Curious about uses for some cheaper/less popular scarabs

Curiosity and thought exercise, mostly. There's a bunch of scarabs available, and while a lot of them have fairly obvious utility, there's some I'm wondering if anyone's found good uses for, and if so, what.

I'll be dividing the ones I'm confused/curious on into two categories: ones I think I might know a use for but am not sure and would like confirmation or correction on my theories, and ones I'm completely lost on. I won't be including any scarabs above about 5 Chaos (save maybe the Horned Nemeses); those are above 5 Chaos because people have found uses for them and those uses are relatively obvious so there's demand for them.

Granted, there is always the possibility that some just aren't impressive in their current states, but I'm curious nonetheless on pondering intents.

Guessing
- Horned Scarab of Nemeses: More mods on rares theoretically means better loot and higher chance of a loot conversion modifier applying. I'm unsure how large the effect is, though.
- Titanic Scarab of Legend: Same principle as the Horned Nemeses, but applied to Uniques instead. Is there a Unique spam scarab setup with like Rogue Exiles or Domination of Terror or something?
- Titanic Scarab of Treasures: Same question regarding a Unique Monster spam setup. Bonus Rewards (fixed types of loot drops?) from Uniques for a relatively small effective health increase. Honestly let's just bundle all the Titanic and Anarchy Scarabs under this question. For that matter, has anyone managed a good Anarchy/Rogue Exile atlas setup?
- Scarab of Adversaries: I actually use these myself a fair amount. 8 extra Rares per map per scarab is nice (possibly 4, I don't pay enough attention during mapping to tell if it clones existing Rares or adds new packs), especially since it's generally naturally-spawning Magics and Rares that drop gold this league, and apparently these count as natural. Wondering if anyone else does.
- Domination Scarab of Evolution: Shrine with a buff that gives, to my understanding, a 5% chance for slain Normals to come back as Magics and Magics to come back as Rares. Has this been helpful for anyone's strats? Supposedly it'd add a pinch to gold gathering and such but I don't know how it compares to other uses for the scarab slot.
- Scarab of Hunted Traitors: Actually a "make map easier" scarab. Some mobs start out fighting each other instead of immediately aggressing on the player (they seem to straight up not even notice you until you attack them!), which makes the approach a little safer.


Confused
- Most scarabs that say Increased Difficulty and/or Rewards (Blight of Invigoration, Abyss of Profound Depth, Blightheart, etc) are unclear on the scaling. I am assuming it's not a very good scaling on a lot of them, or that the lack of clarity makes people wary of trying them, or that the difficulty scaling is too lethal.
- Horned Scarab of Tradition: Largely in relation to its Nemeses counterpart. I guess loot conversion modifiers just aren't very good any more now that they're unpredictable and some of the spiciest ones might be gone?
- Scarab of Radiant Storms: Doing a bit of quick wiki reading, these seem like they turn enemies in it into pseudo-Rares and give short bursts of IIR/IIQ/Damage Reduction. Practical testing says no on the pseudo-Rares (no bonus from additional monster modifiers, I assume), so I'd almost put it under "make map easier" scarabs if it didn't also beef up the defenses of enemies too.
- Scarab of Divinity: As far as I can tell, their old forced loot conversion modifiers don't work any more, so it just summons a weirdly dangerous apparition for no real reason? It's also only one or two Rares per scarab, so unless they have a colossal amount of IIR/IIQ I'm unaware of...
- Incursion Scarab of Invasion: It's a lot of extra mobs but they don't really seem to drop anything so I'm unsure on the purpose. EXP? Vaal souls? Rampage?

horned scarab of nemesis pairs with the atlas tree passive that grants additional scarab drop chance based on rare modifiers on monsters. Which then scales with pack size, allowing for huge scarab drops.


Almost everything you list interacts the same: more rares, more drops, higher chance at better loot per map. Pair that with other mechanics that scale with rares such as delirium, beyond, breach, etc.


Divinity conversions absolutely still work. You are filtering too much if you haven't noticed....



It's interesting that you describe using Scarab of Adversaries for the same use that 90% of the other scarabs you mention are used for.....but they confuse you?

Are scarabs too powerful since the rework? Wondering what people think about that?

I don't have a very good knowledge of using them or sextants previously, so can't really compare. It just seems like having the right combination is very important, and sometimes you might be loading a close to a divine worth of fragments in to juice the map. I'm not against it necessarily, it's cool having scarabs being valuable drops. Just wondering if people think this is better than the previous mechanic? Has it solved some of the things they where trying to fix, like having too many preparation steps before running the map?

Haven't been playing any SSF, how is it there? Improvement?

RE: mefistozxz

I have the filter on pretty strong, but I toggle it off to check the loot for the Pantheon-Touched. You do seem to be correct. At the very least, the wiki's conversion info seems to be outdated; poked a couple Tukohama-Touched while writing this and I think I got corrupted jewelry conversion and armor conversion, both of which are out of line with the maps conversion it claims (and used to be when those were set in stone). Is it just random modifiers from the standard list now? That seems like a limited scope Tradition to me.

That would explain Nemeses, though, huh. Scarab drop scaling. Interesting.

Most of the rest of the list is questions on reward scaling scarabs rather than rare/unique count scaling scarabs, though I am a little confused on some of the mob count scaling ones because they don't seem to give much (outside of league-specific loot) relative to native ones, and Incursion of Invasion doesn't seem to even have anything league-specific to give.


RE: Belegur85

I personally prefer them to sextants. It's less random, you know what you're getting and it's generally easier to shop for them en masse. Never played SSF before, so can't comment on that one.

Agree that they are easy to get through trade, particularly with the currency exchange. So it seems to work fairly well in that regard. I think the scarabs themselves are ok, but some of the combinations might be a bit powerful, especially with the extra scarab slot. I think that sort of relates to the question OP is asking, where certain combinations might work very well, but other scarabs become a bit less useful in many cases, because some combinations are much more powerful. I'm not that knowledgeable about them myself. Just noticed over the past two leagues that people have seemed to find some pretty powerful combinations. When combined with atlas it seems like it becomes an extreme multiplier in the mapping process. Some people probable like that, but I'm wondering if it's too much of a multiplier from running maps without fragments.

It's fine currently, because it's a new interesting system, but I'm wondering if there might become a few meta combinations that are far better than other combinations in most cases. Also that it might make things hard to balance down the track. Probably has made using them a bit more of a friendly process, I've been using them a bit more. Before I often use to end up hording them instead of using them.

Some being more powerful than others isn't terrible; it allows scaling strategies based on multiple levels of willingness for cost investment and ability to handle the difficulties of maps it takes to make back that investment, as well as if you're looking for high risk high reward gambles (e.g. Apothecary hunting) or something more consistent.

Concern and curiosity is more over whether some scarabs are worth the slot for any strategies, costs, or levels of investment whatsoever or are just duds, whether due to the scarab itself not doing much or the strategy it's trying to support not really paying out anything. Does the scarab reliably pay for itself under any particular circumstances, basically. Many do, some don't, I'm also somewhat curious if a Unique Spam strategy exists for things like Titanic and Anarchy much like Magic/Rare Spam exists for things like Bloodlines and apparently Ambush.

Scarabs are also definitely a lot more usable than before, yeah, I agree with that. Partially because the supply is just higher (they drop regularly from basically everything now instead of being predominantly Betrayal loot) and partially because a lot of them branch out in new, interesting, and useful ways they didn't really before, or that were hidden in obscurity somewhere in the sextant roll list instead of in your face on the scarab effect text.

I'm doing something like that on my atlas currently with tormented spirits and exiles. Not sure it will work. Last league people were certainly using it in combination with the lantern, but I think it has been somewhat balanced since then. Seem to remember them patching out people getting hundreds of exiles spawning on the map.

...I wasn't here for Necropolis but that sounds hilarious. Clearly Ruckus wasn't enough Rogue Exiles for some folks, gotta have more! It's still probably possible to get like 65 on a map if you're lucky (Partnership + 4x basic + tree for Ruckus and paired chance). Maybe Giants in there somewhere is more? Unsure on the math.

Probably right. I'm just trying out titanic scarab of treasures * 3 and anarchy scarab * 2. Not really min/max. I don't know what the actual best combination would be, or if its even worth trying. Most of what else i've tried was just getting more mobs on the maps for xp/gold.