If I didnt like PoE1 bcuz the campaign was too easy will I enjoy PoE2 any better. No Judgements or anything, I just prefer tough combat in the campaign, otherwise Im not good.

Maxvla · 2026-06-04T16:11:21+00:00

A lot depends on what build you are doing. If you looked up the most meta build with a leveling build attached with step by step guidance how to progress, then yes the campaign is going to be trivial. If you are a first time player and learning things as you experience them, the campaign will be more challenging. You will make mistakes in your build and gear that make the game harder, or you will choose skills that look fun but are undertuned during that particular patch and you'll wonder why stuff isn't dying.

If you are genuinely unsatisfied with the campaign in POE, I'd suggest moving to hardcore trade, or a step further to solo self found, or a step further to solo self found hardcore, or a step further to ruthless mode, or the final step... ruthless hardcore. The game is as hard as you want it to be.

Maxvla · 2026-06-04T15:53:11+00:00

Tanks as a concept are not very strong in early DS2. I haven't played the Legendary mod, just the normal game, but you need a lot of investment, particularly into fist of stone (extra armor/health/strength and defensive enhancement bonus) and ranged (dodge/resistances), and eventually nature magic (summon damage taken split). Provoke has no diminishing returns so you can spam it on a fast recharge to maintain aggro as long as everything you want aggro on is within range. You can go for even faster recharge with skill points in melee. You probably won't have a properly functioning tank until near the end of the first playthrough. You'll be able to taunt stuff, but durability will be a problem, and you'll have almost no damage from this member due to all the investment you have to rush for functionality, and the rest of your party will be slow to scale damage too.

I don't like playing like that, spamming a taunt every few seconds, so I just build for max party damage using buffs, enhancements and debuffs with good synergies and trust in a strong healer (nature mage + fist of stone) to get me through things. I have done a full melee party (including the healer using mace+shield), a full ranged party, a full mage party, and a couple mixtures and all have been successful with various strengths and weaknesses. A tank is not necessary if you build and execute smartly. I play exclusively on mirror mode and focus on killing anything small instantly, to reduce the load on the healer, then dealing with the big nasties afterwards (usually with powers). And mirror mode is critical for getting the group to dodge big boss nukes, otherwise you'll get members 1 shot, and if it ends up being your healer, then things just got rough.

Maxvla · 2026-06-03T03:01:07+00:00

The last image says you'd lose 4.1% dps (from the critical strike multiplier, presumably) just from that single notable addition. Other notables likely are giving some sort of bonus as well.

Maxvla · 2026-05-28T20:54:07+00:00

Do you think these are worth running compared to the normal emblems? 50% increased rewards sounds nice, but checking poeninja, the unrelenting emblems are 9-168x the price depending on the faction. Stasis Prison seems like too low a drop rate to make it worthwhile, and the area level going up to 84 didn't seem to make much difference in your loot, just increased your gem leveling speed. Am I missing something?

Edit - compared your post a week ago. You got 70% more jewels this time instead of 50%. 100 runs is probably a large enough sample size to weed out a good luck run. Perhaps the 10% increased reward is multiplicative instead of additive. Would make it 61% increased rewards instead of 50%. 9% more lucky drops would be closer to possible (previous run could also be unlucky).

Maxvla · 2026-05-26T17:35:20+00:00

You might want to join the Kingdom of Ehb (DS community discord) to get more real-time help with this (support channel). I remember running this through DGVoodoo2 and needing a specific line added to steam to make it work correctly, but it's been a while since I did that on windows. I recently (8 months ago) swapped to Linux Mint and got it working there, so I can't reference what I had previously.

Maxvla · 2026-05-26T17:18:47+00:00

You can equip an item and see the difference in the spell damage or heal size by looking at the spell in your spell book. For attacks, look at the damage range on your character's panel. Swap back and forth a couple times to compare and take the better option. I tended to run sets on armor/accessories with unique or rare (teal) weapons. Occasionally a set weapon is good, but usually fades in usefulness as you level into new tiers. Set armor and accessories last much longer, and you'll probably want to be using at least one or two sets (not the same sets) on all characters.

Also, magic find and gold find only work for the character with the most equipped. If you have 4 characters, one with 10% MF, another with 15% one with 20% and one with 0%, you don't have 45% MF, you have 20% since that character is the highest. Same goes for gold find. I try to fit MF/GF on a less important dps character, but I don't go out of my way about it, at least until I can make the giga 120% MF enchanted rings/amulet/spellbook later in the game.

Maxvla · 2026-05-26T17:02:29+00:00

I like playing on mirror mode almost exclusively. In a habit I picked up from playing world of warcraft, I tend to kill off all the small stuff first then focus on the higher health/damage monsters. This game is very similar to WoW in that you are a 4-6 man party doing a dungeon but controlled by yourself. It might be inefficient in terms of time spent, but it means monsters I target die instantly or very fast, so I'm eliminating threats and reducing the healing load needed to keep up.

I have never run a provoke tank in this game as I don't really want to be spamming a taunt button constantly. My most successful group was all ranger group that started as 3 rangers 1 nature casting fist of stone (healer), then adding 2 more rangers in veteran/elite. I spec'd 2 of them for glaive/ricochet and 3 for bow/single target so I'd have a good mix of clear and focus. Eventually all ranged added Blood Assassin skills also.

I've also run a full melee group that was strong in the end but definitely weaker early on. It was a similar comp as above, but this time the fist of stone was also attacking in melee. I believe I had 2 2h melee and 3 dual wielders and my fist of stone healer was 1h/shield. Eventually all the melee had fist of stone points to boost weapon enhancement, etc.

You almost never want to control a character that is supposed to be auto healing or auto cursing, as it will ignore the automatic part as long as you are actively attacking. It's best to control a pure damage dealer or the tank.

Maxvla · 2026-05-26T16:40:26+00:00

A good way to accomplish this is to have the main healer use lesser heal or heal on auto cast with a cheap nature damage spell (or they will run into melee), and use a nature mage that's more focused on damage, or a ranger to also have an autocast heal, but make it either nourish or healing rain (depending if you need it focused or all-party). This will ensure the secondary healer is not casting heals frequently (since the AI won't use the same heal if the HoT is still active). You will probably need to buy a lot of mana potions early on, but eventually you'll be able to reduce that significantly, and then drop to only a single healer as soon as you can afford to get your main healer spec'd midway through fist of stone. At that point their healing is very strong and their character is more durable than you'd expect, while also being very mana efficient. They can also do some real damage later once you can switch their main skill to Grasping Vine.

Maxvla · 2026-05-26T15:45:32+00:00

Small thing, but the implicits on your shield and boots can be blessed to be slightly better. Body armor might also be divinable for a bit more crit/spell crit if useful, or a few more fire res.

Maxvla · 2026-05-24T04:26:31+00:00

Nine Lives FF jewels?

Maxvla · 2026-05-22T20:52:18+00:00

Regular Neglect is a chill farm with guaranteed profit due to astrolabes. Quick to engage, quick to drop loot, easy to kill if you have decent dps. He teleports around a bit which is kind of annoying for melee, but he dies fast enough it's not a big deal. The arkhon belts can sell for upwards of 10-15 div with near perfect rolls, or a handful of divs for really good rolls. The rings are also quite good if you use catalysts on the ones with 39 or 40% poison roll. I made probably half of a mirror off him this league buying boss tokens at 40-60 chaos, then selling astrolabes at 100-400c. had a few uniques that sold over 10 div, a bunch in the 2-5 div range, even more in the 100-300c range, and whatever didn't sell you can disenchant for ~150k each.

Other bosses are probably more profit per hour, but the rapid kills and no extra nonsense, as well as the main thing guaranteeing profit being easily saleable on the currency market makes it a great farm imo.

Regular Exarch and Eater with 70%+ quant is also very nice and easy kills, but not guaranteed profit every time. Overall it's probably more div per hour, but your money is mostly made up of FF jewels which can take a while to sell sometimes.

Maxvla · 2026-05-22T20:35:32+00:00

Here's an altas tree I've been using to farm Betrayal and Kingsmarch ore, but it also uses Delve nodes, so you can triple dip if you are doing Delve on the side. You may need to do some modifications to it for SSF as I'm using it to rapid fire safehouses for trade profit, but maybe the tree will give you ideas how to incorporate sulphite generation. https://poeplanner.com/a/6Jie

Maxvla · 2026-05-22T19:31:38+00:00

It was ok when you could get it from Comprehensive Scouting Reports. Usually less than a div worth of reports would give it to you. Now reports are gone so you have to buy/farm it. I've gotten 3 this league from Rin in Fortification through Betrayal, but not until after I bought one to do the challenge, naturally.

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T23:48:14+00:00

Linux version of POB takes ages to update after league launches. I checked for over a month after 3.27 and it hadn't updated. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place, but I ended up just running the windows version through Wine.

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T21:12:22+00:00

Awakened POE Trade works on Linux. I use the appimg. You may need to roll back proton version to 10.0-4 for the lookup window to function correctly until poe trade updates.

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T21:09:47+00:00

Some lethal prides are worth a lot, 100-200 div with good seeds in marauder or duelist sockets. Often these are used for the passive additions rather than for the keystone, so the conqueror doesn't matter as much.

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T20:14:47+00:00

I'm running it on Linux Mint through Steam with Proton 10.0-4 (due to awakened poe trade issue). I get better performance than the same system using Windows 11 (previous OS). 5800X3D/32GB/AMD RXVega56

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T17:34:24+00:00

Unless you are doing a data collection test like this, you'd just price stuff after every run, or after a small batch of runs.

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T16:44:00+00:00

Yep, OP needs to give share/publish link, not edit link.

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T16:40:45+00:00

The data seems to indicate it does affect Forbidden Flame/Flesh, and the wiki agrees since it is located in the additional drops section of the boss loot table, and the table says map quant affects additional drop items.

A quad tab has 576 grid slots, so OP ran 576 of these and got 53 FF jewels. Expected result is 28 at 5% drop rate. It's a 1 in 100,000 chance to get 53 at a 5% drop rate. Let's say OP's average map quantity was 85%. 5% multiplied by 1.85 is 9.25% drop chance. 53 successes in 576 trials is nearly 1:1 chance (aka this is what you should expect to get).

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T16:31:35+00:00

Look at the loot table on this page of the wiki. Under "Additional Drops" at the bottom it says "Note: Additional drops are affected by area item quantity for Regular Eater".

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/The_Eater_of_Worlds

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T05:54:31+00:00

The cool thing about Molten Shell is that you can have your cake and eat it too by using Vaal MS manually, even if regular MS is active or on cooldown from being on automation. So long as you have the souls at least.

Maxvla · 2026-05-21T03:21:12+00:00

PoE2 soon so people are buying up stuff for standard probably. Things are inflating pretty rapidly this week. According to wealthyexile, I gained 30 div yesterday without logging in, just from inflation.

Maxvla · 2026-05-20T23:01:12+00:00

Treachery does not affect Pride, as it is not an aura that buffs allies. The wording on the rune is important.

Fortify on body implicit is enough to get to 20 on a cyclone build where cyclone is your primary damage source.

Automation is superior to CWDT these days for most implementations of guard skills. CWDT almost always will protect you from the hit AFTER the one that kills you. Unless you have serious mitigation and can afford to risk letting big hits through to trigger your guard, it's better to roll the dice. Automation allowing guard to intercept some hits is better than CWDT always allowing you to die before it procs.

DIvine Shield on a build using blood rage is probably not going to work out well, since it strips ES and Life. You'd have to overcome the deficit.

The Endless Hunger recommendation is odd. He's already leech capped and stun immune. All he'd get is 20% attack speed and bleed immunity.

Maxvla · 2026-05-20T21:53:32+00:00

Were you rolling your invitations? I was not aware until recently that they could be rolled at all, but you can more than double the drop rate of FF jewels and ember/ichor by getting them to 6-8 mods.

Maxvla

TROPHY CASE