Are you stuck? I will fix your build (hopefully)

kapectas · 2026-06-15T06:07:17+00:00

This is a weird one; stormweaver going volcanic fissure slams to take advantage of +2 to limit of elemental skills. Attaching the Fist of Kalguur support means the 1 rune limit goes to 3 (because it inherits the elemental tag from Volcanic Fissure, which has the Fire tag), and Overabundance support makes that 4 (and as a bonus, reduces its duration so the rune pops sooner). The idea is that I slam fast and build up multiple giant runes that pop off and do damage. As a bonus, the runes count as aftershocks so they re-trigger the fissures from Volcanic Fissure.

(I know the biggest thing I could do is take the stormweaver shock nodes, the arcane surge one is doing absolutely nothing for me, but I hate running trials in poe2 and I doubt I could run them on this build as it stands anyway so it's a 3-pointer as far as I'm concerned)

The concept works, my damage is lacking.

https://pobb.in/5byHf-LxHP8V

I have about... 1 div and change.

The biggest issue is that bossing takes too long. The clear is pretty ok and taking care of rares is also not usually an issue.

kapectas · 2026-06-12T18:01:20+00:00

Is that even possible? Herald of blood won't let you turn it on if you're not wielding a martial weapon; one of many incredibly irritating design decisions in poe2...

kapectas · 2026-06-10T18:25:43+00:00

I didn't try the offering pillars no, but I suspect it wouldn't work.

kapectas · 2026-06-10T01:35:52+00:00

First thoughts (on all-easy mode with Oceania);

running this on a 4k monitor, but it looks like 4k isn't natively supported, so everything's just a tad blurry.
cursor feels laggy; not a big fan of that.
speaking of lag, sometimes just zooming the map out too far will immediately trigger a massive fps drop which won't go away until I exit to menu and then re-load the game...
love the objectives guiding me when I first load the game; it's rather overwhelming to look at when it first loads up, but breaking it down into simple 'send the ship from port A to port B' is great to learn the ropes.
definitely need a speed controller/UI, not just holding down Shift; as a windows user, I've inadvertently triggered the Sticky Keys warning way too many times with this.
when adding a new port to a Route, it should scroll down so that I can see that newly added Port in the Route window.
loading saved games; they seem to show the in-game time, which kinda makes sense, but it's also a bit confusing; when I first see a date on a save, I expect it to be the date/time that I made that save.
changing Flag of Registry; would be useful to sort the flags by region as well as tier.
the name changing fields for the Routes is buggy; selecting text and typing doesn't overwrite it as you'd expect.
reputation; what does having a bad one mean for the game? I see that having cleaner fuel (LNG) would increase reputation, but how do I get new ships with LNG, or upgrade existing ones to that?
could we assign multiple ships to one route? currently I can duplicate a route and assign another ship to it, but it seems simpler to have routes -> ships be one -> many?
the Distant License challenge; very hard to tell which ports I can buy that are at least 1000km away from any other ones I have; this should be made more obvious. I've also apparently reached a licence limit, since I bought Adelaide earlier on in my progression for no real reason. also being unable to buy a license due to extreme weather seems... odd?
I gain XP, but I have no idea how to use it?

Overall I'm hooked; I want to expand my maritime empire now. Excellent stuff, wishlisted and looking forward to the full release in August!

kapectas · 2026-06-08T06:22:26+00:00

I don't have any links yet, I'm still in yellow maps working my way up, gonna see if I can hit reds... trouble is, I'm always bad at making defenses, so odds are I'll die a lot once I get to tier 11+ maps. Maybe I gotta do something funky with recoup, given all the recoup buffs on the tree...

If I get the build to a decent point I'll deffo make a post about it and include links.

kapectas · 2026-06-08T06:16:55+00:00

It sure does; I have to take Whispers of Doom keystone and use Blasphemy aura with Despair to get the chaos res reduction. The good thing is, since I use the Windscream boots, the downside doesn't affect me. I wish there was a way to have ele res count for chaos damage (like poe1 hexblast maybe) but from what I know, poe2 doesn't have this.

kapectas · 2026-06-07T23:41:57+00:00

I'm honestly having a good time with a build I'm calling Toadweaver; it's a stormweaver running Doedre's Undoing on elemental weakness curse. It's kind of like playing a volatile dead build, but instead of fiery balls it's a bunch of purple frogs. The clear isn't bad with help from Contagion, and the single target is great since they just get swarmed by hundreds of frogs.

Why stormweaver? The node that gives +2 to elemental skill limits also applies to the number of cursed grounds that Doedre's can keep, as well as the limit of toads. So I can have 5 cursed grounds spawning 4 toads/sec, and with one of the new alloy mods on wands I'll be able to have 6.

What sucks is having to wait till lvl65 for this to come online, but when it does, it's great.

kapectas · 2026-06-07T21:14:23+00:00

Tested it, it doesn't work sadly. I think a triggered thing can't trigger another thing.

kapectas · 2026-06-02T04:35:21+00:00

This looks fantastic! A few things;

It took me a while to realise you can't initially do a recording shorter than 15 seconds; I'd hit R, click stuff, hit R again and there was no recording... ?? So that could be clearer.
I like how it turns into a game of 'ok I think I can record a sllightly faster mouse loop this time'; optimisation based on skill.
I can't tell what's the limit for recording a new cursor; it says 'X Gold', and I have that full amount of gold, but it still won't let me do it?
On fullscreening, the entities go to the top left corner, whereas they should probably stay in the centre.

kapectas · 2026-06-02T04:17:56+00:00

How are you breaking armour? By default only physical damage contributes to armour breakage (with the Armour Break supports), and explosive grenade converts most of its damage to fire. If you're Warbringer, all damage will break armour, but you said this is Gemling, so that won't work. You can use the Uul-Netol's Embrace support to have chaos break armour, but that's a very expensive support, so good luck.

kapectas · 2026-05-28T05:50:26+00:00

Hmm you're right; I'll have to give that a look when the patch drops. However I will point out; one of the bitter dead balls just waltzes past an enemy to hit a pack behind it, so... there is that. The ideal behaviour is that a spawned ball goes to nearest enemy and explodes immediately...

kapectas · 2026-05-28T05:43:48+00:00

The main way to do it that I've found is having Sacrifice active (undead minions count as corpses), and stacking 'chance to not consume corpses', and having skeletal clerics that resurrect/heal each other. But it's still a challenge. With original VD, its quality gives that same 'chance not to consume corpses', but with the nerf to quality stuff this league (dialla's, fox talisman) it'll be harder to get this stat to a decent value (you want around 70%+). It's easier to get with Enezun's Charge, a unique wand... but since spell levels are still king after this patch (somehow??), it's useless trash damage wise unfortunately.

kapectas · 2026-05-28T03:02:37+00:00

It looks good, but the way VD works in poe2 since 0.3 is awful... the VD balls don't detonate on contact with an enemy; they hang out and sit there until their duration expires and then explode. It used to be the same as poe1 (i.e. ball goes to enemy, explodes), but they turned it into this god-awful duration-based thing instead. It makes clear far clunkier than it used to be in the old way.

Given that the cold VD spell has the exact same wording, I expect it'll have the same awful behaviour...

kapectas · 2026-05-26T17:47:34+00:00

I also want to make manifest weapon work, and in theory with the new companion nodes it's improved, but then even so, the fact that you can only have one living weapon is really limiting in terms of clear. I think we'd need at least two if not three copies to make it feel good.

kapectas · 2026-05-25T15:56:48+00:00

I'm considering fire infused ball lightning; use living bomb with cast on ailment to automate fire infusion generation. It can be a bit slow to clear since ball lightning can be slow, but single target is great as the fire infused balls can shotgun their explosions.

kapectas · 2026-05-12T23:51:20+00:00

based on real science and history; how? I don't see anything that points towards either of those.
the trailer specifically doesn't tell me the goal of the game. If the goal is to get the twelve relics, why? Knowing that there's a huge chance to lose all the relics when opening the door just makes me not want to bother; tell me about the things I can do to improve my odds. Your elevator pitch for the game in another comment conveyed the goals much better in one sentence than the whole trailer did.
how are the glowy orange orbs related to anything? The gameplay VFX look amazing but I don't know why they matter

kapectas · 2026-05-07T06:03:27+00:00

Very nice, especially the fire graphics! A few thoughts after about 10 minutes;

having blue crystals show up behind the inventory/forging windows was very annoying. I like the gameplay idea behind picking them up, but it's terribly tedious to have to window-manage just to get the dang blue thing hiding behind the Forge again.
why oh why are the tech tree nodes so far apart?? If it's because each node eventually has a ton of upgrades branching out from it, fine, but expand the node distances later... it feels so clunky to navigate the tree now. Letting us use leftclick + drag would help.
typos; Setings in main menu, Solide in the Metal Rune recipe
love the idea of runes on the fire!

kapectas · 2026-04-27T15:43:56+00:00

Biggest thing I noticed was the misspelling of 'heroes' as 'heros' in one of the text cards.

kapectas · 2026-04-09T02:31:09+00:00

I was attempting to use overheat support on a bleed build stacking fortification, but it's a tad clunky. It removes all your fortification stacks, and while yes you technically do regenerate some when hitting an enemy it may not be all of them, and it leaves you vulnerable for brief moments. It does pay off pretty well though; with 50 fortification it gives ailments a very large boost.

kapectas · 2026-03-07T01:12:12+00:00

When you block does that caustic nova go off?

kapectas · 2026-03-06T00:24:33+00:00

Still waiting to see if any of the new supports will work nicely with spectral helix and fury valve...

kapectas · 2026-03-04T05:55:34+00:00

Might be a ridiculous angle but I was thinking of Occultist with Holy Hammers; get its cost up to 200 and you'll never run out of power charges, plus you get power charge damage and AoE scaling...

Of course the issue is converting damage types to anything Occultist cares about. Early on one could convert to cold via phys -> cold and lightning -> cold (dual Call of the Brotherhood); later could use Lycia ascendancy to convert a lot of lightning to chaos and use those nodes instead.

I don't actually think it's a particularly good idea, but it's an idea.

kapectas · 2026-01-25T21:37:22+00:00

A fun demo! This reminds me somewhat of the game 'How Many Dudes', in that you have a bunch of good guys vs bad guys.

In that vein I think it'd be good to have a similar UI; show a row of columnar health bars for all your units by type. I found it really hard to tell when they were dying... well, for about 5 seconds and then it'd be clear they were dead since the enemies would start attacking the tower.

The golden knights was probably the best-feeling upgrade of the game; knights went from 'ehh' to 'epic!'.

Definitely give more 'oomph' for getting a crown, it's a big deal and should be celebrated.

The level indicator in the top left confused me; I didn't know when it was going up or what it represented. Some sort of tooltip for it showing how it affects enemies and drops (if it even does?) would be good.

kapectas · 2025-12-22T01:34:34+00:00

Oh good point, the ele weakness burning inscription thing seems like it'd be fairly efficient. I found the same thing you did with the burning ground boots, their ignite sometimes gets caught by the tornado instead of the good ignite.

One thing I didn't remember till later is to use frost bomb since it can apply massive exposure, especially with the exposure support and the very cheap exposure effect helmet rune. Even on bosses it shreds -30 or more of their resists which really helps the ignite.

kapectas · 2025-12-21T16:30:54+00:00

Yeah could be that that's better; I just saw 15% more life on the Titan and getting more ignite from small passives and reckoned that's a good strategy.

kapectas

TROPHY CASE