I've been playing on and off for 2ish years and continue to basically just follow build guides for the most part but I must say things like this are what's needed to get people to bring out of those habits! Thanks for the video!
Was browsing my RU-vid Algorithm and sure enough, this guide showed up near the top. Although this video is well over 2 months old, I just wanted to say I think this is THE MOST important kind of content lacking in the PoE ecosystem. But you'd nailed exactly why, as I've been told by any content creator I recommend this to- it takes too long to do and not worth the effort (views). I hope you decide to buck the trend and take some engagement hits to teach more of us these exact types of build progression ideas. This seems like an incredibly insightful channel and I look forward to seeing what you do for 3.18.
It's definitely something I'll do when I can especially because this video was very well received but the reason that it's not something many youtubers make is at the end of the day making an unpopular video often means working without pay, or working for minimal pay.
Thanks for posting guides like this. Many times youtubers share information or guides that is totally out of reach. Like farm 100ex in an hour, but the reality it is playing ungodly amounts of hours along w already a huge currency capital that do the initial 100 juiced maps. I like that your videos are more grounded and realistic.
As someone who switched from playing SSF for years to migrating to trade this week, this is exactly what I needed. Like you mentioned the "pace" of upgrades is a lot different, so it's taking some readjusting and this has been very helpful. I always appreciate the long more indepth videos, but this one was particularly apt. Thank you for your videos, keep it up!
Thanks for the video, I often struggle with this. Partly it is being willing to craft at a high level, feels too rich. Currently using your CoC Forbidden Rite and working single target and mana issues. Fun times and being willing to let change ripple through gear is key. P.S. I started with a random example from POE Ninja and holy glass canon batman... rewatched your guide and based closer to that and fan-damn-tastic!!
Nice, I'm glad it's going well! I'd say don't be afraid to craft, but do budget your crafting using craftofexile. If craftofexile says it'll take 5 ex to make something, make sure you have 7-8 ex saved and you should be able to make it (and likely sell a "failure" for a profit on top!)
This is a really helpful video. I feel a lot of build guides would simply say "oh i needed chaos res so I got a new ring" without going into the actual process of it, without saying if it's better to craft or buy, how to think about recouping crafting costs by selling what you made but didn't need, etc. There's a lot of unstated knowledge that super high level PoE players have that us filthy casuals don't lol
I agree with most of what you said. I think that people forget that some issues can be fixed with the tree and not just gear, blindly following a guide
There's often a lot of room to fix problems on the tree, but most importantly to me is trying to spread the message to not blindly follow guides. It's why when I showcase a build rarely do I provide the sort of information needed to be able to follow it blindly, so that people encounter their own problems. Instead I try to provide ways to find solutions to those problems through resources like this video.
I don't know what that is you're doing with 5 other people at the end of the video, but that clearly showcases how much PoE wasn't meant to be played in groups. At 27:07 your video driver even recovers from a crash from the amount of bullshit onscreen, good lord. (This isn't to say that playing solo there isn't too much bullshit onscreen already, but this was just an extreme showcase of how bad it gets.) Great video as usual, love your videos that are more tuned to people not in the hardcore or higher groups of players. (Which basically accounts for 90% of PoE's playerbase.) My biggest problem is often getting my builds over the 1M DPS hurdle. I managed to make a 1.5M DPS Righteous Fire build this league, which while I'm not sure the damage could be higher, to it's credit it was practically immortal from how many defensive layers it had. It could facetank any Slam you think off, and for sure bosses did take several minutes, but I could just about AFK some of them provided they weren't the kind to move around a lot. But that's on a build I've been playing since I first started PoE god knows how long ago, I understand how RF works, even though I didn't really look up any guides for it all this time. My problem is more present with hit based builds. I'm not that big a fan of build guides. Even by abusing PoB and setting all the numbers on items to max, I usually run into the 1M DPS wall very often, which keeps leading me to the question "what hidden mechanic am I not abusing for this". But this was nonetheless a great video. Basically a reminder that I have to read more and more on the items in the game, to know what can be put together to make builds go even nuttier.
AFKing coward's trial it's about the worst group play you can do but I thought it might be educational to include since well.... it is awful. Normally the hidden mechanic used to get past dps barriers is spending more money on your gear or getting more levels for your character, a build at 97 will hit 1m dps a lot easier than a build at 91 for example. However you should be able to get over 1m fairly easily with most skills even at moderate investment levels. RF is actually fairly difficult to push the dps up higher. An example of investment changing dps, in the example I used in the video my original dps was ~2.5m dps (conservatively) before I upgraded the gear, and ~8m after, so the dps increased massively due to the Leadership's Price then roughly doubled from adding the ~30 ex bow and ~15 ex helmet.
@@Tenkiei Usually I hit 1M at about 88, so I guess I'm doing something right at least. The thing is, I usually plateau after hitting 1M (I stay at 1M from 88 to 95, for example), and have no idea what changes in gear or affixes I should make to gain damage - through other mechanics or not. Leadership's Price was definitely a nice find (had seen it in another video, but this did reinforce the idea), but I still have some ways to go about finding out what to change in gear/stats to see the numbers go higher. My problem relies mostly on not knowing what to include/being stuck in old mechanics.
In SSF this league and something I wasn't prepared for was the bad luck on Exalt drops. I've found 1 raw Ex despite farming t16s. Can't wait to get a couple more so I can craft no attack mods and slam my bow for an additional plus 1! Thanks for the video man
When you say, I died to chaos damage, how do you know? How do you figure out what killed you, therefore what to improve? Most times, it happens so fast, that you don't have time to see what degen, type of monster or attack killed you. Teach us how you know! Thanks for the video !
The easiest way is to use something like NVidia Shadowplay to record the last 30 seconds of your gameplay. Barring that, you can often look at poedb to see what abilities monsters have. Also by understanding how your defenses work you can figure out the weaknesses. So if your defenses are primarily armor and evasion you'll be weak to degens because those bypass both of your primary defenses. If you die to betrayal, maybe it's Tora who is known for doing chaos damage. If you seem to get killed by groups of enemies...stop standing in them. If you get killed out of nowhere by a single enemy? Probably a crit. Especially if you have crit on the map.
I play SSF and you described my upgrade process perfectly. My build goals also inform my upgrade decisions: I only want to build T14-16 mappers. This limits me on some crafting choices as I rarely get meta mod currencies (in quantities that matter).
The hardest part I found was actually learning how to craft, blocking prefixes and suffixes, using affinities and level cut offs and how to efficiently use my time to get the correct currency, the game itself hides that part of the game like an urban legend, you have to go learn about it from other sites. I almost never made more than 5 ex a league and now I usually can get 10-40 from things I now know are at least not vendor loot.
Let me push this in the Algorithm. Also thanks for the ides during league start. I am still on an EA Hit based totem build, and some of the ideas you gave me on day one has stuck.
I would love a guide on how to pick which forbidden jewel combination to pick up, which ones are overlooked, which ones could make up for some downsides.
Unfortunately, the real answer to that is: "what problem are you having right now?" for example, a lot of people might value profane bloom on witch, but if you're struggling with stuns then vile bastion would be the correct choice. At some point I could talk about what some of the best generic choices are but the things that are being overlooked at the moment are build/gear specific more so than a generic choice.
This is a great video, and leads me to one of the big problems I have with this game. At the 2:10 mark'ish you talk about "I died to chaos damage". This is my problem. The game makes it so difficult to know what exactly I died from, that I don't easily know what I need to be upgrading. How hard is it to give us a death log FFS.
Incredibly hard actually, for example just taking a DoT would log 30 instances of damage/second per source. You've got 5 poisons on you? Well that's 150 instances of damage to sort through.
Certain types of problems are easy to identify, like "I don't clear as quickly as I want," or "my single target DPS is lacking", but defenses are much harder because you're given no indications as to what kind of damage is killing you.
I don't know if you can advise this. Crafting seems daunting or seems to involve prepping lots of currency. Sometimes I don't know how much to prepare, like do I need to buy like 50 essences or 50 of 3 types of fossils. So I end up just settling for what's available in trade.
I am gen cry build, I just dropped purity of the elements because I got synth implicit avoid ele ailment, and 50% is fine for me right now, (I will Aisling slam my body later to reach 85%, and then get it on my boots as well) I just lost a lot of Res, since my single target damage is fine, I respected some damage nodes on the tree and took res on the tree. I am running a total of 4 rates, with a body with 2 elevated mods, so upgrading that is expensive. Cheapest option is my boots since all they give me is life and light res, and 25% ms. Upgrading in Path is really build dependent. But easy fix for builds with many uniques are corrupt implicits, and enchantments, then it is important to calculate the benefit of an upgrade. Paying 15ex for an bone helmet with skelly damage enchant that is already shaper and elder, +5ex in crafting cost, is a 50% Inc damage for many skelly build. But 20ex is a lot of ex for a lot of people, and getting 10% more damage for 5ex 4 times seems more optimal for many people since they will feel their build getting stronger. We are playing a game after all.
There are definitely times to spend the 20 ex on a single item but you're right. Most of the time you're better off upgrading 4 items for 5 ex each especially if you can't craft while doing so for the big upgrade.
Very well sorted video. Quick question if you are so inclined to answer - You switched to Ele Hit from EA. Is there a drawback to running it as a hybrid - EA Totes and Ele Hit on the bow?
Yes the drawback would be that your ele hit would deal a lot less damage as you'd have to play Trinity Ele hit vs fire conversion. However if you're just using the self attack to kill trash it could be worth doing, so if you try it out let me know how it goes.
@@Tenkiei I have just started trying it (with Trinity as you mention) and for clearing - with chain - it is superior to the EA self cast. I however am only up to yellow maps trying this, and my suspicion was it would cause a dropoff on high level damage. But doing Delirium content up to Lvl. 7 maps thus far the EleHit is by far more reliable on clearing and keeping you moving. I have maybe 2-3ex in the build at this point and am only level 85, so there is room yet to grow.
My hope/theory was the EA Ballistas have enough carry for bossing, I was hoping for a faster clear and better zoom with the EleHit than I was getting with the EA since there is an "instant" effect with the EleHit.
I dropped the Combustion for the Trinity in the Bow. I haven't spent a lot of time thinking through this, just did it on a whim before hitting red maps where I was still planning EA/EA, but found myself surprised at how smooth the EleHit was.
@@ChrisMeirose Yeah I noticed that too. EA had really solid single target but the clear was definitely awkward, you do lose out on sniper's mark unfortunately, however I think with chain Ele Hit should still clear smoothly. I might try that for myself at some point.
It depends on why the build is using the timeless jewel. If the point is to use a specific keystone, the general matters and the number is irrelevant (ex Xibaqua, Doryani, Nasima). If the notables are important and not the keystone, then you will ideally want the same number but that can often be an impossible task, so the build should outline which notables to look for.
Your best bet is to look at what Enki is doing and see what you can adapt, or alternatively you can join my discord and put it in the builds and build help channel as people often give feedback on builds there.
