cytoc posted:

Engineering Eternity's guides are a good place to start when you want to learn the game. If you want to just dive in, there is a Diablo players guide to POE that is a bit shorter, but if you have the inclination to watch the videos, I'd go that route.

There are two schools of thought as to the best way to approach the game for a new player. I preferred to start with a build guide that gave me a end goal passive tree, but others prefer to dive right in and accept that their first character will probably hit some form of wall towards the end of the story and early end game and then select a new build once they know a bit more. You know how you like to play games, go with whatever works for you. If that influences your decision, I reckon that pretty much any build can get through the story if you play softcore and are prepared to through you corpse at the bosses enough (this will be about 10-20 hours into the game, depending how much you explore).

Most good builds should be mowing through waves of mooks. If you want to cover the screen in fire, there is a new skill this league called Armageddon Brand that does just that. Conveniently, Engineering Eternity has just released a video guide to his version of this build (he also has a written guide with leveling trees and gearing advice linked in the comments). Check the video of it in action and if it looks ok, then you can't really go wrong with this guide. There are a lot of good build guides in the official forums and on youtube; ideally "new player" or "league starter" builds are a good place to start -> if you're uncertain, post a link to the build in this thread and you'll be able to get confirmation that there is no pitfalls (for instance super expensive uniques) with the build.

Other things:
- Ask for an invite to the goon guilds -> invites are done by character name, not account name (though all characters will be in the guild once one is invited)
- Join the goon chat channel (/global 5555)
- Get a loot filter -> neversink's is a good place to start
- If a divine orb, exalt orb or mirror of kalandra drops don't use them -> they will partially to fully cover your gear requirements if you're playing on trade league

Hauki posted:

it really is since the stash gets vendored wholesale like twice a day now

kind of a shame since people donated hundreds of dollars to max out everything available for the guild and it's all functionally pointless

whypick1 posted:

Fister Roboto posted:

Unless you're SSF, just buy a courtyard map.

Delve can be insanely lucrative, but you do have to go deep, and you have to venture into the darkness to get them. Every time you complete a delve, go back and explore the side paths using flares and dynamite. That's how you get fossils, which can sell for multiple chaos each.

emdash posted:

who did take his place? unless you forgot to jail Korell before you exited the safehouse, it seems like that should have worked

Firebatgyro posted:

Your 2stone ring is basically just giving you ~75 res its complete trash. Your belt craft does nothing for you. You have 2 bleed flasks and no freeze flask.

Captain Foo posted:

Armageddon Brand is capable of clearing the game; post your character

Tai posted:

Bar getting super lucky on some ultra rare drop that nets you 20 ex, here’s how to make regular cash.

Play more
Clear faster
Delve 300+
Don’t gamble

Zmej posted:

syndicate scarab farming on harbor bridge/foothills/ossuary is stupid but it makes me stupid money. I look forward to them swatting it down.

ThePineapple posted:

I also tried following this guide in Harbor Bridge. After four hours of grinding I got to run ITF as a 3-star leader of Research once, and have been trying to get him back as a member of Research now. Granted, I was making mistakes in the first few hours that prevented me from actually doing it right, and my character doesn't have a ton of movespeed beyond typical boots + flask, but I still feel that it's super boring and not as easy as advertised. I'm probably going to run it once more and stop.

What stage of farming are you stuck at? Getting your target member into the target order? Ranking them up? Swapping out the leader? It seems to me like the first stage is the most random / lengthy. One thing I heard is that the chances of each encounter type showing up is not necessarily 25%, but is based on the number of members in each order - i.e. an order with 4 members is twice as likely to show up as an order with 2 members. If your target order has few members, this may be slowing things down. I guess the only other advice would be to make sure to follow the guide to the letter.

For another take on syndicate farming, this guy did it a different way, by filling the board with rivalries instead of trusted links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaC2G6YvspA. I suppose both work, as long as you can consistently get encounters with the option to rank someone up.

Papercut posted:

Have you ranked up too many members? You want as many unaffiliated floaters as possible because they can show up in any encounter. The issue with having people in the divisions is that they won't show up in any encounter if their division is locked out, so after a while you'll start stagnating and seeing the same encounters over and over.

Also as someone else said, there was a more recent video posted where the strategy was to form as many red lines as possible because then you get the rank up option in 2-person encounters. I switched over to this method and anecdotally felt like it was MUCH faster.

emdash posted:

i followed this thing for leveling https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2150196

and knocked it out much faster than 24 hours for sure. Just be sure to do all the parts labeled "skill point"

Fallom posted:

I'd like to see if this game is for me but I had a couple basic questions that I couldn't figure out from lurking the thread -

I've seen people recommend playing with specific builds that require specific items, which are just purchased from other players. What are you playing for up to that point? Are you just going through the game until you can earn enough currency? What's your goal after you buy the items you need?

I've loved all the Diablo games but finding cool items and changing my playstyle around them was always the most fun, even if that wasn't always optimal in the first two games. Just buying the one item you need and forgetting about everything else kind of seems to take the fun out of that. I get bored of Diablo 3 seasons once I've earned my set and I'm left trying to find incremental upgrades to the exact same items.

Tenzarin posted:

How much should I attempt to sell this for?


It's all setup for crafting on +1 gems into multimod with +2 all support gems.

Already made my bow and getting another one of these from the div card and random fossil I found while delving wasn't too hard. Rolling 1 prefix that is 20% more spell damage and having 3 suffixes and annualing off a suffix does take some luck. And if your unlucky it costs currency each time to try.

Doing 1ex for "Cannot roll attack modifiers", 1ex to get "+1 level to socketed gems", 2ex for "Prefixes cannot be changed", 1 orb of scouring to remove the suffixs, 2ex for multimod, and 2ex for "+2 to level of socketed support gems". To attempt to sell it doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Because I'm taking a 6ex hit before I even sell it.

Zero VGS posted:

I have such a low tolerance for getting killed, even in SC, it pisses me off quite a bit. Hopefully Lightning Trapper avoids this by just doing such obscene damage that I can kill everything before it can kill me back.

Captain Foo posted:

Mathil's voidforge static striker blows up fat chains with heralds

Traxis posted:

CoC Ice Nova/Frostbolt Assassin. Mine is pretty tanky with 7.4k life, Acro/Phase Acro, blind from Pandemonius and a decent amount of life leech.

The Wonder Weapon posted:

Look at this stupid belt I made on accident lol

whypick1 posted:

Hydra - Safest place is right behind her. If you have any minions maybe avoid projectile chain map mods.
Chimera - Make sure you have a Gotta Go Fast button for his cloud attack
Phoenix - Avoid AoE mods like the plague or he'll nuke you from off-screen. He'll also lower your fire resistance as the fight goes on. Fun.
Minotaur - Same AoE thing as Phoenix. Fight is much easier if you can teleport through the lighting beams that both shock and slow you if touched. Watch for falling rocks.
Shaper - Keep him on screen at all times. Don't try to facetank his balls or his beam. Slam attack is very telegraphed. If you see a degen ball coming towards you, lead it to edge of arena to set it off since you do not want them in the middle of the arena. Keep Zana alive during the portal phases or you'll have a Bad Time during the bullet hell phase.

vvv I blame phone posting

Vulpes posted:

In my brief experience, compared to a spectre-based build, Baron sacrifices a small amount of clear speed (not enough that you'd really notice) in exchange for much better boss dps and near-invulnerability thanks to zombie leech and a much bigger life pool. 10-15ex should be plenty to get it set up, with the possible exception of the end-game crafted mace depending on your crafting luck.

The Locator posted:

Small victories. After way too many stupid deaths, I have hit level 94, for my first time ever. Also hit 7k health for the first time ever. Still die stupidly too much.

Think I'm going to look into respeccing into the Baron Skeleton build that was discussed a bit today instead of my zombie/spectre build, but I'm not sure I have the finances to really do it. I'm currently leveling a superior vaal skeleton gem and it's up to level 18, so we'll see what my finances look like when that hits 20. I'm doing ok through level 15 maps, but I died tonight to something in a blight on a T15 map (not a blighted map, just a normal blight).

I seem to be pretty bad at this game even with the OP meta of being a summoner!