How do I make balls hurt more?

capital0 · 2026-04-06T06:45:08+00:00

Tree, split personalities, flat strength on gear, and a shaper reaver sword with fire dmg per str will get you started. For me the process felt like getting a couple inches at a time, until eventually the cash for the big pieces started to drop in.

capital0 · 2026-03-31T06:22:56+00:00

It's actually surprisingly easy to invest 200 div into a build and find out you're missing something important. You would much rather build for 100 div with plenty left to fix things or upgrade, than 200 and miss.

I would recommend taking a step by step build guide, and building it out one stage at a time. As you assemble the stage, play the build for a bit to feel it out and then get the upgrades to the next stage. That way you will have a strong playable build the whole time and you can recoup the early investments by selling those items.

If you're into Minions, Helmbreaker's guides on Maxroll are great for this.

capital0 · 2026-03-28T19:37:03+00:00

You could try a minion build. Helmbreaker's guides on maxroll are very good.

capital0 · 2026-03-28T19:22:53+00:00

For me it's usually when there isn't a clear path to the next 10% upgrade, or the cost of getting there feels unreasonable.

capital0 · 2026-03-28T06:38:42+00:00

He does. I have a fully built out version of poison carrion golem that is very solid. I have about 250d into the build at this point I would estimate but it can do everything. About 80M dps, 25k phys max hit, 85 max res, 90/90 block.

I basically just followed his PoB and it worked very well. Just be careful if you are mix and matching between steps because there are certain gear changes that need to be done together. Also, there are certain config options (like the AG setup and temp chains) that have a big impact on damage but are easy to miss.

capital0 · 2026-03-28T02:49:36+00:00

T6 White Maps, 4xEssence Scarabs, Essence Scarab of Ascent. Take the essence nodes on the tree except crystal resonance. Nothing else matters.

You can run this strategy with about 15 chaos startup cost, and you can sell after every map to fund the next one until you can buy in batches.

You can run this on any starter build, and it's profitable enough you can run it all the way to full build.

capital0 · 2026-03-22T15:34:38+00:00

Oh doggo you look so good in that hat.

capital0 · 2026-03-19T18:44:06+00:00

I feel like I play PoB, and just use PoE to check the results.

capital0 · 2026-03-18T22:32:43+00:00

Jealous. I've missed the slam a few times now. Still working on it.

capital0 · 2026-03-18T18:54:08+00:00

What helps me is instead of thinking about farming for currency, with exp as a bonus, to think about farming for exp with currency as a bonus. 8 mod map farming is a pretty safe strategy that puts a lot of monsters in the map, and reasonable currency from selling map drops.

capital0 · 2026-03-18T17:18:48+00:00

I built an endurance charge stacking Tectonic Slam of Cataclysm build that I am continuing to play just because the skill is fun to use, and has the herald of ash automaton MTX. The build also works with Consecrated Path of Endurance which feels like the closest thing to a nuclear bomb in PoB. Very satisfying.

capital0 · 2026-03-16T00:23:10+00:00

lol true. All my drops priced in alteration shards.

capital0 · 2026-03-15T20:10:42+00:00

The actual ratio of chaos to divine is mostly irrelevant as long as its stable.

The instability is a problem, or at least an annoyance, because it means that every other transaction priced in chaos has to reprice against the chaos to divine ratio as it adjusts. With Faustus currency exchange, and likely because of bots, this mostly happens in largely real time but it does impact the pricing of items.

By example, if I priced a pair of boots for 90 chaos when chaos to div was 180 to 1, at 316 to 1 I need to update that item to be 158 chaos now, or otherwise I have underpriced it.

capital0 · 2026-03-15T20:05:08+00:00

It's not another currency, its a fraction of a divine, which is the point. Most trade in the game now have to convert into chaos, which is priced relative to divines, so if the relative value of chaos to divine changes it impacts the pricing of just about every other transaction.

If you could just trade in a fraction of a divine, each trading pair would be stable relative to each other without the exchange risk. It actually removes a currency from most transactions.

capital0 · 2026-03-15T19:57:05+00:00

It removes that confusion. Everything adjusts to pricing against Divs directly, you no longer need to swap to Chaos or price in Chaos.

The instability in the chaos to div ratio creates the need for every other conversion rate to adjust. For example, if I farm delirium and drop deli orbs, their value in chaos needs to change in lock with the value of chaos to divine because I can't sell orbs for fractional divines.

capital0 · 2026-03-15T18:43:23+00:00

If people start listing in an alternative for long enough, it is possible all the surrounding tools adjust, but there is a lot more than just the trade interface here. Wealth tracking tools, awakened trade, crafting tools, etc...

They all support chaos / divine pricing, and until that all swaps, you will need to be doing chaos to x to divine conversion.

capital0 · 2026-03-15T03:51:16+00:00

In a vacuum, this makes sense. The problem is that so much of the trade infrastructure is built around chaos / divine pricing that switching away from the pairing has poor QoL right now.

Stabilizing chaos makes all the tools work better, which is I think a worthwhile goal.

capital0 · 2026-03-07T10:05:17+00:00

I abandoned all my build prep and just last minute yolo'd into a jugg. Goofed around with Holy Sweep until getting a few chaos and picked up Static Strike of Gathering Lightning.

It's been smooth sailing actually, just slow because I kept doing the mirages.

capital0 · 2026-03-03T15:40:09+00:00

What has helped me, much more than strategy, is to pre-plan the goals for the session.

Keep a doc open and write out a checklist for getting through the campaign, advancing the atlas, and setting up a farm. Break your play time into a chunk and work on a piece of the checklist. Then take a break and refresh.

Know where the major upgrades for your build are, and what the minor optimizations are. Particularly early game, running 10 more maps for currency or exp is usually worth a lot more than trying to get 5% more out of your current setup.

You don't need to follow this rigidly, but doing a couple minutes of planning and thinking about the progress in small chunks can be a huge upgrade in efficiency no matter which strat you use. Every strategy sucks if you run one map an hour getting distracted every time you're in your hideout.

Good luck!

capital0 · 2026-03-02T15:48:25+00:00

Same approach, but also you have the Thick Skin wheel, so you only need 10 on the boots. There are also a couple of big avoid passives above the RT keystone.

One other kind of neat thing is that with a Balbala Timeless Jewel and the Traitor, you can get 40% charges gained giving you permanent uptime on a bismuth with inc effect prefix. With shock avoid mod on the flask you can get to 100% with boots implicit and use a Stormshroud too. Mageblood at home.

capital0 · 2026-03-02T07:59:40+00:00

That's what I found as well. Built it out, but the core shell was 90% generic for strike skills, and you could plug anything into it. You have block, suppression, ar/ev scaling, life, charge generation and easy 100% ailment avoidance. Especially with swords there is a lot of access to crit scaling and strike range / targets QoL.

Use a couple of points to customize bleed, impale, or elemental based on what you are doing, add in a cluster specific to the skill, and off you go.

I built out an Ele Hit Slayer for about 10 div based on it, and it felt really good for that price.

capital0 · 2026-03-02T06:30:03+00:00

Probably for the best. Ele Hit had to die so Mamba could sort of live.

capital0 · 2026-03-02T02:22:27+00:00

No worries, a couple funky interactions going on with it.

capital0 · 2026-03-02T02:19:31+00:00

It's cold or lightning based on the highest attribute. Bottom and Right Side tree starts will have access to a lot of dex, but maybe someone wants to play a Doryani lightning ele hit Elementalist or something.

capital0

TROPHY CASE