notes-on-patho-batho

[notes-on-patho-batho]

This post isn’t that necessary when you can just say… “Tooltip is wrong get Pob”

— my wife, who is correct.

Specifically, get the community fork.

it is known that the DPS tooltip is not good

To elaborate:

Weiterlesen

[notes-on-patho-batho]

love to refer to Cast when Damage Taken as “seeweedy tea”

[notes-on-patho-batho]

it is known that the DPS tooltip is not good

Enemy resistance greatly affects the damage dealt, but the tooltips just pretend it is not a thing. Sources of penetration, resistance-stripping abilities like curses or Combustion are ignored.

Damage sources with multiple hits might only show one of them. For example, Molten Strike only shows the melee damage and not the magma splash. Explosive Arrow is one of the worst examples, since it shows the damage from the tiny initial impact while most of the damage comes from the actual blast. [x]

Clear speed increases through area of effect are not considered in the tooltip, but make a great difference for mobbing.

Triggered components of a gem link, like Cast while Channeling/Cast on Crit spells, are ignored.

Source on the next few: [x]

Triggered buffs like Innervate, Onslaught, Arcane Surge (verify?), Fortify... can greatly affect DPS but they are not shown in the tooltip.

The same thing applies to conditional increases like Bloodlust.

Some skills like Firestorm gain increased damage through gaining duration, from having more uptime.

Path of Building features a much more useful DPS calculation, acknowleding buffs, resistances and conditional effects. It still struggles with multiple hits, AoE components, and triggered spells though.

The Path of Building fork acknowledges Impale damage, and features many other improvements.

[notes-on-patho-batho]

Quick notice, Cold Snap on CWDT feels really really neat

Slowing enemies is good, and it also sneakily grants frenzy charges if the enemies die to anything while on the chilled ground.

[notes-on-patho-batho]

"Everything happens so much“: In Betrayal

Betrayal was one of the most fun leagues imo, hence this allocation minigame is one of my favorite things to explain.

Some of the encounter mechanics get rather obscure, and this goes all the more for how to manipulate the charts and get a good safehouse.

Basics

Syndicate encounters happen starting at act nine. Each encounter advances a meter for its respective division, and when that meter is full you can access an according safehouse. Safehouses are miniboss dungeons containing the members of the given division.

As the Masters are undead, executing one includes their rank in the division, upgrading the rewards they’ll drop at the safehouse.

Interrogating masters decreases their rank and increases the intel meter in exchange. A master demoted to rank zero will quit their division and pop up at new ones, they need to be gain one rank in order to lock them in at the new division.

[Bargaining, betraying TODO]

Transportation: Masters are guarding a convoy, defeat them before it reaches its destination. Pretty mediocre safehouse rewards except for select members.

Fortification: A little fortress with masters inside. There’s doors to break down and healing totems, break those first. Pretty mediocre safehosue rewards except for select members.

Research: An underground lab where syndicate members are trying to destroy the materials they left behind. It’s usually best to check the floor plan and make a beeline for the masters, since their defeat ends the destruction of the evidence. Safehouse rewards tend to be situationally precious.

Intervention: An assassin jumps you without warning, often with a giant lag spike attached. For these it’s good to have chaos resistance, and learn how to strafe blindly, attack and use flasks while the screen is frozen. Intervention safehouse rewards tend to be scarabs.

Considerations

There’s several good guides and charts out there, but people update them pretty sporadically and don’t account for the fluctuation of item values.

[Great spreadsheet], [quick lookup but out of date]

The fewer Masters currently occupy a division, the likelier it is that unallocated syndicate members will try to join that division.  So it makes some sense to put “bad” characters into filler divisions if someone else with precious rewards is going to be unallocated.

Masters with bad rewards can be cruelly used as interrogation fodder, never interrogate someone like It that Fled in Research though.

Safehouse strategy threads: [x]

Syndicate masters reviewed

Aisling: Kick or research. Her Research table of adding veiled mods to existing gear is like a neat spin of Exalted crafting. Otherwise, veiled items won’t help much outside of challenges.

Cameria: Great, keep out of research. Legacy uniques (Transportation), harbinger currency (fortification) and delve scarabs (Intervention) are good. Sulphite scarabs can be overfarmed though, check first.

Elreon: Kick. Swell guy, awesome voice, unfortunately his drops are a sad, sad joke.

Gravicius: Intervention/transportation. He drops divination cards and (Precious) divination scarabs. Fuck this guy though.

Guff: Maybe transportation, not for the faint of heart. This guy gives you crafting resources to use on a strict time limit. Can be profitable, can be fun for RTS gamers with hardcore APM, but not recommended for blood pressure. His transportation table is the best one.

Haku: Kick. His strongbox-related rewards are terrible, Haku was done dirty by the Masters update.

Hillock: Transportation or research for value, otherwise as needed. Hillock increases quality over the limit of what’s otherwise-available without corruption. Valuable unique flasks like Dying Sun with extra quality can be coveted, this might be easily over-farmed though. Quality also increases weapons’ damage (Transportation) for attack builds immensely, it can also help with armor (Fortification) for six-linking.

It that Fled: A+ in research, good in intervention. Upgrading breachstones is very profitable, but prone to overfarming (check PoENinja). They’re so endearing, too.

Janus: OK in research, fortification, and amusingly weasely. Espionagerate... Fortification is a pretty bad division except for Cameria, he’s good for padding it out.

Jorgin: Intervention if there’s Bestiary challenges, kick otherwise. Bestiary scarabs gain a lot of value if there’s a bestiary challenge, but they’re worthless in other leagues. Fuck this guy’s might-makes-right schtick also.

Korell: Fortification or research. The values of mortal/vaal fragments (F) and fossils vary between leagues, so do your research first.

Leo: Research or kick. His bench provides an exalted orb to use for crafting, at rank 3, but if you can’t get him into research and rank him up, his other drops are pathetic. He’s my PoE boyfriend (and Vorici’s) though, so that helps.

Riker: Transportation, others ok. High RNG. He lets you pick random currency/divination cards/rares/uniques, you need to be familiar with the game for the non-currency ones. He’s pretty rippy in encounters, too.

Rin: Fortification or kick. Conquerors of the Atlas screwed over the value of her map-related drops.

Tora: Intervention, research situationally. Her research reward adds experience to gems, but it can’t carry over levels, so only use it on Empower/Enlighten/Enhance, awakened gems, or level 19 gems.

Vagan: Transportation or intervention. Went from one of the worst masters for rewards to one of the best ones as he was updated to Legion rewards. Legion Scarabs and Splinters are highly desired for money and experience.

Vorici: A+ in research, bad elsewhere. His research table adds white sockets to an item without corrupting. This is a great way to get off-colour sockets without spending too much, best done by chroming one or two of the off-colour sockets into the item first.

Rivalries and friendships: TODO

Allocation by place:

Transportation: A mediocre spot for most masters, pad it out with mediocre ones. Cameria and Gravicius are exceptions. — WANT Cameria, Gravicius, Vagan, Riker, (Hillock) ** ACCEPT (if you’re the type for timed crafting): Guff ** WOULD RATHER BE ELSEWHERE: Tora, Vagan

Fortification: Another bad place to be in, again, Cameria thrives here. — WANT Cameria, Korell, Janus, (Leo)

Research: An easily crowded division, try to get important members in here and move out the rest. — NEED It That Fled, Tora, Vorici, (WANT Korell) ** SITUATIONAL: Leo, Hillock ** ACCEPT Janus, Aisling (They take up valuable spots for other members, but if they’re all nested up in there, get them to rank 3.) ** WOULD RATHER BE ELSEWHERE: Cameria, Jorgin

Intervention: Scarabs are valuable goods with high fluctuation, check their current prices. — NEED Jorgin (only in a beast challenge league), WANT Gravicius, Cameria, Vagan ** ACCEPT Riker, Rin

Veiled mods, signature mods: TODO

(Can Aisling drop others’ mods?)

[notes-on-patho-batho]

Brands are weird (This post is not about “ironic” marketing)

The Brand type of abilities in Path of Exile is pretty strange. They are easy to use as support skills, but some of their mechanics get pretty counterintuitive.

I’m currently playing this Elementalist build from PoEVault and coming to figure out the playstyle.

Brand abilities create a sort of semi-automatic playstyle where you summon a thing that does the damage for you, but Brand Recall gives you a different way of influencing them than minions, totems or traps. A brand locks onto enemies and deals constant damage until the enemy dies or it’s detached by Brand Recall, and it can seek out new targets within a small range.

This video showcases the brand playstyle pretty nicely with Storm Brand. Armageddon Brand is a hella aesthetic skill but it’s a bit less explored as a main ability.

Here’s some info on how they actually work:

Innately, only one brand can be attached to an enemy at a time, but both of the existing brand skills (Storm Brand and Armageddon Brand) increase the limit by one. The Runebinder keystone lets two brands be attached to the same enemy. Being able to have more brands summoned at once (as from the Runesmith notable) is of limited use for single-target DPS, but it’s useful for mobbing and Brand Recall activations.

Brand Recall: The way this skill reads is a bit unclear, turns out it does “activate” them in the sense of each brand you have inflicting a damage tick on enemies in range [x].

Path of Building does not seem to care if you have Runebinder, so the actual DPS needs to be multiplied by two. PoB does have a setting in the DPS calculation to check whether your brand is attached though, and this greatly affects Storm Brand DPS. It does not consider Brand Recall zaps either.

Unattached brands do no damage. This is hinted at in multiple places, but said nowhere explicitly.

AoE increases/reductions may affect attachment range, or just the damage range. This is unclear since both Brand skills in the game deal area damage.

Brands do scale with cast speed, as they gain “activation frequency” based on your cast speed multiplier.

Ways of summoning multiple brands at once don’t affect the brand limit, they just make 2+ at once. And Spell Echo’s cast speed bonus does not apply either. [x]

Empower, enhance, arcane surge are some support gems [x] that help with Brand Recall.

Though they might feel similar to traps, brands’ damage is considered to come from the player, hence it can leech, be reflected, trigger Elemental Equilibrium and the like. [x] [x]

WIP, corrections may follow.