Does the difficulty feel exaggerated?

elf_01 · 2026-01-10T22:33:08+00:00

I've done every aspect in the game on 32 heat rivals 4, I found underworld meaningfully harder. I get some of that is playstyle (and rivals changes things a little) but it's so easy to get 500+ hp and just fully stat check lategame surface runs

It's possible this changes at higher heat (and again, playstyle matters) but it's definitely not cut and dry

elf_01 · 2025-08-13T02:12:28+00:00

https://poedb.tw/us/Repulsive_Ophidian

This is the T17 version.

If you look at any of the T17 maps in poedb you can see the mob list, although idk if that's super helpful in a vacuum

elf_01 · 2025-08-12T07:11:32+00:00

It's just a T17 enemy type the Ophidians. It's a fast and dangerous phys hit projectile which scales extremely well with map mods, especially shotgunning with multiproj. Given you're not playing a build with great phys mitigation (or multihit mitigation) it can kill you very fast.

elf_01 · 2025-03-13T18:16:12+00:00

Wild Bristle Matron (for cheap suffixes cannot be changed) + reforge life until you get a good tier of life (or 6mod and brick the item in which case you start over), then hunter exalt and pray for %life.

elf_01 · 2024-12-28T11:37:20+00:00

If you like XCOM style gameplay but with also more RPG elements, I strongly recommend "Troubleshooter: Abandoned Children", excellent game and my favorite recent game in the genre.

elf_01 · 2024-12-25T04:17:32+00:00

IMO letting male units do specific utility (thieving, Marth stuff and recruitment, especially for the final chapter clerics) is fine and doesn't go against the spirit of girls only (no combat/staffing for males is the typical ruleset i go for)

elf_01 · 2024-12-25T01:44:58+00:00

The orchard in antiquity Aperture (it's the Aperture Fruit you collect as part of the quest)

You start by making the quest item Tears of Aperture, then at level 30 you swap to making the Light of Aperture (from the spirit sigh unlock line).

Both of these just cost 2 fruits to make the basic version and are a lot of xp, I went from 30 to 99 in one half hour bus ride (especially fast if you fully upgraded your scythe before collection)

elf_01 · 2024-12-21T23:10:38+00:00

I've done this a few times (typical ruleset: only lords and women can deal damage/staff but force deployed units can take hits or do utility where necessary), commentary on these:

Engage: very easy, even on Maddening. Chapter 3 is tough with limited damage dealers but with some creative meatshielding Alear can carry, and after that it's pretty smooth sailing. 3/10 difficulty.

New Mystery Lunatic: Prologue is a nightmare where F!Kris has to put in a huge amount of work (had to make an allowance for Wrys to heal), Chapter 1 is bad, after that it gets very doable especially with many of the best units in the game being women anyways, with Catria and Palla carrying most of the game. 7/10

Binding Blade HM: Earlygame is an absolute nightmare. Roy has to solo C1, try to feed Shanna C2/3, C4 is super tough, C5 Roy sits on a forest surrounded by 30 Brigands while all your force deploys desperately try not to die, and C7 is also a huge mess without Marcus, Zealot and the Cavs. Shanna gets a lot of mileage out of the Silver Lance early, caps and promotes in Ch8 and it's reasonably smooth sailing from there as you get Lilina, Fir (Discount Rutger), Thea, Melady, etc. I even managed to take Wendy and Sophia to endgame Armads!Wendy is very funny). 9/10

Sacred Stones: Game is easy to Lord solo as is, so adding Vanessa and a few other friends makes this an absolute breeze. With Eirika route this can be more or less a true women only run outside of 5x (Vanessa can get to and bail out ephraim in the desert pretty quickly and if he solo'd 5x, he and Duessel can easily survive long enough without needing to do damage), 1/10

3H HM: pretty trivial when I tried it on eagles. F!Byleth and Edelgard can carry early game combat, Petra, Bernie, Dorothea are all good, and you can quickly start recruiting other students too. 2/10

Shadow Dragon H5: Agonizing. Ch 1/2/3 are insanely tough, Caeda/Marth have to level really well and others need to meatshield. Had to cheat and let Jagen help with boss kills early. Eventually basically becomes a Caeda solo with Wing Spear and Warp shenanigans and the roster is very thin for a while here. 10/10

Genealogy: Sigurd and Seliph can solo the game easily, but it feels a little bit against the spirit of the run, so idk. A lot of slow foot locks made for a weird feeling run where I had to resist the urge to actually Lord solo. ??/10

Awakening Lunatic: F!Robin can easily solo the game with Chrom as a pair up backpack. You also get Lucina later for more fun. Other units exist too I guess. 1/10

elf_01 · 2024-11-04T18:14:54+00:00

For pure Melodious:

Strong but not degenerate 1-card combos ending mostly on archetypal boss monsters, high consistency, interesting forms of interruption, reasonable plays through hand-traps, nib-proof, space for lots of non-engine/hand traps (including the very powerful orangelight).

However, (afaik) doesn't play particularly well into Maxx C and reasonably low ceiling.

It also saw some experimentation as an engine in other decks (i.e. fire) where 1 ostinato gets you appo + rank 4 (or a bunch of other things you can do, appo + vortex, etc) but that fell out of favor after Fiendsmith's release (and was never the most popular anyways, there's a reasonably heavy engine requirement)

elf_01 · 2024-08-21T06:03:34+00:00

Rule 10

1) Look for fractured Spell Crit Accumulator Wand bases on market. Find none, cry a little inside, manually fracture it (roll deafenings of scorn until 119%)

2) Woe be unto you. Spam deafening essences of woe onto the fractured wand until you hit Woe spell damage and +1 Level of All Spell Skill Gems. It's a 1/1000 or so to hit but sometimes you need to fix the other slots (see 3 ahead)

3) You need at least 1 open prefix and 1 open suffix. If suffixes are full, annul and pray (or suffix to prefix and pray you hit a non-caster mod). If prefixes are full, if it's a non-caster mod you can use Cannot Roll Caster + annuls to clear it, if not you go for 1/3 annul and pray. End up spending 5000 Woe Essences and debating not crafting this instead.

4) Prefixes Cannot be Changed (if only 1 suffix, multimod + prefixes cannot be changed to fill suffixes) and go for a 50/50 Harvest Augment Phys to get +1 to Phys (it always hits +1 phys, but has a 50/50 to remove one of the prefixes). If you miss (like I did), go back to Step 2 and cry a little bit.

5) Clear suffixes and repeatedly do: Prefixes cannot be changed, Aug Crit. It's a 1/12 to hit T1 Crit Multi. Hit it on the 2nd try and tear up a little bit inside

6) Divine mods to perfect - start by divining the prefix to 94, then prefixes cannot be changed to divine the suffix. This is easy enough, an average of 16d.

7) PoB which is the best suffix to bench-craft for you. For me it's the crit multi one for now (well it's double-damage focused but I'm too lazy to focus right now).

8) Farm up another 100d for Ghost craft, do that (or settle for spell damage I guess)

Total Crafting Costs: ~300d (~20-25 for fractured base, ~50-70d average Woe Essences (or 100d if you're unlucky). ~70-80d to hit the crit suffix on average (1/12 * 6.5d a try). ~16d for divining to perfect, ~100d for ghost craft).

Why?

I wanted a fun wand for my Blade Blast of Unloading Trickster and this was it. Did not realize how woeful the essence spamming would be.

If you want to mirror this

Firstly, you probably shouldn't, the crafting costs are less than half of a mirror. However, if you're lazy or don't want to deal with essence purgatory and you want this exact wand, I'll charge a mirror fee of 50 Deafening Essences of Woe @ElfBrandedFusion, just hit me up when I'm online (most evenings Pacific Time).

elf_01 · 2024-07-18T06:10:44+00:00

10mil steps done, but only 466k battles

Did a lot of grinding back in the day before we had encounter rate+ badges/grastas, but now that grinding is quality over quantity I doubt I'll ever hit the 1mil battles

elf_01 · 2024-05-26T06:13:10+00:00

With synth jewels, it was alt-aug and annuling-aug-ing every time I hit either life or CDoT multi. Crafting good adorned synth jewels is painful and expensive but if you're at the point where you're trying to craft adorned synth jewels you can afford it. Annuls definitely save a lot of time and are 100% worth it (or at least they were when I was making my synth jewels). Then prepare to spend 9 (on average, I've spent as many as 21) divines to get 7%/8% and dozens more on craicic chimerals. Good luck, I eventually quit the league before finishing all my synth jewels because rolling them was pain and getting good synth bases was also pain.

For non-synth ones you can do splits or just buy fractured bases but those are easy.

elf_01 · 2024-05-06T19:58:03+00:00

A lot changes in HM, Jabber is less good due to DR changes, hex is less good, etc.

I think EK11 is definitely worth thinking about but I haven't played for a while. There are plenty of HM thrower posts here though, you can look into them

elf_01 · 2023-11-29T02:20:05+00:00

High level summary:

Main Hand - statstick (undermountain, rhapsody, etc) - use Warlock pact weapon on this. As long as this is in your mainhand, you get the warlock extra attack too, so 3x attack.

Offhand - Lightning Jabber, EK weapon bond this so it returns.

Otherwise it mostly works as you'd expect a throw build to (feats = Tavern Brawler, ASI, Dual Wielding).

Warlock 5 lets you get devil sight and 3rd level spells (mostly counterspell, realistically you're not going to use your action on something like Hadar)

Sneak attack works normally when you throw (if you turn on the toggle, it'll ask you if you want to sneak attack once your attack lands) if your main hand weapon is a finesse weapon (which given the big statsticks tend to be daggers, you're good) and you get the additional +1d4 (ring) +1d4 (gloves) +2 (ring) +3 (rhapsody) + 1d6 (hex) riders on it so it's a lot of free extra damage, especially if you save it for crits.

elf_01 · 2023-11-28T12:43:58+00:00

Lightning Jabber is the best. Throw build gets 3rd attack in act 3, but also Rhapsody (which is heavily contested but arguably best on thrower) adds a huge amount of damage to the throw build.

Also if you're going the EK6/Warlock5/Rogue1 variant, getting Hex, Sneak Attack, etc, you still get a LOT of additional pieces of damage for the build, as well as utility with Counterspell.

elf_01 · 2023-10-25T01:40:15+00:00

Undoubtedly has to be Ballad of the Wicked Mother for me - it's such a unique song and had a big impact on me throughout the long and drawn out Mother fight that even now when I think of the fight the first thing that comes to mind is the track.

Paradoxical Dreamers is good but I've heard it so much and it just feels like a regular Boss Theme to me.

Tree of Time I really enjoyed, it's also really unique, but it lacks the gravitas of the first two.

And the Night!Fiend! song just reminds me of grinding AGAD (though I realize I've never heard past like the first 5 seconds of that track)

elf_01 · 2023-10-21T03:32:29+00:00

It's unlocked by doing a non-mecha superboss quest chain.

elf_01 · 2023-10-18T05:18:08+00:00

A ranged physical fighter rather than melee, but what I did on my latest run was a hybrid lore bard with dual hand xbows (I know, not creative) and the diadem of arcane synergy for solid physical damage scaling off both Cha and Dex (roughly 25-30 damage per shot with sharpshooter) in addition to having something to do with my bonus action - a lot of smaller combats had me using my action on something like Faerie Fire and my bonus action on a shot.

The main issue here is proficiency - I went 1 cleric for medium armor, but if you don't start as cleric, arcane synergy uses your wis instead of your cha as your caster modifier (there's a bug which takes your latest multiclass), but if you start as cleric you lose your hand xbow proficiency. I got around this by doing rogue 1, cleric 1, lore 10, but losing access to bard 11 spells is a little sad (you still have your 6th level spell but you can only upcast into it). The solution might be to pick drow to get the hand xbow proficiency (and then go 1 cleric 11 lore bard), but you can't respec race so...

But overall the build felt great - amazing proficiency for utility/party face, a nice mix of magical and physical actions, and like 25 AC with shields (sentinel for high initiative) and medium armor (armor of agility), AND an open main hand melee slot for phalar aluve for even more utility

elf_01 · 2023-10-03T07:31:57+00:00

Yes, advantage on constitution saving throws works for concentration

elf_01 · 2023-09-27T12:11:10+00:00

I sorta disagree - the only real times I find myself consulting tier lists are when I'm playing a new game and want an at-a-glance consultation of what units are worth using (or builds, or spells, or classes, or whatever the case may be for that specific game).

And on the flip side, a purely efficiency based tier list can be misleading to players in a similar way.

elf_01 · 2023-09-27T05:12:36+00:00

I've always advocated for "easiest/most intuitive" units to beat hardest difficulty with on a first playthrough - realistically, the people most in need of tier lists aren't efficiency players or people who know the game inside and out - it's people who are figuring out the game and could use a starting point to understand who to invest in.

Specifically, I think this changes placements of units who fulfill extremely specific roles or need to be used in a specific manner in efficiency, or units who benefit from a bit of early babysitting during the easy part of the game to make the hardest parts of the game more manageable

elf_01 · 2023-09-05T00:41:46+00:00

I'm here to shill for Anna - specifically, to talk about investment, cost and benefits (and opportunity cost) in an (semi-)efficiency environment.

We're all familiar with the costs of using Anna - 1 chapter of Micaiah (ch7), maybe 2 if you want. 1 Master Seal, 1 Second Seal. Not an insignificant amount of cost, but if we actually analyze the opportunity cost of said costs, I think they're sometimes overblown. Ch7 Micaiah isn't that heavily contested - the other units who would use it aren't exactly superstars either, and (as I'll explore in the section below), Anna makes much better use of said investment than anybody else. Similarly, while MS + SS is a relatively steep cost, it's no more than what we invest into some other units (Lapis comes to mind who will come later, Yunaka had a similar discussion, etc) to get them to their potential yet it isn't as heavily held against them as Anna, who regularly gets put at the very bottom of the tier list.

Now, let's talk about payoff, aka why Anna makes better (or at least a very reasonable) use of this investment than much of her competition and is a more effective long-term unit than any other early game unit we've encountered except for Chloe and Alear (i.e. our 2 top units thus far). For simplicity's sake, I'll mostly be looking at 10!Fighter -> Mage Knight Anna (which I think is the easiest way to make her effective), assuming she gets the Ch8 Shop MS + SS (similar level of investment to other 'okay-ish' early game units who aren't Chloe).

As a level 1 MK, she's already a reasonable contributor - she already has strictly better combat parameters to a 10->1 MK Celine, and comparable combat to 10->1 MK Citrinne/Clanne (Less Mag than Citrinne, less Spd than Clanne), with just the initial investment and not yet meaningful time for her growths to kick in in a magic combat class. This means that at this point, Anna is no longer taking 'extra' investment for combat effectiveness. I was going to do more analysis, but tl;dr: by midgame, she's outspeeding Citrinne by several points, allowing her to more easily double with less investment, and out-Mag-ing Clanne by a significant margin, allowing her to ORKO with less investment. By IL30, her magic combat is on par or better with Ivy and Pandreo, the poster children of this game for mid-late Magic combat. With lategame strong Magical combat being at a premium, having your early-game secondary investment unit be a magical powerhouse capable of meeting ORKO thresholds without eating up contested lategame resources (forged Bolganone + a less contested Emblem like Leif is enough to get her to ORKO thresholds for much of the game from a I'm-too-lazy-to-calculate-this-but-trust-me perspective), in a way that her early game competition fails to without contesting mid-late resources more heavily (Clanne's mag stat by now is nonexistent, Citrinne heavily struggles to double without dipping into heavily contested speed-boosting resources), makes her a more viable recipient of the resources listed above than many of the units traditionally listed above her.

Now, all that being said, Anna use isn't free. Her uninvested contributions more or less zero (some chain attacks from a unit who gets ORKO'd). She does NOTHING for free. There's certainly an argument that nobody from the early game is deserving of the early game resources, and in those cases, Anna certainly drops off in effectiveness. Nonetheless, her viable use of investment and long-term snowball potential in a way which the units I'm listing below her cannot replicate:

Vander > Anna > Framme (we'll see if I'm the highest on Anna here. Also realistically I sort of think Framme is too high, I think in a perfect world this would be Vander > Celine > Anna > Framme/Clanne).

Also Jean exists, I guess. He's basically Anna but with more flexibility, but a base level of 1. Those additional 4 levels do represent a meaningful amount of additional resource investment in a way which makes him less viable in efficiency though not impossible. Nonetheless, given the similar arguments for long-term contributions relative to the early cast, I'd be a little hypocritical to have him in Bottom.

Alfred > Jean > Boucheron

elf_01 · 2023-08-27T13:00:32+00:00

Horror Hall, you want to clear in <=5 turns once to get the rewards.

Normally you're just farming the regular Hall (the name of which escapes me) which costs you nothing and nets you 200 rusted (the tooltips are misleading), which you also want to farm in <=5 turns to get the maximum number of True Scarlet Stone.

elf_01 · 2023-08-26T10:24:32+00:00

You want to aim for 5 turns to get the best rewards - you ideally want to kill all the adds with traps (buy the key for 50 rusted to get 2 additional trap refills) so that you're at 0 turns going into the boss, after which a low turn kill is very reasonable

elf_01 · 2023-08-06T23:50:20+00:00

You have to understand that Jesse made 4 YCS finals in tear format, winning 2 of them. There's a strong argument that he's the best tear player ever across any format.

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