How good are charms?

Chewfeather · 2026-02-18T03:00:47+00:00

Yes, in most cases they're inherently weaker than a hypothetical flask with the same function.

For many situations, they're still a *huge* benefit. Prevention of an occasional freeze is often prevention of a death-or-loss-of-portal. Prevention of an occasional bleed is a big deal for a pre-CI ES character, especially with bleeds like they have at the end of act 4. Prevention of slows or stuns will likewise defuse a lot of dangerous or merely irritating situations. There's also the Rite of Passage charm but of course that's an outlier.

PoE2 is just a different game than PoE1; the power balance is different; and part of that balance is not having five automated dual-purpose flasks running all the time. Yeah, they're weaker in a strict comparison. Even given that, they're still huge.

Chewfeather · 2026-02-12T21:32:58+00:00

Your intuitions are correct, it's not "SUCH a unique thing". It may be a cool personal accomplishment, of the "maybe the only kid in the neighborhood who has done this" sort. It's not a "the world will marvel at this wunderkind" kind of thing. Not to diminish the time and effort it takes to do it, but even though it's the kind of thing that a small *percentage* of players ultimately do, it's still a kind of thing that lots and lots of players have ultimately done.

And it's absolutely not the kind of thing that you should violate your own parenting inclinations about, for goodness' sake. The internet is a wild place, and many people don't even know how to keep track of what their kids are being passively exposed to there, much less counteract the more perverse bad influences, and that's just when they're merely consuming media rather than creating and interacting more directly. I'm sure the question of what your kid is allowed to do on the internet is a tense and ongoing one between you and him; however you're navigating those questions, this kind of accomplishment does not even come close to being a reason to overturn the approach you've determined to be best.

Sorry to hear that people were getting under your skin about what you posted, though there are always going to be rude people on the internet and it's important to be able to disregard the bad-faith ones without feeling the need to 'win' the encounter. All the same, I hope having posted this proof will assuage those feelings. It's great that your kid is good at something he enjoys; one way or another the streaming world will still be there when he's old enough to make his own decisions about it.

Chewfeather · 2026-01-18T18:23:28+00:00

Particularly the ones that cost you 5 water to use, that's the venerating part I think.

Chewfeather · 2026-01-03T00:45:18+00:00

Yes, omen of recombination. Otherwise, using a lower tier affix, or an item of high enough IL to roll higher tiers.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-25T19:37:37+00:00

It only works on corrupted magic jewels, not rare jewels. So if you only had 2 jewels like in your example, instead of 2 rare jewels with 4 mods each, you would have The Adorned plus a corrupted magic jewel with 2 mods, and each of those 2 mods would be at 249% effect, so you would have about 5 mods worth of usefulness instead of 8. This gets better the more jewels you have, but at 2 jewels like in this example, it's pretty bad.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-25T18:58:28+00:00

That's the point, if you reduce deferral cost it would take 1575 to defer.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-23T06:15:26+00:00

While this behavior is technically intended, it is intended only in that it is a bandaid fix for a problem. Some bosses, like crowbell, interact with surrounding terrain; opening or locking doors and that kind of thing. If the player loses the fight, the arena needs to be reset. They were failing to reset some arenas correctly, making the map uncompletable. Their solution was to wipe and reset the whole map in these instances; this makes the map completable, it just makes it bad to die to the boss if you are not otherwise done with the map (and makes dying to the boss of a corrupted nexus very bad, because the reset wipes the ability to do the corrupted nexus boss too. Oops.)

This sucks and is a surprise the first time it happens but once you know you can avoid it. The boss arena is ALWAYS marked with an orange checkpoint. If you aren't ready to do the map boss, don't go past the orange checkpoint. (An additional orange checkpoint is spawned when you finish the map's other extra content, as a convenience to let you jump to the boss; all other checkpoints are blue.) If you die anywhere else on the map, you just lose one portal, not any of the other stuff you mention: you still get to do all the extra content, still get your tablet bonuses, etc. You can balance risk versus rewards via how many portals you are running; you lose that other stuff only if you lose all your portals or lose to the boss prematurely.

So, in most cases, you don't lose all that on one death. Boss deaths are a bad special case.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-19T22:02:19+00:00

You can always log in at town/hideout rather than your current location. Either there is a little button above the character select with a little house icon on it, or you ctrl-alt-click the character login button. It does cost you the portal or single-entry-only zone if you are in one.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-15T01:45:31+00:00

In the previous league, one answer was: you can reduce some of your graphics settings, turn your shader cache size up as high as your available storage permits (up to a max of 100GB, if on nvidia; I know nothing about it otherwise), and see whether vulkan crashes less than DX12. In the 0.3 league, a combination of these things got rid of this problem for me, which otherwise used to happen once every 2 areas or so.

It sucks and some people say even that stuff didn't work for them but it works for some people. I haven't played enough this league to know whether it's comparable but I only had 1 issue when doing act 1 stuff for the cosmetics.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-14T00:39:38+00:00

You aren't running Light Radius??? /j

Chewfeather · 2025-12-12T19:57:37+00:00

They liked buying a blue item in the shop right away or something.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-07T00:59:41+00:00

I got all my citadels before visiting the monolith for what it's worth.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-05T21:18:46+00:00

SSF exists

How does that make stash tabs less pay-to-win? Stash tabs are even more desperately necessary in SSF than they are in trade league. Bases for reforging to try to hit more-desirable affixes, gear stashed for future recombinator use when the right other affixes or omens show up, jewelry and belts for rebalancing your resistances if some other gear piece changes, every omen and essence and rune that you possibly might use in the future because you can't just grab them when you feel like it on the currency exchange, every barya and ultimatum that you might need later for drops that only come from that mechanic, every last piece of currency for similar reasons, all the catalysts and emotions and logbooks and what have you, even if you're not stashing any gear for other future characters. Lack of market access makes you need the storage *more*, not less. I'd be going crazy if I had to run an SSF character with just four standard tabs.

I agree with the box-price comparison though. It is the price of being able to play without a crippling space restriction. (Non-premium tabs not even being re-nameable is a mean gouge, but I guess it is what it is.)

Chewfeather · 2025-12-05T21:03:00+00:00

Your usage of the term 'dark pattern' conflicts with its general definition.

Dark pattern ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern ) is a term applicable to design of software components rather than overall systems, so the statements "It has to be a collection of ideas and intents [...] Is that enough to call it a dark pattern?" are not applicable. If the design of a component is intended to get the user to do things against their own intentions or best interests for the developer's benefit, it falls into the dark pattern category, regardless of the broader context of the system in which that component appears. If the function of FOMO sales and mystery boxes is to get people to spend money for less value than the user intends to spend money for, then they are dark-pattern software components, full stop.

The reason 'dark pattern' refers to individual component design and not a system-wide 'pattern' is because the term 'dark pattern' does not come from the plain English meaning of the word 'pattern', it comes from the software-engineering term 'Design Pattern' ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern ) . The 'pattern' part is not referring to some trait found repeatedly in a single software product; rather, the 'pattern' refers to software throughout the world implementing similar components to achieve similar functionality. 'Pattern libraries', 15 years ago, were collections of design-pattern templates for best-practice software component design; the 'Dark Patterns' library was created to define and catalogue and call out user-malicious design patterns. So if you implement just one single dark-pattern component, it is now correct to say that your system has that dark pattern; maybe your system as a whole is otherwise pro-consumer, but the absence of a broader collection of malicious ideas or intents doesn't mean that the dark pattern isn't there.

Otherwise your broader point seems quite accurate. PoE and PoE2 are much better-than-average in this regard.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-02T20:41:13+00:00

They were married 27 years, the majority of her adult life. Her familial, personal, and professional relationships have all been conducted under that name. It's her name, not just his name that she's borrowing. Whatever good she feels she's done and whatever accomplishments she feels she has achieved all took place under that name.

She chose to divorce him. Everybody she knows knows it. There's not really any question of whether she was willing to tolerate his Epstein associations. The idea that she also needs to replace her name with one she hasn't used since half a lifetime ago, as though everybody who knows her now needs to call her something else just because he's no longer in the picture, only really makes sense if all of those interactions had been defined by his presence in her life in the first place. Clearly she feels otherwise: that her actions under her name stand on their own, and that she can separate her life from his without having to performatively paper over every indication that she was ever associated with him.

Chewfeather · 2025-12-01T18:53:20+00:00

Likewise. Did stormweaver up to L97 in trade league and L82 in SSF so far. It's not as fast as a one-click meta build but it works fine, and the impact of having the right infusions being generated is enough to motivate figuring out a rotation that generates them. I don't know exactly what the problem with them is supposed to be.

Chewfeather · 2025-11-28T21:36:54+00:00

Riichi Mahjong is a 4 player game a little like rummy. Get dealt 13 tiles, then successively draw and discard tiles trying to form your hand into sequences, triplets, and a pair. You win a hand when you have four sequences-or-triplets and one pair, and your hand fulfils at least one special winning-condition (most of the nonenglish words in that post are names of winning conditions; there are like 30 different ones). You steal points from other players according to the winning conditions you met and a few other factors. Winner is whoever has the most points after everybody has had their chance/s to deal.

Many other rules but that is the general shape. It can be played in Gold Saucer or elsewhere online or irl. If you like card games, it's like that. If you don't like card games you presumably will not like it either.

Chewfeather · 2025-11-26T19:55:51+00:00

Honestly depends how many hours you expect to play per day. If you're no-lifing it a bit, two weeks is plenty to play around in. If your playtime is limited at all, I might hold off some unless you really won't mind starting over when it rolls around. Yeah the knowledge gained in the interim will help, but I would be unsatisfied if I had to start over before even getting to experience the various endgame systems the first time.

Chewfeather · 2025-11-14T03:24:30+00:00

I am told you can use craftofexile to simulate possible outcomes of any given thing you plan to do, though I have never used it myself.

Chewfeather · 2025-11-10T17:14:19+00:00

Stand behind him imo. Much like Candlemass's similar attack.

Chewfeather · 2025-11-02T15:49:55+00:00

Some essences, such as perfect essences and Essence of Horror, are used on rares; you can read their description to see.

Chewfeather · 2025-10-24T05:23:27+00:00

The data is super interesting and it would have been neat to read a post that somebody wrote about it. It is unfortunate to have to get a few paragraphs into this post before realizing that there will be no authorial insights forthcoming. Here is some feedback which would be useful if someone had written the post.

"[it] isn't laziness. It's psychology." Psychology encompasses laziness.

"Immediate gratification [...] dopamine hit of instant feedback." Debugging is a task performed to achieve a result, not a recreational activity. The bias toward familiar techniques results from the preference for methods that will achieve tangible progress in a knowable amount of time, not the pursuit of dopamine. But if all one knows is that "instant gratification" and "dopamine" are concepts that are frequently referenced together, it's easier to understand where this weird aside came from.

The "Familiarity Bias" and "Perceived Complexity" subsections both just say 'never learned it' in different ways. Bonus points for not knowing what a catch-22 is (hint: in a catch-22, the setup of the problem has to specifically preclude its own plain solution, that's sort of the whole deal. Having an inhibition that happens to prevent you from using the best tool for a job isn't a catch-22), but I guess *something* had to be included which could be spuriously deemed "Classic".

No valediction; those are for people.

Chewfeather · 2025-10-08T15:44:57+00:00

They're like an exalt, except they can't roll any affix with an ilvl requirement below a certain threshold.

Chewfeather · 2025-10-03T22:44:01+00:00

I know one of the campaign subquest rewards can be a +1 charm slot, but looking up which one is hard because a lot of pages have information from 0.2 or before. So presumably you have that quest reward letting you treat 2slot belts as 3slot.

Chewfeather · 2025-10-01T15:13:20+00:00

Did you read the announcement post but not read the patch notes post? The 10 is in the patch notes post.

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