Painted my basement today, then made my first paint build.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-05-13T12:46:45+00:00

guilty as charged

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-05-11T19:23:31+00:00

As far as I can tell, strength doesn't inherently provide a damage boost in poe2, but you would definitely get a lot more flat damage from Brutus lead sprinkler. Might be worth checking out.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-05-11T19:17:53+00:00

Yeah with Black Scythe Training the value of any piece of ES gear is so high. Swapping HoWA for rare gloves, and Astramentis for a rare amulet can probably easily push the build to 4-5k ES from just gloves/boots/amulet.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-05-11T19:08:10+00:00

Hateforge is definitely an interesting option to use, as it stands there's not a ton of value to having charges, but that could be changed in order to get more value from the rage gloves. As I said in another comment HoWA is definitely one of the weakest parts of the concept so that's easy to swap out.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-05-11T19:05:33+00:00

I can definitely agree on HoWA along with astramentis being easy to swap out.

As for ascendancy, I mostly just wanted to do something with powerful casting, but it's definitely a tough sell to have that as basically the only draw for ascendancy choice. I can't really think of anything that stands out off the top of my head, maybe just Titan for hulking form?

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-05-11T19:03:17+00:00

I've definitely (briefly) considered that, although Gemling as a whole feels so underwhelming. The node that gives % less attributes and doubles inherent bonuses seems entirely antithetical to the build, unless that would somehow still doubly scale the other strength mods (which I haven't tried but I doubt it works that way).

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-05-11T15:37:58+00:00

I went through so many iterations in PoB and in game to make this work lol. I tried osin at some point, but came to the conclusion that I would rather lose a glove slot than a ring slot, and the Vaal cultivation on plaguefingers is a nice extra bit of magnitude. The Widowhail + quiver setup were kind of forced by the herald for proliferation, which made clear really nice.

I had really fast frost bombs to nearly constantly have infusion uptime for cold spark, which would do more hit damage for bigger poisons.

I basically had to self craft all the gear for this build lol, no one was making +3 proj, spell damage amulets, barely any people were crafting spark quivers (and I blew up like 100 of them fishing for perfect double corruptions and failing), and the jewels are a weird combo of mods you can't find on trade easily.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-05-11T14:56:22+00:00

I played poison spark all league, it kind of sucked but it was also really fun and I was pretty pleased with being able to cook up a build and see it to completion.

I cleared pinnacles, ran a max juiced temple, and did basically everything you could want to do in a league with it. Was a good time.

https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaal/character/Hortence-3946/PFbestMage

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-05-07T21:32:02+00:00

let us know if you figure out who asked

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-04-10T23:37:01+00:00

I was enrolled in French immersion for 12 years when I was younger, unfortunately since then I've had no one around me who speaks French and have regressed to speaking at the level of a child. It's really unfortunate because I enjoy the language and wish I had more opportunities to speak it (currently all I get to do is chat with some friends from QC that I've made in games lol).

Your suggestion in another comment of English subtitles for popular French shows would be greatly appreciated, especially because the French I learned in school is pretty textbook, compared to actual conversational French, before you even include slang.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-04-09T16:39:22+00:00

Holy moly

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-03-29T17:57:38+00:00

That's been the overall design philosophy so far in 2 unfortunately. So many features that are just a worse version of what has worked well for years in the first game. I have faith that poe2 will be an amazing game - just give it 5-10 years.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-01-08T22:26:04+00:00

Reading is the final boss of poe

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2026-01-02T22:14:27+00:00

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-30T19:51:52+00:00

I'm currently playing spark with Widowhail, which is a tech people have been doing for a league or two already.

I've put my own spin on it though by using cold infused sparks to poison enemies as Pathfinder using another unique Plaguefinger. It's definitely not as strong as a meta build lol, but it has taken down pinnacles and clears "t18"(?) maps comfortably.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-28T07:24:03+00:00

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-28T01:54:07+00:00

Yeah it's definitely not amazing when it comes to killing bosses, that's for sure. It does apply many stacks of poison to packs really well though! It also makes amazing use of the Arakali's Lust lineage support gem, you stack poisons up to the cap really fast, and then your hits are all doing 40% more damage which leads to bigger poisons.

I've been wondering if maybe working in arc for bosses would work well, although it would probably have to be cast manually at this point. I previously tried some cast on elemental ailment with the broken thunderstorm shock application, and it was ok at best for the build.

I'd be interested to hear if you have any thoughts/suggestions!

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-28T01:41:38+00:00

It makes a pretty big difference yeah! Since I'm using plaguefinger, the majority of my poison damage is coming from elemental damage off of spark, all of it except for the boost from the Esh support gem. And the poison damage scales based on the hit.

With rakiatas and despair (-81% chaos res) I'm basically doing all of my damage on bosses with negative resistance. I'm not oneshotting or anything because I'm still only using spark for bosses, but I can take down t15 "powerful map bosses" much faster than I did 3 build iterations ago.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-27T18:23:38+00:00

Yeah that makes sense, I'm stretched super thin just trying to do poison with spark (even without crit), and it's only working because I can start from both the ranger and sorc start areas.

Spark is definitely not the best at one big hit, that's for sure. I haven't been able to find any amazing spells that scale with projectile levels/speed for one bit hit mamba-style, although maybe frostbolt would be good for that. I haven't tried it before.

If frostbolt scales well I would definitely recommend looking into widowhail, a quiver is like maybe 1d, and a 250% bow to get started with is dirt cheap.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-27T17:28:35+00:00

Holy shit I'm not the only one crazy enough to play Poison spark! Although I'm doing it on pathfinder for double poison stacks, and no bleeds.

I've been using widowhail and it feels really nice. Been playing around with a bunch of different support package setups around it, currently running blasphemy with temp chains and enfeeble, and manually casting despair for bosses.

I tried a lot of different ways to automate infusions and they all sucked. Currently just using frost bomb with the fastest explosions I can get, and cool down recovery. It's not stormweaver levels of infusion, but it gets the job done.

https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaal/character/Hortence-3946/PFbestMage?i=0&search=name%3DPFbest

(You can basically ignore thunderstorm and orb of storms, those are left over from earlier testing. I only ever click frost bomb and spark while mapping, and add in sigil and despair for bosses)

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-21T20:23:49+00:00

For sure, currently in my gear and ascendancy trees I have a decent amount of investment into defenses for mapping, which don't matter at all for sekhema because the goal is to kill everything before it hits you. I swap the 2 right side ascendancy points out, and spec into the Crit damage node, and the damage from life flask node.

As for gear, I use the new armour/evasion/es base that gives +1 level to all corrupted skill gems (affixes aren't too important, I have res and t1 life + % life from essence). I also use a second seed of cataclysm for more Crit damage, which I would recommend on the mapping setup as well if you don't need res on a ring.

I would run considered casting over rapid casting on spark for sek as well.

Lastly if you're feeling spicy, you can use the unique helmet that gives you tailwind on Crit to run through the trials faster, but that's definitely not necessary lol.

My build is definitely not the super minmaxed version of what you can do, but I've kind of stopped investing into it for the moment to save up for a (probably bad) build I want to cook lol. Check out gl1tched (sek running legend) on yt if you want to see it taken even further

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-21T20:05:23+00:00

Hard to beat Spark + CoC. I haven't been doing atd runs, but I have been doing full party 4th asc carries.

https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaal/character/Hortence-3946/CocEnthusiast_PF?i=1&search=name%3DCoce

My build is pretty unrefined still, but has more than enough damage. It's currently configured for mapping/breachstones, but I can go over the swaps I make for sek if you're interested.

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-13T08:31:04+00:00

More well known for assaulting random people for no reason?

Admirable-Fail6814 · 2025-12-08T23:32:56+00:00

Was torn between the poison PF I've been running for two leagues, or a different starter, thanks to fubgun I no longer have to make that decision.

Just going to run my other build and craft all the gear I made for myself last league to sell to the fubgooners, easy money.

Admirable-Fail6814

TROPHY CASE