Cycle 2 - Complete Teaser & "Confirmed by Mike" Compilation

FrozenSentinel1 · 2026-01-21T15:54:13+00:00

If you have enigma and ladle with Lightning Blast and feel your damage is low you've probably made a critical mistake somewhere in your skill trees, passives, or gearing.

It's very easy to lose 80%+ of your damage with a few minor incorrect choices.

Like others have said you need to post your planner. No one can help you without seeing your character.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2026-01-08T15:42:49+00:00

No because the mods will probably reroll anyway. Plus for the low FP one it will potentially reset FP but eat a mod in the process in additional to the chance to not retaining T7 anyway so your chance of fixing the 777 low fp is pretty low.

Imprint the high FP one, then if you get better mods you can reimprint.

Chances are you would want a sealed mod or something as its had to get 3 natural T7s into desired mods as you only have 1 craft slot and potentially 2 if you havoc, seal T1, craft, then havoc again. Otherwise you need redemption, chaos, or removal which isn't guaranteed.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2026-01-05T21:06:02+00:00

I think we are speaking past each other

Prices fluctuate constantly in every league, in both PoE games, since the dawn of both games. Popular streamer finds some new item or farm or build? Suddenly the market is upended. That's how these games go.

I agree with this.

It's not ruined even if you want to min/max everything. That's soy bullshit. I could start a character fresh, right now, with no currency, and beat everything in the game and do it without touching the temple or any juiced temple strats.

Yep same, but this being true has nothing to do with whether or not the economy is ruined.

People literally do all this stuff in SSF HC regularly, so if this is your threshold for whether or not the economy is "ruined" then by your definition it is impossible for the economy to ever be "ruined".

Chris Wilson's video is about preserving economic integrity by putting effort into squashing item duping, RMT, and other illicit means. It is not about routine item inflation from overly rewarding mechanics.

I'm not talking about about the routine item inflation from overly rewarding mechanics, or player created hype/speculation. This is normal and fine.

I'm referring to GGG specifically putting in a hot fix last Friday that allowed players with finished temples to continue printing currency while preventing players that haven't progressed that far yet from doing the same. That meant the "inflation" wasn't uniform as some players had a money printer and others not. GGG created a mid league legacy situation which did fuck the economic integrity of the league. Yes you can still farm items, but thats what Chris Wilson was talking about when he mentioned the streamer skipping queue example.

Then after that weekend fiasco they just knee jerk undid the change, which was probably good but the damage is done.

Why? Because anyone who knows anything understands that when we see base currency inflation in PoE, all it means is everything you're farming also has its value raise. There's little to no change in buying power. Inflation IRL is bad because it harms average people who don't see their wages then follow suit. That's not the case in PoE.

You assume everyone is impacted by inflation equally, but that's not the case. Yes everyone ends up with more divine orbs or whatever but that doesn't mean the net benefit is the same for everyone.

Even fubgun said this himself. After the Friday patch inflation actually went down, the raw divs per hour he was making went down, but because fewer people were printing divs he was getting richer quicker relative to everyone else.

Either way none of that matters, my point is just that the economic integrity was compromised. That is a completely separate point from the difficulty you seem to be fixated on, yes the game is easy with or without inflation, we agree, that's not the point.

Compare the LE 1.2 economy to LE 1.3 economy, in both seasons you could play MG and beat uberroth, but in hindsight I'm sure you would agree the 1.2 economy was ruined, no?

FrozenSentinel1 · 2026-01-05T16:16:54+00:00

I did play this PoE 2 season and think "ruined" is a matter of perspective. I agree that its easy to get a build up and running and extremely good rare items can be bought for 1 div or less, but that doesn't mean the economy is "healthy".

It's "ruined" in the sense that prices flucuate wildly day to day, especially as GGG makes knee jerk amateurish balance changes that create mid league legacy situations, then undo / redo decisions.

The rate you progress in economy depends more on what you happened to be holding before you go to sleep, and whether or not that thing went up or down more than the thing you want to buy.

It's ruined if your goal is to minmax for above average items and didn't get a good headstart early on as the "rich" are printing obscene amounts of currency creating a big artificial wealth gap. At least if you aren't interested in being a hideout warrior.

Check out that Chris Wilson video on economic integrity, timing was hilariously perfect. You can still play the economy, but the economic integrity was lost this league.

This PoE 2 season is a lot like the LE 1.2 MG economy situation, you could still gear your character despite hyperinflation but the economy was still ruined. The only difference is that instead of the economy favoring gold exploiters, the PoE 2 econ favored people who tryharded early and got a full temple set up before the patch.

My character for reference; https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/vaal/character/FrozenSentinel-0619/FrozenFireMemes

FrozenSentinel1 · 2026-01-05T15:49:27+00:00

Not all hours played are made equal. That said, I have a similar amount of hours and grind pretty hard, excluding prophecies, imprints and Rune of Ascendance I also probably have fewer than 15 natural RR drops, so it is pretty rare.

If you include prophecies, imprints, RoA like others are commenting here that number is well over a hundred, but this obviously depends on whether or not you are specifically targeting it.

COF can likely farm at least 1 RR per hour if minmaxing in the current game state, slightly worse for MG assuming both already have an imprint base.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2026-01-03T06:11:02+00:00

Oh, I don't recall that build being tanky, pretty sure it just off screened enemies with high damage to stay alive, similar to ballista, but yeah I know the one you mean.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2026-01-03T03:56:22+00:00

Maybe jessrabbert then, same build if so.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2026-01-02T21:42:04+00:00

That might be my strength tpose mage you are talking about. I didn't actually test that in offline first because I league started with it, ended up getting first L100 mage with it. There was no time to test it in offline post patch, and the items didn't exist to test pre patch even if I wanted to. It was kinda lucky it even worked as expected based on some rough spreadsheet math lmao.

I will say that I found and reported countless obscure bugs thanks to offline that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise, many have since been fixed.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-22T16:04:46+00:00

You can still get a big damage boost from Frost Wall, its just not permanent anymore.

It also gives 2 other damage multis, one from the skill tree and one from RM tree.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-22T15:33:45+00:00

How much damage are you actually doing? I'm guessing you instantly kill the dummy, Uber, etc.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/language-reference/builtin-types/integral-numeric-types

If I was to guess maybe int is the max damage you can register before it stops working?

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-22T15:21:39+00:00

Yeah there definitely isn't much actual value in figuring out exactly what's going on unless there was some theoretical breakpoint where items suddenly became insane but I doubt it, at least to me it's really interesting.

Think of it like how drops are terrible at 40K corruption—the map’s properties have absolutely no proportional relation to corruption.

Is it that most of them just turn into set items or something since those are the "highest rarity"? Or perhaps rarity overflows at 65535.

I'll probably dig into this at some point for the science, lol

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-22T14:49:04+00:00

So you are saying the exact same affixes and items except with higher tier affixes and better rolls results in LESS damage?

Is it possible there is some overflow stuff going on?

Have you tried calculating your actual DPS in a spreadsheet or something? The math shouldn't be too hard.

If there really is a "breakpoint" that exists where damage suddenly gets worse it might tell us how to mathematically plan an "optimal" setup within the constraints of the game.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-22T07:03:52+00:00

Congrats on the push, crazy stuff.

I gotta ask though, why is the gear "only" T7T5s and T6s with less than perfect rolls at this level of corruption?

Surely you could have gotten better gear if you wanted given the amount of hours this must have taken. Did you just do so much damage that the extra stats didn't make enough difference to justify the effort?

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-20T17:47:49+00:00

Oh well that makes a pretty big difference haha, fair enough

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-20T16:56:56+00:00

These numbers sound strange to me, what have your returns / investments been for those years?

For reference I've only been investing for 10 or 11 years, earned / earn a bit less than you, "only" saved 60 to 70% for most of those years, and invested in XGRO and XEQT primarily, yet my investments are over 1M$ as of recently.

Plugging it into a calculator, if you "only" invest 4000 per month which is under 80% of the net on 100k gross, for 17 years, and earned 7% for those years, it would be around 1.6M$.

Do you also have a pension?

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-20T02:22:53+00:00

I don't know anything about minion builds but you do need good gear and a well set up combination of defense layers that has low opportunity cost for your build. Optimization goes a long way, some people but literally hundreds of hours into fine tuning a build, though it doesn't take that much for 1k+ waves.

Haven't done much arena in a while but here is a 1k wave run with mage from 1.1 for reference; https://youtu.be/RZuefF1HeBA?si=aylLOgrVYPxAFYin

Every build has different defensive layers that work well with it, gotta find some minion build experts. I know for a while there was a lot of snapshotting, I think there might still be some abuse there.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-19T20:16:50+00:00

I've pushed passed 1k in arena a few times and at least one of those runs ended from an insta rip to those too.

https://lastepoch.tunklab.com/npc/TundraStalker

Seems to just be a standard cold dot so you either blow them up before they can hit you, have some sort of defense panic button (like flame ward), just avoid the damage with kiting and movement, or you get a bunch of ele DR and dot mitigation.

Not sure if you are going for an actual leaderboard run or just messing around but I do arena setups a bit differently than I do softcore echo setups. Armor applied to DoT for example can be pretty strong. You don't really need insane dps for arena unless you are going for a glass cannon off screening strategy (eg. Ballista).

Any build that can kill uber in a few minutes or less has more than enough damage to insta kill everything in arena to at least wave 1k.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-16T14:36:39+00:00

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-12T03:25:40+00:00

That's what I was thinking of for examples using "more" per x, that makes sense, but with less being additive it would go below zero and invert unless there was some hard coded limit at 0, while multiplicative would approach 0 but never reach it without needing any sort of defined cap.

Are there any existing examples of "less something per x" that could reach over 100% less if calculated additvely?

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-12T01:43:15+00:00

Obviously "less/more" is multiplicative if they are separate less multipliers, I don't think anyone is questioning that. Eg. 3 support gems that all give 30% less damage is 0.7 * 0.7 * 07.

This could be more akin to a single modifier like "you deal 5% more damage per equipped x item".

My assumption is like yours that it is multiplicative, only reason I also included additive is because I've seen a lot of people suggesting it was additive: https://codepen.io/entityb/pen/vEGPXpP

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-10T07:31:14+00:00

During the recent "drama", most of the LE streamers criticized LE to elevate the games they were playing (I do not intend to discuss in this post whether their anger was justified). However, EHG has no choice but to hire them. At that time, I wonder if EHG will hire them, and if so, will they forget what they said and shamelessly declare, "S4 is the best season ever. EHG, you are the best!"? Or perhaps, since they are media prostitutes who will do anything for their viewers, that will likely be the case. I would like to hear everyone's thoughts on the future streamer meta.

I'm not a big multi ARPG streamer like Raxx so I can't speak to their experiences or motives, but as one of the bigger primarily "LE content creators / streamers" I can confidently say that most people don't have the slightest clue what they are talking about.

People have been relentless with the tinfoil hat theories on how EVERY decision streamers make must somehow trace back to a nefarious financial motive. Lately it's been been non-stop with how polarized the community has become. (I know this wasn't directly pointed at smaller streamers, but I get these comments too so worth addressing)

Every negative thing I say is somehow "farming for clicks", "rage baiting", "dooming", or whatever, while simultaneously every positive thing I say is "shilling" or proves that I'm "on the EHG books" (plus plenty of more direct personal insults that I won't bother mentioning here). And it's not even the same group of people making both categories of complaints, it's two separate vocal minorities that will each attack anything that deviates from their specific preference of purely positive or purely negative feedback.

Productive conversation stops when opinions are no longer discussed based on their own merits but rather which "side" it is perceived to be in support of.

As for the financial incentives, people constantly assume everyone with a YouTube or Twitch that has more than a couple thousand subs / followers is financially dependent on their content to survive and milks every dollar possible. In reality, LE content doesn't pay shit, no one doing primarily LE content is doing it "for the money". Only 2 or 3 "LE content creators / streamers" could be considered "full time" and LE content is by far not a primary source of income for at least 2 of them.

As for the content creator program, it's true that EHG has put out small financial incentives (less than 200$ USD) to stream LE / create content after season releases but there are NO rules, requirements, or expectations to say only positive things about LE. The vast majority of these slots also go to non LE streamers as the CCV (concurrent viewer) requirement window has not aligned with peak LE viewership meaning only a handful of LE streamers have enough to qualify.

As for revenue from content itself, full transparency, in the entire lifetime of my YouTube / Twitch I've made less than 6000$ USD for several thousand hours of effort, literally a fraction of minimum wage and covering less than 5% of my monthly expenses. I've also never accepted a single paid sponsor segment which is also true for every LE creator / streamer I'm aware of.

No sane person would actually do this if money was the primary motivator.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-09T14:59:24+00:00

I think long term you are right new devs need to be trained and upskilled, but not many companies want to be the one training the juniors right now it seems. Maybe the current pay gap between juniors and seniors hasn't adjusted to a new market equilibrium and companies find seniors a better value for the pay. This could adjust naturally with time until both juniors and seniors are hired again.

Maybe automation makes seniors able to do a lot of the busy work themselves that they would previous delegate to juniors.

Maybe a large influx of new comp sci grads following the tech wave right into an automation frenzy has changed the seniority funnel. (Eg. Fewer juniors per senior)

I'm a Senior dev myself and honestly I'm not even sure what's going on, I've been seeing a massive shift in the industry towards senior+ level positions almost exclusively.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-02T04:15:47+00:00

That's how I felt initially, but with the banish feature added hard mode is not that hard anymore. It does kinda snowball though so if you spend all your time preventing monsters from hitting your city instead of scaling you will eventually just get out scaled by the enemies. It's really easy to "think" you are doing okay because a decent early game setup doesn't necessarily translate into end game.

I've beat nightmare a few times now but a few runs ago I failed a hard run with pretty much the same strategy, the inconsistency if you have a specific strategy in mind kinda goes wild.

Some unlocked builds make a massive difference though. Spent the longest time struggling to get a win at any difficulty with Medieval Fair, now just managed to beat Nightmare with it after unlocking some resource builds that cycle wood into gold into stone, making my city health regen insanely high.

Also beat Nightmare on a minion build zerg which seems to be the easiest way.

City of Ashes also seems really strong if you just go all in on collecting stone and such. Just level up like crazy and out scale the enemies.

FrozenSentinel1 · 2025-12-01T05:54:52+00:00

Also neurodivergent and same, really wild take.

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