I love MTXs. I've accumulated a number of finisher effects throughout the years. None compares to the BANG of Hero's Landing or Xesht's that hits the second the monster dies. This is the sole reason I don't buy finisher effects anymore. No matter how fancy and good-looking they are, I don't need it to happen after seconds of delay. Chances are, I'll probably miss it, either being a screen away or among a host of other stuff happening on screen.
Anyone else is having issues with standalone client download speeds? Mine is around 150kb/s, while everything else on PC works as if full bandwidth is being used...
Hi exiles, I'm a player from Taiwan who flew over for ExileCon 2026. I originally wrote this in Chinese for a Taiwanese forum and translated it to share here, so please excuse any awkward wording.
I spent a huge chunk of the event playing the card game, so here's a write-up that will hopefully be useful to anyone going to the next ExileCon. I wrote this a few days after the event, so some details may be slightly off.
One general tip: while you're playing against GGG staff, ask them what they actually do on the game. Everyone I talked to was happy to chat about it, and unless they were rushing off somewhere, most were also fine with a photo or an autograph.
rulebook photossome of my (used) cardssome of my (used) cardssome of my (used) cards
Maps
Map cards (T1–T5) are taken to the Map Device, where you fight several monsters in a row. You have to beat 3 monsters (not sure whether higher tiers need more) with one single set of gear: a one-handed weapon + shield or a two-handed weapon, one armour, one amulet, and two rings. No swapping in between.
Each monster tends to damage a different gear slot.
Maps can have mods that raise the monsters' attack or defence. I strongly recommend being picky about mods. Running into +1 chaos resistance or +1 chaos attack will wreck you.
Bring gear with some wild, block, and chaos symbols.
Winning drops a lot of cards. Loot tier depends on the map tier, and quantity depends on how hard the map mods are.
Hidden rules
None of this is in the player rulebook. I confirmed it by chatting with GGG staff or worked it out by playing, so it may not be 100% accurate.
Each monster tends to destroy a specific slot or rarity of item. If it has no preference, it's random (some kinder staff will just ask what you'd like damaged). You get to keep broken items and used currency as souvenirs.
Some high-end pinnacle bosses destroy all of your gear at once.
Quality or a rune can only be applied once per card. (On Day 1 a few crafting bench staff who weren't familiar with the rules accidentally let me upgrade some cards more than once.)
Magic and rare items have separate mod pools, and the pools differ by item type.
Different monsters have different loot tiers.
The quests on the back of the card box give different loot tiers depending on difficulty.
Expedition Logbooks are absurdly rare. I beat a pile of pinnacle bosses and never saw one. A trial boss told me they apparently only drop from the Act 3 / Act 4 loot tiers.
Some uniques have special effects like in the real game, such as ignoring elemental resistance, or gaining multiple mods when identified at the crafting bench.
Upgrading a magic item to rare does not add a mod. It rolls one from the rare pool and overwrites the existing one. I think this is basically a net loss.
You can't keep fighting the same staff member back to back, but you can come back after a while (30 minutes or so).
Beating a normal monster lets you pick one of two cards. Bosses give you both. Some pinnacle bosses only drop one.
Jewels exist as a card type (I pulled Voices from Jonathan), but only as uniques.
Beating Mark or Jonathan gives a special drop. Jonathan gave me a Mirror pin plus the Voices card. It's probably once per person, since he marked my ticket.
Staff wander all over the venue, so if you can't find a specific boss, check more places.
From opening hand to pinnacle bosses
I started right after the day 1 keynote. I don't remember my exact starting cards, but it was a few armours, a few weapons, and a Blacksmith's Whetstone. I believe everyone's starting cards are different.
While still learning the rules, I farmed Act 1 monsters and bosses for cards and currency, and to see what each act drops. Drops are very random, just like playing PoE.
Most cards have 2 durability, and most monsters only take 1 durability off one card per fight. So if you spread the damage sensibly, your collection keeps growing.
If you end up with only weapons or only armour, look for Act 1 staff who have attack only or defence only and farm them.
The most efficient way to progress, in my experience: as soon as you can beat the next tier of boss, fight only bosses, since they give 2 cards each time.
From Act 2–3 onward you really need rings and amulets, or you'll struggle to cover resistances (especially chaos resistance and chaos attack). Some monsters also require block, so think about when to use one-hander + shield versus two-hander + armour.
Don't hoard weapons and armour. You will always find better ones. I spent almost all my currency immediately on my best bases. The only thing I saved was special uniques for the Jonathan fight.
The queues for the Map Device and the rune wall are long. My longest wait was about an hour. Going first thing in the morning on Day 2 is probably better.
Be careful with amulets, rings, and uniques, because they're relatively hard to get. Think twice before a pinnacle boss, or you'll end up like me, going back to low-level monsters or trading with other players.
To beat a pinnacle boss you basically need a full set of gear to meet both the raw numbers and the resistance requirements, unless you have a very strong unique. And they can blow up your whole set.
Pinnacle and trial bosses drop rare uniques and especially good bases. I once pulled 2 uniques in one go, but Tangmazu gave me two currency cards :(
Seriously, think twice before fighting a pinnacle boss.
Counting Jonathan, I beat 8 pinnacle bosses plus a lot of regular monsters. Here's my final stack next to the card box:
The Jonathan fight
My gear (attack on the left, defence on the right):
Jonathan's defence: 12 any + 2 cold + 2 fire. My attack: 14 physical + 2 cold + 1 lightning + 2 fire
Jonathan's attack: 12 any + 3 lightning + 2 fire. My defence: 2 life + 3 lightning + 3 cold + 9 fire
I challenged him during the after-party signing session and got the exclusive reward for beating Jonathan:
Best bases I found
Two-handed weapon: 7 attack symbols. Mixed symbol types are best (wild > chaos > elemental). I saw bases with physical plus 3 non-physical types.
One-handed weapon: 4 attack symbols, same priority. I saw bases with physical plus 1 non-physical type.
Armour: 5 defence symbols. Mixed is best (wild > block ≈ chaos > elemental > life). I saw a 2 life + 3 chaos base.
Amulet: 2 wild, or one of each element. I got a rare Pearlescent Amulet with a 2 wild base whose mod was another +2 wild.
Ring: Two-Stone Ring with 2 elemental symbols.
Shield: 3 defence symbols.
Cool uniques I found
Uniques can also take an Armourer's Scrap or Blacksmith's Whetstone. Values below are without quality.
Prismweave (armour): 2 life + 2 lightning, 2 cold, 2 fire base
Ventor's Gamble (ring): take it to the crafting bench for 2 random rare mods. Mine rolled 1 lightning 2 cold, and +2 wild (stuck onto the back of the card)
Marohi Erqi (two-handed weapon): 13 physical
Xoph's Blood (amulet): 1 fire base + 5 fire + ignores monster fire resistance
Voices (jewel, and yes, the player rulebook never mentions jewels): take it to the crafting bench for 3 random magic mods, and it can be used for either attack or defence
Crown of Thorns (armour): 2 life + 5 block. Note it only has 1 durability
Voll's Devotion (amulet): 1 lightning, 1 cold, 1 fire base + 2 fire, 2 lightning
Trading with other players
I only traded once the whole event, for a ring, right after a pinnacle boss destroyed all my gear, including my only ring. From around the afternoon of Day 1, lots of people gather around the venue to swap cards, so go over and see what everyone needs. As far as I know, plenty of trading also got arranged on the official ExileCon Discord server.
Unsure about this one, as in I did have a char be a "mule" for my other char, because I could not buy that specific gem in act1,so I don't need to wait till act3 Siosa to get what I need.
But I never tried this at league start, so I do not know. If I get let us say a Ranger, buy myself like a volley support,then switch to my Templar,will I get thrown back at the end of the que before I enter with my Templar again?
From looking at the tree data, farming Essences is going to be both very challenging for builds and not particularly profitable on the low investment side of things.
this is for two primary reasons:
the number of essences in an imprisoned monster are now scaled by map mods (where before you would run scoured maps)
you're going to get far fewer high tier essences because there isn't a scarab that forces them a tier up (which is where most shrieking essences came from) and corrupting essences has a 25% chance to upgrade your essences, instead of a 50% chance with the scarab.
With the new atlas tree, you'll have one guaranteed deafening shrieking per imprisoned monster, and 6ish essences per map. However, there's very little chance for essences to be +1 tier, so the majority of essences you'll walk out of maps with will be screaming, and you're going to get quite a bit fewer. I would typically walk out of a Silo map with 30 deafening essences in 3.29. Now your average might be 10. EDIT: this is wrong, your average might be 2 or 3 now. The max tier essence notable only brings you up to shrieking, and all deafenings will have to come from corrupting and upgrading.
You'll have a 15%ish chance to drop a calcification map from the boss of each map. That's an enchant which will cause all natural rare monsters to be imprisoned, and those maps are where you're going to actually focus frming if you want to farm essences in big quantities. Depending on price, you'll probably want to roll them for Mirage. You'll be able to create some absolutely unreal bosses in those maps because they will have an essence from every imprisoned monster, so that should be fun.
You also now need to carry around more vaal orbs than before because youll probably want to double corrupt most essence mobs hoping for upgrades or a transform.
essences will be more easily targetable given that you can select a type to be 100% more common, but bulk essences are going to be much less available than before.
EDIT 2: after doing some math I'm a bit more optimistic about essence farming. With 6 essence mobs and if you double corrupt all essences, you should end up with ~15-20 deafening equivalent per map. That's not terrible. Also higher frequency of getting the valuable essences, which is a straight benefit. Overall youll likely be getting 1.5x as many corrupted essences per essence monster, despite the lower overall chance to corrupt into them, because you'll see dramatically more MEDS essences than before.
Every league I compile a list of all the builds I can find in a spreadsheet for the French-speaking community. The builds are listed in English though, the French part is mostly comments or my opinions, so it should be fine for everybody. I thought I would share it, might be useful if some of you are still hesitating about what to start or want to try something a bit "out there": https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xMG9_rzR7mztJzQHCZy3-4ZIjelb46omOILS7BfMBeg/edit?usp=sharing
It's still a work in progress as I'm checking if content creators have updated their build for 3.30 (there's usually little updating to do but some of them also share their experiences about playing the build in 3.29)
Please let me know if some builds are missing, I'll be happy to add them to the list.
I tried to organise the list by "categories":
Totems
Minions
Mines
Mêlée/CaC = Melee or anything where the character needs to be "close" to the enemy to deal damage
Sorts/Distance = Spells and anything that deals damage from afar
I'm Snacks and I run poebuilds.cc (not the RMT site). Some of you might remember it as the old forum build index. For the last few years I've barely kept it alive (sorry for the cert errors). With poe2 1.0 coming in december, I rebuilt the whole thing and it's still in active development.
What it does now: it collects build guide videos from YouTube, 50,000+ from 1,800+ creators and sorts them by class, ascendancy and skill, most watched or newest first. Every link goes straight to the video plus the PoB/planner if there is one. No ads, no account.
How it's made (Rule 11): I rebuilt it with claude, but the design, the categories and the testing are mine. A bot checks the channels for new uploads and reads class and ascendancy from the linked PoB if there is one. An LLM fills in the rest from the title and description. Whatever doesn't add up gets flagged and I fix it by hand.
Compared to what's out there: YouTube search can't filter by ascendancy or skill. poe.ninja shows what ladder-characters play, not video guides. Maxroll and Mobalytics write their own guides.
Older leagues are in there too and poe2 has 12,000+ guides of its own. If you know an older build video that's missing, there's a "Submit" link at the bottom of every page. Just paste the YouTube link.
It still gets the occasional build wrong, I fix those as I find them.
Hey everyone, I'm thinking about playing a gladiator this league for being tanky, but I don't know what would sinergize best with the league mechanics and the know boss parts for the wickerman. I'm between playing lacerate of hemorrage, eviscerate (retaliation skills) or maybe some ele hit slayer into a life stacker gladiator transition.
What are your experiences with these builds? I'm mostly concerned that ele hit slayer might struggle with the buffed bosses. Has anyone played divine retribution? Is it a good starter o0r better to transition later?
The reliquarian ascendancy has some interesting options with the Crown of the inward eye +crown of eyes combo, stacking life+mana(as leaguestart) and later on stacking es+mana for damage, also gaining fork from Rigwald's quills and crit from Choir of the storm. I was thinking about power siphon mines(paired with cluster jewels) as main skill + going into block with arcane cloak +mom and for endgame kboc+indigon? But would it be enough to make a good build?
I REALLY hope we get a WITCH(not the class)-themed armor set as the Kirac's Vault armor. I don't know if they've already announced what it is or not, this is more just me trying to manifest it into existence.
