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The Abyssus Fallacy

225% Crit Multiplier suddenly becomes 125%. Still the same drawback. The item was absurd in terms of raw damage. The pretty popular alkaizer Bladeflurry Gladiator got more than 60% damage boost just from using it. The damage is far from free, though. Arctic Armour, Essence crafted Chest, ToH and Outmatch and Outlast were just some of the things used to counteract the downside of taking ~40% more physical damage. I think GGG killed the unique by not reducing the physical damage taken alongside the crit multiplier. So how do we get crit multi now, you might be asking? Well, I got Abyssus 2.0 for you

Marylene’s Fallacy.

+(20-30) to Intelligence+(80-120) to Accuracy Rating

+(210-240)% to Global Critical Strike Multiplier +(80-100) to Evasion Rating (10-15)% increased Light Radius 40% less Critical Strike Chance Critical Strikes have Culling Strike

That is right, 240 crit multi. Culling Strike on critical hits is also very nice. But what about the downside? It is a less multiplier, meaning that we lose 40% of our crit chance. That obviously sucks. However, Diamond Flasks are not considered crit chance, meaning that all the bonus crit from it still works unreduced. With relatively minor gearing we get ~60% crit chance with diamond flask up when using Dual Wield, which is fine.

Is this as good as Abyssus offensively? No, obviously not. It is however a strong alternative that requires way investment to counteract it’s negatives.

I have a Gladiator Crit Sunder build that I am working with, currently achieving roughly 450k DPS. I will probably post it here in the next few days. 

[gurkeygaming-blog]

Fall of Oriath 3.0

The good, the bad and the meh (no spoilers)

So I played through the Path of Exile 3.0 live version for the first time, these are my thoughts on the update.

The good

Soundtrack: The soundtrack is just awesome. The new act has such a good theme, the ambient sounds are very gruesome and fitting. Every new boss encounter features a unique music and most of them are simply amazing. That is, if you happen to be able to focus on the music during the fights, because...

Bossfights: GrindingGearGames did a phenomenal job when it comes to the bossfights. Without spoilering too much, every fight is a visual masterpiece. Changing environments, different stages, engaging mechanics. Every single fight is different, chaotic but never unfair. The health tuning seems good and nothing flat out screams overtuned. This is hands down the biggest achievement of the expansion. Older bosses such as Piety (1, 2 and 3) or Vaal Oversoul are nice but they absolutely pale in comparison to the new ones. If you want a sneak preview, here are some videos from GGG (Spoilers)

The leveling: The goal of the expansion was to improve the leveling experience. Instead of doing act 1-4 three times with increasing difficulty, Fall of Oriath adds 6 new acts. Act 5 is completely new while in act 6-10 the player mainly visit old zones with different layouts, new monsters and new twists. In earlier versions leveling felt very tedious and repetitive and 3.0 certainly alleviates some of that boredom. The first playthrough felt engaging at every moment. How long this freshness will last is up to debate but it is certainly a big improvement.

The bad

Freshness: With GGG more than doubling the amount of acts it is more or less expected, but I still think it’s worth pointing out. There are very few actual changes to the core gameplay. 3 new skills were introduced as well as about a dozen new support gems that enhance your attacks or spells. While this is nice, there are very few changes to underperforming skills. A good portion of the abilities are too weak to compete with better skills. The “meta” is barely changed and presumably people will more or less run the same builds they played before.

The players voice acting: In the original acts 1-4 your player would comment on his actions. Whether it was the Duelist flirting with his enemy Piety or the Witch acting very fond of the enemies torture devices, the dialogue always added some detail to your character. In the new act, your character does not say a single thing, as far as I can tell. It’s worth pointing out that there seems to be more quest NPC dialogue instead.

The meh

The recycled acts: None of the acts 6-10 feels particularly bad. But then again none of them blows you away. Some zones like the Lighthouse is a very nice zone but then you walk through the same forest you already wandered through in your first playthrough in reverse order with slightly different monsters. Again, the pure number of new acts is so outstanding that I was not expecting all zones to be new and shiny. And it would be unfair to say that all zones are just “meh”. There are as many good zones are there are recycled ones.

Closing words: If you have never played Path of Exile, play it now. It is free, it will eat your freetime and it is the best ARPG at the moment. If you are thinking about returning after a break I would also absolutely recommend picking it up again. Only if you played in 2.5 or 2.6 and grew bored of it I can only give it a slight recommendation, as you will see only slight changes to the core gameplay.

[gurkeygaming-blog]

Thoughts on ES nerf

About a week ago GGG showed us their manifesto

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1899919

containing a lot of ES nerfs and a few life buffs, here are my thoughts.

First of all, this is beta and subject to change. Summary of changes:

higher tiers of ES on items get reduced by up to 33%, based on the affix level.

Vaal Pact does not work with Energy shield.

Discipline ES reduced by 33%, added recharge rate speed

Removed ES% craft from Rings, added recharge speed

Is ES dead now? I personally don’t think so. Es builds now have to invest an equal amount of points into ES% on the tree whereas before ES builds would pick up ~10 nodes while life had roughly 30-40. ES will still have a higher pool, my estimate is that 7-10k will be the average.

With ES being nerfed, there is less demand for ES gear, hence it will become cheaper. Your high end regalia will then cost as much as a mid tier regalia now. While that will still result in a loss in ES, it won’t be 30%

Ther removal of VP is a hard nerf, but you can still leech ES regularly. The fact that ES had no downside using VP was bad enough in itself. I would rather have VP be gone completely, but for now this nerf will suffice

[gurkeygaming-blog]

My Hegemony Zerker

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Path of Exile unique theorycrafting

So let’s talk about Perseverance

In terms of stats this item is subpar. 8% increased maximum life is roughly 40-70 life, which is underwhelming. The resists are also rather small with 40% cold. So it comes down to: Fortify on Melee Stun, Onslaught while Fortify and 1% Attack damager per 300 armor and Evasion.

Important things first: While the attack damage makes this unique sound like a build around kind of thing, I strongly believe that it’s a noob trap. It’s not worth putting passive points into the tree just to boost this affix. More on that later.

Fortify is incredibly strong, since it gives flat 20% damage reduction. 20% chance on stun is easily triggered by most abilities, only on bosses is where we start to have issues keeping this up- While Fortify can be kept up with Movement skills anyway, I consider this mainly a QoL option. Onslaught however is something that is incredibly good and not everybody has easy access to it. Essentially replacing a flask slot is good enough to make this worthwhile.

So let’s talk a second unique that I think might be pretty strong in combination, 

Okay, 80 Life is nothing spectacular, neither is 1000 ER. 10% dexterity isn’t too bad with ~300Dex we are getting 600 Accuracy and 60% increased ER. Again, nothing spectacular but it adds up.

Free arctic armor! Yes, that is a big one. 13% reduced Phys damage taken, 12% reduced fire damage taken and chilling enemies. Again by itself not outstanding but there is still more

ER is increased by uncapped cold resistance. Basically your total resistance after difficulty reduction. With 135% we have 75% increased ER. We can increase cold resist past the cap to further boost this, but we don’t want to do that simply because we are trying to get a lot of effect without heavy investment. 

Phase acrobatics gives us 30% spelldodge without the downside of picking up acrobatics. This is big.

Neither of those affixes screams OP, however everything together gives us a lot of benefits- I believe the key to this item is to not fall into the noob trap of investing in cold resistance. This armor alone boosts our ER by roughly 150% (Dex + Cold Resistance)

Remember when I told you not to invest into ER with perseverance? Here we get another huge source of ER that I believe to be strong enough BY ITSELF. With this armor and a bit of mix and match we should get to 12k armor/es with just the general Life/Armour/ER nodes from Duelist  for a total of 40% increased Attack Damage due to perseverance. Doesn’t look too bad for no investment at all, right?

So how to continue... I guess we need a melee skill now. I’d like to put block into it to further the defenses but we will just have to see

[gurkeygaming-blog]

Hegemony Berserker

First entry is going to be a buildpost. This time we are doing a build for the Marauder - Berserker Ascendancy, focused around the unique Staff “Hegemony’s Era”

The theme is pretty obvious: We have a high crit base, power charge staff that requires knockback. We add the following items

an Abyssus for the huge crit multiplier. A Lightning Coil to diminish the additional physical damage we take through abyssus. Flaks are

 Blood of the Karui as a better Life Flask.

Taste of Hate to further mitigate Physical Damage

Diamond Flask to boost our crit to 80%

Lion’s Roar to add Knockback to our attacks as well as boost our damage

Regular Panicflask

Our skills are as follows:

6L Hege: Earthquake, Less Duration, Melee Physical Damage, Increased Crit Chance, Added Fire Damage and Increased Aoe/Conc Effect

5L Coil: Warchief, Melee Physical, Conc Effect, Faster Attacks, Added Fire damage.

4L Abyssus: Enlighten 4, Arctic Armour, Herald of Ash, Hatred

4L Movement: Leap Slam, Faster Attacks, Blood Magic, Fortify

Free 4L for Shenanigans like CWDT, Bladefall, Enfeeble

Passive Tree here:

Link

Video will follow shortly.

Damage according to Path of Building: 2 million DPS with Conc Effect