourage does it for me?

Nice, congrats.

Didn't really pay attention to the league hype cycle this time, started chief RF then went poison golems as a second build. Guess I can start mass-double-corrupting things now? I already farmed up the FF&F jewels for the elementalist golem node. Hmm.

No no, that's far too sensible.

What you want to do is buy one Mageblood with a 29% increased rarity of items found implicit (3 mirrors as of this writing), for mapping, and a second one with #% increased movement speed during any flask effect, for looting.

 

[teubbist]

And here I thought I was doing well with my ~120div from doing harvest/betrayal mapping.

At 5 mirrors I'd probably go browse the zero/low fee mirror shops and see if anything catches my eye build wise to act as a jumping off point. Or just stare at them in my currency tab.

 

[masonk]

for fuck’s sake!

congrats

 

[sauth]

Yeah, I took a screencap more to make sure I wasn't hallucinating than anything else. Like... those are divines or Valdo's or something, right? Surely?

And here I thought I was doing well with my ~120div from doing harvest/betrayal mapping.

At 5 mirrors I'd probably go browse the zero/low fee mirror shops and see if anything catches my eye build wise to act as a jumping off point. Or just stare at them in my currency tab.

That's at least in the ballpark of what I'd farmed ethically beforehand - logbooks were pretty lucrative for raw currency, reliable chaos/bubblegum and the occasional div/etc jackpot. Fun, but in shorter stints since the mix of needing to focus for setting up the explosion chain but then zoning out spending the rerolls didn't always flow well for me. Boss ones have doubled in price since I was doing them, but the cheap ones were fine too, fishing for a free boss and breaking even/slight profit if not.

Alva temples are pretty much always at least decent if you can fit 'em into one of your trees, and are very solid gold/XP as well with the magic pack scarabs, good for supporting Kingsmarch shipping.

Good call on the mirror shops, definitely need to think about another build to avoid the too-rich-now burnout - I could just throw money at this build for a while but there's a limit to what's even out there to buy, so at some point I'd have to start crafting, which might be fun with vast funding, but isn't actually playing the combat part of the game.

Went from 10m to 26m PoB DPS over today as I decided to buy various bits - better ghastlies and clusters, ES chest with minion poison % mod, etc - but at some point I still need to use the build for something and "make currency to buy an upgrade" isn't too relevant anymore... so yeah, double corrupting for things that don't exist because no one's looking for them is an appealing option, and farming up the temples myself keeps me from turning currency directly into gambling.

 

[ferzerp]

After clicking my brains out last league (farmed up multiple mirrors of currency with the abyss strat), I retired my wander last week for a cws ultimatum farmer. It does what it does exceedingly well and I just do ultimatums while doing other things on a second screen. It’s a nice diversion and the currency per effort is pretty high (the currency per time isn’t great). My only t0 inscribed ultimatum to drop so far did double but it’s a no value one beyond its status as a t0 inscribed. I’ll probably just hold it until I get 5 for the gamba.

If I get the expected value out of my first shipment later today I should have MB which will really speed up the character, and free up a lot of jewel sockets since a perma boosted ruby flask can cover 9% max all res (or 10% if I get 5% flask somewhere). Right now I have 90% res with no flask since there are ways to turn them off.

The league mechanic though this league…. It’s a snoozer.

 

[Thegn]

Got my first unassisted Maven kill. Actually screwed the pooch on the final memory game, but it somehow counted it as complete and I got the credit for the kill!

 

[ferzerp]

Got my first unassisted Maven kill. Actually screwed the pooch on the final memory game, but it somehow counted it as complete and I got the credit for the kill!

That's no joke! I have way too many hours in this game and most leagues I just don't bother killing Maven since I buy that stone day 2 or so, and have no patience for the fight by the time my character could do it.

edit: Yay, mod changed the title for us!

 

[Apteris]

That's no joke! I have way too many hours in this game and most leagues I just don't bother killing Maven since I buy that stone day 2 or so, and have no patience for the fight by the time my character could do it.

I like the Maven fight and enjoy doing it, though I can see how it might not be everyone's cup of tea.

I dislike the Shaper fight, but can tolerate it due to its potential for huge drops (Sublime Visions). Haven't ever gotten one of those myself, but a man can dream.

But then there are things like the Guardian of the Chimera fight, which is just garbage.

 

[Thegn]

Maven is the only non-uber fight I can’t faceroll by out gearing. It’s that last bit where you are dodging a ton of shit at the same time it’s flashing the movement sequence at you - too much for my aged brain. I would rather do the Heigan dance again…

 

[sauth]

On a good day I can do the Maven memory game at all, by itself with nothing else going on. Ditto for the rotating beam with the gaps. Together? Yeah, time to DPS fast enough to burn through before I'm out of portals. I don't even try to pay attention to the memory game sequence at that point - I'll die trying to watch it, much less remember it, much less replicate it.

 

[RandomZero]

So I've managed to get to two void stones with this janky elemental spectrum deadeye . I've been looking over the builds on poe.ninja for reference, but my tree is still more towards using storm rain, which was the original plan, but hey. I think I've put about 4 div into it, and two of that was a bow in early maps, the rest just chaos added up for a couple other things. Need more defense and a bit more single target, but otherwise, as disjointed as the tree/gear/skills I'm running are, it's still pretty damn strong.

 

[Thegn]

Just noticed I've got a 955% facebreaker - any suggestions for fun things to try?

 

[ferzerp]

Usually, if you want to get an idea of what builds a unique works for, go to Poe.ninja and look at the build portion. You can filter on a specific item and see what people are doing with it to get ideas.

This is also a good way to get an idea if a corrupted unique might be worth something. Check to see what builds (in any) use the item and then if they would want the corruption (or if a lot of them are using that corruption) you have a potential market for it.

 

[ferzerp]

Doh, they've restricted our edit window I guess.

Here's an example of what I mean. I just had a 80% reservation multiplier ultimatum helm drop. It corrupted into Veil of Night (the ultimatum boss helm is special in that it has corruptions you can get nowhere else, and can be corrupted repeatedly until the line that allows it to be re-corrupted disappears, it bricks into a rare, or it turns into any chanceable unique helm). This is a pretty crap item, so my instinct is just to delete it. But instead, I go check poe.ninja. Sure enough, not a single character on poe.ninja uses that item, so onto the ground it goes.

 

[masonk]

KBoC guy: did another round of regearing after I picked up the super expensive jewels (ff/ff and escape). Gloves, body armour, boots, rare jewel all got redone. Then a million little things had to happen to fix my attributes and resistances after that. For example I had to sell my HH and rebuy a higher roll to make it all fit.

However, the guy got significantly stronger even after I thought there was nowhere to go with it. It doesn't come through very sharply in the POB because the DPS stayed roughly the same. But for instance, I was able to drop Tempest Shield, so I have a lot more unreserved mana. That means that I run out of mana less often, my Laviagna's lasts significantly longer before filling up the bar, and I am rarely OOM when I get hit now. Making attribute room with all T1 suffixes meant I can afford a single chaos res craft so I am always overcapped on chaos res without Atziri flask. I can and probably will switch that into a Wine of the Prophet (just to experience that). Taste of Hate can become Dying Sun.

https://maxroll.gg/poe/pob/ebs480y7

Keep in mind that it says 97m DPS, but it's configured conservatively. In reality I think I get way more than 4 hits per attack under most scenarios where it matters. I am just keeping it at 4 so I can apples-apples compare with all other versions of the build I've played with. Also it's at 16k mana spent recently, but in reality I think I'm capping out my mana sustain at around 20k mana spent recently. This is possible to deduce because I can look at the tooltip cost of KBoC and see that it oscillate around 1.2k mana cost when I am in a sustained fight, and 20k mana spent recently puts me at a 1.22k mana cost tooltip.

Anyway, last league I played multiple builds, and I played for like 6 weeks. I never got to the point where T17s bosses were on farm. They are very much on farm right now. I can do T17 100% deli Abom with pretty much any map mods, and always complete the boss. Some of the tankier mods, like reduced extra damage from critical strikes, 150% more life or more ES, and 80% chance to block attack damage, are things I avoid out of preference, not out of need. It's risk viable, that's all I'm saying, there are no hard bricks.

 

[Apteris]

That means that I run out of mana less often

Your Indigon is a 56% increased spend, perhaps consider getting a lower roll? They're not expensive.

I want to play something very much like this but I'm stuck on my (admittedly not bad) league starter (Mjölner Hierophant) until I farm up a Mageblood. Sad. (It's a joke, I'm still having a good time, marred perhaps only by the knowledge that I'm not playing other games.)

 

[masonk]

For what it's worth, although I love the megablood, I don't think it's better for the T17 farms until you get to Choir of the Storm lightning res stacking. Headhunters are very affordable right now. I bought mine at 85 less than a week ago and now they're down to 32 or something crazy low. This build scales perfectly off HH, benefiting from pretty much everything HH offers. But I know there are some people who just need a mageblood every league because of the movespeed QOL, maybe that's you.

 

[ferzerp]

my t0 unique drop for the league: rakiata’s dance.

I’ve ended up playing more than I ever expected by making an afk ultimatum farmer. Stone circles is rare enough when you take the other more likely nodes that most of the time all you do is click downsides and then on the boss nameplate lock casting the ring mark. Pick up loot, check for crater or lost shipments, only touch ritual if nameless or you haven’t gotten all your audiences out yet.

i have MB and about 150 more divines. I really should convert it to the lucky block PBoD ruin capable gladiator build to run any inscribed and add in grueling and the every round gives an inscribed scarab, but its low effort passive play as it is. Log in, grab 20 white jungle valleys and the scarabs (2 kalguur, bribing, dueling, inscription), empty the map rucksack in one session and either log out or run another. Further character upgrades are mostly pointless. The only thing that could be sped up is the trial master kill, and it generally doesn’t take too long. My inc aoe is enough to have the ring phantasms explosions to hit him without any positioning tricker, and there’s no way this character could die doing this in a white map. Sure, I get fewer tainted catalysts by running them white, but they’re low value anyway. The 10 stack of random other catalysts off the boss is unscalable anyway.

Not having to roll maps makes it really easy.

I almost league started this but went on the wand bandwagon. That character was fine, but I didn’t want to do wand again when I did it a lot last league.


Edit: the big downside is it makes almost no gold, so my city is shut off. The city needs removed from the game IMO. The shipment mechanic is too good to be ignoring like I am. My choices are buy gold runs or leave it idle.

 

[Apteris]

For what it's worth, although I love the megablood, I don't think it's better for the T17 farms until you get to Choir of the Storm lightning res stacking. Headhunters are very affordable right now. I bought mine at 85 less than a week ago and now they're down to 32 or something crazy low. This build scales perfectly off HH, benefiting from pretty much everything HH offers. But I know there are some people who just need a mageblood every league because of the movespeed QOL, maybe that's you.

I guess my personal goal for this league is to ramp up the rate at which I earn currency. Still considering which option is the best.

Edit: the big downside is it makes almost no gold, so my city is shut off. The city needs removed from the game IMO. The shipment mechanic is too good to be ignoring like I am. My choices are buy gold runs or leave it idle.

FWIW, I get at least 1 raw divine per 36 mapper maps, and that's with alch-and-go T14s/15s/16s. I gather that you can buy 1M+ of gold for 5 div, so I think it would be worth it.

 

[teubbist]

And done, time to go touch grass.

I'm not quite as down on the league as some: I thought mechanic was fine and fairly rewarding, Foulborn uniques add some new flavour and grafts represent a nice boost of borrowed power early on while having some scope in endgame builds due to implicits. It being a little shallow is the only real negative, but I also don't need/want a 3+ month league.

Final build tally for the league:

• an Ignite Elementalist(https://pobb.in/nTa8Qp9mHZvU), WoC initially but switched to ID, to get to 4 stones and all favourites minus Feared. 2.6m DPS gets you pretty far progression wise
• an RF Chieftain that got to maps before I got pissed at his slow ass clomping and rerolled
• a Scourge Arrow Ballista PF(https://pobb.in/Q9krVE8HQ2hk) that initially was the cool guy zoom zoom frenzy stacking/Olesya/etc. version with an EHP of zero and then flipped to the Inextricable Fate variant when I started full time T17 and bossing. Did the easier Uber's(Cortex, Shaper, Uber Uber Elder, Exarch) without much issue, along with the new ones

Was tempted to farm up currency for a Memeblood, but decided to settle for a double explode Berek's with my remaining liquid divs.

 

[masonk]

Ok, I finished my league by going for a misted helical ring with a 1/10 of success and 60 div per shot. I failed 9 or 10 in a row and I'm out of gas now.

I am pretty happy with where my character ended up: https://pobb.in/p2_k-VHro__4. I went Adorned / lightning res stacking.

It will be most my powerful char on standard and hey, I got a taste of high stakes crafting this league which is fun, and I have some ideas for next time.

 

[Apteris]

Ok, I finished my league by going for a misted helical ring with a 1/10 of success and 60 div per shot. I failed 9 or 10 in a row and I'm out of gas now.

Rough, man. As I said a couple of pages ago, I don't mind paying for expensive things but the negative emotions I feel when "losing" a craft just suck. (That character does look good, though.)

Me, I've lost the desire to play. I have enough currency to buy both a Mageblood and an expensive FF/FF pair, but I just don't care to.

It doesn't help that the game is currently buggy as hell. Recent versions -- since 3.26, perhaps? -- do this thing where they load the map but not all of the shaders which go into the map. So you can play -- you have to, unless you pause the game -- but you won't see the wisps in the Wildwood, or the bowling alley that Sirus confines you in, or other bosses' various abilities. They'll have their usual effect, but you won't see them.

30+ seconds to load said shaders. Up to a minute in some cases. My video card is not the newest, but then again it's not like I turned up the graphical settings either. Feels bad.

 

[Thegn]

I've reached the point where my earnings are linear and my upgrade costs are exponential. (For example: to upgrade my wand to my "midgame" wand costs around 30div, and with the time I can play that's probably 1+ week of earnings, barring a lucky strike) I'm turning to trying to complete the season challenges. Not too hard because I can plow through T17 maps pretty quickly (Fortress can get hairy if I get multiple wave motion guns going off at the same time in those tiny passages) but still annoying as I've always been weak at the economic game in any game I play.

I'm currently doing a gold farm strat I found on Youtube; buy 8 mod Sepulchre maps, Alva/Kalguur tree, 2x Champions, 1x Kalguur, 1xGuarded Riches, 1xGlittering, Settlers craft from map device. The weak spot is that some of it is dependent on recognizing good bases, recombinating them, and selling them. I'm making better currency than I was at Delve, which isn't saying that much.

Sadly, this will probably be my last season for a long time. Not because I want to stop playing, but I have a major project (learn French) coming up that I know won't be compatible with the kind of playtime I get into.

 

[Thegn]

Also, while this build is very powerful, I probably wouldn't play it again - it's not as bad as VFoS but the amount of crap on the screen is just a little bit high for me.

 

[Apteris]

Mageblood prices are in free fall; just a few days ago the shiny one I wanted to buy was 220 div, now it's 193. Are people getting luckier or are they grinding harder, I wonder.