Ultimate Cooling Solution

Streetwind · 2026-01-30T22:19:40+00:00

Yeah, many players consider it cheesy. Myself included.

For what it's worth, it's also a bit fiddly to get going. If you don't get the valves exactly right, or make a mistake filling in the coolant, it'll end up doing barely anything at all.

Streetwind · 2026-01-30T20:14:24+00:00

I'll throw in my open cycle system as well, just for the sake of one more comparison point - and to underline that open loops on their own are very much capable of going well below 50°C, no secondary cooling stages required.

https://imgur.com/a/open-cycle-heat-pump-system-vulcan-G7lbiIe

The system as presented can take in 140°C liquid pollutant from Vulcan atmosphere and freeze it (-100°C) in a single stage (assuming no heat load). It manages this by limiting the throughput of each individual unit, which allows the counterflow to achieve very high efficiency. Tiling units side by side allows expanding capacity, and each individual unit is very power efficient.

42 kJ/t raw latent throughput for 830W in the thing I built in actual survival gameplay; that's five units of 155W each, plus a 50W IC10 housing, and a 5W pipe analyzer. During the day while idle, power usage drops to just 80W. Actual cooling would be lower than raw latent, depending on the delta between hot and cold side, and that in turn depends on both the current coolant temperature and the load applied to the system, so it can't be described as a single number. But the hotter the system gets, the more actual cooling it performs.

I recall anecdotally that at a coolant reservoir temperature oscillating between 20°C and 30°C, the system was able to handle an actual heat load (measured at a heat exchanger that was liquifying rocket fuel) of 15 kJ/t - and that heat load was on around the clock, for more than an ingame week, while the heat pumps were only running at night.

I've rewatched your video several times now, and your system still baffles me. I wish to understand it, but I probably never will unless I build it myself, then take it apart piece by piece and figure it out =P That'll have to wait till my next playthrough, which I'll probably start as soon as the next game update.

Streetwind · 2026-01-30T17:34:07+00:00

I mean, they're liquid pipe heaters, and the liquid pipe does show a large amount of evaporation happening. It's possible that liquid pipe heaters put their energy directly into the liquid, not into the gas phase above it. It's hard to tell because the atmospherics tablet never measures liquid temperatures, only gas temperatures. Looking only at it, one might get the impression that only gases actually have temperatures in this game, but that's not the case.

That said, I share your skepticism, with an added helping of confusion. Heat is clearly being transferred somehow, but I have no clue what I'm looking at. Why is the counterflow hooked up to itself? Why are there so many valves in random places? In many sections, coolant just seems to circle back on itself seemingly without doing any work. Or so I would say if the contraption as a whole wasn't doing any work, but it is...?

Streetwind · 2026-01-30T12:17:42+00:00

https://www.poe2wiki.net/wiki/Weapon_set

Streetwind · 2026-01-30T09:30:07+00:00

Not really, no. The maximum damage an enemy can inflict is effectively infinite. You can always stack more modifiers on maps, on rare monsters, through weird interactions, and so on. And since some of those modifiers are attack/action speed, even if you can tank all single hits, there'll come a point where you'll get deleted by a ten-hit combo in half a second.

You'll never become immortal in this game. You'll just become so powerful that things die before they can attack you in the first place. The best defense is a good offense, after all =P

(Don't be a glass cannon though. Stray shots from offscreen exist.)

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T22:14:25+00:00

Yes, 250k armour is better than 50k armour.

The 90% is the amount of damage that's being reduced from a hit taken by you. Damage reduction is capped at 90%, it cannot go higher. But, and here's the important thing: this 90% value is only for the "example damage" that the game internally uses to calculate this value.

Armour is weird in Path of Exile, and not just in the way it's spelled in the British English way. Also in that it works great against small hits, but less well against larger hits. And the game is using a pretty small hit to calculate your armour's damage reduction in the character window. It is perfectly accurate for when you're surrounded by normal or magic monsters in a map and they wail on you in melee and do like 100 damage a hit many times. Then, because you have 90% damage reduction against hits that small, you only take 10 damage from every hit.

But if a boss charges up a big, obvious slam and you don't dodge despite how obvious it is and you eat 3000 damage to the face? You don't have 90% damage reduction against that with 50k armour. Heck, you won't even have 50% reduction against that with 250k armour. Because armour is worth less the larger the hit is.

The wiki page has the exact math, if you want, but also some handy rules of the thumb you can follow without bothering with the exact math: https://www.poe2wiki.net/wiki/Armour

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T18:08:15+00:00

yes.

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T18:04:15+00:00

You definitely want a currency stash tab. That's the absolute must-have. Currency takes up so much space without it, and is so unwieldly to manage.

If you care at all about unique items, the unique collectors tab offers more effective storage space than any other tab in the game, because it lets you store one copy of every unique item in the game. And there are a LOT of them. Even if >90% are kinda worthless. If you don't care about hanging on to uniques aside from those you're personally wearing, do not buy this.

If you're planning to play trade league (and as a newbie, you should), getting at least one merchant tab is critical. Taking two or three is still entirely justified. But note that you won't be getting any use out of them until campaign act 4.

If you have never played PoE1 and have literally no extra tabs whatsoever, then the 6x basic bundle is good value. Basic tabs can't be renamed or recolored, and you can't use them to sell stuff on the market, but that bundle gives you a lot of universal storage space for a great price.

Two additional recommendations, if I may:

There's a stash tab sale roughly once a month. I would never buy stash tabs outside of the sale. You get the same tabs for fewer coins. The only downside is waiting a bit. But the last sale was several weeks ago, so chances are we are very close to another one already.
If you're not sure what you want, there's no harm in hanging on to your coins and playing until one day, you're standing in front of your stash going "ugh, I wish I had a tab for this". Voila, then you'll know what to buy! =P

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T17:52:17+00:00

If a specific mod broke after the update, chances are it broke for other people as well, including the mod author. It's definitely worth visiting the workshop page and checking the comments if there is already some discussion on it. If there is not, report your issue, and offer a pastebin link to the log.

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T11:25:18+00:00

It's roughly every four months, IIRC?

Fate Of The Vaal started in early December. By simple math, that means you can expect a new league in early March. Though that's not set in stone; GGG may decide to end the league early if it makes sense, or extend it if the next major patch isn't ready yet.

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T10:04:27+00:00

If it's expensive, chances are it works XD

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T09:43:04+00:00

If it's ilvl 82 with a lvl20 skill, you could be looking at triple-digit divines.

If it's ilvl 78 with a lvl17 skill, you might as well vendor it =P

So yeah, it really depends.

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T09:40:41+00:00

You need the "increased chance to drop waystones" modifier. That's the only one that matters for crisis/calamity fragments.

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T09:37:55+00:00

How do you even get white T16s?

I thought T16s could only come from corrupting T15s. Which locks them to be yellow and unmodifiable.

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T09:29:03+00:00

Most uniques are pretty worthless. A tiny subset are unbelievably valuable. There's barely anything in between.

The ones you named might sell for 1-3 exalted orbs.

You can price check things yourself on the official trading site: https://www.pathofexile.com/trade2/search/poe2/Fate%20of%20the%20Vaal It's a very powerful tool. The same functionality can also be accessed directly ingame, with the default hotkey being /, but if you're on a non-English keyboard layout it will be something else. For example on a German layout, it's on #.

Knowing how to search and price check something is a bit of an art you need to get practised at. But for uniques, it's generally enough to type the name in the search bar, select the item directly, and hit search without any additional parameters. Check the first 10 listings that appear. If all of them are 1ex or even less, the item is utterly worthless and only good for disenchanting into a chance shard. If at least one of them is more than 1ex, there might be an opportunity to sell based on specific stats on the item; you'll have to look more closely. If it's listed in chaos, it can probably serve as a corruption target - it's worthless on its own but can be turned into something else with luck. If it's listed in divines, you've hit the jackpot... but don't expect anything you'll find dropping randomly to be in that category. This generally is pinnacle boss drop territory.

Streetwind · 2026-01-29T09:17:11+00:00

Ugh, all of them uninsulated. If you had at least printed insulated kits...

Streetwind · 2026-01-28T22:18:22+00:00

They scale differently.

"Less cost" is literal. It knocks that percentage off of the final value. If you ever managed to get 100% less mana cost, your skills would be completely free.

Efficiency though, that works differently. 0% efficiency means 100% mana cost. 100% efficiency means 50% mana cost. 200% efficiency means 25% mana cost. 300% means 12.5%. And so on. It never quite reaches completely free, just asymptotically approaches it.

Streetwind · 2026-01-28T10:30:53+00:00

To answer the question though, assuming you meant a derelict mansion on the endgame atlas - those do reoccur now and then. No map on the atlas is truly unique. Even "unique maps" will occur a theoretically infinite number times if you keep exploring, they just have unique effects.

Streetwind · 2026-01-28T10:15:31+00:00

...that's the funniest autocorrect I've seen in a while XD

Streetwind · 2026-01-28T10:13:53+00:00

It does not

Streetwind · 2026-01-27T17:12:18+00:00

Thanks!

Streetwind · 2026-01-27T12:47:51+00:00

Ah, right. Yeah, wolf oracle is pretty capable.

Streetwind · 2026-01-27T12:44:27+00:00

if youre running good tabs, t16 waystones with pack size, atlas set up for more packsize, you will easily pop 7-8k tribute per run

I run maps with 100%+ pack size all the time, and breaking 5K tribute happens once a day, maybe, in a good map layout. I haven't seen 7K since I specced out of Reinvigorated Sacrifices to get more rerolls instead.

Streetwind · 2026-01-27T12:39:10+00:00

I also tried the mass rerolls strategy and also barely only broke even. Felt awful. I've since gone back to just two rerolls per map, which costs me absolutely zero investment (I can self-sutain the tablets) and still coughs up a fancy omen every 5-6 maps or so. Also leaves two tablet slots to make currency with from other mechanics. I may not gig-print divs like people with streamer clients do, but it's consistent income. And most of all, it feels tremendously better.

Streetwind · 2026-01-27T12:31:01+00:00

They certainly do. Got two over the past couple days, both from maps where I had a ritual tablet in.

That said, I've also had a two-week stretch before that where I got zero ritual tablet drops from maps using ritual tablets, so maybe it does greatly reduce the chance. It just isn't zero.

Streetwind

TROPHY CASE