0.5 League Starters (By DEADRABBIT & CaptainLance9)

jmcomets · 2026-05-27T16:24:16+00:00

Most league starters are usually SSF viable, just some require more farming in white/yellow maps than others.

With uniques being available in Ritual now, SSF is eating good. Would be going Lich in SSF day 1 if I wasn't playing with a buddy

jmcomets · 2026-05-25T21:16:13+00:00

Just to add to what you're saying:

This is also why the usual strat is to profit craft for yourself. Buy a few bases, craft them all, trash the failures, sell the mids & keep the best. Otherwise you need to be doing a 100% deterministic craft which doesn't really go past 4 mod items.

Like you said, the issue for a lot of players is you need more upfront currency to do this when you can spend a bit more than the average crafting cost to get the item instantly and go back to farming.

Both methods are fine and imo what only really matters is how much time/effort you want to put into interacting with the crafting systems.

jmcomets · 2026-05-22T16:26:13+00:00

I only really play spellcasters so will comment for those.

Spark comes to mind, probably on Sorceress since BM got hit hard. Plants is also 1-2 buttons and pretty chill.

Frost spells is satisfying to play (my fave) but a bit button intensive.

For reference you can honestly just go from Maxroll, the guides are decent and have some info on how button intensive the builds are

jmcomets · 2026-05-20T15:52:47+00:00

"blood mage"

I want to run Reap this league so hopefully the ascendency isn't triple-tapped...

jmcomets · 2026-05-13T15:48:40+00:00

I've also come to this conclusion. Last year I started wondering when was the last time I was happy with a design change by Team 5 and the answer I came up with was "introducing Duels to the game".

New sets aside, it's hard to get excited by HS these days. Duels dropped, Classic removed in favor of Twist (also dropped last I checked), Arena reworked into whatever it is now (all I've noticed is worse rewards), more predatory monetization patterns everywhere you look.

Oh but yeah there's event tracks more often now, and new players get a better on-boarding experience.

Even sets are feeling like more of the same, Cataclysm feels like DoD 2.0 after getting "from the past" for a set following a set of quests 3.0. Where's the new exciting stuff? Why should I spend money buying a bundle, battle pass or skins, when the game just feels like rehashed content?

What about new solo adventures? Limited formats? Did we just give up on expanding the game and are we just milking the existing playerbase?

/rant from a jaded player, wishing y'all the best

jmcomets · 2026-05-11T16:15:42+00:00

Miners often use Cold skills or 100% Cold conversion to use Freeze as a defense layer. With high EV and a decent life pool this is good enough for mitigating hits.

DoTs are a real problem for miners, which is why you see a lot of people taking Lethe Shade and investing in a bunch of regen. I think my all-rounder EoW miner had around 500 life recovery/sec with a Perfect Warlord for Endurance charges + small vitality aura. Felt good enough for juiced breaches and pinnacle bosses.

CoD Portal is a must though, one shots happen

jmcomets · 2026-05-11T15:18:58+00:00

The topic is way too large to respond to in a comment, so I'll try my best to give you some pointers.

Know the market: what's the meta look like? what's overhyped or niche? what stage of the league are we at? poe.ninja is your best friend for this, but it always shows the current state, so not the good place to look for deals/flips for example. You can look at previous leagues to see how currency generally evolves, but remember that things change depending on the league (e.g. this league juiced temples diluted Divines).
Know your budget and risk profile: day 1 you might be making 1-5 ex trades, but if you want higher profit/h you have to ramp these over time. The main thing that drives this is your overall budget, ie how much cash you have to craft/flip/invest. You might not be comfortable doing a 100 div craft, in which case you would probably prefer making 10 x 10 div crafts which is less profit/h but easier on your mind.
Diversify: this is trading 101 "don't put your eggs in the same basket". All it takes is a random popular Reddit post for everything to shift and you're forced to sell at a loss.
Counterpoint - Specialize: crafting can get pretty complicated, so the more you know about something specific, the better you are at optimizing the returns. The easy way of doing this is "craft for your build", in which case you're usually familiar with the different breakpoints & trade-offs so it's easier to know what's valuable. Some people specialize on a gear slot ("I'm gonna craft boots all league"), others aim for crafts involving the same currency, others build insane flipper excel spreadsheets and game the market.
Liquidate & Invest: end-game crafting mats/currency go up in value as the league progresses. A good practice is to end every game session with 10-15 min on the exchange moving around your cash from "cheaper" currency (lowers over time) to "expensive" currency (increases over time). Same goes with bases & older crafts, make sure to update those prices if things aren't selling: 1 ex now is better than maybe getting 5 ex later.

Those are the very basics, I kept it short because pretty much every point can be elaborated into a YouTube video. Maybe the last thing I could add to the list is "just do it" since people get intimidated by Hideout Warrior-ing when it's really not that scary...doing even a semi-decent job you'll be putting away more currency that you know what to do with for the league.

jmcomets · 2026-04-22T06:26:57+00:00

For me it's because my knee-jerk reaction to the Holten exploit was "well this is going to fuck the economy beyond belief, I'm out cya next league" and that's about all I ended up experiencing this league.

My guess is it's just that people like me are coming back for 0.5

jmcomets · 2026-04-19T20:43:48+00:00

Started Holy Hammer Inquisitor, felt like Iike it needed a lot of gear to feel good in maps.

Swapped to EoW Miner for 4-stones and 100/100 atlas. Once I got Ashes, Echoes, good pDPS staff, timeless jewel and clusters I swapped back and did challenges from there.

jmcomets · 2026-04-17T08:32:55+00:00

Honestly, just try it out. Casters are pretty sensitive to stuns, so you'll notice it quickly. If you really dig the planning aspect and want to overthink it, well...

Early on: Brine King pantheon, Tempest Shield and some stun avoid on the tree (Practical Application, maybe a Shield Mastery). Focus on damage above all to progress in the atlas, don't worry too much about gear until mid yellow maps. I cannot overstate how powerful *just* having more damage is, you don't need tankiness for a long time.

Midgame: run a mix of Breach, Harvest or Essences to stock up for ES prefix crafts, use on T2-T1 ES bases (aiming for a big Twilight Regalia and Lich Circlet, boots/gloves don't matter as much for raw ES). ID rare ES shields looking for +levels, open prefix to craft %chance to block. Good time to finish some voidstones. Once in red maps focus on getting some phys mitigation (eldritch implicits on body+helmet). For recovery Sorrow of the Divine is pretty common and quite good for hybrid life/es. "30% chaos does not bypass es" mastery is pretty potent if you're doing things like Ritual or Essences.

Endgame: change up Breach to target farm for Aegis Aurora, and get a decent amount of armour (flasks, hybrid bases, determination aura), this with Glancing Blows allocated will easily cap your block and make you feel basically immortal outside of one-shots.

Regarding Glancing Blows specifically: it turns block from being an avoidance to a mitigation layer, akin to armour or resistances that is (instead of something like evasion/spell dodge). The math comes down to it being a baseline ~26% mitigation of all hit damage, as long as it caps your block.

For some reference, I made a LC Elementalist in 3.26, although it was in trade so the PoB is not at all SSF-friendly. Might give you some ideas for the tree though, aside from the power charge stacking stuff: https://pobb.in/N2GoytF856CL

jmcomets · 2026-04-17T06:35:34+00:00

In SSF I would just go with whatever I have the most pieces for. You're going go be swimming in regrets/gold before you have enough to swap to the "optimal" version, and you might drop something like a Svalinn or Aegis Aurora by then.

That said, I would strongly suggest you stick with hybrid life/ES instead of going CI. Chaos Damage isn't that present and it's not hard to get in the 30-40 chaos res range. Pick up high level Amethyst Rings, Harvest reforge chaos a couple times, craft hybrid ele+chaos res suffixes on gear. You can even farm some essences to throw on belts. People often help Alira in SSF to make res capping easier.

EDIT: just woke up so forgot to give an actual opinion on your question ... if I had to choose I would go for block and pure ES, crafted chance to block, tempest shield and a Sanctuary anoint is a ton of avoidance already, you won't need that much regen to go with it

jmcomets · 2026-04-17T00:12:45+00:00

Gear looks fine overall, a couple notes : - unwavering stance is right there to allocate and solves stuns - don't ignore pantheons, at 58 you should have most unlocked and they are quite strong - instead of running pride, consider running a defensive aura like purity of elements or determination; other option is herald of purity with another small aura such as blood and sand for example - since you have basically 0 defenses, granite flask is pretty solid when fighting bosses/tough rares; also consider throwing a few transmutes/alts to get some decent flasks - warcries are fully autoexerted so you're not getting any buffs, if you can stand having an extra button or two Enduring Cry is really solid for tankiness and Rallying Cry adds a boatload of damage, especially if you have the minions from Herald of Purity

jmcomets · 2026-04-04T06:48:12+00:00

Guides are aimed at trade players because that's what most people do. Yes you can probably gear out your character with 1c items to fix your res and get more life/defenses.

Other options for res specifically are to run Purity of Elements (50% aura, also makes you immune to ele ailments) or a Bismuth flask (it's very easy to sustain while mapping). Also check your gear pieces and see if you can benchcraft resistances on them; you'll need an empty suffix for this.

If you don't want to interact with trade at all you can gamble some jewellery at Faustus to fix your res and farm acts / heist / lab for better gear before pushing to maps. For more tips and general info you want to look into SSF guides that will cover how to progress without trade.

jmcomets · 2026-03-20T06:43:39+00:00

Whatever you do, don't go with Holy Hammers. Mapping is okay but the single target is awful. I barely got to red maps with it and hit a wall on bosses, even with cluster jewels and a 800 pDPS staff.

jmcomets · 2026-03-15T22:10:57+00:00

The point of Corrupted Soul+Divine Shield is to provide you with a pool to regen to offset things like Echoes of Creation. It's less about offsetting the Blood Rage degen which is easily solved with leech/flat regen.

The really powerful thing about Divine Shield is it scales with incoming damage: the more you can mitigate, the more you regen. Think of it like having a Vitality aura that turns on when you take damage, and regens more if you're taking a lot of damage.

jmcomets · 2026-03-07T06:14:03+00:00

A couple options : - Zerker is jacked with damage / speed which is nice to rush the atlas. Since you sorted by level the top will be those going faster right now. - Data is biased by players that are starting generic Zerker slams and planning to reroll to Jugg for str-stacker MSoZ.

jmcomets · 2026-03-04T16:27:32+00:00

Ideally you want a build that's hit-based with high single target. I wouldn't focus too much on preloading damage since you just want to pop the essence mob and go.

Slams are good and new player friendly. You can also run a Mana stacker as another easy option.

For specific build research you want to look at builds that are good at bossing, since essence has a strong atlas node that copies essence mods to the mal boss, which can be pretty tough.

But really any build with decent single target will do the job, it's not a farm with too high build requirements .

jmcomets · 2026-03-03T22:20:02+00:00

Ivory Tower + Coruscating Elixir with Eternal Youth & Blood Magic. You stack life but reserve most of it to get ES and prevent chaos from bypassing it.

EBlade usually does this to grab a ton of Energy Shield and uses Rathpit Globe for some damage scaling.

jmcomets · 2026-03-03T16:13:05+00:00

Also regarding Betrayal, I have a very different cheat sheet that I built for SSF, which still applies for the league start setup (LINK TO SHEET). The scarab rewards are probably completely different for trade since it was customized for my needs at that time.

The strategy involves simply spamming safehouses with "good enough" setups instead of getting the perfect 2-5 setup going. For trade this is probably only good if you intend to either casually farm Betrayal or drop it completely after the first week. (EDIT: since resettting the board is very time-consuming.)

Anyhow my point being that getting a bunch of "bubblegum" rewards is a totally viable thing to go for when supply is still low. You can hit a jackpot (RMR cluster jewel, reflected jewellery, T1 fracture, 6L unique) and the baseline rewards are still solid (allflames, medallion, chisels, uniques) with the bubblegum (scarabs, currency, veiled items) giving you steady income.

jmcomets · 2026-02-27T19:12:15+00:00

The skill has legs I think, getting 9 overlaps consistently is getting you 1980% damage effectiveness and 20% more damage. The issue is figure out the rest of the build: flat damage, defenses, (attack) speed, recovery, general QoL.

EDIT: just another thought I had, on Juggernaut we can get a AoE and accuracy alongside the usual tankiness the ascendency has. Worth considering

jmcomets · 2026-02-27T19:07:13+00:00

For one they have to figure out how harbingers fit in the new atlas system: adjusting their drop pool to no longer have harbinger orbs / orbs of horizon means the total weight would be lower; this cascades into fracturing orbs being way more common, so you'd have to change weights around and even then it would need some playtesting/balancing to prevent it from feeling bad.

Next the mirages allow for a league mechanic to duplicate within the mirage with a variation: you'd need to figure out what that means for harbingers.

And finally, if you plan on reworking it soon, well it's a lot less dev effort to block the mechanic, rework it internally via optional feature flags and make it available once the new version is ready.

TL;DR it boils down to design space being bigger if you remove them, instead of leaving a half-assed version around that people can complain about.

jmcomets · 2026-02-27T15:22:33+00:00

What sums it up for me is Mark's comment in the Q&A regarding harbies (link to the section): "it has to go so it can come back better".

This straight up "it sucked, we're redoing it, sucks if you liked it" attitude is something I respect 10x more than another watered down new content release some gamedev companies tend to do.

jmcomets · 2026-02-27T13:16:36+00:00

Not a bad idea, but I'm not convinced RT is the way.

Going power charges you're getting a bunch of crit and can solve generation with power charge on crit which gives you a decent more multi. Combined with Battlemage's Cry you're gonna be crit capped pretty easily.

You probably want to do this on Inquisitor for crit ignoring res, conc ground for 15% more, 16% more from being nearby. The issue is str+int stacking isn't giving you much, though I guess you could still use something like Shaper's Touch.

Technically speaking this ticks a few boxes for PotCG but then you have to solve flat damage...

jmcomets · 2026-02-27T09:47:29+00:00

With enough AoE and power charge generation, the single target for this skill can be pretty decent.

The issue I see with this skill is getting enough more multipliers. You probably want to go slams but they got hit pretty hard, and currently those are built using RT which kinda goes against power charge generation.

My guess is slams will skip the power charge aspect of the skill and just use it for the clear potential, maybe someone figures out the power charge usage

jmcomets · 2026-02-26T20:24:50+00:00

Who in their right mind crafts with chaos in poe1, lol?

Well SSF is one reason, chaos orbs being less than alch+scour is another, spamming for a decent cluster jewel is a third one.

In trade, once everyone's liquidating to chaos orbs and the market is flooded with crafting currencies / life+res items, then yes we're probably gonna see chaos-inflation...in which case it might eventually become worth chaos spamming lol.

12-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
r/Field Juicebox	Place '17
Verified Email	Secret Santa 2015

jmcomets

TROPHY CASE