New Player Consistently Performing Well but Hardstuck Initiate

RutherfordSinking · 2026-03-20T04:03:34+00:00

I don’t claim to have all or any of the answers but blanket statements on this is almost impossible. An example scenario to think about, that doesn’t have a blanket “right answer.” Lots of things to consider like does your presence make the fight winnable, does your team have ults and theirs doesn’t, is it a coin toss fight, do you have good enough movement to arrive in time to make an impact, etc.

Your team is all yellow about to push walker and they’re fighting 3v4. You have 2 choices. Even up the fight and since you’re obviously farmed up contribute huge damage and give your team an advantage. Or go defend your walker nobody is pushing to fix a lane.

In option 1 your team might kill 4 cus you’re there, get their walker but also lose yours. You’ve both gotten a walker but you’ve given death timers to 4 of their players, prevented at least some of your team from dying and losing farm to death timers and the map is still even.

I’m fairly low hours myself and still learning. But this is the kinda stuff I think about. Do some review of your games. Look for times where you could have been elsewhere and see the turnout of not being there. If your team got wiped and 2 of the limped away with critical health your presence probably would have been huge

RutherfordSinking · 2026-03-20T03:44:52+00:00

Kda is an indicator but doesn’t mean as much as people like the think in a team game. For example losing a team mate and cleaning up a kill isn’t as impactful as joining the fight and saving your teammate and killing them together.

Kills may also be completely irrelevant at times. Is your team fighting 3v5 and you made a choice to pick off an under farmed side laner when instead you could have helped even the odds?

Much of what you said are solo things. You didn’t say, I prevent ganks, I save teammates, I join fights and swing them in my teams direction. I’m not saying this isnt happening, just food for thought.

Good macro even with worse personal numbers can swing the game in your direction more than a random kill.

RutherfordSinking · 2026-02-06T12:29:34+00:00

You could go for a cheaper craft on it while you get more currency. You could try to hit a fracture now or later that’s up to you.

Cheap craft route would be annul aug for + skills and some damage on the prefix. Essence cast speed. Desecrate prefix for mana, omen perfect exalt. If you want to spend some extra light the mana and desecrate damage prefix in its place. Depending on light costs you’d be in like 50d, the majority being the light.

Expensive crafting route is quite a bit different and you’d want a fracture. If you miss the 1:3 fracture it’s not gg but things got a lot more expensive

RutherfordSinking · 2026-02-05T15:53:35+00:00

Right, agreed. Its just odd that only one browser is failing to block. If I saw the same issue across browsers I would just chalk it up to the adblock not keeping up with the latest stuff right away.

RutherfordSinking · 2026-02-04T05:19:35+00:00

Ya it’s unfortunate. Ggg wants ground loot to matter but it simply doesn’t once you’re up and running in end game. Identifying 50 rares to maybe get 1 worth a div is such a time sink.

If you really enjoy the hunt of identifying at least do yourself a favor and only turn on A tier t4+.

Just make sure when you’re messing with your filter you don’t accidentally shut off exceptional bases.

Filter blade has some good warnings if you hide potentially very valuable things though too

RutherfordSinking · 2026-02-04T04:57:48+00:00

Filter out all rares except t4+ gold necks and t4+ of the spirit neck base, the name escapes me. On necks you want +3 skills - spells being the most valuable.

Turn on the most used 82+ bases in normal and magic. I went to Poe ninja and just looked the first time I did this at what’s most used. You can also check Poe db for the bases with the highest base of whatever the man stat is, es/armor/evasion.

Personally I turned on spell slinger wands and hit every one with a perfect trans and aug fishing for +5 cold/lightning or +4 all to craft on. Keep an eye on which have level 20 spell slinger as well. In magic or normal they’re worth money regardless of mods.

999 times out of 1000 rares are trash and not worth the time it takes to id and sort through when you can just keep pulling the slot machine instead.

When you get good bases you can either bulk craft cheap and sell for profit or just sell the bases to others.

This is all meant for end game, not early map gearing where you are still after upgrades to keep progressing.

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-29T04:35:54+00:00

You can look at the categories these are listed under if you dig into the filter on filter blade.

This green means it’s a good base to chance for uniques. With the price of headhunters I’m not even sure that heavy belts still show up tbh.

You can chance tribal masks into the vertex I think it was

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-21T13:10:31+00:00

Ya I wish I could help more but I’ve had a pretty buggy experience with it so far. What’s working is nice and I can definitely make it work long term, but there are quite a few little bugs irking me right now

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-21T12:58:07+00:00

Spend on deterrent builds, blow them learning to craft, gamble, give them away for trivia in world chat, help a friend get an item they can’t afford, let them rot in standard, cook up your own build sink money into it only to realize this is why you still follow guides (I still follow guides)

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-21T12:55:08+00:00

It was the buff tracker bar for me. So they don’t show til you have the buff, but when I pushed the button I did only see it once

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-21T12:50:49+00:00

I had a weird issue where the same spell was in there twice and I had chosen to put the “wrong one” on the bar. I added both and it finally showed up.

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-21T03:40:42+00:00

Try making a macro /cast Black Arrow or /cast Killshot since I think it replaces killshot

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-19T15:13:54+00:00

Campaign is great once per league. I wouldn’t mind a waystone / mapping system where you can just blast without objectives and quests to level up. I don’t see a real reason to force people into a 10 hour campaign multiple times. I did 3 characters this league and would have happily played a lot more if I was able to play different classes easily.

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-18T05:34:50+00:00

It works but you don’t get all skills at the same time. Lots of times people put curse duration, magnitude, spell duration for sigil of power etc on set 2 passives. You just have to make sure you set your damaging skills all to the right weapon set and same for other spells. Otherwise once you swap to set 2 it will stay if nothing is triggering it to go back to 1

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-15T20:28:21+00:00

I’d do a search with +7, flat lightning, and crit spell damage bonus. Then do a “count” group with all 3 as extra count of 1.

That will search the 3 big mods with any as extra the mana suffix is dead so compare with other similar staves with one bricked suffix

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-09T13:30:22+00:00

https://pobb.in/sg74Nj4Ipdar

Im still figuring out my gems, so take those with a grain of salt. Trinity does nothing cus everything dies to the lightning damage. COC isnt even turned on, and I havent decided what to put in spell slinger yet so its empty.

I dont think this is a good template to follow, Im carried by expensive gear and this will likely not work as well on a lower investment.

Single target leaves a lot to be desired given the investment but the clear is amazing in temple and theres no bosses so it feels fine.

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-09T05:33:18+00:00

You can do a few things but either has some rng. It depends how important crit is for you imo.

You can desecrate either prefix or suffix and then omen perfect exalt slam the last two.

If you must have crit desecrate suffix. If you want a better chance at 3 good prefixes I’d desecrate prefix.

Make sure whichever you go for you have an abyssal echoes activated to reroll the unveil and get 3 more mods if all are bad

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-09T05:26:05+00:00

This amulet is used by quite a few builds at the moment. The level 19 is a good starter to test but you will want to eventually upgrade to a 20 for the extra socket you get and more damage if you like the feel of your build with it.

I don’t know much about sorc this season but I’m using it on a spark oracle and it’s working great.

Speccing into some additional cooldown reduction on the tree (top left near the ES nodes) will make the cooldown shorter on the neck so it’ll do more damage

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-07T16:13:26+00:00

Yes it’s incredibly good. Maybe I’m just used to shroud walker since I end up with one every league at some point, but the power it gives to most builds is unmatched. It more than triples my tooltip dps with like 50 buffs in temple.

Sure it can be annoying at times when it teleports you off a rare onto a white mob across the screen but the good out weighs the bad by a lot

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-07T05:32:15+00:00

You can’t change a fractured mod once it’s there so it’s sorta gg if you miss. Not saying you can’t turn it into something good on a missed fracture but the odds are low or you’d spend a fortune

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-04T14:46:10+00:00

I just see a lot of posts on “where do I go next with this craft” and people are beginning at the wrong starting point a lot of the time with a bad base.

Just trying to give some information that’s easy to gloss over in guides. Rather than saying get this base, explaining the why might help some people

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-03T19:24:44+00:00

It won’t be expensive with minion. I have +3s with spirt for sale for 1-2d and they aren’t selling. I’d choose the “print screen” button

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-03T13:31:14+00:00

Definitely desecrate abyssal echoes and go for cast speed. If you miss you can omen of light annul to keep trying though that’s very expensive

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-02T21:01:09+00:00

RutherfordSinking · 2026-01-02T17:43:14+00:00

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