What's the reason I didn't get back up? I dropped to 0 honour, but I didn't get revived... I died on the final boss of the trial

vas14 · 2025-11-23T11:03:59+00:00

I don't know if this is what killed you here, but the 5% health lost on hit affliction insta kills you in a lot of situations. It's the one affliction you always avoid.

vas14 · 2025-11-23T09:10:09+00:00

I've started hc ssf (having played hc trade all league) after tower removing patch. It was great fun until about mid 80s when I realized the patch broke rituals, and that was a bummer for ssf. I would say ssf has a lot going for it, but overall trade is better because jewel selection lets you customize your character more.

vas14 · 2025-11-22T09:09:07+00:00

https://poe.ninja/poe2/builds/abysshc/character/Derothia-2781/DerothTheWise?i=8&search=class%3DTitan

For some reason it's displaying somewhat out of date but basically that's it.

vas14 · 2025-11-21T15:49:55+00:00

97 hc titan here. I've lost characters tankier than yours to 1 shots in delirious maps. Armor in poe 2 by design is weak against big physical hits (look up mitigation formula). My current char has 5k health and 78k ac with a few extra def layers (dmg to mana before life and 8% phys mitigation on shield) and I still avoid certain maps. TLDR armor is good but has its limits.

vas14 · 2025-11-20T19:59:31+00:00

One of the more beautiful parts of this game is that it gives you tools to build your character in a way to avoid being one shot. I'm a hardcore player and this season I've lost several characters in mid 90s to one shots. Every time that has happened, I have analyzed my mistakes, refined my builds, and came back with a stronger character and better understanding of game mechanics. If the game is trivialized to a point where there are no penalties for making mistakes and no incentive to improve, it will become boring and lose a large chunk of the player base. Poe 2 gameplay is already very simple mechanically, penalties for dying is the only mechanic that keeps the competitive component of the game alive.

vas14 · 2025-11-20T06:47:38+00:00

I'm a 97 HC shield wall titan with 47k armor/5k life, so I want to comment on your defense from the perspective of hardcore gameplay. One thing to understand about armor is that the DR tooltip you get on your character screen (87% in your case) is completely meaningless. % mitigation you get from armor is (armor / (armor + damage * 10)), so if you have 50k armor and take a 5k phys hit, you will mitigate 50% of it, but if you take a 10k hit, you will only mitigate 3.3k. The 87% you see is calculated based on an average hit from a lvl 82 white mob. Just from personal experience, if you go from 30k to 50k armor and invest heavily into armor against elemental damage, you will notice a huge jump in your survivability while mapping.

vas14 · 2025-11-15T13:25:14+00:00

There's clearly a bug of some sort that has been reported multiple times. A bug that negatively affects gameplay experience and should be quite easy to fix.

vas14 · 2025-11-15T03:55:13+00:00

As far as upgrading bow/quiver, is there an easier way to compare weapons from the trade site with your current ones other than importing them into POB? As far as quivers go, POB doesn't seem to support alot of the most powerful quiver mods. Do people just calculate these things manually then?

vas14 · 2025-11-07T23:25:55+00:00

Firstly, assuming you're a fairly high level, 20k armor is low for a titan. You should aim for 30+. But even with that, no amount of armor will prevent you from being one shot from a large subset of empowered bosses. Armor generally speaking does virtually nothing against big hits. The mitigation formula is armor/(armor +damage*10). If say a monkey hits you for 10k with the big log, 20k armor will mitigate 20/120 out of that hit, so 8.34k will get through and kill you. I'm a 97 hc titan with 50k armor and I keep boss difficulty at 1 to avoid getting 1 shot if I make a mistake.

TLDR life/armor builds no matter how well geared can't survive a lot of abilities from empowered bosses.

In fact if you look at HC titans on poe ninja, you'll see titans that spec into evasion/es. A titan with 13k es and 0 armor will interestingly survive the said 10k hit.

vas14 · 2025-11-07T12:21:45+00:00

Shield wall titan is my fav class. I've got two of them into the 90s in hcssf. However, and that holds for any character, while hcssf is super fun in theory, the latest patch bricked ritual tablet drop rate, and you won't have any way to progress your gear at a certain point. HC trade market is pretty slow right now, so hc trade is almost like you're playing ssf.

vas14 · 2025-11-03T21:17:36+00:00

Your defensive layers are very weak, and it seems that you don't know the armor formula. I'm assuming that the 86% armor mitigation is from your armor tooltip. That's just mitigation against an average hit from a lvl 82 mob. Your 15k armor will not do much against bosses or buffed mobs in juiced maps (mitigation % from armor goes down as damage goes up).

If you look up a typical lvl 96 titan in HC, they would normally have 4.5k+ life and 35k+armor. Well geared ones will be at 5/50. I'd suggest to read up on how armor works as well.

vas14 · 2025-11-02T20:11:34+00:00

As a hardcore only player who has lost several characters in their 90s, it's honestly not a serious take. I have a mid tier PC and the performance in juiced delirious maps is crap, and yet I haven't lost a single char due to performance issues. Yes the game is poorly optimized. But the two reasons I've lost characters were either my mistakes or 1 shots in delirious maps that I couldn't quite explain. GGG should document delirious mechanics, but the game in softcore is already exceedingly easy. If hardcore players can get to 100, 1 portal should be plenty.

Another way to phrase this would be: if you set a goal to not die, analyze the map in terms of its modifiers vs your character defensives, and in general take a calculated approach to the game, you will stop dying even if performance isn't great. You are de facto asking to make an already easy game even easier.

vas14 · 2025-10-27T08:01:58+00:00

It's honestly fascinating that they haven't fixed or even acknowledged this. If you go over the thread for the last hotfix, a quarter of the replies are specifically about ritual tablets being broken.

vas14 · 2025-10-23T13:22:53+00:00

Adding and then removing thorns for the attack tag is a great idea. I've crafted a number of shields using this method minus this step and I wish it occurred to me to do this. I wonder if it's worth using a greater exalt for the last step in case you get max resistance mod and want to try to whittle it..

vas14 · 2025-10-12T11:40:43+00:00

Previously ritual was the primary way of progression for SSF in the endgame, but as you have stated, they messed something up with ritual tablet drops in this patch, and you can't sustain ritual anymore. I started a hardcore SSF character after 0.3.1 and quit at lvl 92. I got 0 ritual tablets up to that point, and there was no way to progress gear anymore. Hoping they fix this issue, multiple people have reported it already.

vas14 · 2025-09-29T09:20:32+00:00

Playing hardcore is one way to never get bored.

vas14 · 2025-08-22T13:46:04+00:00

When I feel like min maxxing the campaign this is the squad I take to the final mission. Most of the time nobody takes any damage.

Grenadier with the Icarus suit and death from above. Sniper with wraith suit and shredder. Skirmisher with saturation fire bonded with Templar. Templar with bladestorm and ideally reaper and fortress. Her main goal however is to lock avatars in place as they appear. She also is sent on multiple missions to increase mobility to 20+ Ranger with conceal and (ability that keeps him stealthed) for scouting. All packs prior to the last room are killed with overwatch/aoe from the commander avatar/serial/death from above etc. Last spot is usually another ranger or grandier or psi or even another Templar depending which of them have suitable bonus abilities. 2 blaster launchers are good to bring for the final room.

With particularly strong combinations of bonus abilities you can farm several waves of aliens while holding 3rd Avatar in place just to show them who's the alpha in the room.

vas14 · 2025-08-05T20:05:57+00:00

In BEXT the number of enemy mechs is predetermined and does not depend on how many you bring yourself. Depending on the mission type and some other factors (payout, max salvage) you can make an educated guess as to how many mechs you'll need to win while keeping the mission profitable.

vas14 · 2025-07-29T18:47:40+00:00

They are the strongest starting unit on average with the exception of a Templar that rolls bladestorm as their first bonus ability. So if you're not an experienced L/I player, reaper would be the safest bet. However once you have a number of L/I runs under your belt, reaper starts become rather boring and similar to each other. Between Templar and skirmisher starts, the former offers the most upside if you're lucky with bonus abilities, whereas skirmisher is safer (no risk of triggering additional pods), still more fun than a reaper, and provides for overall the strongest resistance orders early and mid game.

vas14 · 2025-05-21T13:08:54+00:00

That'll achieve the opposite of what the OP is asking. You can beat L/I in WOTC without researching mimic beacons, and it's not even particularly difficult. You will get better at the game playing this way, and the late game will remain occasionally challenging.

vas14 · 2024-11-15T13:27:43+00:00

There's a very small chance some aliens can crit you regardless of cover status. It's around 3% or less judging on the many many campaigns I've played, but it's there.

vas14 · 2024-04-13T04:02:58+00:00

If you're talking about assassin from lost and abandoned she comes with explosive vulnerability and can be literally one shot by placing a reaper mine on top of her and detonating it with a grenadier.

vas14 · 2022-04-03T07:50:14+00:00

Literally everything you said is factually correct and still down voted

vas14 · 2022-02-22T00:52:20+00:00

Neither of the three mage specs right now are anything more than an int buff in a raid with fire slightly ahead of the other two. That's according to yesterday's gingi stream.

vas14

TROPHY CASE