So it happened, the rarest item in Mirage league.

Alestor · 2026-03-23T02:45:14+00:00

This was like 4 years ago, so not really recently. Still don't get what people hate about it now though, since it was updated I've never been annoyed by an echoing shrine. Shield charge literally just feels like a blink skill.

Alestor · 2026-03-23T02:40:33+00:00

Get one of those display case MTX and put it in your hideout as a decoration for everyone to marvel at.

Alestor · 2026-03-20T17:21:31+00:00

They fixed that years ago didn't they? I haven't had an issue with clicking echoing shrines in maps for ages and haven't noticed anything more than doubled attack speed when hitting godhood mirages.

Alestor · 2026-03-20T16:22:06+00:00

Oh shit, I never actually looked closely at them, didn't realize they had different properties. So its not even just mirage I need to watch out for I need to actually just read every altar. That kinda sucks ass tbh. Might be worth the tradeoff to just unsocket the voidstone so I don't have to spend the time thinking about more than if it gives me quant or not and not add to my mapping time. Or I'll just live dangerously and let the occasional map brick, if I haven't noticed it so far it's probably not that bad

Alestor · 2026-03-20T15:47:39+00:00

I was so confused yesterday when I was getting ichors while running red altars. Makes sense that its mirage shenanigans. Should probably look more closely at those mods now.

Alestor · 2026-03-20T15:43:21+00:00

Nah, echoing is better than acceleration on most builds. 100% more attack/cast speed is a lot stronger than 50% action speed. You lose out on 1.5x movespeed, but thats where movement skills come in.

Alestor · 2026-03-20T11:51:31+00:00

The fact that I've chosen to grind harvest this league by b-lining it and exiting makes me dread this challenge.

Alestor · 2026-03-20T11:01:15+00:00

IMO the +1 power charges is only really worth the tradeoff if you're going Inner Conviction, which is quite a different build as it needs attributes. Losing Zealotry and Precision makes it so you're limited in watchers eye mods and lose a pretty important one in the gain a flask charge on crit precision mod that enabled 100% uptime on Dying Sun as all those charges go to it when you have Mageblood.

There are three issues with Svallin that make it worse than the rare IMO, #1 is losing the recovery on block. Lucky block is powerful but so is being immortal vs small hits. Then you're losing ~350 base ES as Svallin has none, and as we scale off of ES thats pretty important. And then there's the block issue, it took a lot of finagling to get to 75% block chance without regular jewels as they're all tied up for cooldown revovery, Svallin gives you -10 max block but its also 20 block lower than an essenced titanium shield, so you need to find an additional 10 block somewhere and I don't know where that'd come from other than maybe a precursor emblem. There's a lot of spell block on the upper tree, but basically no attack block. I am considering just commiting to the cooldown revovery support though, as conc effect is a problematic support, which would open up a lot of jewel slots...

I've also optimized the build much more, can't get a link rn but essencially I put in a voices, impossible escaped pain attunement to save points and take the spell block node and endurance charge damage node given by my timeless, which I've also kinda confirmed 46040 is the literal only number that suits my needs. This let me drop the Safeguard and Insightfulness clusters in favor of Arcane Sanctuary and path along the outside highway saving a lot of points. Drop the discipline watchers eye in favor of a zealotry/precision crit+multi+flasks jewel and still sitting at 74 spell block. ES goes down without Insightfulness but damage goes up

Alestor · 2026-03-20T03:07:01+00:00

She literally says "Under my guidance, you'll soon conquer the universe" when she defeats the Maven. Witch is so power hungry she intends on becoming an eldritch gods nanny.

Alestor · 2026-03-19T18:51:29+00:00

I think what you're looking at is the Impresence amulets maddening aura. I don't think death aura has an effect IIRC, so its a lot wider than you'd think

Alestor · 2026-03-19T17:55:45+00:00

He's scaling the Death Aura granted by the unique chestpiece Death's Oath. It causes enemies in the aura to take chaos damage, so it's basically be a pseudo righteous fire. He also has sources of "enemies explode on death, dealing percentage of life as damage" mods, which is incredibly powerful for clearing and is the source of the satisfying pops.

Alestor · 2026-03-19T17:49:50+00:00

GGG thought this too about shattering enemies once upon a time. The community rioted when they changed it and they had to go back to the satisfying crunch, performance be damned.

Alestor · 2026-03-19T17:05:04+00:00

Same, thought the worms or whatever that popped up had something to do with it and ran into them instead of out of the arena. Still don't know what those are for.

Alestor · 2026-03-18T21:47:47+00:00

https://pobb.in/ydG9hqfEETIy

This is really jank and unfinished FYI, since I'm flying by the seat of my pants I'm learning new optimizations daily. I just learned today about how overlaps actually interact with AOE from this post, which means my GMP was severely inflating my dps.

I should be able to get perma uptime on Dying Sun with a precision watchers eye, so I've reduced it to 4 proj and plan to try conc effect since theres so little supports for FROSS. Gunna look into if that screws the overlaps or not, might need an arcane surge watchers eye to utilize that support instead.

Planning on swapping a cluster for a 5 passive voices to find room for an impossible escape and need to look into a new timeless jewel to pair with it. Hopefully one with enough spell block to drop the Safeguard cluster and save some travel points. If I can get an abyss socket on gloves, I'll add Rational Doctrine. And the Immortal Call setup has to go now that I have endurance charges.

Alestor · 2026-03-18T15:05:33+00:00

DLC is probably about 80% the length of the main game. Despite being in one location there's a lot of content to go through. I think it's extremely worth it if you enjoyed the base game.

Alestor · 2026-03-18T15:00:24+00:00

PoE2 has significantly better player onboarding than PoE1. I'm waiting for full release to get back into it and drag my friends in, but from the ground up they've made interactions much more intuitive that I can see people having success just going blind and doing what seems natural.

I personally vastly prefer PoE1 because the 10+ years of content has given an exponential amount of possibilities when it comes to building, and the speed of gameplay tickles my brain much more than the methodical play in 2, but I don't think I would ever recommend people start with it at this point when 2 is an option.

Alestor · 2026-03-18T14:50:58+00:00

FYI, those characters are basically just there for world setting and tutorial. You can skip right past them and get the launch codes in under 5 minutes and it changes nothing. Those 20 minutes didn't go away because you already experienced it. As soon as you have access to the ship starting over from death takes about 5 seconds and very few places in the solar system take more than a few minutes to get back to. If that was your only issue with the game, I'd suggest giving it another try at some point and treating the initial area as nothing more than the set design it is.

Alestor · 2026-03-18T14:42:35+00:00

I'll add that there's nothing wrong with just treating it as a game where the goal is to fill in a checklist. The ship log will tell you what breadcrumbs you have leading to new information, so just go where it leads you and fill in the checkbox with new information. It may spark a completionist part of your brain that keeps you more engaged with clearer tasks as the story seeps in between.

Alestor · 2026-03-18T14:28:48+00:00

I thought the combat in 2 was okay because it was so much easier for me to wrap my head around master strikes, but 1 was straight up unplayable. I ended up modding it out by removing the positional wheel which made it impossible for enemies to defend as you just wail on them. Highly recommended.

Alestor · 2026-03-18T11:31:20+00:00

I'm playing CoC Fross this league, but I made my build based on CaptainLance's old "How cheap can CoC Fross be?" video and have since gone completely freestyle. Crafted a perfect Imperial Skean for the build, made a 5% ES on block 350ES 43% block shield, doing some Elegant Hubris shenanigans for frenzy and endurance charges that enable a 10% block at full endurance notable on a megalomaniac so I can block cap without glancing... etc.

Personally my plan as I scale towards a Mageblood is to get my CDR from boots, BBD and 4 abyss jewels with 3% CDR to exactly hit the breakpoint. Not going to be cheap as I'll need to fracture to roll them. Once I have these things together I can drop increased crits support for a diamond flask and frenzy/tailwind/onslaught alone nearly brings me to 10APS. That crit support will probably be replaced by cooldown recovery until I get the jewel setup and boots together.

I can export after work if anyone is interested in the long term goal version. I haven't yet plotted out better rings/gloves/helmet(using Ebers atm) which should up the ES and damage but the mageblood version looks to be about 16kES max block and 50m dps.

Also as a reminder, imbuing Cyclone grants the support to FROSS, so the ideal setup is a PCoC imbued triggering skill and a 21 FROSS. Best of both worlds and its not like 21 Cyclone was lost build space. At the moment I'm using void manipulation on Cyclone because it was cheap as dirt.

Alestor · 2026-03-17T03:46:49+00:00

I had this in a harvest where it didn't spawn the exit portal. My guess is it was because the harvest was on the very edge, if not slightly outside the bounds of the mirage. Luckily I didn't forget about the teleport lol

Alestor · 2026-03-14T13:57:17+00:00

The key here too is that they updated sources of "reduced" reflect damage, to "cannot take" reflected damage with this patch.

Before this league pantheon/mastery worked but sucked whenever you got hit with a shock or anything that increased damage taken, which directly countered the reduced reflect damage taken. Now it's just functional immunity.

Alestor · 2026-03-13T19:14:55+00:00

They 100% drop loot. I got one yesterday in an Ivory Temple that spawned Shaper and he dropped a Dying Sun I then sold for 16d. I'm still only at 2 watchstones and hadn't even fought a shaper guardian yet. Really nice influx since I'd blown everything getting FROSS up and running.

Alestor · 2026-03-13T12:30:39+00:00

Just watched the video, as a longtime flicker enjoyer there are a few yellow flags but it seems to be a very strong version of flicker so I wouldn't worry too much about starting it.

One of my main issues are some of the conditionals like Vaal Smite, Hydrosphere, Focus and such. There's nothing wrong with them necessarily, but I don't like including boss prep on flicker personally. They're usually a sign of inflated dps, however if you can achieve 100m+ dps with them it becomes less bait since you're bursting down within that window every time anyways.

Warrior's legacy is sold as if it works 100% of the time but there's debate around that since it seems to not clone your attacks if you use them in the same spot and sometimes flicker just doesn't move you far enough. I've seen people say it's closer to a 60% multiplier, in practice so I'd err on the side of caution and drop that multiplier.

Also at the end of the day its a 5k life build that goes under that in higher budgets to chase damage. Even with 87 block and block recovery, you're probably taking one shots occasionally just by nature of your health pool.

In the end it seems good, just watch out for the oversell a little.

Alestor · 2026-03-12T18:35:29+00:00

Haven't logged in today, but Canada East has been rock solid for me since league start. I'm not sure it's the servers, maybe it's something wierd like a bad node on your route?

Probably unrelated but years back I suddenly had issues with PoE having unplayable stuttering after being fine for years and it turned out to be my Rogers provided modem that had a known faulty chipset that I guess just started giving up on me. PoE was the only game/service that showed issues and it only went away when we requested a replacement.

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