[Megathread] Path of Exile

[theostrichsays]

By epics you mean uniques? It should be the same it's always been, in fact, Chris made a statement that it would be higher now after the act 4 update, not because they buffed the drop rate, but because there are more uniques to drop.

Yes unique, my bad on that. I guess RNG is just not in favor right now, thank you Lysah.

[Lysah]

Of note I usually average probably 2-3 uniques from act 1 normal to act 4 merciless, so I think you might have just been really lucky before

[Jackielope]

The drop rates on some uniques have been boosted actually. But if you're only looking at your own drops then you're going to get quite the difference between good RNG and bad RNG.

[theostrichsays]

Of note I usually average probably 2-3 uniques from act 1 normal to act 4 merciless, so I think you might have just been really lucky before

Well my witch was much higher then mid 40's and I spetn a lot of time mindlessly grinding. But I appreciate it.

Is there any scenarios that Avatar of Fire is worth while? I tried Googling it and didn't come up with anything recent, and a few youtube videos but nobody really blowing things away with it. I've got a boredom melee Witch I've been messing around with, and grabbed the aoe boost for Ground Slam, and was thinking about grabbing Avatar also, but I don't want to gimp myself more then required.

[Jackielope]

Well my witch was much higher then mid 40's and I spetn a lot of time mindlessly grinding. But I appreciate it.

Is there any scenarios that Avatar of Fire is worth while? I tried Googling it and didn't come up with anything recent, and a few youtube videos but nobody really blowing things away with it. I've got a boredom melee Witch I've been messing around with, and grabbed the aoe boost for Ground Slam, and was thinking about grabbing Avatar also, but I don't want to gimp myself more then required.

Avatar of Fire is mainly used for things like Molten Strike where there's the skill's baseline 50% phys to fire conversion, so AoF just converts the rest over. Due to the way reflect tends to go now, it's often better to split up damage between physical and elemental.

If you want to look at the damage conversion options, see http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Damage_conversion.

[Redblade]

So I made a new char that pretty much combines everything broken with the exception of chaos conversion. Generic low life spell crit build using a 6L Shav's, ball lightning to deal damage, Call of the Brotherhood to convert half the damage to cold which freezes everything but bosses, Skyforth for stun immunity/power charges on crit/6% reduced mana reserve, Taste of Hate for armor/max cold res/phys to cold conversion, Vessel of Vinktar for max lightning res/damage/instant ES/Mana leech, and finally I obviously use a spell dagger with Whirling Blades linked to fortify for movement/damage reduction.

It's beyond broken...

[Lysah]

I think they need to remove the ability for crits to cause status effects if they really want to balance the game around crits doing 800% more damage than than non crit builds.

[Redblade]

The problem lies more with the fact that crit scaling beats just about anything else (with the exception of chaos double dipping atm), they tried to correct it a few times but crit is still king. To be fair though, build diversity atm is probably the best it's ever been, even if a lot of it is crit based.

In my characters case it's more the fact that I combined gear for closer to 75 exalt to create a perfect storm of broken. =)

[Lysah]

They could also make controlled destruction like 200% more spell damage 100% LESS crit chance instead of reduced. I use CD on my crit cascade mine build, every crit build uses it now, it's stupid not to. I do agree it's a nice time to be able to play pretty much whatever you want, but there are still glaring issues with things like how the status effect nodes on the tree are basically a complete waste of points.

I wouldn't mind having a Skyforth, if only for the mana and power charge on crit. Wish there were better ways of getting these things without stacking them all on one extremely overpowered item.

[Redblade]

They could also make controlled destruction like 200% more spell damage 100% LESS crit chance instead of reduced.

Yeah that one should have been "Less" for sure, makes no sense the way it is now.

I wouldn't mind having a Skyforth, if only for the mana and power charge on crit. Wish there were better ways of getting these things without stacking them all on one extremely overpowered item.

Yeah the power charge on crit is amazing as well as the stun immunity, the 6% mana reduction is just gravy. Luckily got mine when they were "only" 25ex.

[Vespian]

Yeah that one should have been "Less" for sure, makes no sense the way it is now.

Maybe this is a language barrier(not natively English), but reducing something by x has a result of x less. They should virtually be the same...

[Redblade]

Maybe this is a language barrier(not natively English), but reducing something by x has a result of x less. They should virtually be the same...

The in-game logic is based on increased/reduced being additive and more/less being multiplicative, so the difference is huge. This is one of the reasons why, for example, low life is so popular as 'Pain Attunement' grants 30% more spell damage.

[Jackielope]

The in-game logic is based on increased/reduced being additive and more/less being multiplicative, so the difference is huge. This is one of the reasons why, for example, low life is so popular as 'Pain Attunement' grants 30% more spell damage.

To give more more context on this in case it's needed, Controlled Destruction being 100% Reduced crit chance (or -100% increased) means that if you've got 300% increased crit chance, Controlled Destruction only drops it down to 200% increased. However, if it was 100% Less then it basically multiplies the critical strike chance by 0, so that will bring everything down to 0 just like Resolute Technique. Even if there was a +100% More crit multiplier, all More and Less modifiers are multiplicative with each other meaning that 100% More is times 2, then a 100% Less is times 0, so regardless of the order of how the More and Less modifiers are done if there's a 100% Less that'll make it 0.

As for whether it's a good idea to make it a Less modifier... It seems GGG wanted to allow crit builds to still use it if they managed to get a lot of crit chance since that would supposedly be quite a lot of investment and opportunity cost that they didn't spend on something else like survivability. However, stuff like Taste of Hate makes that point moot since a single item can provide so much defense that it's kinda pointless to "balance" around not making the investment elsewhere.

[Lysah]

As an extra comment, GGG words everything very precisely so that, once you understand their "rules," you can understand how everything works without needing them to explain it.

[Jackielope]

As an extra comment, GGG words everything very precisely so that, once you understand their "rules," you can understand how everything works without needing them to explain it.

Aside from a few skills with exceptions to their support gem capabilities, yup. Alas, some of their rules need better documentation. But that's what the wiki editors are for I suppose.

[Redblade]

Aside from a few skills with exceptions to their support gem capabilities, yup. Alas, some of their rules need better documentation. But that's what the wiki editors are for I suppose.

Personally I think the skill feedback threads on the forum should contain a mechanics explanation and the intent of the gem. If a gem is intended to fill a solo player roll for example then there is very little use to provide group play feedback for example.

But yeah, once you figure out how it's designed you realize that they are very literal with their wording on gems and gear which is a very good practice.

[theostrichsays]

Hey guys had a pretty solid turn around on the unique drops, and decided to work on a new character. Was reading some of the skill tree guides, for making my own set up. 150% Life or ES, +80 to both stats that are not my primary, and 300% crit if I'm doing a crit build.
But what about Weapon Damage, Spell damage, Elemental damage, and so on and so forth, numbers should I be aiming for, at a min?

[Lysah]

I don't know if I ever aim for any particular number when it comes to DPS stats, just grab what is accessible on the way to getting defenses and nodes that are mandatory for utility. If you want to post a skill tree I know people in this thread can critique it, we have a few master builders hanging around.

[Tommy T]

Been playing PoE again a lot recently...

My finger hurts.

[Deleted]

Is there a release date for Ascendancy yet other than "Early 2016"