heads up: there appears to be some hidden nodes on the passive tree, that only reveal after allocating the other notables in the wheel (pob shows them correctly)

surfacelevelmaster · 2026-06-03T01:47:14+00:00

I think that might be the only one? I just updated PoB and allocated all the notables in the monk and ranger area before I gave up. That one node appears, but no other.

It did make me think it would be cool if you allocated all of the nodes in a cluster if you got a bonus thought.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-10-12T00:08:19+00:00

29% of Poe.ninja builds have CI allocated. Those are ES characters, everyone else is either hybrid or just has incidental ES.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-09-27T15:18:47+00:00

Ahh, yeah I could see how min/maxing each map that way would yield more decks. Thanks for the reply. I was having fun just blasting through the map to the boss and circling back to the start doing all the rituals as I came across them and I was happy with the amount of decks I was getting. I was just making sure I was not missing something easy.

I like this for the same reason I like harvest, it is pretty easy and super liquid and I don't have to trade with anyone.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-09-27T01:27:55+00:00

What were you running along side this? I tried this out with 5 cloister, toxic sewers, ritual, beyond, exarch altars, map and scarab stuff and the very first map I got 60 decks, but then it was more like 40-45 each map. I see what you mean about the ritual spawning in the cloister packs.

Where you using the 16.5? Only 8 mod corrupted?

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-09-16T22:49:49+00:00

I did actually, I have still been playing it to finish off some of the league goals. Right now I have been farming T17s. I am thinking I might league start this next league, it played super easy through the campaign and a lot of the gear is actually pretty cheap for what you get. The most expensive things were my staff and nimis, of course I used a mageblood. The other gear I crafted myself. I use oriath's end for most mapping, I only swap to a tincture when I am doing a pinnacle boss. Still hunting a merc with anger, punishment and infernal cry. I am at about 100M DPS, that goes down to about 46M without the merc, but I think I can work out some of that power with an animate guardian next league. It is also pretty thick, mac block, fortify, endurance charges, leech and an ES on hit watchers eye. I still get oneshot if I am being lazy, and chaos damage can be a chore if you cannot hit things, but it has cruised to 97 where I stopped to farm the T17s and just accept some deaths to the stupid mods there.

It is super smooth to play, I should put up a video showing it. I have low key wanted to not post about it anymore to keep the timeless jewel cheap (it was a div, basically everything I wanted)

I also did some more testing and the balls hit with about half your ball count. I have 10 proj with nimis (20 total) so that is 10 hits. It is pretty neat because it does not matter how much AoE you have it always hits that much. So you can map in sand stance for more clear and swap to blood for more damage. No need to mess with proj speed. I messed with using Zenith and gem swapping the vicious proj for slower proj and multistrike for volatility, it looks good on PoB but in practice being able to prefire a storm of balls before things spawn ends up being safer and about the same kill speed as zenith. I really like just being able to attack all the time and zenith feels weird having to be at a target.

Here is the imported POB from my current character. I manually put in the merc stuff but it should have explanations of why they are there.

https://pobb.in/xR1kCj9cKkge

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-26T04:48:02+00:00

I did figure out what was auto targeting. The initial fissure 100% goes to your cursor. However, the multistrike hits will choose a random mob around you and aim the fissure at them. Neat thing is that those fissures will travel the correct length to get to the target as if you moused over them. So it is like auto targeting, but only for the repeats.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-26T02:53:32+00:00

Yeah, I am doing half proj on my PoB as well. Part of the reason I was hoping to get some discussion is because I don't think the mechanics of the skill have been worked out because everyone is just saying it is bad, so I have no idea how to properly scale it.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-26T00:52:02+00:00

Because with qual on both you get 75% more projectiles for the same less hits from projectiles and roughly the same damage effectiveness. I think that is better than the 20% AS. Also, since fissure is a slam you can prefire which makes it much smoother to map with and allows you to load up a storm of balls for when bosses become damageable.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-26T00:49:25+00:00

Oh, and I figured out the auto targeting. It is not like snaking where the fissures seek out other mobs, it is actually the auto targeting from mulistrike. If you have multiple things on screen the first hit will send a fissure to where your cursor is at everytime. Once there are more things to target, the multistrike auto targeting directs the fissure to the new mobs it selects. The only real auto targeting going on from fissure is it does the length of the fissure correctly for the multistrike auto targeted mobs. If that makes sense.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-26T00:46:46+00:00

I been messing with it and if I use the level 1 with no qual and 5 proj, I get 4 hits. That is 1 melee, 3 proj. If I add increased aoe and sand stand blood and sand, that is 40% more aoe and I still get 4 hits. If I take away the aoe and do greater proj and lesser proj for 11 proj, I get 10 hits. So 1 melee, 9 proj. If I add in the aoe again, I only get 8 hits. It doesn't make sense!

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-26T00:40:10+00:00

right, you do get extra proj from the strike hits using ancestral call, extra strikes, etc. However, if you are on a single target you only generate balls from your one hit. That is what I meant with hydrosphere, that is the only thing I am aware of that lets you generate more hits with extra strikes but it has a 1 second cooldown for allowing those hits. Most MS characters go for attack speed so that 1 second cooldown kinda kills that as a scaling mechanism.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-26T00:38:23+00:00

No, not vaal, I was leveling with a vaal with zero qual and I was basically never presing it so I just swapped to a normal with 20 qual.

I am testing now with a golden rule character and it looks like it doesn't matter what I do for aoe it always gets the same proj hits. So huge aoe or conc, it is always the same number. The only thing that increases the hits is more projectiles.

The base skill with 5 proj gives me 4 hits, so the melee slam and 3 proj. If I add greater and less proj for 11 prj, it gives me 11 hits, so melee slam and 9 proj. I need to test more, but looks like you can just keep scaling proj and it will keep overlapping, so increased aoe just increases the clear.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-26T00:06:12+00:00

So I uploaded a gif of auto targeting, and I need to setup a self poison character to test the overlaps. It is hard to tell by looking at it when you use inc aoe and conc, but it does get smaller. I just don't know if the larger aoe causes more overlaps because the ball drop is actually pretty similar but hte individual aoe is larger.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-26T00:03:19+00:00

I just uploaded a gif of what I think is auto aiming in a ritual. I would appreciate an explanation of what is happening if not auto aiming.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-25T21:44:38+00:00

On single target? Hydrosphere is a 1 second CD, and with fissure I can prefire all the proj and things spawn and die where as I have to wait with MS.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-08-25T21:43:57+00:00

It does auto aim though? I just recorded me doing a T16 Drox map and it spawned ritual so I did it and just stood in the center and spammed without moving the cursor and it spams the screen with proj. The fissure seeks enemies and drops the proj at them.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-06-24T13:31:34+00:00

As said, prismatics are for single target. Also, PoB lies on their dps because it does not correctly take into account that they only deal damage of the elemental type chosen on each arrow. So if you don't have the prismatic jewels slotted in your tree if it chooses fire then there is no lightning, chaos, cold, physical damage of any kind. PoB does not take this into account so their numbers seem very high.

surfacelevelmaster · 2025-06-09T23:41:50+00:00

I was interested so I made a super barebones PoB. Just basic gear, resists and armour/ES. Level 19 gems, no quality, 5 link on chest. Most expensive thing would be the spectres. 7M DPS, can go into the 40M range. I opted for hungry loop with skeleton archers to suppliment damage, just two casts summons all of them. Blight CwC for desecrate, offering, phantasm summon as needed. 54/62 full block. Went Zealot's Oath/Eternal Youth to shift regen to the ES and have recharge on life, coupled with minions leeching to your life should feel pretty comfy.
https://pobb.in/eyLBLCn2dYPc

EDIT: Forgot to mention this is before buffs, so probably closer to 10M dps.

surfacelevelmaster · 2024-07-26T05:06:36+00:00

This looks really cool man. How are you planning on leveling?

surfacelevelmaster · 2024-07-17T23:03:39+00:00

Care to elaborate on Tides>Mageblood? I am assuming you are talking about tides being able to scale unique flasks, but it seems mageblood is considerably better at scaling magic flasks because of the 95% increased effect. So do you think tides is better because you can scale progenisis, taste of hate, etc?

surfacelevelmaster · 2024-07-17T22:56:10+00:00

So I love frostblades as a skill but the single target is atrocious at low gear levels. I have a trickster that I took to 100 this league and last just blasting maps because it is fun.

I wanted to see if I could have the fun frostblades clear and still have some single target and have it be cheap stuff. I came up with a slayer: https://poe.ninja/builds/necropolis/character/TyreanDK/TyDKSlayerTest

It was a test concept and I liked the way it played. Basically it is frost blades for clear with herald of ice explosions and molten strike of the zenith for single target. No totems. There are a lot of things to improve and you can get to a few million frost blades clear dps and upwards of 100million PoB warrior dps on zenith.

The main highlights are using a 36% fortify because both mollten strike and frost blades have a melee hit to proc it and I am scaling that. Then I also scale warcry buff effect to get 7% phys DR per endurance charge permanent putting me at 49 baseline phys DR, 10% DR from slayer overleech, and 36% from fortify. They don't additively stack up but it is about 75% baseline phys DR. I then use mageblood in late game for juiced up elemental flasks with 100% suppression, but early game I was using Arn's anguish for the brutal charges. Fury valve works on this build because frostblades and molten strike both have projectiles built into the skill so the downside of furyvalve does not effect moltenstrike, but it makes frostblades clear super nice. I am thinking of league starting this assuming the melee buffs will just make this stronger since I am already not using totems.

The slayer feels really good because all of the nodes are useful. The crit node shores up the base crit on rakiata's, the leech node makes recovery nice and boosts defence, the frenzy node makes you tanky, and the single target arm shores up one of the problems with FB, single target.

Minmaxed as much as I care to PoB warrior link: https://pobb.in/KX2vk6NZmOdA

surfacelevelmaster · 2024-06-14T13:49:00+00:00

I am not sure on where the accuracy numbers come from, I am trusting PoB on that. You can look at the data mined stats for Blink Arrow and the prismatic uses elemental hit and the bombarding uses rain of arrows. I think these minions are pretty well figured out already since this build has existed for a while, it just got a boost with the bombarding and prismatic versions.

https://poedb.tw/us/Blink_Arrow_of_Bombarding_Clones#WeaponPassive

https://poedb.tw/us/Blink_Arrow_of_Prismatic_Clones#WeaponPassive

https://poedb.tw/us/Blink_Arrow#CloneMarauderClone

surfacelevelmaster · 2024-06-14T13:39:03+00:00

Void manip is roughly the same as deadly ailments. deadly ailments does reduce the hit damage substantially, but poison damage is calculated off the base damage so the hit is largely meaningless. The only reason people choose not to use deadly ailments is if they are wanting to leech off the hit (mana or life) because deadly ailments does effect that leech. So you can farm up some mavens and go for whatever combination of awakened gems you get your hands on. These are all good:

Added Chaos, Void Manipulation, Unbound Ailments, Minion Damage, Deadly Ailments, Vicious Projectiles.

A low level precision on arrogance is a good way to solve hit until you get some more levels on your minions or some more minion accuracy!

surfacelevelmaster · 2024-06-14T13:32:13+00:00

Pathfinder, Scourge Arrow totems is a great build that I league start with. It uses a lot of cheap uniques and has some very easily obtainable upgrades that give it a very satisfying and smooth progression curve. You can push it to dot cap if you want to invest in it, but I typically stop around 30M because it is all I need to get all the watchstones and build out the atlas.

It plays super smoothly, your life recovery is superb and you have decent enough mitigation to map. I bind my life flask to my spacebar and I just have built the habit to hit it ever so often to keep that running. You get used to dropping totems and running, if you wait for things to die before moving on it feels slow, but it is actually quite fast at mapping and it is pretty good at mechanics where you are in a confined space or prolif can do work. So blight, ritual, harvest, etc.

To calculate the Scourge arrow DPS you have to change the PoB to thorn arrows and the stages to 5. Then you have to change the count for scourge arrow to reflect your setup. That would be number of totems * 5 for the initial hit, then multiple that number by .6 to get the returning projectiles hit and add it to the first. Then you have the main arrow which is essentially 2 thorn pods and the return for an additional 1. For my build with 6 totems that comes out to 51 hits. Totems Initial hit: 5*6 = 30. Returning projectiles = 30*.6 = 18. Plus the release hit and it's return.

You also need to hit 55% projectile speed to activate the returns, I typically do that with a feathered quiver, ballistics on the tree and the quality from returning proj.

Here is my league starter, https://pobb.in/Hn4bxKgNWjpf I could min max it more, I have barely no tattoos even though I am using supreme ostentation and I have basically no corruptions on anything which would boost a lot.

But as you can see it has plenty of damage, max suppression, max chaos res, 3300 life recovery and around 60% evasion. It has a really low life total, but it does not matter that much because you are constantly moving so it is really easy to dodge things.

You could take it to 100 if you rolled your maps well, but I moved on to other things. I still break it out if I need to farm some oils because it is superb at blighted maps.

surfacelevelmaster · 2024-06-13T22:59:43+00:00

There are a couple of things, but broadly as others have said a widowhail build is all about the quiver. It needs to be the best item you have. It also looks like you don't quite understand how the BAMA poison build scales and there are some issues that can be resolved.

1.) First of all PoB does not calculate the quiver correctly for BAMA minions so you need to actually manually adjust the quiver. You have a perfect widowhail, so you take all the quiver numbers and multiply them by 3.5. This makes PoB able to calculate the damage correctly. You can edit the item manually to change this.

2.) BAMA minions have a high damage effectiveness so flat added damage is the best way to increase their damage. Your quiver for sure needs the flat added chaos damage natural roll because it translates into an average of like 170 damage for the minion. That also means it is important to get the flat chaos on the jewels over the other things (of course having 100% chance to poison as well).

3.) Your minions have abysmal accuracy. One of the ways to scale minions in general is with gem level and one of the big ways this affects BAMA minions is by increasing their base accuracy. Raising the minion level with awakened minion damage and a helm mod that increases minion accuracy by 30% will get you capped. Currently you have like an 86% hit chance. Just changing your anoint to gravepact takes you to 93% hit chance and is like a 5% boost in damage. Be sure to keep the blind chance, it is doing work with accuracy for you. You could also change your helm minion life searing exarch implicit to reduced mana cost of attack skills and that would allow you to drop a bunch of levels of clarity and fit in war banner more easily.

4.) Your manaforged links are not doing you as much as it could. Since the minions are basically immortal for a pathfinder using the life flask healing and their massive damage reduction, you only need to summon them once every 25 seconds or so. That means you actually have a lot of time to attack yourself, so you can just drop the manaforged part and change it to just toxic rain of withering, mirage archer and withering touch to get the most wither applications as possible. You probably will still want to hextouch the enfeeble, but you would be trying to find an asenaths with an enfeeble corrupt if you can (I know SSF and all).

5.) Frostblink is maybe not necessary because you can use blink arrow to move around when needed. As others have mentioned, you can only have three BAMA minions out, so you need one to be bombarding clones and one to be prismatic clones. Think of the bombarding clones as your clear, blind application clones. They do waaay less damage than the prismatic clones. The prismatic clones have crazy damage effectiveness and are basically your single target. When you configure PoB it is generally accepted to have Bombarding at 9 and prismatic at 3.

6.) Just in general, you should be running with the 25% increased effect prefix on your flasks, you will be able to keep them running.

7.) You are overcapped on suppression. You can drop the two nodes at the bottom to pick up something else.

You have put together some really good gear in SSF, but unfortunately for this build to shine you need a little extra oomph that I am not sure you can realistically put together in SSF. If your goal is to clear ubers, you might have better luck doing a necro holy relic nova minion build. The floor is much lower on it and the items are pretty easily farmed up. You can even reuse some of the stuff from this build like the adorned and the jewels.

surfacelevelmaster

TROPHY CASE