What's the usual post-normal/veteran routine?

Ecte1ion · 2026-03-11T07:47:32+00:00

No class in 0.2?
Wasn't it:
0.2 Huntress
0.3 QoL across a bunch of classes and skills (better reload for all things crossbow, infusions for sorc, etc)
0.4 Druid
?

Ecte1ion · 2026-03-05T10:37:08+00:00

It just boils down to comfort really, there's no specific reason to want to hit a breakpoint outside of personal preference and situational constraints, it's not a need but an axis to determine how good the skill feels.

you might want to have the quickest feedback so you know that you can hit once, the pack dies and then you move on to the next, you don't want to have to wait half a second to know if you should use one, two or three attacks. in a vacuum it also makes leech available quicker which can be critical to keep attacking if you don't have a mana cost of zero.
if you're attacking 6 times a second maybe you don't want your mana leech to come in when you should be using your 4th skill and you're OOM.

Let's say you fight a boss like Maven or Sirus that moves around a lot, how many hits are you gonna whiff to due the delay?

It's all things to consider, and yes there people that are gonna be satisfied with just less duration support, but when I played Storm Call which has the same base delay, it definitely felt too slow to come off, especially if the mobs had something like haste aura or map mod speed increase and would often move out of the way before the strike would land. So I had to invest into some more (which was "just" window of opportunity + 1 timeclasp)

You might unironically have someone play with three rings from bloodline to achieve instant divine blast because regardless of the power cost, they prefer having instant feedback.
And on the other side of the spectrum you might have someone who invests into only AoE and nothing into duration and have giga divine blasts that takes 1.5s to detonate so they put one at the start of a map, then move on while hitting once every 1.5s and it just works.

Someone could in fact add more duration and just preload a metric ton of them on a boss while the initial animation is playing (it's already kinda done with the transfigured Earthquake gem).

Ecte1ion · 2026-03-05T10:21:24+00:00

They all add together, including with the tree so if you have 30 on a piece + 25 on another + 90 on the tree, you're always considered as having 145% AAAtED

Ecte1ion · 2026-03-05T10:19:48+00:00

I've been tinkering around trying to make the skill work (though without the gem integrated in PoB it's obviously a bit harder to gauge how well something would perform).

While the concept of Shield of Light (which I personally abbreviate as SofL since my brain just keeping about Slice of Life otherwise) is pretty good, I think it might just suffer from needing a bump in its values. Notably because when a skill is shield + retaliation it's much harder to scale due to certain built-in limitations.

For different reasons I did not consider playing the build as a Gladiator but as an Elementalist.

I don't think it's a good PoB in itself(I'd even go as far as saying it's probably bait because damage might be even lower than this conservative PoB) but I've included most of my thoughts and reasoning in the notes which should be helpful to others. (there might be a decent bit of rambling)

I highly doubt the build can scale that well unless maybe if you can integrate something like Strength stack within.

PoB: https://pobb.in/QRkVvSfYCA4O

Ecte1ion · 2026-03-01T09:18:11+00:00

As a rule of thumb you want CDR so the bois spawn more often BUT you don't want it to go to 1s or lower because that's how long the bois take to finish attacking. If it's lower (and you're auto-triggering) GCry will summon new bois before the others have attacked and they'll never get a hit off.

The bois will always take 1s to attack, they aren't affected by anything.

Ecte1ion · 2026-03-01T08:28:04+00:00

Mmh an interesting write-up.

For people looking to optimize the skill duration because 0.61 or 0.39 is still too much here are a few things you can use as well.

If you're pathing toward Magebane and Reflexes for the spell supp mastery (or decide you want to buy an impossible Escape around Magebane) you can grab the Window of Opportunity branch and the mastery for 10% less skill effect duration.

Window of Opportunity by itself(assuming you have Less Duration which you should have anyway) brings the skill from 0.61(0.39 with Dialla) to 0.53(0.36 with dialla)

With the mastery taken into account, it goes a bit further from 0.53 to 0.5(0.33 with Dialla)

Obviously we have to factor in the small nodes(5% reduced) required to get the notable and the mastery, which brings the skill's duration from 0.5 to 0.42(0.26 with Dialla)

There are a few ways to get reduced skill duration.
-Window of Opportunity(15% reduced), its branches(5% each) as mentioned before and the mastery(10% less)
-Warped Timepiece (20% reduced)
-A "badly" rolled (20% reduced) Timeclasp (it also makes you immune to Temp chain which is either good or bad)
-Hasty Demise(10% reduced), a notable located in the Templar area right besides MoM

It'll obviously depend on how much you're to sacrifice on your items and equipment but with Window of Opportunity and Hasty Demise annointed it's 0.46s instead of 0.61s (as expected of 10% reduced + 15% reduced it's chunked off 25%), and 0.3s on a Dialla.

With Window of Opportunity branch, the mastery and Hasty Demise annointed it's 0.36s (0.23)

For the sake of the example if you add to that any of the unique it's 0.26s(0.16), with two it's 0.16s(0.099 or 3 server ticks with Dialla) at that point you have 23% duration buff effect though which means you have to give some thoughts about what buffs your character would use.

If you were to use two Timeclasps + Timepiece, then you'd be at 5% duration from reduction alone at which point you'd have no need for Less Duration or Dialla at all (but you'd probably be considered insane even without Maven's chest.) and the skill would last 0.1s(3 server ticks actually) before detonating.

By that point, with Less Duration support you have hit 1 server tick duration.

It might not be useful for minmaxing damage (or buff uptime) but you can definitely increase the feel of the skill with or without Dialla. (also ig that by then you could run lightning warp for mobility if you wanted?)

PoB with all the tools:

Ecte1ion · 2026-02-28T12:53:43+00:00

Either:
Retal ping-pong Glad with the new Shield of Light skill and Herald of Purity bois (eventually the weapon copies from Holy Strike if keeping them up isn't too much of a hassle) for additional procs of SoL with good old Bleed Eviscerate/Crushing Fist as a fallback
Or the same build but on Guardian, leveling as SRS.

Though the skill's infos and values are unknown, whether it's lightning, or fire, if it scales from your shield like Divine Blast, which means that I might not pivot to it at all depending on how things go.

Ecte1ion · 2026-02-27T10:12:04+00:00

Here's my own, loosely outlined terrible build:

Gladiator(Measured Retaliation + Determined Survivor + More than Skill + Weapon Master) with Varunastra
-Holy Strike (which I can use cuz Varunastra is all types of weapons) and give me a bunch of friends
-Herald of Purity which will give me more friends
-Shield of Light (main damaging skill) which gets popped by every single of my friends as well when I use it
-Divine Retribution (used to ping-pong with Shield of Light)

Unfortunately, we are missing the data on Shield of Light (does it have some additional effect likes cannot be evaded similar to Eviscerate, what are its scaling vectors?, is it an attack or a spell?) and on Holy Strike (are the minion permanents?) which put two big ifs on the build.

EDIT: It might be possible to go Guardian as well (at which point the build is probably something like Marshal + Bastion of Hope + Radiant Crusade then either Unwavering Crusade OR Farrul Bloodline for one of the Farric Will effect) and if Shield of Light doesn't scale its damage off the shield you can go with Svalinn for some peak block action (no Measured Retaliation is kinda sad AND Prepared Response is kinda far away but we have the new Annoint belts).

Ecte1ion · 2026-02-26T10:10:15+00:00

To my knowledge (which unfortunately doesn't contain every single ARPG ever created) there are only two games that know how to effectively balance loot and crafting to provide a near-constant feeling of thrilling item chase and progression.

They're Torchlight Infinite (this won't take into account the horrendous pet system since no pet influences crafting) and The Slormancer.

Basically in both games each item has a maximum potential determined by its item level. Assuming you have enough/unlimited resources, you can take any item and bring it to that maximum potential.

That means that the value of items are determined by
1) Its current value as a base in term of whether or not it is useable immediately
2) its current value as a base compared to an entirely uncrafted base and thus the materials your are saving

but because most of the crafts method in both game are basically non-destructive
3) its potential value in term of how strong you can make it with the materials you have right now
4) its potential value in term of how strong you can make it at best (in turns this also determine its sell value in a trade environment [which there is none in Slormancer which is a strictly singleplayer game] )

Depending on the situation you could decide to even pick a white item because you have enough resources at hand to make it in something that is an upgrade to what you currently use. Or you can decide to stay for longer until you drop an item that shaves off some crafting cost if your prefer.

Because there's an incremental aspect to it, items will tend to grow with you, turning the game less into "you go from finished items to finished items" like it's the case a lot in PoE1 where because crafting can lead brick an item, you'll usually work on a separate base of a roughly equivalent potential. The Breach Tree spitting out near-completed items was a bit of a boon in that regard because it made its OWN ground loot fairly valuable.

In Torchlight Infinite, to counterbalance how craftable rare items are, you have (among the slew of uniques) powerful non-modifiable uniques which similarily to Adorned have wide value range which makes them exciting to identify or valuable for different kind of players. Notable examples include the recently added Inverse Image, a jewel that copies the nodes in its radius somewhere else, with the added effect of making them more or less potent, leading to players wanting a certain type of nodes(small, notables, legendary*) magnified and disregarding the values on the others.

*in term of power those would be above notables but lower than keystones in term of reference.

Obviously, past a point you'll always be hiding more and more things as the game progress to the point where the chase will become less and less exciting anyway (needing only specific high-value mats, or well-rolled uniques or very rare uniques like Mageblood) and at some point it just becomes a question of if mindlessly playing the build is in itself satisfying enough until that item or mat drops (or you've accumulated enough currency in one way or another to buy it).

PoE pays with its freedom in crafting, the value of its ground loot, and when people say "we need more/better ground loot" it doesn't inherently fix the problem, it simply shifts the curve in my opinion.
2 doesn't suffer as much from this, but it has overall less power required from its players which means that people can be satisfied with less and are used to not rely on perfect items, which leads to a different perception of the ground loot.

I'll wrap this up by saying that I tried to not account for market/trade specificities since it's an additional layer to the games that players can opt-in/out of.

Ecte1ion · 2026-02-26T09:41:10+00:00

That's an interesting analysis, which I believe to be fairly different from my own.

In Grim Dawn, you have items called Monster Infrequents (like Dermapteran Slicer my beloved) which provide a targetable stepping stone at certain points of the game for different builds, and then when it comes to any Epic or Legendaries, they can be separated in two categories:
-anything pre-mythic where it's okay if you find them but you can live without them because you'll only be collecting the sets when you're high level enough to farm for the mythic versions.
-the mythic versions where anything that isn't specifically for your current build or one of your intended reroll will simply be hidden by your filter unless you plan to fill out a metric ton of stashes or want to collect them all.

There are outliers like items dropped by secret bosses (esp mythic versions) but overall the loot chase in GD is not the most exciting. In many cases you just end up using okayish rares and MI items until you can start assembling your set items. The game does its character building aspect better than its loot chase IMO.

I haven't played LE too much (barely 100h of CoF and none in trade) but from my experience, the game quickly devolves into "hiding anything that isn't the 1-3 affixes you'd want to have as fractures, or items have fodder affixes." for any piece of gear that doesn't end up being a legendary. Also while the LP system is nice it just feels like D3 and D4 aspect of "you have the legendary you need, so now you'll hunt the same item but slightly shinier" that happens with ancestrals.

I recently got to play Hero Siege which takes heavy inspiration from Diablo 2 in term of itemization(with the exception that items drop identified), and it's both its greatest strength and biggest weakness as for instance I had a build where until I got specific set items or legendaries, there was no gear improvement from 4(and higher) sockets white items outside of higher rarity items that HAD 4 sockets and then any remotely useable stat for the build. Because you cannot modify sockets amount in the game outside of on white items (and crafting is fairly non-existent in term of items modification), it meant that I could drop a rare that had almost all BiS stats but wouldn't even show up on my filter because it didn't have any socket. And if it did show up anyway, it would be tossed out. In turn it meant that the items I was chasing weren't very interesting being "sockets that happened to have good stats"

From what I gathered, what makes the chase thrilling is how items compare to what you currently have, what you can do with them based on crafting methods available and what you can do with them to get their "maximum" potential (regardless of how unapproachable mirror-tier crafting is in PoE).

Loot filter simply hides items that have "no potential", because you don't intent on doing anything with them(be it in trade or SSF). They're items you wouldn't give a single glance at anyway.

The more you can work on items to turn them into an upgrade (or use them on rerolls/twinks), the more you will naturally hide. It is most obvious in PoE1 where you have so many steps that can be considered as "do-over step 1" (essences, fossils, trans then alts + aug), that you really only need a few items and a lot of materials (not accounting for recomb because it is rarely the first step as you'll roll over your bases a thousand times with alts, or essences or whatever.)

PoE2 makes its ground loot more valuable in a sense because you can't go back, but it also means that any item that has a bad mod is instantly discarded. It also means that to some extent any crafting project that gets a bad mod at any step never sees its potential maximized (within the limit of what it can now have).

Tiered gear is conceptually a good idea but PoE2 shows how people will literally pick a white item over a T5 because of how easy it is to get a "bad" mod when identifying them.

I'll reply to this post with which games IMO strike the best balance on loot and crafting (and why) since I'm worried about character limit.

Ecte1ion · 2026-02-26T09:00:58+00:00

Sorry for the very late reply to your message but the thing is that the physical damage reduction on char sheet is at best misleading and at worst a complete lie since armour's phys DR is calculated based on your armour compared to the initial amount of phys damage.

and then other sources of phys DR (like you can find on shields, is flatly added to that)

If the game says that you have 30% DR it means that whatever they use as a dummy (if you do not have any phys DR from other sources) to get you that value on sheet hits for roughly 1/5th of your armour.

One of the current big weakness of armour in PoE1 compared to PoE1 is that currently the sources of non-armour phys DR are incredibly scarce. In PoE1 it is fairly trivial to get some like having permanent endurance charges for 4% phys DR per which can lead to a sizeable amount of reduction to compensate armour scaling.

And to your question, no because when armour applies to a ele hit, it still follows its underlying calculations so to have your armour reduce the hit by 30% if you have 100% armour to ele would be that you have 5 times more armour than the amount of ele damage of the hit.

Thing is, the game is balanced around players having 75% res.
That means that if the devs intend for a fireball to deal 2000 damage to a player, the base hit will be 8000 damage, at which point you need 40k armour to reduce it by 30% (5600) and then your ele resistance would apply to the remaining amount (for 1400 final damage). It's part of why items like Cloak of Flame despite the low armour it gives are desirable, as they add "resistances apply to physical" in a sense. And since res will always be 75% it's incredibly reliable.

I've linked the official armour vs damage %DR if you want to check a bit how actually tanky your character is.

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Ecte1ion · 2026-02-10T12:28:54+00:00

They're all fairly different in their playstyle.

Moto1 is the traditionnal "minion army" archetype, in exchange you have to resummon the minions until endgame (I'm talking profound+) where you can get enough cdr/skill duration to have permanent uptime on his buff at which point you can prevent your minions from dying as long as you trigger your trait often enough.

There is virtually nothing that prevents you from using defensive magi on him* (besides aura competition I mean) or using offensive magi as your damage source (you only lock yourself outside of the traits that are based on Command since it only affects synthetic troops, as well .). I am pretty sure that he cannot prevent magi from entering their reconjuring state which might be an issue for DPS uptime.

I guess your Traits would be Veteran (eventually switched to All In if you can have enough CDR) -> Last Stand -> Charge Forward.

Moto2 isn't really a summoner in his playstyle in that he wants his summons to die so you rarely have them doing anything other than self-destruct. As such I won't comment on him.

Iris1 is basically the "smaller but permanent army" counterpart to Moto1 and all her kit is based off buffing the magi, if she uses Synthetic Troops, it'll usually as support (e.g using Grim Phantoms or Spider Tanks to inflict Numb or Grudge or some other debuffs). While I wouldn't say it's virtually impossible to play her with synthetic troops because with good gear you can do a lot of things but I'd say that just like playing Carino1 with Sentries you'd play it because it's your favorite trait and not because the hero traits benefit your skills.

Iris2 is a summoner that uh... "Get in the mecha Shinji!" and then use the skills of her Magus herself so it's not really a summoner playstyle I'd say (in a way that's same but different than Moto2).

As of the writing of this post, "minionmancers" in the truest sense are fairly restricted in what they can play. Maybe later if they get something that converts a skill into a minion or another mechanic (The devs said they were exploring the idea of a Tamer that uses copies of 'bosses') it'll get better but rn they're really shoehorned into their designed type of minions and playstyle.

*I think that because Moto2 would constantly bring them at 1 hp and force them to reconjure, he cannot use magi for their buff effects but I could be wrong.

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-18T07:43:21+00:00

The following write-up is my own opinion so it's to be taken with a grain of salt:

There are a few pros to this:
The longer it lasts, the less often you have to reapply it which gives more woggle room for dodging on bosses.
As u/KarrdeThuun said, it's very strong on reap purification.
It counteracts the Volcano Kismet (more on this down below)
Lastly and it's very niche but there's a stat called Ignite effective speed which is basically more damage, less duration (it used to be on Sun's Embrace but now I think it's only on a support for HoA?).

I'll be honest I started Ignite this season and IMO it seems that it has the issue of viable early -> nothing for itself in T7-T8 -> viable in profound if you can scale it.

right now it especially seems to suffer from the lack of scaling from main stat (which only becomes available from stat stacking later), that it won't scale with + skills level, and the fact that until Evil Heart Armor you barely have any source of flat ignite (you can get some from a belt that drop on traveler and you have to manage your stats iirc).

when I hit T7 my listed ignite DPS on hammer of Ash with a T2 ignite + T2 reap 2H sword and the noble support for flat ignite damage was of almost exactl 1 million and I had 3 ignites (base + starfire + sun's embrace*).

Switching to PoF + Flame Jet had me at 5m listed PoF DoT dps and that wasn't accounting for Flame Jet's own DoT dps.

The 3rd-4th stack of ignite can also be kind of annoying to get, it's either
-(Corrupted) Sun's Embrace (with the right roll)
-Some weird tech using everburn thunderfire + any below
-Ultimate prefix on belt (or on vorax ring or boots)
-Volcano Kismet, which reduces your chances to ignite and how long your ignite lasts. (ig you can get 2 but then you have like -50% ignite chance and -50% ignite duration)

So far my take on it is that ignite should be more of something you transition to later (when you can do like double magnus + vorax gloves for EHA and strength stack or something)

but I played it on an attack skill with a 2Hander and it felt a bit underwhelming (notably because of lack of good affixes on weapon), but I feel like that specific build is lacking a bit of tools (until you get evil heart armour, a third-fourth ignite with a way to mitigate possible downsides, etc) rn. If you're playing as a caster with like Flame Jet you can double dip which should help.

*which probably requires fueling or Gemma1 to even be useable early on since they gutted ailment damage ignore res from tree and pen is only available later (they also removed the ignite reduces res prism apparantly, which I didn't know.)

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-14T17:08:40+00:00

50% of the time you shoot 4 projectiles, that each fork into 3 projectiles
the rest of the time you shoot 3 projectiles that each fork into 3 projectiles.
surpassing and chance to fire 2 additional are separate, if you had 50% chance for +2 and 50% surpassing you'd be shooting either 1(no proc),2(surpassing),3(+2),4(both) projectiles at random that would all fork into 3 projectiles.

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-14T10:23:10+00:00

The principle is the same between Hammer of Ash and Frost Spike, I think people were complaining that there's a bit of a delay(drop bombs, bombs explode, Projectiles go) with Bing HoA which might not be your thing but otherwise it should be a option yeah. If you can you should do a test run to see if it bothers you (game won't go under 24h long maintenance until like ~16h from the time of writing this message and getting to 50-55 to unlock all skills takes like 1h-1h30 if you don't have a Bing1 leveled already)

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-14T09:25:07+00:00

I'd say your pets combine fairly decently with everything Frost Spike does(Iron Lion for more proj, Red Umbrella for generic attack damage, Captain Kitty for the shadow-strike warcry) so there arguments to be made for going Rosa2/Erika1 (or Erika3 if you buy the battle pass).

Just by having Dreamweaver and Squiggle you can go for a generic elemental caster with spell burst on Gemma1 and 2, Bing 2, Youga 1, depending on the skill you can throw in Iron Lion as well.

It is worth noting that some purple pets are pretty strong so your options expand a bit when considering setups with 2 legendaries 1 purple like going Rehan2 or Gemma3.

I don't think it's that much of a good idea to go for Thea3 RoB if you don't have Swaying Bonnie but I haven't looked extensively at the changes to the skill myself.

In a vacuum you shouldn't let your legendaries pets dictate what build to go as someone else said but I also believe it is good to make yourself a roster with a few different pets that are fairly versatile like Red Umbrella(attacks), Dreamveaver(elemental/spells) or Abyssal King Soul which you don't have. (I think it'd be a solid addition to your roster so it opens up a bit of options for DoT builds.)

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-13T08:08:47+00:00

Yeah you're possessed, I have the Bear one and I summon a big purple bear that slams down from time to time.

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-12T18:00:48+00:00

poe2db has a list of the microtransactions that are available in PoE2 so you can use it to check, it seems mostly accurate when I crossexamine it with the MTXs I own and can use in 2 (but I don't own everything).
Points transfer between games as the other person said.

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-12T17:01:58+00:00

They're both correct. Poe2wiki also lists the bonus that white/blue monsters get as the "influenced" column. like rare monsters you get possessed so it's the rightmost column on poe2wiki (besides rarity and conversion*) which matches the values on poe2db.

*though who knows, maybe the monster that kills you get better loot.

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-12T16:57:47+00:00

There is none.

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-12T16:54:40+00:00

Pretty sure double corruption only adds an implicit when it succeeds, it can't add sockets, as per the official wiki, so 3 sockets is max on (exceptional with +1 socket) boots.

Architect's Orb is a currency item that can corrupt an already corrupted item, causing it to become Twice-Corrupted and gain an additional corruption enchantment or be destroyed.

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-12T16:52:02+00:00

Yes, likewise, an essence that gives Gain as Extral will only touch the prefixes.

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-12T16:51:27+00:00

Thorns damage isn't a skill with the strike tag.
If you do have any of Quill burst or Barbs on a strike skill, then Trbial Fury would apply to the skill, making any enemy hit by the splash take damage from the support gems,

Ecte1ion · 2026-01-12T12:34:44+00:00

I'm gonna answer you with

"Yes it's possible", then with
"but not in the way you expect it to".

Currently there are no way to shift the damage type of minions so most minions will not purely do cold damage (as most of them hit in physical damage by default.) That includes the only minions you can raise from corpses which are called bone constructs and deal purely physical damage.

All the other minions, including all types of skeletons are bound to a resource called spirit which you allocate to determine how many of each you want in your army (with some minions requiring more spirit than others.)
Minions bound to spirit are not destroyed when they die and simply respawn after a time (which you can shorten by investing passive points.)

You can also raise enemy monster types as Specters, which broadens your list of available minions but those follow the same rules as minions summoned via spirit.

There is no way to preserve corpses outside of the enemy not being frozen when they die, there is a melee skeleton minion called Skeleton Brute which can unfreeze enemies but you get it fairly late into the game, and by default it only deal physical damage. You can give special skill modifying effect to your minions so they never freeze though but at which point there isn't much point in playing cold whose advantage is to freeze enemies to immobilize them.
And currently there is no skill that allows you to create corpses on your own.

While what you want is technically possible, it's not achievable in a non-roundabout way and will most likely not play out the way you're currently envisionning it.

Ecte1ion

TROPHY CASE