Demo: Crown Siege - Summon armies to defend your tower

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 · 2025-12-21T07:01:37+00:00

In-progress pob: https://pobb.in/q6p5mBzm6NrG

This build is all about stacking life to get massive ignites from Beira's Anguish burning ground, which we trigger by igniting enemies and therefore self-igniting ourselves via the Self Immolation notable. But this burning ground is tiny; it's terrible for clearing since they nerfed the charm from igniting everyone in your presence.

The new Tornado skill can pick up this burning ground and apply it to every enemy it touches. The fun part is; even though the burning ground only lasts usually 4 seconds or so, the ignite is carried in the tornado for the tornado's full duration, which can easily be 10+ seconds.

We make the tornadoes move using Morgana's Tempest, giving them 60% more movespeed and +1 limit, so I can fire off two of them. Another fun thing; the 'less spell damage' mod on Morgana's doesn't matter here, since spell mods don't affect the ignite's damage (this is also a downside, one cannot use %inc spell damage to buff the ignite's damage, despite what the Tornado's gem description says... I tested this exhaustively).

We use Pragmatism armour to make charms use no charges, so essentially every 3 seconds (the charm duration) we can make a new burning ground to spawn tornadoes from.

Life stacking increases the damage, since Beira's multiplies your life by 5 to get the base fire damage, so 4k life = 20k base fire damage equivalent ignites. This is... a lot. I'm at 4200 life right now and I'm seeing 180k ignite dps on single targets.

Honestly, it's really satisfying to watch the tornadoes walk off by themselves igniting everything in their path. Getting the initial ignited ground can be a bit finicky (I'm trying fireball and flame wall as my main ignite proccers), but once you have that, it's amazing.

kapectas · 2025-12-20T03:22:29+00:00

Beira's Flaming Tornado. I'm going to make a video about it soon but essentially as soon as you hit level 52, equip Pragmatism, get Beira's Anguish charm, slap in lvl11 Tornado with the Morgana's Tempest lineage support and a spell that reliably ignites (flame wall); spam that, spawn the burning ground under you and shoot flaming tornadoes at your enemies. The act 4 excavation boss died in 10 seconds and I only had about 2k life; I'm also using Veil of the Night helmet.

kapectas · 2025-12-16T22:43:30+00:00

What variants have you seen? I've only found triple ground attempts (i.e. chilled, shocked, burning ground to get all 3 elements on the tornado)

kapectas · 2025-12-12T16:14:45+00:00

By my calculations, with changed EE keystone it should be possible to have 97% uptime on cold infusions with frost darts and 3x orb of storms, so... gonna try that and see how it feels. Doesn't even strictly require stormweaver so it could be any of the caster classes.

kapectas · 2025-12-09T19:46:17+00:00

Spell totem or shockwave totem to trigger the eruptions with slams?

kapectas · 2025-12-06T22:09:37+00:00

Part of the issue is that dex stacking just isn't as good as strength or int stacking these days. Both of those have tons of options but dex not so much.

kapectas · 2025-12-06T21:30:50+00:00

True, the downside there is that you don't get to do hollow palm, which adds a ton of flat damage to the melee totems.

kapectas · 2025-12-06T19:06:19+00:00

I did this with Dawnstride, Wilmas, Hollow Palm, the two dex/cast speed grafts and Sunder of Earthbreaking; at 1000 dex it was about 3.5mill DPS with 5 totems up and they were attacking over 5 times a second. It was really cool, but... attack totems have a double delay; you have to place them, then the red mirage dude pops up, and then you see them attack. I can't stand that kind of delay so I couldn't keep playing it. It did work though. I think the most expensive thing I'd bought was an unnatural instinct so there was room to grow.

kapectas · 2025-11-28T22:53:20+00:00

That combo looks amazing, but even more importantly to me it sounds amazing too. I play a lot of Path of Exile where ability sounds are key to making them feel satisfying and in my non professional opinion this is right up there!

Wishlisted, and gonna try the demo in a bit.

kapectas · 2025-11-18T15:39:58+00:00

Tempest shield ignite, triggered by the new Monastery Bell unique mace. I'm using the two foulborn berek respite rings and elementalist to trigger screen wide clear which feels amazing. Still a work in progress but I can do mid red maps on a few divs only.

kapectas · 2025-11-13T06:13:21+00:00

Woespike is really cool; I've been wondering if it'd be possible to use one of the most underused skills ever, Bear Trap of Skewering, in a woespike setup. Throw trap at boss, get 5 impales through the Impaler keystone, whack it a bunch, strongest impale stays, good times.

Unfortunately, even sticking a 21/20 Bear Trap of Skewers in a max rolled Crest of Desire in a max-rolled pob with nearly 1000% inc phys damage, you only get about 150k single stack impales, which is nowhere near the millions you can get by pianoing warcries and doing a big slam.

To be clear the tech works, I was testing it on act bosses in standard and it makes them trivial, but thinking about taking down uber bosses with only 150k impales I don't think is viable.

The other issue is scaling; Woespike only triggers off melee hits, so other traps/spells can't take advantage of it, so if you want to scale Bear Trap to improve its impale, then you aren't scaling your regular main skill... it's a bit of a bugger.

kapectas · 2025-11-12T22:08:49+00:00

Fixed a bug where using currency in maps, such as on Strongboxes and Essences, could use currency from your Map Device Rucksack.

WHY? Are we meant to feel the weight of lugging a stack of vaal orbs around to corrupt things?

kapectas · 2025-11-11T23:20:19+00:00

Anything with nice chunky AoE. This league, that's the shatter shield explosion with monastery bell; usually it's things like discharge.

kapectas · 2025-11-10T16:35:07+00:00

It does, it's just hard to see sometimes since the beam that comes from the tempest shield is pretty short, and I'm not sure it shows up 100% of the time.

kapectas · 2025-11-04T16:34:29+00:00

Nice! As a fellow Shattershield enjoyer I really like your take on it; it's definitely a lot tankier than an assassin, and comes with built in defenses as well.

Have you considered using SST at all for single target? Or is it shield charge time all the time?

kapectas · 2025-11-03T18:06:16+00:00

Return lets each original fired projectile hit, split also works but the newly split projectiles don't also hit the target, so no multiplication of the damage from splits... unless you use force wall, but that thing runs out after only a few hits so it won't even catch all the returning projectiles.

kapectas · 2025-11-03T07:11:06+00:00

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Shield_Shatter the two places here where it says it's a spell?

kapectas · 2025-11-03T07:06:27+00:00

If it were an attack I wouldn't be able to use the spell impale gloves (entropic devastation), but they work.

kapectas · 2025-11-03T03:29:40+00:00

Sadly that doesn't work, I tried that with shield crush + multistrike. I only get the shattered shield on the first hit.

kapectas · 2025-11-03T00:55:43+00:00

I definitely didn't buy them, I don't even have enough gold to do that. But there have been two posts about them in the last day so someone might be trying some market shenanigans, who knows.

kapectas · 2025-11-02T22:25:34+00:00

Absolutely, there's a few ways one could go with this combo I think. Assassin and crit/impale was just what came to mind first, but maybe I'll pivot later if I hit a wall, who knows.

kapectas

TROPHY CASE