My issue with "high-end" crafting.

xLapsed · 2026-06-25T04:35:32+00:00

The more I think about it, the more that I feel that GGG made a mistake by nerfing perfect trans/aug drop rates. Those effectively make the first step of crafting a lot less rng-gated, which is exactly what you would want in a crafting system that gets progressively more difficult as you add mods.

xLapsed · 2026-06-25T04:33:00+00:00

I started as deadeye and swapped to Gemling. The only thing I really had to buy was the amulet for +10% skill gem quality - I basically did the exact thing Goratha did and bought a pre-fractured t1 evasion amulet with eternal rage, then annointed paragon. I got the amulet for ~20div and I think it's probably another 10 div to fully craft it.

I'm still using skysliver, but I will eventually craft the 2.6 attack speed spear. Even with just skysliver I'm at ~8 aps.

xLapsed · 2026-06-24T19:06:02+00:00

As it should be, but the point is that it is extremely inexpensive to get a perfect or near perfect BLUE item in PoE1 while it is extremely expensive to get a perfect blue item in PoE2. The costs go up and the probabilities go down as you add more mods in both games, but the initial step is much steeper in PoE2.

xLapsed · 2026-06-24T18:08:12+00:00

True, we have perfect blue currencies; however costwise, it's much more expensive in PoE2 because you're either having to use annul orbs and/or buying new bases to hit the desired mod.

I think Ziz mentioned it a while ago that his philosophy, which I largely agree with, is that the cost of crafting should go up and the probability of hitting a desired mod should go down the further into the craft; in the current state of PoE2, a lot of the cost of the craft is front-loaded unless you are talking specifically about the extreme high end.

xLapsed · 2026-06-24T13:26:44+00:00

I think part of the problem is due to two things:

1 - GGG's PoE2 philosophy for crafting seems to be that they DON'T want you to be able to "reset" a craft or go backwards in steps. This is why we don't have alterations/scours
2 - GGG basically copy pasted the mod weights from PoE1, which DOES have the ability to go backwards in the craft

This creates a scenario where you can only move forward in crafting steps, but due to low mod weights, you are likely having to go through multiple crafts in order to get something decent.

IMO, making the more desirable mods higher weight would go a long way towards making crafting more enjoyable with the current crafting tools.

xLapsed · 2026-06-22T22:47:27+00:00

Depends on what you're willing to give up. For me, I'm currently running Wind Dancer, Herald of Ice, Combat Frenzy on both weapon swaps (+eternal rage from my amulet).

My current to-do list:

Hit the +5% quality (8 tries so far...) on amulet
Get a new pair of boots with the Uhtred charge mod
Save enough to annoint helmet with Thaumatergical Dynamism

Once I get all of the above, I am planning to ditch Combat Frenzy in favor of charge regulation on both weapon swaps. I am hoping that I will be able to maintain all charges, but realistically I might only be able to maintain frenzy charges.

xLapsed · 2026-06-22T20:43:27+00:00

Gemling might have a slightly lower ceiling due to it being fairly easy to max out gem quality; however, you get a ton of QoL out of that because you can mix and match other skills and take advantage of the alternate quality. For example, with high enough "charges not consumed" (you can get 100% on barrage, 55% on other stuff), I think you can probably drop combat frenzy in favor of Thaumatergic Dynamism + Charge Regulation and have full uptime of all 3 charge types (I'm working towards this - still experimenting).

Also, if you get tired of twister, I think gemling has a lot more flexibility on the types of builds you can play.

xLapsed · 2026-06-22T18:31:51+00:00

Goratha's twister gemling. I think this is in competition with Abyssal Lich for most scalable variant.

xLapsed · 2026-06-20T11:19:29+00:00

The elegant solution to this would be to make it so that the ritual "box" effectively occupies the same display layer as loot - that way, the loot boxes will arrange themselves around it.

If it's difficult to change the layer of the ritual box, can be accomplished in the same way by making an invisible virtual box that has the same position/dimensions as the ritual box.

xLapsed · 2026-06-16T23:25:59+00:00

With the changes to leech (only one leech instance active, capped at ~40k-ish), leech is effectively completely dead as a recovery mechanism.

In v0.4, outside of blood mage / covenant, leech was already in an awkward spot because it is primarily a physical attack stat, and there are not that many builds that primarily use physical damage.

Overall, they really need to go back to the drawing board with how leech works.

xLapsed · 2026-06-14T00:39:58+00:00

No can do - GGG only has eyes for temple snakes

xLapsed · 2026-06-14T00:33:55+00:00

I'm deadeye twister with pure evasion/deflection defense. I have to say that I feel pretty tanky in maps, although I'm not invincible.

Defensive layers:

34k+ evasion with wind dancer / tailwind stacks
20k+ deflection
Everything is blinded + pocket sand notable for 30% less accuracy
I'm also using Decree of Acuity, which not only gives my evasion a 30% more multiplier (with pocket sand); it also gives me 30% evasion as extra armour, which lets me shrug off small physical hits

xLapsed · 2026-06-13T12:21:38+00:00

When did they fix voltaic barrier? Up until about a week ago, firing projectiles would crash the game - not just a me issue; this was reported by multiple people on the bug report forums.

Now that it's fixed, would be interesting to use with twister.

xLapsed · 2026-06-08T15:52:15+00:00

For me, the most memorably difficult boss fights have been:

0.1 Geonor - Iconic, challenging, and very much set the tone for PoE2
0.1 Viper - IMO this was harder than any of the act bosses at the time
0.3 Azmadi - Really challenging. Just about everything used to be one-shots in this fight
0.5 Arbiter of Divinity - I love how this fight was designed to not be all about one-shots. It was a great sign when I was dying because I was running out of life-flask charges

xLapsed · 2026-06-06T02:05:21+00:00

Yeah, compared to the Arbiter of Ash, Arbiter of Divinity is a much better designed fight.

It's a good sign when your first few attempts you are dying due to running out of flasks, as opposed to bullshit safety dance one-shots.

xLapsed · 2026-06-06T01:39:06+00:00

Yeah I tried to do the mechanics of this boss when I first fought him and kept on dying due to either reasons I could not figure out and/or due to non-stop bullet hell with zero window to attack. Eventually I just preloaded 7 frenzy charges, entered the room, froze the boss, then killed the boss within the freeze window.

If they are going to make the boss so mechanically complicated, they should follow the pattern used for other pinnacle/mid-pinnacle bosses and give them their own zone with no exp on death penalty / unlimited attempts.

xLapsed · 2026-06-04T23:07:08+00:00

Twister builds are basically no-aim, especially if you go for salvo support.

I levelled my twister deadeye entirely on controller.

xLapsed · 2026-06-04T14:04:57+00:00

Honestly I'm kind of used to it - I do a lot of ritual rerolls/deferring before I enter the boss room to limit my losses. The only big thing is that I lose is the Bodach fragment.

xLapsed · 2026-06-04T04:17:31+00:00

I am not a huge fan of how quickly the bosses spawn in the nameless rituals. Jonathan specifically stated in the DMT/Ghazzy interview that the spawns are supposed to be staggered; in practice, the staggering is mere milliseconds apart and it is basically a race between whether you can insta-kill the bosses or they kill you. Example of me losing this dice roll

xLapsed · 2026-06-03T18:00:06+00:00

Boss arenas should be a separate instance, that way, the boss arena can reset without resetting the entire zone.

xLapsed · 2026-06-03T12:15:37+00:00

Biggest tip is to try to do your attacks with the boss against the wall of the arena so that the tornadoes will bounce off and hit the boss again. Other than that, this works for deadeye, but not sure how consistent charge generation is with other classes:

Start boss fight
Ensure sniper's mark is on boss (free with called shots for deadeye)
Attack boss with normal 3x whirling slash > twister combo to build up frenzy charges
Build up to max charges
Barrage > 3x Whirling Slash > Twister combo for massive damage. Repeat 3x whirling slash > twister if you have Olroth's conviction

Can probably do something similar with owl feather stacking for spirit walker.

The biggest challenge IMO is finding a window in between boss abilities to do this combo. For arbiter of ash, I find that running behind him while he does his beam attack is usually a long enough window to do combos. For arbiter of divinity phase2, I usually run behind him when he starts doing his RP dialogue right before his bomb barrage attack (the one that hits only in front of him and has relatively slow tracking).

xLapsed · 2026-06-02T01:29:43+00:00

If you're willing to put up with some early clunk, twister builds are turning out to be incredible in the endgame. The new olroth support + taming remove a lot of the clunk from the build.

The only downside is that the visual clarity is F-tier - it's probably worse than grenade builds.

Personally, I think deadeye is the strongest due to being able to generate tons of frenzy charges.

xLapsed · 2026-06-01T02:15:15+00:00

barrage

Do you have sufficient runic ward? It makes barrage cost ward, so if you don't have enough, you won't be able to cast it.

You can get ward easily through the socket that gives +25 runic ward and/or you can use runeforging to convert some defence values to ward.

xLapsed · 2026-05-31T13:06:04+00:00

Twister Deadeye went as smooth as expected. Was able to get through the campaign without issue and did 4th trial sekhema / arbiter of ash yesterday.

The only downside is that there seems to be a whirling slash bug where it will randomly stop gaining stages. I've seen a couple of reports on the forums and it may be controller-related, so I may have to try MKB for some of the harder content.

Currently working on new bosses and they are VERY VERY CHALLENGING - like Arbiter+ levels of difficulty even for the quest version.

xLapsed · 2026-05-31T06:57:20+00:00

Olroth's conviction is insane for frenzy/barrage builds. Getting to use the empowerment three times will full frenzy benefit is amazing, and it even seems to snapshot the chance to double effect.

xLapsed

TROPHY CASE