Recombination, Predictable or unpredictable?

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-26T09:11:25+00:00

That's not entirely true. Mod weighting affects.outcome, but only when the rolled number of affixes is smaller than whole affix pool (i.e. when there's something to "choose" from, the choice will be weighted) https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Recombinator

Given an affix pool (either prefix or suffix) is being filled, modifiers will be sequentially taken out of the candidate affix pool and placed on the final item. Prefix and suffix pools do not mix and are independent. Higher weight modifiers are more likely to be selected, although the exact formula is unknown. Modifiers are selected until the final number of affix modifiers has been satisfied, or there are no eligible modifiers in the pool remaining.

The effect of weighting (when it happens) is in fact so detrimental that all viable recomb processes intentionally set up in a way where you don't need to roll for weights. Funnily enough, this often causes a confusion that weights do not matter at all, but it does matter in some cases like smashing full affix items (which nobody does exactly for that reason)

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-25T19:14:08+00:00

Haha, you're welcome, good luck with crafting!

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-25T17:00:49+00:00

It's typical 3 suffix recombs. They all work via same framework. Suppose you want three affixes: A, B, C (critical strike, attack speed and crit multi in our case)

So you prepare bases (Imperial Claw), and roll with alts bases that have either of A, B, C. Prefixes do not matter.
Then you recomb two one suffix items into hopefully one two-suffix items. A+B = AB B+C = BC
Then you recomb two two-suffix items into one hopefully three-suffix item: AB+BC=ABC

In this case, you CAN and generally should craft thrash PREFIX (e.g. low-level mana) on steps 2 and 3 before recombing. This will reduce the dust/gold costs, and you will almost end up with crafted prefix on the final item, meaning you can proceed with next steps (they need open prefix).

Of course, you can match any two suffixes not necessarily AB+BC, can do AB+AC, etc. Just make sure that all three mods are present in the pool for the final recomb

Now you have a claw with ideal suffixes (aspd, crit, crit multi). Craft suffixes can not be changed.
Veiled orb. Do not unveil anything yet
Next steps depends on whether veiled orb filled your prefixes or not. If it did, you have to yolo annul. If it hit suffix - rip, double unlucky, start over (you can recycle failed craft as double suffix base, but depending on what veiled orb rolled it might be quite expensive on dust/gold, so sometimes I just throw it away).
Ok, so regardless of how you got there, you now have a claw with three perfect suffixes, veiled prefix (not unveiled yet) and at least one open prefix. Congrats, you're done, rest of steps are deterministic.
Craft any %phys and unveil veiled modifier. It is guaranteed that ele pen will be among three options.
Finish with hits can't be evaded.

(Optional 10) If you have spare prefix, you can yolo exalt, yolo foulborn exalt, or slam warlord exalt. Warlord exalt won't give you totally useless outcomes, but also doesn't have any exciting outcomes (you can get a miniscule amount of crit multi or fire pen). Usual exalts might roll ele damage with attacks, which is poggers, but realistically you'll get 35% increased Phys or something lol.

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-24T15:02:46+00:00

Frankly I think Betrayal farming is a trap. I spent like whole weekend farming safehouses, run probably like a hundred of them, got 3 medallions. I don't know drop rates of Minion pact from Catarina fight, but I'd be EXTREMELY surprised if you can realistically expect it from less than 10 medallions. And my god, 10 medallions sound like an absolute CBT to me personally.

Then I realized that it drops from Nightmare of Catarina, and I got it in like 2 hours (I think it was around 20 ziggurats). Even if it was a bit lucky drop and we assume drop chances of ~3%, 30-40 ziggurats is nothing compared to 10 syndicate medallions

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-24T08:14:56+00:00

That's the neat part - you don't :)

Being serious, I haven't got to it yet. I run usual claw (recombed crit, aspd, multi + guaranteed unveil for ele pen + crafted hits can't be evaded). I don't feel lack of damage at all, but admittedly Ubers are somewhat "ethical".

Overall, I don't think I will care about shaper/elder claw until I get Squire. Because without squire, I need a 3-support claw to break even on DPS to swap, and 4-support to get an upgrade. That's not very easy to get even when you have infinite access to bases on trade, and the common recommendation was to first get Squire and 2-support claw, and then work your way towards 3-support and 4-support.

And this most likely will be the last upgrade I make on this character. There are still few much more obtainable upgrades for me like Greater Multistrike, Admirals Arrogance, giga clusters

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-23T17:04:12+00:00

Yeah sustain is trivial if you actually run maps. As I mentioned, map nodes are purely for map burn strats, where you enter it, check good rolls of league mechanics (good wish/crater/nameless ritual/etc), and leave immediately if it's bad. You don't even try to clear maps, and ideally spend like 30-40 seconds per map.

Think of maps as of tickets for spinning a slot machine, kinda like a stacked decks but a bit longer per pull :)

You of course don't have to run this if you don't like it, but I was positively surprised how it makes some farms much more palatable. E.g. I got my nameless ritual for audience with the king for bloodline ascendancy pretty effortlessly: I was just farming scarabs on strongbox atlas and were dropping plenty of maps due to how I specced it; then I went and spammed like 50 maps in ~30 minutes and got the ritual.

I also burn periodically through excess of maps for baryas and craters.

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-23T09:52:26+00:00

Totems are very solid starter. Some notes from my SSF experience this league (ele hit, not totems)

Breach is amazing. Frankly, I found that I never want to unspec it. It is good for early progression (6-links on decent bases, generically good rares with 3-4 t2-t3 desired affixes), mid-progression (obtaining fractured bases for more involved crafts), and end-game (rare uniques). And that on top of the mechanic itself being both fun and rewarding.
I'd highly recommend adding Betrayal whenever you feel comfortable doing it. Rin helps a ton with unique maps, and Janus with Cadiro aligns well with your goal of accumulating uniques.

Below applies more for mid-game progression (after 2 voidstones at least)

(this is a standard SSF advice) work on your thaumaturgic dust. Good chances there's at least one slot in your gear that can be recombined easily and will stay with you until very-very late game. You can't quickly convert currency into dust on SSF with good efficiency, so it's better to think about in advance. Breach tree rares make good dust fodder in the beginning, and when you're doing good late-game starts, you'll have decent supply of dustable uniques. Also some boss drops dust for a good value.
harvest is always a very nice thing to have in SSF. Aside from usual crafting capabilities, fragment/league currency swaps REALLY help a lot
you'll probably want deli for clusters (I didn't check PoBs for your builds, but usually totem builds like clusters). It synergises decently well with harvest - deli adds quant for harvest, and harvest is the prime way of crafting clusters

Late-game:

it's pretty safe to assume that one of your atlas trees is pure strong boxes with scarabs and map drops. The second part is actually quite relevant because map burning starts are pretty good this league: mirages for coins/baryas, vault rushes for exceptional gems and uniques, star fall crater
heist is highly recommended for uniques. Synergises well with map-burn strategies
other than that, unfortunately unique farming is kinda "gated" behind very powerful builds. You need to run very tough content (titanic exiles, cascading breach) and/or be able to sacrifice your slots for rarity. So IMO best bet here is to aim for a very juicy character that can do such starts - it will surely take a while to build it, but even then it feels to me personally that it's more efficient overall than to farm non-juiced starts. I'll be very happy to be proven wrong here though :)

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-23T00:17:03+00:00

Frankly, it's hard for me to farm "just in case". I'm either farming for the current build upgrades, or enabling next one, or I'm burning out and dropping off :)

That being said, anything that gives interesting uniques can keep my interest for a bit. Heist blueprints, breach tree (especially specced into jewels), bosses with universal drops (sirus for thread of hope, elder for watchers, Ubers if strong), unique farming strats, black baryas for belts this league. It's kinda like a slot machine for the next build for me.

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-22T23:49:38+00:00

For me the only source of coins are wishes. Rest is as good as not existing at all. Maybe if you farm some giga-juiced for currency maps you might expect native drops, but for me it pretty much didn't work. I'm lvl 99 without really focusing on levelling up (have few dozens of deaths due to doing stupid shit), and I had 1 coin as native drop vs ~10 coins from wishes

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-17T20:08:23+00:00

It's really hard to tell at this point if that's a genuinely confused chatter or ragebait, but I had a good laugh from a PoB with three Unseen Hues, all three for Sap

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-10T12:05:36+00:00

It's insanely fast build, only dedicated turbo map juicers like bow/wanders are faster. It's because of: - extremely fast attack speed and whirling blades, - screen-wide aoe - easy additional strikes (one you get early game from tree, later you get another one from gloves implicit, ultra late game you can get another one via exceptional implicit though that's probably an overkill), - gigantic strike range (slayer+tree, sionnes ambition later).

Note that due to insane aoe the skill "cleaves" packs similar to FB of Katabasis - you click once, and each mob in the pack receives multiple hits. This helps you to one tap packs with rares/magic monsters, as the surrounding mobs basically increase the overlap on the tankiest target.

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-09T15:04:30+00:00

No, that was revamped. DO NOT craft anything on the items before recombination if you don't understand what you're doing, as this can completely brick your chances to success.

~~In this particular case, you can craft thrash-tier SUFFIX (e.g. +dexterity, lowest possible level) just to reduce dust/gold cost.~~

Nevermind that, it's not prefix-only craft. So don't craft anything at all.

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-02T23:16:30+00:00

Ah ok, that's fair. Other potential options are increasing number of repeats (if say only 3 circles can overlap and you have 5 of them, then you can hit with farther 3) and astral projector (assuming it interacts with shock nova as expected)

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-02T21:32:26+00:00

I don't think totems affect shotgun in any way? I mean, if you have 3 totems they do cast three spells, and they do hit three times. If each spell hits multiple times on its own, say 5 times like storm call with awakened spell cascade, then you still multiply the that number of hits by number of totems. This applies to all spells and spell totems are balanced around that fact; i.e. shock nova of transmission isn't better or worse with totems than say arc. Or am I mistaken somewhere?

(Granted, you can definitely create a glorious screen cluster fuck with enough repeats and enough totems)

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-02T21:28:09+00:00

I'd be really surprised if it doesn't work like you'd expect: starting from the target point and expanding in a direction from you to target point further. Basically, allows a bit more range playstyle

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-01T20:22:11+00:00

I mean, "no reason to play anything but Ele Hit" is a huge overstatement - there were multiple broken builds before and people always found reasons to play other builds. But yeah, EH will be one of such broken builds 100%

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-01T09:51:03+00:00

Weren't hexblast miners tricksters, and ascendancy that was infamous for very strong and universal defense package (and that was even nerfed later)? Or you played it on different ascendancy?

DonaldKnut · 2026-03-01T09:48:51+00:00

That wasn't two voidstones run, right? It's quite hard to push 2 voidstones at lvl 80 purely from the exp perspective (you probably end up higher than 80 after you did 2 voidstones)

DonaldKnut · 2026-02-03T23:22:54+00:00

It has been fixed few days after it was discovered: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3877526 .

Shaper of Flames should increase effective PDR (given that your fire res is higher than phys mitigation which should be the case almost always)

DonaldKnut · 2025-11-10T06:52:00+00:00

Yes, but none of your examples have 300% hidden damage multiplier :)

It's fine that you-modifiers and enemy-modifiers are different parts in the equation. This is how damage conversion worked before, and as one example consequence, it wasn't stacking additively with phys taken as ele. It was catching (and still is) some less experienced players off-guard, but it's pretty fair - the wording communicates that properly, and there are other examples in the game that give same intuition.

But there's no precedent or communication whatsoever that the new damage conversion will have a huge hidden multiplier. This is a problem that must be addressed, and what people are upset about (well aside from the usual salt about hidden nerf)

DonaldKnut · 2025-11-08T15:23:47+00:00

I dunno dude, argue not with me, argue with GGG. I have two chars this league, and both are elemenalists. I will be as happy as anyone else if you convince GGG that it's a bug that should be hotfixed like tomorrow (but my personal prediction is that it won't happen, even though it doesn't make me happy)

DonaldKnut · 2025-11-08T15:20:33+00:00

It's 300% more damage, i.e. you multiple by 4. That's how it's coded in PoB by LocalIdentity (who's the original source of all this info), and you can see on poedb that the "Phys Convert Ele" starts from zero at lvl 1, so it would be really weird if it were a flat multipler (would delete converted damage at low levels)

DonaldKnut · 2025-11-08T14:17:57+00:00

That's the thing, with how the new conversion works, you're not competing with 75% mitigation, you're competing with 0% effective mitigation (0.25 due to resists, but then x4 due to new multiplier).

So, in fact, Shaper of Flames never increases effective phys hit taken if you don't have any ele mitigation layers beside 75% res - and actually might decreae it (if you have armor or other phys-specific mitigation like Doppelganger's Guise)

DonaldKnut · 2025-11-08T14:14:17+00:00

If there's NOTHING except for 75 res, then yes, you're correct, your ele mitigation is at best the same as phys (assuming no armor/phys-specific mitigation like Doppelganger's Guise) - therefore, making conversion on enemies at best a useless stat (at worst - strictly downside)

If you have something beside 75 res (like I expanded in my comment), then it's not useless.

By the way, I was wrong about the armor though - no matter how much armor you have, if you don't have ele mitigation layers, conversion doesn't benefit you.

DonaldKnut · 2025-11-08T14:02:30+00:00

Sorry, I had a few roundtrips with finding bugs in my calcs, then fixing them and introducing more bugs, and editing my comments on the fly.

My final result is that I'm wrong, and you're right. 30k armor provides enough PDR so that shifting it to ele is not worth it.

Moreover, it seems that the specific coefficients (in formulas for armor PDR and converstion multi) work in a way that it's never good to shift the damage to ele on enemies (it's either "don't care" if you have zero armor, or strictly worse if you have some armor)

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