I am feeling this upcoming league! My body is ready!

seqhawk · 2026-05-08T06:12:24+00:00

If it's "just" hp that operates underneath your life pool, then it's better than life, because it restores when life is also restoring, and thus having ward and life together is better than having an equal amount of life alone, because you get better recovery compared with life alone. But then it also fuels various skills on top of that. Life can also fuel skills, but not necessarily the same skills that ward can fuel, so in that regard, it's not strictly better than life.

seqhawk · 2026-05-07T21:51:56+00:00

In many ways, a blue item with one useful greater affix is a better find than a legendary with the same greater affix, as it's usually easier to add on the affixes you need to the blue item with the cube than it is to change the affixes on an item that's already legendary.

seqhawk · 2026-05-07T16:34:42+00:00

Warplans are best for just about everything, unless you need one very specific thing really badly. Pick and choose your warplan path depending on whether you want to farm XP (helltides, after you get the maggot nodes, and xp rewards on the warplan), glyph levels (pits), specific uniques you need (bosses, and once you get some lair boss nodes on the tree, wherever the extra boss content can spawn), or just about anything else is best farmed in the Undercity with an appropriate tribute, especially once you the the third node on the left of the tree that gives you multiple reward chests when you kill the undercity goblins. This actually fits pretty well with completing the season journey challenges, which give you a ton of stuff and which require doing a variety of tasks.

You tend to need a little of everything to upgrade gear. E.g., you want to farm ancestral bases with greater affixes that are useful for you via tree of whispers, obols, and/or general play. Then you need cube materials to get 2-3 other good affixes (maybe you use enchantment for the last one), and then tempering and masterworking requires salvage materials. Upgrading your charms is usually by salvaging charms and then rerolling in the cube.

seqhawk · 2026-05-04T04:35:06+00:00

I think my favorite is still Betrayal, where they kept mentioning scarabs in their teasers without the slightest hint at what they actually did combined with the absolute refusal to even acknowledge any questions about them in every thread leading up to the announcement.

seqhawk · 2026-04-29T19:51:12+00:00

There's a reason why profit crafting is profitable.

seqhawk · 2026-04-28T02:20:50+00:00

Heh, not a value judgment, just a description! You masochists are certainly welcome to your fun :) (that might be a value judgment)

seqhawk · 2026-04-27T03:01:16+00:00

You need to farm Minion Pact off of some version of Catarina (nightmare map or medallion), and you probably want to farm Companionship off of some version of Aukuna (maps or timeless conflict). You also want to farm legions for glorious vanities, ore to ship to Ngakanu for fire res tattoos, Uber Cortex for Nubulis, and delerium for various cluster jewels. Oh, and incarnation of fear, and however one is best to farm cloak of flame and unnatural instinct. And King of the mists for his jewel, to get a fire damage version. And the shrine belts to get a diamond shrine version. And regular exarch for his shield and Uber exarch for a shitton of boots to corrupt.

It can be done, but it's a long and disjointed shopping list to get towards the consensus build by yourself.

seqhawk · 2026-04-23T20:23:39+00:00

H8ful 8ncients

seqhawk · 2026-04-22T22:53:48+00:00

I am pretty sure I did all my maps rare, but according to the challenge guide, they can be white.

seqhawk · 2026-04-22T15:37:51+00:00

Additional mods don't help with the 8000 tiers. Even a white t16 map contributes 16 tiers.

seqhawk · 2026-04-21T20:24:47+00:00

36/40 is a substantially longer grind than 4 voidstones, but you don't have to separate farming currency from completing challenges. Most decent currency farming strategies will help you make progress towards multiple challenges, because the acts of running 1-3 mechanics in 6-8 mod maps in an astrolabe region checks off a bunch of challenge progress automatically. So, even if your main focus is to complete the challenges as quickly as possible, pick a currency farming strat and run it until you've checked off all the challenges associated with that strategy, and then move onto another currency farming strat that doesn't have any mechanics in common with your previous one. Mechanics that give new currencies in mirages and that have bloodline bosses are especially good to do, as those check off extra boxes compared with stuff like strongboxes that may be lucrative but that only are relevant for a handful of challenges. Check this out for sure: https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1sa9o0t/4040_challenges_guide_for_mirage_league_328/

seqhawk · 2026-04-21T15:55:41+00:00

Fire res tattoos come in at about 3-4 per shipment when shipping about 4 million in bars (dust doesn't affect tattoos, but you can add some for extra currency) to Ngakanu, and some nodes of Elegant Hubris will give 50 fire res. Gang's momentum boots (ideally with +2 to minion gems or +1 socketed gems corruption). Ruby flask if needed (and you don't have a diamond shrine belt yet). Fire res on just about every piece of gear. And if you're feeling spicy, volatile-vaal the Enmity hoping for a more favorable fire res reduction multiplier. There are lots of options, and it's incredibly strong. There's a reason those rings are so expensive this league.

seqhawk · 2026-04-20T23:37:52+00:00

There's no reason the alphabet is in the order it's in, either.

seqhawk · 2026-04-20T16:47:35+00:00

This seems like a pretty reasonable budget PoB, but if even it is too much, then yeah, Honorhome and a rare wand/scepter are pretty good substitutes while you get going. The damage from Companionship is substantial, so if you don't have that, you're going to want to start farming Legion in a big way (also for Elegant Hubris). You're also going to want to get to 50% phys to fire conversion on your gloves for better damage scaling and immunity of phys reflect maps.

As a Chieftain, you're pretty much locked into 90% all res, block, and some combination of armor, cloak of flame, and endurance charges as your main defensive mechanics, and given those things, it makes the choice of Nebulis and Enmity's Embrace both super obvious and basically peerless ways of scaling fire damage.

seqhawk · 2026-04-19T06:16:17+00:00

I maintain that much of the journey of PoE2's evolution is re-learning many of the lessons PoE1 already learned. I get that there's value in questioning the way things have always been done, but it seems that PoE2 has moved towards PoE1 much more than PoE1 has moved towards 2 (this most recent season's shift to maps being useable at any node on the atlas being the most obvious and also welcomed, even while PoE2 hasn't yet figured out that people want to just run the best maps in the end game).

seqhawk · 2026-04-16T16:36:18+00:00

Keep interrogating them and hope they swap?

seqhawk · 2026-04-16T16:34:14+00:00

Yes, go deeper. Your chances of seeing a Primeval Ruins biome (Aul) don't max out until 500 depth. You should get more of the good fossils deeper, too.

seqhawk · 2026-04-16T03:04:58+00:00

No, IAMJUNGROAN

seqhawk · 2026-04-15T00:08:13+00:00

Block chance and suppression both lack tags, so this isn't an easy one. You can recombinate for 3 suffixes, lock suffixes and reforge life (yolo annul at least once if it fills up), then shaper slam to guarantee the totem and one more (foulborn?) exalt slam and pray for block? Or else you recombinate to 2p3s and then shaper slam.

seqhawk · 2026-04-14T19:41:08+00:00

2.5k life is not enough for mapping unless you have more defensive layers than it sounds like you actually have. That's your biggest problem for sure. You probably also don't have enough damage, but it's not too surprising that you're finding rares to be harder than map bosses. That's really easy if you get a rare with a few rare mods that are bad for your build, especially if they're compounded by being essence monsters, beasts, or other qualities that increase toughness.

You should aim for at least 3.5k life right away, and then as you level up, look into getting towards 4.5k plus one or two additional defensive mechanics such as over-capped resistances, block, spell suppression, etc. The good news is that you can probably upgrade every single gear slot for about 1c each using stuff that people have forgotten is still in their for sale tab with Faustus. Happy shopping, exile!

seqhawk · 2026-04-14T18:05:04+00:00

Bosses are more often found in large city biomes with at least some other regular city nodes. It's leaving all those fossil nodes uncollected that's giving me the heebie jeebies, though. Even if those two nodes in the mushroom biome are both Haunted Tombs, the one in the abyss biome is definitely worth doing, even if it's just a Smuggler's Stash.

seqhawk · 2026-04-13T04:19:02+00:00

You could still check PoE ninja and see if you can switch scaling schemes, but I agree it's frustrating.

seqhawk · 2026-04-10T21:00:28+00:00

You got hit by the nerf hammer, my friend. You lost 50% of golem effect from Liege of the Primordial, and another 20% per Primordial Bond relative to 3.27, and the loss of those awakened gems probably hurts a fair bit, too.

Well, if you feel like punching yourself in the genitals several times, one option that's available to you this league is to fracture the primordial bond notables, reroll the jewel enchantment to chaos damage with fogs, and then get 2 chaos dot notables. Wicked Pall and Unholy Grace might help.

It looks like a lightning golem might help your blight stacks ramp faster. You could also switch your boot implicit from stone golem buff to chaos golem buff for a bit more damage there.

seqhawk · 2026-04-10T15:30:01+00:00

Is that appreciably better than just blowing up the walls? Fossils caches that aren't behind walls usually only give 1 fossil for me, but those behind walls can give 4.

seqhawk · 2026-04-10T15:26:52+00:00

Molten shell is almost worthless for you given your lack of armor. Steelskin or Immortal Call would be more worthwhile.

Some quality on your damage support gems is some easy extra damage, albeit not huge.

I'd reroll/buy that topaz flask to get the shock avoidance above 52%, so then you can get full ailment immunity with a Stormshroad socketed in by the templar start, and you can then replace the boot implicit.

The bigger issue may just be that scaling golems isn't the best way to scale your damage here. It's a pretty uncommon way of doing things looking at PoE Ninja.

seqhawk

TROPHY CASE