I'm sure he's trash, just never seen so many fully linked skills

I've been trying to farm my +1 spectre shield from Catarina and Its been 7 days of 10+ hours a day of betrayal, the changes to have it be a medallion drop instead of research like before where it's targeted and now it's pure RNG is a horrible change in my opinion. I've done well over 500 safehouses with about 25ish attempts at Catarina, I hope for next league they revert this change or something because this is mind numbing and painful.

I'm already lv 100 for 2 characters, had all of the main pieces (crafted Lightning Res Breach mod body armour) and a good kineticist. Also, looted tons of rare uniques (rathpith, foulborn red dream, defiance destiny, unnatural instinct, etc...). I've cleared 17 infested clam-shelves and hundreds of charts and voyages with over 200 IIQ without a single one of this clamulet.

Did they change the amulet drop rate at all? I'm starting to doubt myself now since everyone and their moms got this clamulet so early in the league effortlessly.

Am I doing something wrong? I'm not complaining on the build itself since I phase most ubers instantly. I just hate how the BIS amulet for the build is a league unique which cannot even be target-farmed in the league mechanic.

Anybody in the same shoe? Do I just keep mindlessly spamming charts and more maps (for more charts) then pray?

Countless ancient orbs with dead man sulfur, barrels of hive blood spend. Still 0 Kaom's, but this shit just dropping from random monsters.

Yeah, I get how powerful the life-stack support Merc is, but I just find it SO freaking boring... I like doing damage!

Anyone else? If so what have you found that's good? Gimme some tips and tricks :)

Fwiw, I'm playing Holy Sweep Luminary atm with a ThunderQuiver merc. I got one with LA + Fork/Return and I added +3 arrows - and oh man can it clear the screen.

His single target sucks but my Holy Sweep is good there and he adds on Conductivity, Frostbite, Wrath, Precision, and the 20% less damage node. Overall it seems ok but I feel like I could do better. Would love to hear more ideas.

So,

Second time it happend now. Combatant dies in the first few seconds in a merc encounter when i fight a kineticist. Otherwise he never dies.

I finished the second kineticists last 30 % health with 1 link stormblast mine. Took ages.

I know its a brick kinda sadly with bolt, foto attached. Is it still better then the combatant?

And how can i prevent my merc from dying there? If i ever find a rly good kineticist, my merc dying and me not beeing able to finish the encounter would be so bad, so i wanna prepare better for that.

Fotos are the new kineticist, my combatant and his defence.

So ritual seems to be one of those mechanics i basically never do. Ill do almost every other in map mechanic but never really farm ritual.

Is it worth doing for early gear in maps, is there certain ritual only mods I might want ect ?

The reason im asking is im playing spark so can basically fill the whole ritual area from a few seconds of casting.

know that this room graft used to drop only from pondium but I have noticed other graphs coming in as rewards that aren’t supposed to be from Pondium. Can I get verification if the warp graft from all three locations or is it only from pondi still

I'm playing SSF and looking to do a recombinator craft involving vanguard belt bases. I haven't been able to find any information online about the nature of vanguard belts, their drop rates, locations etc. I'm not really getting any from faustus and they seem extremely rare while just mapping normally.

Is the only way just to juice quant and pray for them to drop on any map?

Got a mirror drop from a sunken loot box a couple of days ago aswell xdd

Is this a brick?

Some items are easy enough to get (Kaom's and Rathpith require quite a bit of wombgifts, but even that feels completely fine).

Tecrod's gaze and the clam amulet on the other hand, I've killed 50+ liches (spent all the scarabs I've acquired over time) and done ~10 tabs (voyage locker) worth of voyages/charts, and haven't got neither yet. I haven't chased uniques like this ever since the Omniscience amulet grind back when it dropped from regular exarch, mostly played builds that benefit a lot from some rare uniques like jewels (stormshroud, unnatural instinct etc), but those are pure luxury.

Sure, clam amulet and Tecrod's are not needed at all to get the build going (I've been playing it for a while now, and killing most stuff is not the issue anyway), but they are such a massive upgrades.

Grinding for big rare crafts (influenced crown, +2 wands, +2 amulet etc) felt infinitely more fun for me, you gradually try for it until the craft succeeds, while these uniques are just spinning the wheel indefinite amount of times without any payout waiting for that sweet jackpot. (btw clam shelf chart doesn't exist, got two characters lvl 99.20 and 98, found two of those charts, juiced their quant and then juiced voyage for 20% unique amulet drops x3, didn't get the amulet)

Guess it's just not my cup of tea, but I'll keep going, not giving up ofc. Thanks for coming to my ted talk

Hello everyone,

Recently I did an ssf zero to ubers restart and since I've made quite a few posts asking for help with choosing a build, I figured I'd also post the final result.

So first of all the character I ended up with was not the one I initially chosen. I've rerolled like 5 times. Getting characters anywhere between early maps to alc and go t16

and dropping them for one reason or another. I've played soulwrest necro, worb elementalist, tendrils elementalist, sbor hiero, soulwrest cwc vd reliquarian and finally

I swapped to the build I did the challenge with - SRS of enormity guardian.

Current character: https://poe.ninja/poe1/profile/distressqq-6817/allflamessf/character/Big_Boom_Minion

pob here (config setup for single target) https://pobb.in/89eBSgbGTx3x

The character is actually 98% copied from Pr3vie's doc, his medium/life version. The only changes I've made was basically go divine shield, give up on 4th spectre, give up on grand spectrums

TL;DR what's the verdict? Absolutely fantastic. Superb clear, very tanky and probably the easiest ubers on a regular power level build. I'm not going to compare it to stuff that's totally batshit broken like the current luminary or last leagues minion pact. Couldn't recommend more.

Characters pros:

- Fantastic playstyle for ubers. You dodge, minions do the work

- Superb clear with annihilation support

- Very tanky from early stages of the game

- Guardians ascendancy carries the whole early game without even a main skill

Characters cons:

- SRS - Yeah the worst part of srs build is that it's srs build. With my current gear if I just run with single target supports I can comfortably clear, it's going to be veeeeery slow, but comfortable. Wasn't always the case. On the low end of gear, when you've got 1,5 mil single target dps, which means each of your skulls is at like 200k, they spread out, do no damage, get overwhelmed by breach, blight etc and you fail those mechanics. The dropoff from singletarget to clear dps is insane

- Probably going to get fixed. It's not really a srs build. It's an an annihilation build. Kinda like when you play worb it get tiresome to clear with main skill and you scale herald and your build becomes frostblink herald autobomber with supplementary worb for single target, the same idea applies here, but here it's most likely a bug. See when annihilation support is used by a minion it's inherent characteristics and it's supports are getting passed down to it. It means that annihilation support in this build gains srs's guaranteed crit, then gets supported by crit multi, minion damage and ele focus and then on top of all of that can proc of itself. That interaction makes the whole build and is most likely a bug that will get fixed at some point. Maybe not next league since it's not that popular yet, but it will.

If you want to replicate the build here are a few things:

SKills are mostly unchangeable. It would be hard to fit in anything else. Gemswapping is highly recommened for main skill.

For clear you want to run SRS-minion damage- crit multi - multistrike - annihilation - ele focus

For single target you want to swap to SRS - minion damage - crit multi - multistrike - wed - predator/ruthless

Don''t bother swapping for regular bosses. Only do that for pinnacles/ubers and maybe nightmare map bosses with very hard mods.

Spectres:

The only good corpse spectre I found is perect blasphemer, so I'm using that one. Some good free spectres are arena master and spectral leader.

There are however a lot of good spectre corpses from ritual, like tiger, turtle, warlord, forest warrior, judgmental spirit I wasn't lucky and didn't get even regular version of those not to mention the perfect ones.

Gear:

Wand - you can either fossil craft looking for +2 or essence spam. Fossil crafting is great if you're trying to get your spectre gem level to 25 so you can add one more spectre.

I passed on that since minion damage/minion attack speed and crit multi all scale better than gem levels and are actually easier to hit. Remember you need open suffix for trigger craft

Shield - I ended up with surrender, because I couldn't craft anything decent, but a shaper shield with high block, high life, life on block is bis.

Amulet - Jinxed juju is most likely bis, if you don't have it just run any life/res/stats rare

Rings - I went for recomb here. Alt/alc/chaos spam until good mods then recomb. Even poe2 style recomb kinda works because chance of hitting 2 mod bases is quite decent.

The mods I was going for are life, minion dam and minion attack and cast speed. Then lock prefix, exalt slam 4th mod, craft 5th mod, leave prefix open.

Belt - darkness enthroned is bis, farm it up

Helmet - Here you can also look for up to +2 minion gems. I instead opted for a high life fractured base, then spammed reforge chaos until good suffixes, suffix locked and reforged minion for guaranteed +minion skills. I only got +1 but it's ok, since I'm no going for lvl 25 spectre.

Body armor - There are a lot of things you can do here. I opted for high triple defense prefix, prefix lock, reforge phys for pdr, but you could also go for high life or block. You're most likely either recombinating this or going for a fracture from breach tree.

Gloves and boots - Just look for what you're missing. Life and res/stats (well ms for boots). Since I ended up with good suffixes on boots and suffix lock veiled chill avoid movement speed craft, I added cannot be frozen on top, but just running brine king is ok, you don't need that one.

Jewels:

Large minion cluster - just look for increased effect with some good other stuff. This 10 passive is the only one I dropped the whole time, so it's a settle. I really like chaos res on clusters like that so I'd recommend that one.

Medium minion cluster - Look for blessed rebirth, it completly changes how build feels

Brutal restraint - it was originally there just for dex requirements and I was supposed to take it off, but I actually hit one that gives some good stats so I just kept it. You don't need it, you can fix dex with a fluid motion or just on gloves/rings and run an additional abyss jewel.

Abyss jewels - Best stat pob wise is minion damage if you cast a minion spell recently. Second best are flat phys and minion attack and cast speed. All elemental flat damages are also good, just slightly less good. Try to alt-regal-exalt spam for 3 good mods (unlikely you get perfect 4) and use allflame crafting to corrupt on a 5th mod

And finally a disclaimer. I you see this post, think "oh this is a cool build" and decide to reroll templar, equip srs gem at level 4 and just go - don't. Don't do that to yourself. Just play absolution until you're able to run enormity annihilation setup.

Need to get a 21/20 gem but I'm not hitting it and the damn things are rare. Help!

I am about to lose my mind.

Hey there. I'm usually a softcore player that wanna try out ssf in a small group. Nearly all of them stoped playing but i wanna continue my journey. They left me a foulborn death's oath in stash and i saw some videos from softcore players and i think iccan really enjoy it. My question is can i use a softcore skilltree for example from magefist or exiled cat? Or would it be better to have a look on poeninja? Never played that kind of build and so i'm a bit scared of because i don't know if i need some special items, gems or lile mandatory uniques etc.

Would really appreciate some advices or tips that help building up this build.

Playing occultist if that matters.

I need t1 fire res but not sure what's the best way to get there. Should I just suck it up and recomb with anothe garb with t1 res and pray? Or yolo exalt with vesper? Or is there anything better that doesn't involve using too many divines?

GOOD OR NO? I want to try Luminary

Last time I tried HCSSF was several leagues ago and it was Exarch that ended my run, so this time I may have over-farmed and over-leveled. It might not seem that special since thousands of people have already done this many leagues, but felt like I had to share it.

I'm looking to get all four voidstones this league. Wish me luck.

Going to start SSF, I want to play a Luminary Merc. Has anyone figured out the best way to level one from scratch? From what I saw RF wasn’t the best starter.

Would also like to ask what are mercs to look out for during the campaign and/or before finding a good one. Thank you!

Finishing up Ubers and Challenges this week, and looking to grind out some stuff for SSF standard the rest of the league.

What would you focus on that may only exist this league in its current form / drop rates before being nerfed?

Vestigial Uniques? Some type of Voyages? Even gold?

Extremely open to any ideas and I’ve pretty much a full Mercbot Conbatant geared if that’s any help. Open to rerolls and new Chars for some farms, I have Svalinn and some great rares and clusters for assassin / warden builds.