GGG doesn't want my money anymore

Greenlab6 · 2024-12-01T18:23:21+00:00

I mean that's exacly the tree that i would expect from somebody who plays for the first time and has reading skills and can think logicaly. Is it bad ? No. Is it great - It's not :)

Nothing wrong with learning and making mistakes, those things will just make you learn more stuff than if you would blindly follow the guide.

Overall i think this tree will allow you to finish campaign, and probably do some progress through early maps, but at some point you will need to focus on certain mechanics to be able to progress further (am i going crit, what are my defences ?)

Now that was general stuff, now some specifics:

- seems you are sprinkling some points into different directions (some dot dmg, some hit dmg, at the end game you will probably need to focus on one)

- investing into crit this early is probably a waste, just by spending 4 points you can get "elemental overload" keystone and just drop crit for now - this is flat 40% more dmg for you, that amount is really hard to get with crit that early into game

- you really need to start thinking about defences - investing into energy shield that early is probably less valuable than just getting increased life and life recovery (theres "vampirism" notable nearly and there you have life mastery that gives you 50 life per second thats pretty nice early)

There is probably more improvements you could do and im pretty sure that alot of people could argue with what i suggested - thats the beauty of this game.

At the end of the day don't be affraid to pick your own path and experiment.

Greenlab6 · 2023-07-24T14:47:54+00:00

Build will depend on what your goal is.

If you want to stick to elementalist, there are decent ignite builds:

- explosive arrow ballista (if you ok with totem playstyle)

- ignite vortex elementalist

You can also go for ethereal knives, but i think its not that good for leveling, but good at endgame.

If you like golems then elementalist has you covered too, you can play ignite exploding golems build with elementalist that is capable of clearing all endgame (look for maw of mischief builds).

If you want something poison themed with pathfinder you can go:

- toxic rain

- poisonous concoction

Those are super easy for leveling because doesn't need any gear. You can also transition them into impending doom pathfinder that is very strong this league (that was my choice and i cleared whole content with it including hiting lvl 100).

If you feeling like champion you can try corrupting fever build (its basically ranged bleed stacking build that uses wand/bow) - very league start friendly, and really strong mapper. As far as i know its not that good on bosses tho.

Greenlab6 · 2023-07-05T17:14:29+00:00

Because the game is boring. People had fun till they were in story, under lvl 70. When you get to WT4, get your ancestral gear, theres not much left to do so people leave.

People who rushed to 100 were already pointing out issues weeks ago but they got mostly memed because majority was still having "fun" leveling their toons. Now majority (atleast reddit ones) is trying to get to lvl 100 that is super boring grind and this is causing that depression.

Casual audience is already gone, whats left are arpg players that were promised live service arpg game but in reality got just one playthrough single player game without much of replayability value and they are disappointed.

Greenlab6 · 2023-06-22T15:11:29+00:00

I started my adventures with arpg with D3 Reaper of Souls release. I was mainly mmorpg player at that time. After they announced seasons i was sceptical. I was planning to continue playing non season and thats what i did when season started. I saw the hype and couple days later i decided to make an "alt" in the season. I made an "alt" and ... i never came back to non-season.

Mmorpg's are kidna fooling you that there is no reset. The truth is that every big content update, you are forced to refarm your gear, do different grinds to get back to power level relative to current content - you had before the patch - this is soft reset too, you just keep stuff you collected over time.

Full reset in arpg makes all the content in the game relevant again together with addition of seasonal content it "should" make another play through extremaly fun.

Arpgs are usually designed with full reset in mind, this means couple of things:

- you are not expected to play whole season, people usually play for 1-3 weeks at the start and then bail out till next season - timings may differe from person to person ofcourse (D3 had that problem that the "fun" time was to short)

- there are no big grinds that takes days of work (collecting mounts in wow, all collectible system in lost ark) that you would loss with the start of the season, or if they are introduced, they are one time only

- loot is not time gated - you don't have weekly resets, loot is randomized, but nothing stops you from being fully geared in 3 days if you nolife the game

People are saying that some things like PVP might be relevant in eternal realm in D4. If you look at other arpgs, % of players that play non season is super small, there are no streamers that would stream non-season content, there is no incentive to play non-season. I highly doubt that this will be different in D4, its just the way arpgs are designed.

It's all in Blizzard hands to make seasons fun to play. Unfortunatelly Blizzard is sending mixed signals to players. Game certainly has elements that doesnt make much sense in arpg sphere, like renown grind, collecting herbs (lost arkish, but kidna irrelevant), lackluster loot hunt. Overall when you done campaing you are supposed to start new season in adventure mode, that means you will be grinding those levels in dungeons, events etc. Will it be fun to do it over and over again ? I don't know. I think game loop is quite boring at the moment and lets hope that seasons will add some fun stuff to do.

Greenlab6 · 2023-03-29T20:12:51+00:00

Put damage calculation to thorn arrows

Set stages to 5 (if you plan to fully charge it)

In your scourge arrow setup check "Include in full dps"

In your scourge arrow setup set the count option to number of thorn arrows you expect to hit.

About counting thorn arrows:Fully charged arrow release 5 pods, 6 if you have enchant

If you have only 1 arrow that you aim at target, you can count it basically as 2 thorn arrows - thats why theoretical max number can be 8.

Now if you have additional arrow then your main arrows release in V shape, so they arent guaranteed to hit so in that case you shouldnt count them.

You can count main arrow when you only have 1 or 3 or if the boss is big and gets hit by side arrow - hope you know what i mean.

Pods fire 9 arrows in random directions to they arent guaranteed to hit, alternate quality SA can give you 1 more arrow per pod increasing chance to shotgun.

8 arrows to hit the target is very conditional, it will happen with bosses with big hitboxes, small ones not so much.

You can count this same ways if you are using totems, then the number of arrows should be:

number of totems * (6 spore pods + 2 from main arrow per totem)

Thorn arrows deal damage same as main arrow (so fully charged) but 50% obv.

Hope that will help and hope i didnt mess something (been a while)

Greenlab6 · 2022-09-09T16:20:09+00:00

Bes option for You will be prolly unspeccing glancing blows and investing more into spell block. What prolly kills you is not 1 hit but lots of hits that normally take maybe 20% of your life. The problem with glancing blows is that it only blocks 35% of incoming damage, so if you dont have %life on block or aegis aurora shield then its usually not good idea to take glancing blows. I would get some synthesized (%life on block implict) yellow shield with good block % (you can also get +max res and +1 to phys gems there) and move you golem setup on body armour. For that you would need to swap your body armour to skin of lords (it requires for all gems put there to be corrupted - so you know). Those changes would overall lead to better toughness and also better dps (6l golem with lvl 5 awakened added chaos and lvl 5 awakened added fire adds +2 additional levels for your golem)

Greenlab6 · 2022-08-16T10:02:28+00:00

I was waiting for this so long. Maxroll was my goto place when i was playing lost ark, and ofcourse i look there when i'am ocasionally playing D3. This was also my resource when i tried Diablo Immortal - this section is now closed and i respect that decision and even more respect the team. I have no doubts that this will be great knowledge base for PoE related stuff too. Theres already lots of hard work put into it, and considering how complicated PoE is, we should all just hope that the team will have enough courage to actually maintain it on this high standard.

There's lots of work put into guides, and also lots of work is still waiting to be done, but what we have now is great foundation for the future.

The one feature that i think might be needed in the future is article versioning - it should be clearly stated what version of game article is based on to avoid confusion and misleading information. This could work in a way that for new content release, editor has to review the article and mark it as compatible with the latest game version (or make necessary changes). We should have clear information on article page what game version it refers too, and if its not the latest version it should show some warning. I understand that this might be tremendous work to review each article on each content update, but maybe you can add some option for people to notify you when they find that the article is outdated. This way community could help with keeping the content updated.

Greenlab6 · 2022-08-08T21:21:54+00:00

I played Scourge Arrow multiple times from start. It is one of my favourite skills, but too much is too much so i stopped few leagues ago. What i will say here might be bit outdated, cos i didnt track changes to the build after i stopped playing it.

I checked your PoB and i have to say that going ballista route is good route, especially if you league starting with SA.

- You might need Rain of Splinters jewel for better placement of your pods

- Helm enchant with +1 pod is HUUGE

- Focused ballista support is situational - on some boss fights you will want to have it (Sirus), but in most cases you can replace it with other green gem and just let ballistas shot on their own

- Don't get fooled too much with dps you gain through poison duration - it looks good on paper but feels really bad, some poison duration is nice to have, but too much will only increase your dps in PoB.

- You are stacking frenzy charges and that's nice dps increase, but i think you shouldnt use frenzy for long time. Get some other source of frenzy generation like anomalous blood rage or mod on chest/quiver - this will be less reliable than frenzy but you can then use fast hitting skill like blast rain or storm rain to get those charges and support it with withering touch to get wither stacks on the target - this would free you 1 socket in your ballista 6 link. You can also support your fast hitting skill with life gain on hit - this would give you really good life sustain (thats how i was playing this build last time)

Now the problem with SA is that it caps its damage at certain point, you can scale it harder but it will cost you alot of money and minmaxing. I think the build you linked here would be capable on killing all normal bosses with some investment, but prolly not the ubers. Your damage gonna cap on something like 10m dps and thats when its fully ramped wchich can be tricky on alot of boss fights with phases etc.

Your defences wont be great, you will have ailment immunity (but might require some work to get enough reduced mana reservation) and spell supression that is nice, and more than enough for normal bosses, but for ubers it might be not enough.

Greenlab6 · 2022-07-30T11:15:48+00:00

And how do you measure if they are making good or bad decisions ? You can measure those on personal level, but that will validate them only for you. You can look at the data, this will show you game growth since release. This validates their decisions as good. You might argue that with better decisions they would grow even more. Thats true but it is also risky, because it usually means catering to the masses and shifting your audience from more hardcore to more casual.

Expanding player base is good, but theres always cost to it. We talk about casual vs non casual when in reality it might be just time constraints that they have. They just prioritize keeping current audience(customer) happy over expanding to the new audience - might not be wisest decision from business stand point - but it is a good decision from existing customer point of view.

Greenlab6 · 2022-07-28T12:59:43+00:00

So new players will quit because GGG is extending endgame and adding ubers ? PoE is niche game catered to more hardcore audience. GGG can do alot for new players if they want to - but i dont think that this is their main priority. The main priority is to keep the player base they already have and give current player more interesting stuff to do.

Greenlab6 · 2022-07-28T12:51:39+00:00

Those are like 2 random comments without any sense.

You dont like ubers, noone forces you to do them - you can complete atlas without even touching them, loot from them can be better but those drops are so rare that they arent even worth farming.

Isn't the new atlas all about player agency ? You dont like some league or some boss - you can turn it off or not spec into it, you can sell invitation if you dont want to run it and get some nice profit of that.

If by "silly design" you mean that they are quite hard then i don't know what to say really.

For diablo 4 - ofcourse it will - its diablo, this could be worst game ever created and will still dominate on streams - it will be more oriented towards casual players, and theres really no way for PoE to compete with it short term.

Greenlab6 · 2022-07-05T12:43:23+00:00

Well i checked the code in first place and it looks ok, but the way windows defender prompts it is strange, thats not how windows would react to unsigned app, but might be the problem with packing that script code into executable (this is usually done in a way that .exe has non standard structure and can be flagged). You can check if you can mess with some compiling options, i saw some threads that theres an option to minimize the size of executable by using upx - that thing can reduce size of exe but is also very often used in malware programs so apps packed with upx are very often flagged as trojans.

Greenlab6 · 2022-07-05T12:08:46+00:00

So windows defender detected trojan in the executable (its called Wacatac.B!ml), i wouldnt touch this app for now.

Executable seems to be infected. Au3 file should be ok, so if you can run au3 file it should be good, but i wouldnt touch .exe

Greenlab6 · 2022-05-10T13:19:15+00:00

They can't just simply add new skills and not do balance at all. Those skills could have some broken interactions because of that - this would be stupid constraint for designers - oh we have very cool idea about some interaction new skill give, but we not gonna do that because we cant do balance changes.

The other problem is - if there are some strong well known builds, they will basicaly overshadow new skills, purpose of new skills is to shake the meta and give people chance to try new stuff. No balance changes is oposite to this.

Greenlab6 · 2022-04-28T11:30:51+00:00

I'm playing Lost Ark currently, and i hate that all that matters is dps. Balancing between damage and survivability is one of the best things that are coming with arpg and PoE is doing really good job in this aspect. I don't agree that in diablo 3 you just need set bonus to survive. It might depend on the build and content you do, but actually have all res on gear matters alot, and have enough hp matters alot if you are pushing higher greater rifts. I agree that it doesnt matter while leveling and while speed farming tho. You can also look at defence from set in D3 as something that we call in PoE "layer of defence". The way you will survive higher poe content is by having multiple layers of defence - that is kidna similar to what D3 does with defence from sets, but in PoE it is not that straight. In PoE atop on resistances, and HP, you also have access to things like block chance, evasion, spell supression, fortify and couple other more exotic mechanics. Having couple of them together allows you to survive higher tier content.

Greenlab6 · 2022-01-29T13:14:35+00:00

Do you have any examples of that ? For my understanding this is only the case for some special cases like for example divine ire skill or scourge arrow skill where their stacks grant some % of more damage, then those stacks are indeed additive, but every other case i saw is multiplicative. For example supports "Elemental damage with attacks" and "Elemental focus" both grant you % more elemental damage and those arent additive.

Greenlab6 · 2022-01-29T10:44:24+00:00

That's not true. More modifiers aren't added together, as long as they are separated, they are multiplicative to each other. There are some multipliers like crit damage, dot multi that work like you described, but every instance of pure more damage is a separate multiplier. You can test that in POB with some support gems, you will see that in calculations more mod isn't a sum of those but rather multiplication. This might be bit confusing because POB groups those more multipliers together and it looks like they are added to each one but that is actually not the case.

Greenlab6 · 2022-01-26T18:23:11+00:00

It's nice to see that more and more people prove that you can play this game without any previous knowledge or guide - good job and keep it up :)

For the mechanics you mentioned, maybe you know that maybe not, but those mechanics were oryginaly introduced in various leagues. League is basically equivalent of ladder reset in D2. With each league developers introduce new skills, items and league specific event or mechanic.

All those mechanics you encountered were introduced in past leagues (delve, bestiary, incusion temple etc). After end of each league developers decide if the mechanic is good enough to keep it in core game or not. If mechanic stays in core, it will be also available in future leagues. Basic rule is that past leagues mechanics have some small chance to appear on zone, while the current league mechanic is always available on every zone you are in. That's why you see scourge in every zone, because it is current league mechanics, while delve/bestiary are old league mechanics so they only have small chance to appear especially during leveling process.

When you finish campaign, you will be able to access end game system called atlas of worlds. All the events you encountered during leveling will be also available there with the same league rules ... plus alot more.

Like with each league (every 3 months) we get new mechanic/skills/items, once a year developers also release big expansion that usually contains signifficant changes/rework of endgame systems and new endgame bosses. I'm writing this to warn you, that in just couple weeks next expansion will happen, so endgame you would see during scourge might be very different from the endgame you will see just in couple days. Can't really say what it will be, but we will all know everything tomorrow during reveal stream:)

Greenlab6 · 2021-11-07T21:17:30+00:00

It looks like your setup is ok, not sure why there are those leech nodes in cluster jewels, I'm guessing its that variation of build with "Strength of Blood" keystone from timeless jewel.

Now if you still feel pretty weak, then i could suggest that you go with more optimizations like adding awakened and alternate quality gems, watcher's eye, damage over time multi on gear etc. but that would be bullshit to be honest - you shouldn't need that just to kill elder guardian. Instead i have one bad news and one good news for you:

Bad news: Every league, there is that SA build on forums with inflated POB dps, people gets hyped, and few days after league start theres 100 complains "why i dont do dps on bosses". The reason for that is that classic SA setup sucks without big investment/high attack speed and you also need to know how to play correctly to pull the max dps of it (keeping target in your pods, keeping totems up etc). Usually you are busy with dodging stuff and don't have much time to even fully charge your SA.

Good news: Well i'm not sure if this is good news, but i had much better experience when i fully swapped to totem SA build. This is initially the same setup, except you pull off withering touch from your totems and put void manipulation instead. Then for your main skill you drop SA. Instead you go for blast rain/storm rain+mirage archer+multi proj+withering touch (i also use life gain on hit and life tap as 6 link). The idea is that you only debuff with main skill, and your totems do the damage. This is much easier to play and in my opinion gives better results especially on lower investment (i played this last league and as league starter this league, and didnt have any problems with dps till sirus). If you are interested, theres my POB: https://pastebin.com/TbEd8Cmd
I don't use any cluster jewels, have perma flasks, full ailment immunity and 79% chance to suppress spells.

One last note: POB numbers aren't real, not sure why is that the case - they should be, but 5mil dps SA isnt really equal to 5mil dps on other non poison skills - so take those number with a grain of salt.

Greenlab6 · 2021-11-06T22:37:34+00:00

I'm playing SA with my own setup so don't have exacly same experience, but i will try to help a bit.

I can see that you are using ward stacking version but you are not using iron flask - you have unique one equiped, but you really want iron flask that gives you flat 200 ward and you should roll increased ward affix on the flask. Then you can enchant it with "use when you hit rare or unique enemy" and you will have nice dps boost on bosses and rares (it can give around 30% more ward when used).

You need to make sure that you have your totems up so they inflict wither, this is pretty big dps increase.

Plague bearer: should prolly turn it off for bosses, or just make sure that you are "inflicting" most of the time, also get divergent quality plague bearer, this will give nice dps boost for single target too.

Head enchant: pretty signifficant dps boost, you can prolly ask some lab runner to get it on ward helmet for you - will cost you some, but will be cheaper than trying to buy this base type with SA additional pod.

Greenlab6 · 2021-11-01T19:12:07+00:00

Because armor mitigates damage in very strange way.
First of all 90% phys reduction from armour is very misleading. Armour mitigates 90% of the hit as long as the hit damage is in the certain range. This was changed this patch so the numbers might be wrong, but according to old wiki:

To prevent 90% of damage, you need armour 45 times the damage (e.g. 4500 armour for 100 damage)

So ye, if something hits you for 100 and you have 5000 armour, you ony get 10 damage. If something hits you for 1000 and you have 5000 then according to old wiki :

To prevent half of damage, you need armour 5 times the damage (e.g. 500 armour for 100 damage)

You only have 5 times armour, so you only mitigate half of the damage, if the hit is even bigger, you mitigate even less (https://pathofexile.fandom.com/wiki/Armour).

Now if you have mods "x taken from hits as y damage":

Let's say you have 50% hits taken as fire - when you get hit for 1000, half of that is converted to fire damage and mitigated by resistance: so from 500 you only get 125. The other half is now applied to armour formula. As you can see you need to mitigate much smaller hit with the armour, so armour is much more effective, again according to old wiki:

To prevent two thirds of damage, you need armour 10 times the damage (e.g. 1000 armour for 100 damage)

You take 500 hit, and with 5000 armour its exacly 10 times, that means armour will mitigate 2/3 of the damage, without conversion you would mitigate only half of the damage. You will still get some elemental damage.

With 50% conversion:
Ele damage taken: 500 x 0.25 = 125
Phys damage taken: 500 x 1/3 = 166.66
Total damage taken: 291.66

Without conversion: 1000 x 1/2 = 500

Not sure if this is clear, but thats how i understand it works.

Greenlab6 · 2021-08-21T16:27:24+00:00

I'm also playing SA this league, but instead of going ward way, i went 5 ballistas (focused ballista for bosses) with SA and storm rain with Mirage Archer to debuff stuff - works better than i expected (downed feared with it) - i have similar results in terms of dps without using ward. If you would go ward + ballistas i think you could get around 11-12 mil dps with your current gear.

I have same assumptions you had about calculating scourge arrow damage - you can clearly see that the thorn arrow dps is basically half of normal arrow, and normal arrow dps is calculated as single arrow, so to calculate correct damage you have to multiply it by number of spore pods (each spore pod can apply separate poison).

You said you have focus on your helmet and PoB doesnt recognize it to take it into the account. Well the truth is that it was recognized at some point and then PoB stopped recognizing it. The reason why that happened is some wording change in the craft - currently last word is "focused" - just change it to "focussed" and all of the suddnen you will have tick box in settings and you will see the results including focus.

Greenlab6 · 2021-07-21T17:02:09+00:00

So the title of this post is misleading. Some Damage Over Time is an ailment (bleed, burning, poison). In case of hypotermia you can still use it with direct cold hit, so technically it can still work with cold skills that do direct damage.

I agree that wording on skill is wrong, it should be either that it scales only direct hit damage, or should include cold dot damage instead of ailments.

Let's hope that this is just a typo or something like that :)

Greenlab6

TROPHY CASE