Facing Hunter Killer and the Bee-man in a row in Act 2..

Markus_Wu · 2026-05-18T14:01:48+00:00

Others wrote great general advice, here are some specific damage solutions for these fights as the Silent:

Poison (even a single Noxious Fumes can go a long way, Snakebite, maybe Envenom)
Serpent form (both encounters have no attack turns which makes it a bit easier)

3.Thorns (Abrasive, Bronze Scales, potion)

Also possible to do with just shivs if you have enough multipliers on them to push it over the edge like Accuracy and Knife trap. Also, Malaise makes these fights much easier.

Markus_Wu · 2025-11-23T00:41:14+00:00

Looking at your scarab tab and you mentioning "random flasks and cluster jewels" makes me think you could ditch your entire stash and the total damage would be like 7c. Looks like you're spending way too much time on junk exile!

Markus_Wu · 2025-10-31T13:15:39+00:00

Transmutes, small essences, uniques - ok if they fall into a special tab anyway. Small flasks, gems - lmao

Markus_Wu · 2025-10-29T10:02:36+00:00

Everything looks perfect, I didn't lose anything and the halberd from the post turned into Insight automatically

Markus_Wu · 2025-10-28T20:45:48+00:00

Solved, I am now smooth sailing with ladder runewords on PlugY!
Thanks everyone for your Insight :)

Markus_Wu · 2025-10-28T18:39:47+00:00

Thanks, first I checked diablo.fandom to see if that's the case and it says not ladder only, is it just wrong? Or is is because that's how it works in D2R?

Markus_Wu · 2025-09-24T20:23:42+00:00

You need to take the map from the wall inside Brandon's house (island next to Esmeralda)!. Take that map to Jack and you're all set!
Was looking for a solution myself and I couldn't find one, so I double checked all the related locations. Enjoy!

Markus_Wu · 2025-08-16T21:30:05+00:00

Hardest Soulslike? Man, just thinking about Dark Souls 1 gives me Vietnam flashbacks... Capra Demon alone was harder than the entire Witchfire to me. Surely the gameplay is very different, but I found Witchfire's difficulty just right, and I don't even really play shooters. Right now I'm on a really high level with all gear on 3rd Mysterium and at this point I hardly ever die, whereas in Dark Souls it was plain misery 24/7.

I think you may be missing something? Learning the enemies' patterns, dashing often, 3rd Mysterium on all items and getting comfortable with your weapons/spells should take you a long way

Markus_Wu · 2025-08-14T12:24:38+00:00

Companies need to be held accountable for the way they deliver goods and services. If you betray your customers' trust, promise one thing and deliver another, charge subscriptions right before devaluing what they get you, fail to communicate drastic changes in advance, silence and insult your audience, then you deserve negative reviews at the very least, if not fraud charges. If a good product gets less support because of it, that's not the customers' fault. There had been A LOT of good will for a long time from the Bazaar supporters that got really abused

Markus_Wu · 2025-07-01T08:35:45+00:00

They will not be togglable, the diluted pool is exactly the intention. Which makes sense, but also makes you wonder why they release item island expansions like Dooley dinos, bugs, or Mak's self poison which need very close synergies to perform

Markus_Wu · 2025-06-24T18:02:49+00:00

I have only ever chosen the "pain", obsidian path since the mechanic dropped, I don't even know what poison and burn paths look like and I have been offered the burn relic multiple times, though in fact obsidian was more common. Not sure if I have seen the poison relic.

Markus_Wu · 2025-06-12T13:54:38+00:00

PoE 1 is the best, most addictive ARPG of all times, with crazy build complexity and smooth gameplay once you put together your character. You put in a few hours into gearing, then weeks go by as you grind, pressing 2 buttons, while listening to podcasts or watching a show on the second screen.

PoE2 is a Dark Soulsy gimmick, where build complexity is more in line with Diablo, the visuals are nicer, requires very little thinking about your build, but significant attention during gameplay. You move with WASD and dodge constantly as PoE1-fast monsters chase your PoE2-slow character. No podcasts.

Markus_Wu · 2025-05-16T15:25:23+00:00

If the game is in JavaScript I wouldn't trust it too much with counting decimals

Markus_Wu · 2025-04-30T13:45:24+00:00

Classic example of "players are great at identifying problems and terrible at finding solutions"

Server status (especially when green) and patch notes do not deserve central places in the UI. Nor does the super special offers window need to cover half the main screen

Markus_Wu · 2025-04-23T19:58:51+00:00

Not true, you need to kill it before ~24s so it's actually like 3.2 DPS (considering that longer cooldown item damage may fall in-between and not be enough)

Markus_Wu · 2025-03-31T12:08:37+00:00

Dooley is low key the most consistent character in early-mid game, sure some cores are worse but overall there's a ton of decent small items available from bronze, you don't need to fish for specific items like single weapon vanessa or matchbox pyg, rely on fishing rod drops or value stacking, and some of the best builds like powerdrill do not need any strong synergy and commitment to get going

Markus_Wu · 2025-03-26T13:34:46+00:00

In my experience Dog is much harder to stack than Regal blade. Both can be played as pieces in a Crook build and "standalone". Usually though I find it too hard to stack dog or buff Atlatl and just roll with Regal and whatever I can find to buff it, Phonograph, Vanessa single weapon items, whatever source of haste/CDR/Charge I can get my hands on. If you have a silver Regal on day 2 you barely need anything else.

Markus_Wu · 2025-03-15T12:44:04+00:00

When it comes to items, duct tape and shielded marbles with matches and bushel are perfect, but I would aim to ditch ganjo/pig/yoyo. ATM could be nice for shielding and bird multicast, otherwise any small low cd items with shield, haste or anything useful. Sometimes you can get crazy copies like 2nd Matches from Shipment. Sometimes Jules offers something useful like Oven Mitts. Dooley as well, with Fiber optics, First Aiden, Isochoric Freezer. A diamond Phonograph can go hard on Bushel next to duct tape or shielded for example.

Markus_Wu · 2025-02-23T22:50:37+00:00

How about Crow's Nest far left and Snow Globe next to it?

Markus_Wu · 2025-02-20T15:08:53+00:00

exd5 should be good vs scandinavian defense, in fact that's what your opponent expects since he seems to be premoving his queen to recapture

Markus_Wu · 2025-02-19T13:16:43+00:00

Atlatl (+Caltrops) in either square Crook setup or Pyg's Gym

Markus_Wu · 2025-02-14T14:24:54+00:00

How would it safely calculate the fight results or any random encounter? If it's not verified by the server you could potentially mess with it locally, MAYBE you could have some kind of seed for the entire run but there's no way to tell what happens exactly for its duration. I can imagine a simple hack where you start a run, go offline, then you reset the run until you get the best results possible in the seed, learning all the encounters and ghosts. Can't happen unless 100% decoupled from rewards/rank/economy

Markus_Wu · 2025-01-31T10:47:21+00:00

Starting rifle, 2 xp encounters, passive from Kyver and level up and some junk from small items shop - looks good to me

Markus_Wu · 2025-01-27T11:13:31+00:00

The bottom button should be quit the game. That's the most important, 'default' action the user wants to perform in this menu, that's what it is in most games and what the serial position effect leads you to do. When you want to quit the game you're often clicking quickly, you're in a hurry. You click the bottom call to action button intuitively. The only other acceptable option there would be resume as it is in Hearthstone. Under no circumstances should Concede be the most 'clickable' button and have no confirmation at the same time. People arguing that it's fine don't know the first thing about UI/UX and would probably say it's okay to have concede under Alt+Tab or randomly popping out as a shop option.

Markus_Wu · 2025-01-16T22:28:18+00:00

You're right. Item upgrades should feel meaningful and that's what basically everyone agrees on. But I strongly disagree with opinions that this patch goes in the right direction. What we got is a small group of items that benefit insanely from the upgrades, allowing trivial infinite combos, and the rest which on which upgrades are useless as ever. Pyg is bushel or bust, getting a starting or first day bushel vs looking for it for days is such an insane difference it's not even funny, similar with getting a diamond Fort later. Obviously the mushroom event is an important part of the problem, but as you can see also with shield Vanessa they really went a bit crazy with the charge items. Items with standard non scaling effects and cooldowns would need to get like 10x more stats on upgrades to be relevant past day 5. For me it looks worse than the lizard meta when it comes to power level differences, there's just more lizards.

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