Beating Nemesis without rares or uniques

I got a mod responding to my thread. Now I can die happily (but I won't)!

I have 75 lightning and fire on merciless but 60 in cold resist with purity of elements on.
Really I didn't think my resists would be this high. I anticipated getting more resist nodes.

Maybe I will still get the nodes. When you cap your resists through nodes it gives you more freedom in picking
gear. If I did not need a resist roll on my rings for instance I could simple pick the ring with the best life roll
or one with life/cast speed

I experiment around on the zombies in act 1 merciless: its been to learn things about your character
on the easy parts rather than the parts that will get you murdered.

My clear speed is still pretty good with a +1 wand and a 3 link.
I test damage with enfeeble and without.
There are many factors for this: before I was late in act 3 with lots of 'resist all elements'
and the monsters had more dangerous ai and special moves so I was forced to take a defensive approach.

I let the monsters attack me with a variety of buffs on me and debuffs on them to see how
they feel.

Monsters do hit pretty hard but the most important factor is what type of monster I fight.
I can probably just cruise control up to Vaal except at certain enemies: rhoas, devourers,
golems, viper strikers (easily fixed with a gear swap to my trust chaos resist belt), and
the occasional rare monsters. These guys will be trouble but if they only come 2 or 3 at a time I can manage them.
A pack of devourers or rhoas will require thoughtful play.



Act 3 merciless will just be completly frightening.

I still haven't encountered Xandro Blooddrinker, slayer of those without armor.
If I do will show you a new tactic called "running away and resetting the instance because the RNG god wants you dead!"

I decide to go back and practice normal dominus. I can not stress how powerful a learning
tool normal mode is. Just imagine if the game started at merciless (but you as a player
where scaled up so that a level 1 was like a level 55) and you had to learn everything
in merciless difficulty. When vaal smashes you in normal all he does is tell you 'hey
boy watch out this thing hurts' but when he smashes you in merciless its all over.

As a long-time runner I thought I knew everything about Dominus but I learned a few things.
The 'pull range' of his uniques is exactly the full length of the screen. I practice my pulling
on the uniques and I'm pretty sure I can now successfully pull each one at a time. They wont gang
up on me in merciless, it will be a series of 1v1. I even found out I could pull
the second wave of uniques: the second wave of uniques always spawn in the exact same area.
Just make sure you are behind cover hiding when they spawn. That way they will spawn and be 'lost' than
you can make the appropriate actions to pull them behind the wall.

Ok that phase will not be dangerous.

Dominu's devil form I dont anticipate problems in merciless: its just a dps check and I am
confident that my 5 link and a good wand (when I find it) will let me pass.
I truly believe that GGG balanced merciless around a 4-5 link: not a 6 link.
Worst case scenario I fail the dps check on merciles dom, pull out of the fight and grind till storm call
is 1 level higher.

Dominu's human form though: thats what I am worried about. I have never actually foughten
merciless dom you see. Could his hand of god 1shot me if i had 75 lightning and 4k life?
Probably.

Thats not too big an issue: I move very fast and have lot of practice.

I'll point that whenever I fight dominus even if im a level 80 doing a normel kill-for-pay
I do not face tank a hand of god. My muscle memories are refined from countless practice,
something that the people who pay for rushes have not earned.

I bait dominus into doing hands of god (intentionally get up close to make him use it than run and shoot him while he hits the ground).
I learn it has an internal cool down. I don't think baiting him into it
is a very reliable tactic. If I could learn exactly when the cool down ends it may be.

I practice dodging his lightning stream and hitting at the end, after he stops the hose
there is a moment where he lets you get in free hits. If his stream is giving me trouble on cruel than
it will be the most dangerous thing in the fight for merciless.


I still do not have a proper solution for it.

Late I will return and fight cruel dominus again. I need to know exactly how hard
his spawn hit for when I have a molten shell up.

While practicing I use the opportunity to sell kills on him for quicksilver flasks (remember the boot recipe). I could get them by making spectral throwing
scions and doing medicine chest quest over and over but fuck that. I wonder what the noobs I ran thought of that? Many of them seemed to not
know the prices of the game at all and tried to give me a fuse or alch instead of quicksilvers. Here I am undercutting every other runner and they dont even
know it.


quicksilvers+augments+the new tier of boots in merciless and I have crafted a movement/cold resist boots. One I get to level 58 and equip my 5 link i can
juggle my resist properly (right now I'm overcapped in some resist but have no proper way to switch gear around) and have 75 in each (when using purity of course).


Capping resists in merciless is perfectly obtainable for any player its simply a matter of priority. Yeah that ring with 3 damage rolls is really nice but maybe you should save it for
later, use the ring with 2 resist rolls instead, maybe you can gear juggle into the damage ring later.

I am making harsh sacrifices: no damage mods, very very little mana mods, just plain old resist, life, and movement speed. But im wearing blues only and you are not.

Yeah maybe theres a bit of a gear check in poe with resists and life but its so easy to pass that I think just about any build can work.

I'll also give some advice for crafting resist gear

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0ArsB7KohOhhpdHoyZzU2WVZZNXQxMDg4MVk1b0FGbkE&f=true&noheader=true&gid=6

Heres a spread sheet that shows all the mods any gear can roll. You dont need to read it all just look at the size of the mod pools.
Notice that amulets can roll way more things than say boots or helms? Because of this you are way more likely to get resist rolls on some gear slots than others.
triple/double resist boots? Not too unobtainable
triple/double resist amulet? Not likely.

For this reason it also a good idea to, when you shop look for items that would be difficult to craft yourself. Why do you think I chose to shop for a resist/life amulet instead of craft one?
Because amulets can roll so many modes I'd go broke!

Not very much progress. Only made it to mud flats. IRL stuff today

The only change in my gear/stats is my boots right here which I am saving for later, maybe I'll gear swap to them once I reach some ice monsters.

In this Log I clean up act 1 merciless

Act 1 is so relaxing. Its one of my favorite, flowing water, misty beaches, lonesome sand hills,
and strange caves with land squids.

Act 1 merc is much easier than act 3 cruel. I cruise along. I've been using molten shell more
and have used its explosion as an audible cue to either pop a granite, drink health potions, run
or maybe all 3.

I try to face tank as much as I can and not relay totems when possible. I use different
curses. Its important know how much damage you take under a large variety of circumstances.

My armor is still below 1k and it will probably never go above 1200 or 1100 even with my
final gear. Against heavy physical hits I must huge molten shell or chug potions.
Its best to converse potions so I use shell (middle mouse butten binding makes it easy to reach,
always put your important spells in easy reach

If you play PoE properly you should know everything that happens before it occurs. Its not too reflex intensive, just about short term planning. This is why PoE is a somewhat easy game
compared to say Ys Origin on inferno difficulty (great game, go buy it, if you are broke pirate it) where things are much more chaotic and faster paced.

The nature of PoE's internet connection means it can never be very reflex intensive, theres the learning mechanics skill but since the game is kind enough to give you a piss-easy normel mode first you should be familiar with most mechanics in merciless if you have an open mind. There is a certain level of strategy to building however since the strategy is very static and not reactionary (an tbs or rts has reactionary strategy) I think that it's not that difficult. The tree is pretty intimidating at first but after making 2 or 3 crap trees characters it becomes second natures make an, at least passable tree.
Theres also some skill involved in trading which I am certain must be a nightmare and a bore to those who hate trading.

Maybe GGG should add more vendor recipes with fixed results (like the movment speed boots) to resolve this.

Even if you do screw up in PoE you have a variety of quick fixes, seething potion chugging (or just pressing all 5 potion buttens), town portal shenanigans, or just leaving the game and reseting the instance/leaving the map. There is also always the option to grind.

PoE isn't that hard.

I meet a rhoa with iceblood mod. Me with 60 ice resist. I decide not to face tank it and get him down to
low health, than give him a totem to play with and kill him from a distance. Always read enemy mobs if you have some sort of resistance weakness.
Merciless is really balanced around having 75 in all elemental resist and you can have debuffs or high damage inflicted to you by even trash mobs if its
below 75

I go back town and gear swap some rings bringing me up to 75 in all resists with purity (lost a bit of health though)


I go visit the chaos damaging unique rhoa in mud flats and let him damage me with his aura for a while while I get a feel for how much chaos hurts alone, with enfeeble,
and with potion chugging. Everyone should do this because it lets you know exactly what to expect. The rhoas aura is about as strong as the best chaos dealing monsters
in the game so if I can manage him you can manage anything. I feel with just my nodes and ring I could stand up to all chaos mods except viper strikers and weaver.
I now know I must gear swap for them.
The other chaos mobs (snake spitters, vile touch rares) will not hurt me as bad as mr. rhoa so I will get by without gear swapping on them.


A lot of players who relay exclusively on grinding to win get stuck here.

At this point in the game grinding stops being very effective: the experience curve
is more sharp and you have already gotten all the best nodes. The difference in level
between enemies in various zones is much smaller so you wont get much better itemlevel stuff.

You had 2 previous difficulties of training to learn skill, technique, and conserve currency for trades (I bought my end game gear well before merciless though)
if you threw away your cash on boss kills and cheesed your way through the previous content with grinding or let party members carry, you might end up dead in merciless.


Since item level isnt going to change much I get more serious about crafting.
I pick up high tier white gloves, helms, leather belts, and rings and trasnmute them.
I save the crap rolls for the 5x vendor recipe that recylces them (look it up on the wiki)
I still trasnmute flasks hoping for an upgrade. I have all the important mods already:1 catalzyed, 1 seething, 1 bleed removal, a curse immune quicksilver, an ironskin granite,
and a perpetual mana. But getting some perpetual rolls on quick/granite flasks or debuff removel/move speed on my mana/health flasks would be a nice extra



I get a good life/cold resist gloves I save to juggle resist items better.

I do the side quests last because they are harder and I am still getting comfortable learning exactly how much damage I take and deal.

I meet a mob from hell in the necromancer cave.
Smoke Mine
Extra Damage as Fire
Powerful Crits

That means: block your vision so you cant see other mobs nibble at your health
crit you and do a huge ignite hit and than you die.

I low down a totem and back off picking off the weak enemies first.

I pull him back so I wont get any other intrdues that come in the smoke.
Granite flask, molten shell, enfeeble. Hes dead.
I feel pretty good if I can beat such a powerful mod combo so well.



I want to hit level 58 before I fight brutus and get my 5 link. I dont anticipate being 1shot. Brutus Merc is about as strong as Kole Cruel and I survived a punch
from him (with armor flask) any boost in damage that brutus has compared to kole will be negated with an enfeeble curse. However a brutus fight rarely doesnt have desync
so I want to kill him as fast as possible.

After clearing everything up to Brutus I am level 57. I decide to grind to 58. Grinding is a miserable experience. Normally in these situations I would just rush forward to the next zone but Brutus is a desyncing bastard and I'm not going to let him stay alive for very long.

I grind ledge solo and its the most boring thing I've ever done in my adventure. At least when I grinded with a group in felshire I got to see all the cool builds everyone else was doing. I try to grind medicine chest beach thinking it will be faster but I'm forced to use enfeeble over conductivity on there so it's not.

On an unrelated rant, I really miss being able to play shor-allocation in parties. Awhile ago there was no permanent allocation, now people start to leave the party when I play short allocation. Partying makes the game so much easier and having to run around capture loot (or steal loot from slow players) adds some more depth to it. Its pretty hilarious that those melee characters covered in rares/uniques in felshire were afraid of a witch in all blues stealing their orb drops.

I can see the case of permanent allocation in maps where a billion things drop on the screen and any moment a rare devourer may pop up out of nowhere but ledge and felshire are harmless.

Music helps the experience be better. No incidents happened in the ledge and now I head off to brutus with my new chest armor.

WoW I'm amazed at my resists. I can get 75 75 74 in my elements now WITHOUT PURITY. I may still use the aura if it means wearing gear with better life rolls. I buy a vitality aura for 1 scour and keep it for later.

My collection of auras is growing: purity of elements, purity of lightning, vitality, clarity.

My dps is much better and I clear rares without even needing conductivity.
I use
-stormcall: no reason I picked this ability really. I just like spell casters and wanted to try the new ability GGG made.
-Concentrated effect: essential for all aoe builds if you dont know why 'more' is better than 'increased' you should do some research
-lightning penetration: a new layer of multivity. The tool tip doesnt say it boots dps but it does
-Faster casting: More dps than added lightning but more mana cost per second, perhaps i will swap them at some point
-Life leach: Playing it safe with this ability, my base life regen is pretty weak so this helps compensate. I feel I have 'enough' dps for everything up until probably the later parts of act 3 where all the enemies are elemently resistant. I'll worry about it than

For now I dont run purity of elements. I am leveling up my clarity and only using that to compensate for my big mana issues. Maybe I can run double aura properly once I get more mana nodes or aura nodes.

I am checking out the passive tree in the middle of the dungeon (not a smart idea) when I notice my health going down. Just skeletons? I'll blast them.

Nope its the leap slam marauder I've been dreading. I just survived a direct attack with no enfeeble, flask or molten shell so I know I can tank this guy. With my new life leach and a few defensive spells he is easy. I was low on flasks when the fight started and before I use them all up I decide to portal out and restock that.

While waiting the above paragraph I lost my instance and the rogue exile got away with his life. Fuck that. I swear the promised "10-15 minutes for an instance to stay open" is more like 3 minutes. I hope I see him again I'm going to kill him and his fucking vanity pet.

Ever seen a battle anime where the hero and his rival are about to have a showdown but than something interrupts it. Thats what happened to me.

I go around exploding things with my 5 link and easily sustained off my 5 link. What actually gives me the most issues is my mana. I've jumped from 3 link to 5 link and the difference in cost is huge.

Brutus goes down. He doesnt desync much and I toy with him doing a variety of ways on him.

Dodge the chain, hit him when hes recovering.
Make him run in circles around the wall dropping bolts in his path.
Skeleton totem shenanigans

I never go for the face tank method but I probably could with enfeeble+granite+molten shell+life leach from my shock.

I imagine a lot of melee players who qq about it being too dangerous simply do not life leach. Its a whole new method of survivability.

With cautious juggling of enfeeble, molten shell, and armor flask even when brutus does hit me it doesnt hurt for much.

Its all face roll up to Mervil. I met a storm herald rare rhoa but he just went down.

Life leach is so strong, so fucking strong.

First time Nemesis player, just found a quartz flask. LOL thats cute. Who would use this though? Some sort of speed-run type player who skips over zones and rushes to grinding areas or does merc piety rounds? I guess.

Theres another rogue exile on the beach just before mervil. A bow one this time, physical damage: my weakness. With curse immunity flask+life leaching storm call I can almost sustain her damage indefinitely.

I need more life leach! I ask trade and people are trying to sell me it for 2 chaos. Guess I got a great bargain on the 1 scour one. I settle for a 1.5 chaos one. Now my molten shell has life leach.

I honestly don't forsee any problems now except for Vaal, the barracks, and Dominus. I'm actually kind of disappointed.

Mervil was easy. Just face tank. I did need to use some flasks and curses but thats not much of a challenge. I've actually killed Merc Mervil several times on my level 80, people payed me to this. They wern't really weird builds that couldnt solo content just generic builds: most of them were shadows. Shadow seem to attract bad players.

I have no clue how thats possible. Maybe they piggy-backed off other players efforts? Always partied but was the weakest link, always payed for boss kills and now they can't stand on their own. They will probably end up dead.

I sold my spell totem quest reward for a hard chaos and converted some orbs into more chaos. I've still got 2 quest reward faster casting gems I've been trying to peddle.

What will I spend it on? Probably just convert them into alts, augs, and trasnmutes. Maybe I'll have a big give away when I beat the game.


Well that was a fun ride, also a boring ride. I wonder how Act 2 will fair? Look forward to it!


Here is my tree and gear.

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMAAuMHYwelCPQVUBZvGYUaOB0UHwIkqij6LJwtHzGIMZ41kjbFNuk64T1fQYdEq0WdSbJN4099UlNVrlXGVytmnnB9c1N2EXkDeqp-r4BWghCCx4jxjRmPRo-mkFWa4JuhplenCKeErFm3PriTwBrAVMG0z2XQ0Ngk3YzfsOAS42rk7Odj6-7yRfno-tL-Cv6P

I'm finally getting that shock chance nodes!
After this I've got a lot of choices. I could get the scions mana/mana regen nodes to try to run double aura better (either purity of elements for more gear options or vitality). I could get the scions life regen.
I could get block chance.
I could also travel through the templars weapon elemental damage into a nice set of diverse nodes.



Scepter is crappy, I really hope the RNG gods bless me with a spell damage/mana regen one (sorry not gonna trade for it. I've met my quota for how many end game items I get via trading).
I'm very happy with how diverse my gear acquisation is.
Prismatic ring was purchased using the in-game chat.
Shield and amulet were purchased from PoE XYZ
Chest was purchased as a white but crafted into a blue.
Everything else was crafted or found.



Here is my wealth. Not too big. I think that me having excess orbs is a good sign. It means builds more expensive than mine can get by easily.



What awaits me in act 2? Perhaps a rematch with the rogue exile who got away. Maybe some rare mobs from hell. Most likely just more face-roll (at least until Vaal)

Sorry about the long delay between logs. Work sucks and theres always IRL.

A log in which I nearly get killed doing something really stupid.

Holiday seasons and work are horrible. I want them to end.

Well things at work are not looking good. Its a small bussiness and our local-work-holic (damn guy worked 60+ hours a week) has left the country because of family issue. That means longer hours for everyone else! Between that and the chains of christmas I havn't been able to play since my last log.

I will try to go as far as I can in act 2 for now.

A new patch is up.
Tons of gems are buffed. I agree with the element support buffs since they were previously just back-ups for better gems. Maybe they had a use a 6th link if you had nothing better to get.

The firestorm and fireball I feel is just GGG saying 'these arn't popular lets buff them" firestorm is actually a very strong ability its just that you can't judge its damage from the tooltip so dummies think its crap (its one of the only spells in the game that gains a dps boost from the duration support). Fireball always had its place as a strong single target ability. Its a great choice for solo players because its accurate across extremly far ranges.

One could argue that a minor boost to mediocre gems is not harmful but I think that frequent balance patches in of itself are harmful. Players get used to a certain playstyle and hate to see things change. Some gems will always be better than other gems for varius reasons: all that matters is that you have 'adequate' gems. Stormcall may not be a top-tier ability but its good enough as it is.

Before the patch I had 2391 dps with my 5 link
I swap out faster casting for added added lightning my dps is now 2324 (slightly lower)

WIth my old build I spent 173 mana per second casting stormcall (faster casting)
With my new gem set up I spend 153 (added lightning)

A miniscule decrease in dps inexchange for a much stronger mana base, 1 step closer to throwing out my mana flask for another utility or seething flask.

I could see other stormcallers still taking faster casting over lightning storm because the extra casts mean you are forgiven more if you miss a shot or an enemy dodges a bolt.

The real choice between the gems is ease of use vs mana conservation and I choose the mana.
Perhaps I can them around based on how agile my enemies are?

Dear god

My first time exiting the client to run from an enemy. A curse immune devourer with storm herald and life regen aura.
I couldnt handle it without enfeeble. I had about 1k health when i exited the client.


This instance is being reset. Maybe I could have taken him with a skeleton totem and kiting but I havn't played in awhile and I don't trust myself very well. I feel rusty. Also I got like 4 hours of sleep last night.

Ok I really need to start putting up totems ahead of my path for scouting.

I do that and do not meet any more rare-mobs from hell. I do meet a curious one though. A forest warrior with the smoke mine ability. He ran to my totem, than before he attacked it smoke mined to me, than ran to my totem again and repeated it over and over never actually attacking.

I swear GGG should really hire me as a bug tester.

Try the weever nest. Huge damage and there. I don't trust myself with flask usage so I'll put if off till later.

I make it to the western forest WP and call it a night. I'm rusty, still having my heart race from that devourer, fingers are chilled to the bone and I think the cold is affecting the speed at which my twitch muscles hit keys, I'm sleep deprived from yesterday. Besides I need to baby sit some shit-head kid soon.

Crap I really want to play this game but theres way too many facotrs in the way

Also its patch day. Patch day always means theres some bug that kills your character.

What the hell was I thinking playing today?

Didn't even get a single quest objective done.

Time to sleep. I think I learned a valuable lesson today.

Well I'll be back in 1-2 days (maybe) until than heres something to occupy your time.


Theres a trinity of characters in diablo PoE.

The melee character enjoys the greatest dps at the cost of having to face-tank everything. He also has the highest defenses statistically (but the lowest defensive techniques) since his high dps becomes high life-leech. He's a brute who stands toe-toe with big monsters, only kiting very briefly to let his life leech, pots, or regen, tick when he dealing with very dangerous enemies. Using warlords mark or life leach rares/uniques is practically required at a certain point. Unfortunatly his dependency on life leech means he has an aversion to elemental damage: this is why abilities that look perfectly fine like glacial hammer are never used. There really needs to be some mechanics inplace to give elemental melee superior dps to physical melee inexchange for its absence of life leech, maybe a 'melee elemental damage' gem or node cluster. They are also the most disadvantaged by enemies having superior positioning. Ranged characters can have any positioning they want while melee ones are stuck with what the enemies decide (pulling/agro losing tricks aside)

Bow users/other physical ranged are the 2nd type, and the type I am least familiar with. They have the best sustained dps in the game (at least on a technical level not always a numbers level). Their projectiles are faster, longer range, and more precise than spells letting them fight comfortable from any distance and putting damage on the enemy the moment it appears on screen. They can get extra defenses with life leech but due to their kiting it is not required

Than we come to my favorite: the casters. They have the most visually impressive and colorful spells. Lots of their spells have some weird hitbox or timing you need to work around which is fun for me. Their growth is very steady as long as they continue to pump xp into their gems and get enough support gems linked up it will be acceptable the downside is they can't just buy a dps whenever they want buy getting new gear. The linear dps scaling is enjoyable to me because it makes them very stable and reliable. They have the burst in the game letting them picking out a single danger enemy (a rare mob or a troublesome normal enemy like a necromancer/corpse exploder) and killing them early on: even if there is a pack of enemies shielding the trouble mob they will probably have a ranged ability that can pierce or be thrown over the meat-shields heads.

I've always liked wizards in games because they had the largest collection of utility or weird spells and magic is more awe-inspiring than pieces of steel or wood fashioned into some sort of weapon. For defenses they are the most lacking since the only way in the game they can get life leech is a support gem however with proper kiting it shouldn't matter
There's a lot of talk about how they are the worst of the trinity in the current state of the game. Thats probably true but only for very late game. The warrior, archer, and wizard all scale fine until they each get their 5 link (5 links are about 7 times cheaper than 6 links, anyone can afford a 5 link). Now at this point the wizard asks "how do i get more dps?" He could get a 6 link but thats very, very expensive: the 'increased' cast or damage boost on quality gems, wands or rings isn't going to add up much. The true way to scale any damage is too boost the base (noncasters can get flat damage on many items), which the wizard only does with gem levels. In d2 if a wizard was seeking to boost his dps by spending cash he would buy pricy skill charms.

Empower I feel was meant to solve this problem.
The gem boosts the dps of a wizard better than nearly any other support gem and is cheaper than buying a 6 link however it takes weeks or months of tedium to level it up so its not a real answer. I think GGG should rework empower and get rid of the gimmicky massive xp requirement: maybe make it only give +1 gem level in exchange. If you can actually level empower up to max than you already have a godly character in the first place.

Even if this late game damage scaling was not resolved I would still play wizards. A 5 link with nonquality support gems provides good enough dps to clear 99% of all maps solo. Contrary to what players so you don't compete with other players in this outside of pvp. We run our own maps and zones never encountering each other: the economy has a large enough supply of rares and uniques for everyone (there are handful of exceptions: we do compete over the shavs and godly 6 links with a bidding war but this is extremely uncommon and certainty not required to beat the game).

In summery the 'mages have sucky dps' argument only matters when dealing with extremely late game content where you already have a 6 link and are looking to invest several exalt into even further dps. Maybe their dps is worst for leveling but its nothing to complain about. Its a fact that the cape is a better power up than the fireflower in mario world but only a loser or a speed runner would never use the fireflower because its 'underpowered'. Besides melee characters deserve their higher dps (and thus higher life leech) because they cannot kite as well or burst a high priority target down as well.


I am enjoying stormcall right now. The dramatic delay between the bolts coming down with a loud bang and watching the sigil on the ground rotate is exhilarating. Its a lot of fun seeing the various shapes you can make with it and watching the storm chase after a fleeing enemy.

The delay makes it less accurate but once you get a feel for the enemies move speed and the delay timer you can pretty much land every bolt accurately (except on basilisks on the undying in tower of god who seem to move around completely randomly or desync a lot). Its dps is pretty average but on a technical level it has a lot of strong points. I feel too many players just look at the dps tooltip and dont consider versatility.

Storm call has good range. You can use the delay to your advantage by using to to be a safe distance from a volatile blood explosion. There is a moment at detonation where you cannot lay new marks and you can use this time to scan for trouble or evaluate the situation, while you can do this with any spell I feel the forced delay is good because it makes the process a habit.

You get the most dps out of it by face tanking enemies so they all gather up ontop of you although hit n run is a good, if slower, option.

The way you support it (like every other ability in the game) is you simply pick the gems that give it the most dps and maybe use life leech or mana leech if you want. Unfortunatly lots of more technical support gems like increased aoe and stun duration are almost useless. Perhaps if GGG threw some 'increased damage' mods on them we could use them, people use faster projectiles even though its dps boost is inferior to many other supports.

Its a very underrated skill: lots of players just look at tool tips to make their decision about what is the best skill and never consider utility or versatility. Apart from that PoE is not a super-difficult-demanding game that demands you play the absolute best or you die. games like that are do not sell anymore (someone will probably mention dark souls as a counter argument its not hard: concepts like 'block/dodge butten', extremely slow and predictable ai and unlimited continues make it easy)

The skill system of PoE as a whole is interesting: when you first experience than you think its incredibly complex but after you learn it than its suprisingly simple. High skill floor, low skill ceiling. Find 1 single target and 1 aoe. Slap on as many dps boosting supports as you can and thats how you gem. The selection of skills is huge but the actual act of using them is really lacking. While you sometimes have to aim things with projectiles the actual use of skills is boring and easy how many times have you heard someone say "whats a fun skill to use?" We are bored here.

I'm not saying PoE is skilless. Theres a lot of depth to positioning, flask use, planning your build, shopping and budgeting, and anticipating what to expect from the enemy mobs. However the actual 'attacking' part is mashing right click.

While I use utility skills frequently thats only because of the severe handicap I have on myself. Most players do not use utility skills very often because they arn't needed. A decent rare or unique collection is all you need to face roll. In other words the BETTER YOU DEVELOP YOUR CHARACTER the less you will actually depend on utility skills.

Part of the reason for this is that enemies are extremly static. If something works in act 1 it will probably work in act 3 just as well. There are very few times where you need to come up with an entirly new plan (like how I get raise zombie to counter the corpse spitters in the gardens) and even during those moments having enough stat points means you dont need planning. We havn't really advanced very far from d2's skill system. Sure the way in which you acquire or upgrade skills is more complex but the actual we in which we use them hasn't changed at all. Min max your dps on 1-2 abilities and spam away. Adding a few dozen new dps skills with patches to our already giant list isn't going to change anything.

The diablo-clone genre has had almost no evolution since d2: poe hasn't done anything revolutionary, its merely taken decade old concepts and improved them. Its a better game than d2 yes, better by a long shot, but its still a clone. Actually scratch that: PoE is the best clone of diablo ever! While its great the best, still being a clone is lacking. The community of this genre seems afraid of changes.
As bad as d3 was it still introdcued a lot really refreshing ideas. The game was crufied not because every awesome idea it had was exicuted terribly but simple because it had new ideas. "What you can now change skills easily? You couldnt do that in d2, game is ruined"
instead of saying "Wow what a great system, now I'm going to use more than 2 attacks in my characters lifespan! too bad its ruined by having the enemies be crap"


I think adding more depth, where you need to constantly re-evalute and rebuild yourself to each obstacle, is going to lead to a much, much better game than adding a different flavored DPS attack or a some gimmicky unique with a 1,000,000 chance of dropping. This is just my wish, not real commentary, but what I would like to see is the number of utility skills greatly go up (decoy totem, molten shell, curses, smoke mine, and sometimes zombies are examples of utility) most builds only allow 1-2 damaging abilities but can accept 5-6 utility skills. The new skill barrage was not used by many players but a new utility skill would be used by many many builds. Than you would revamp the gem xp system so you can easily swap out gems all the time and keep them leveled. A player may may have 20 utility skills at appropriate level but only take 6 out at a time.

With players than having a huge arsenal of easily swapped utility they would make all the monsters much harder all of them would have 1 more powerful ability like corpse spit or self-teleport. Than and using tactics like 'deprive the corpse spitters of corpsers' 'give the kiting enemy a decoy totem to play with' would be MANDATORY to win (instead of just being a silly trick) like how capping resists is mandatory. Imagine if every enemy in the game and each new zone required its own special set of tactics and smart use of utility skills? I am drooling just thinking about it! Much, much more depth than just spamming right click and chugging pots. Sure some noobs would crash and burn into flame: some people can barely handle putting together a build that only uses 1 damaging ability and 1 curse. Asking them to juggle dozens of utility skills and develop new strategies every time they enter a new zone would blow their mind! But they could team up, do research, grind or just do something called 'learning'. Well thats my fantasy for the perfect PoE development. Maybe it sucks because you can change skills easily! Maybe Chris Wilson is reading this right now and is bumping it up the #1 priority for the dev team? I can dream

Well Holidays are over and I can finally get back to whats important utterly crushing everything in the game with crap gear.

I ease myself back into the game with a quick run through felshire and purchase an icewall because why the hell not? I've got room on my hot bar.

Yep still remember what flasks do, how to kill monsters, pinky butten is still hitting /oos macro every 5 seconds. Seems like I'm good to go. Time to clean up act 2 and get to the hard stuff.

I take a trip though the crypt. Its probably the easiest of all side areas, slow skeletons, almost no physical damage what so ever. If I goof up here it won't cost my life.

Crypt is my favorite area in act 2. Spooky ambiant music, skeletons that shamble about, archeture that actually makes sense kind of. Reminds me a bit of the Kings Crypt in Ocarina of time.

I can't sustain mana well against all these elemental/lightning immune enemies, I burn through more mana flask charges than I recover back and it leads to some boring moments where I am just standing waiting for my mana to return

The only dangerous thing in the crypt is the necromancer, whos curse is easily countered with a proper flask.

I reach Geofry's area and manage to pull him without agroing the spiders by incrementally placing decoy totems up further ahead.

Geofry himself is hard-countered by totems: He depends on curses to do any damage and totems are immune to curses so he takes forever to bring them down. I use skeleton totems for this fight because the crypt gives terrain bonus of +25% damage bonus to all undead creatures.

Geofry seemed bugged today. He didn't bother to actually attack the skeltons that surrounded him, just stood there idling and occassionaly cursing an area of the ground with nothing on it.

The servers seemed to have more lag spikes than usual today so maybe he was suffering from it more than me.

I do western forest next because I wan the skill point. The poison archers are dangerous but I am sure to always nuke them down early, if I cant than I enfeeble them. I love having a decoy totem in this zone because its hilarious watching the suicide bombers self destruct onto it.

There was a dangerous moment where I had several melee guys on me, even with enfeeble, molten shell, and a granite flask I was losing health fast. I ran out with a quick silver, half were dead by the time i did that so clean up was easy. I really think it was desync or something because the mobs didn't have any special properties and they don't normally hit that hard.

I reach the cleaving unique and let him hit a bit to learn more about my armor defenses. I was pretty amazed at how easily I could face tank him. I just needed to use one of my 3 defense boosters (enfeeble, armor flask, molten shell) and I could sustain with my life leech indefinitely.

He goes down.

I go to fight Alira (thanks for the poster who said the trick for finding her!) and I have my 2nd alt+f4 exit from the game. I was having constant roll-back on the fight and couldn't even move properly. I was not in any danger. I had plenty of health and nearly full flasks when I exited. I guess the servers are overcrowded now that the holiday season is ending. All of us introverts escaped our chatty familys, screaming kids, and long lines and want to go back to our little game.

I take a break and eat food. This time when I fight Alira again I notice there is still desync issues, not nearly as bad as the first time but the game just feels much more sluggish than when i was in the forest and hits dont seem to connect well. I feel that there is definitly something weird with her that makes her desync more than she should. I bring a devouring totem.

First round with her I just concentrate on killing her guards, than I portal out to reset the fight and spam attacks while the devouring totem eats up the corpses. I wont be stepping on any exploding bodies this way. I find it funny how Alira just sits there while I do this.

I fight her seriously now. Its an undead duel my skeleton totem vs her zombie summoning. The 2 are an equal match and occupy themselves while their masters fight each other. I conductivity curse alira and we exchange blows, with life leeach i almost heal for as much damage as I take.

When I run out of mana (as I said I'm not completely stabilized on it) I go and hide while I naturally recover. I run out and repeat the process again. Once the zombie corpses start to pile up I use a devouring totem and run around dodging wand blasts while the corpses disapear. I also make sure to only fight Alira in a 1 spot on the map, that way all the corpses are concentrated so its easy to remember where they are.

I only drank flasks twice on this fight (mana flasks). My defenses are nearly perfect! Once I stabalize my mana I will be even more powerful! As long as I have mana I have dps, as long as I have dps I have life leach!

Kraityn is next. On the journey to him I kite the bears or use a decoy totem against them since they are pretty hard heavy physical enemies. On the archers I get their attack, strafe and allow them to miss a shot than attack them during their recovery animation. I could have also just face tanked them if I used a molten shell/enfeeble but either way is fine.

I reach kraityn with no issues. I do the usual pattern of using 1 round to kill his minions and resetting the fight after he's all alone. I keep my molten shell+life leech combo allows me to face tank him without drinking potions the entire fight. I had planned to use the corpse pile to refil my life with devouring totem but that wasn't needed.

Kraityn is probably the worst designed boss in the game. I don't get his pattern. He goes in and does some basic boring stabs, than he runs around in randomly with phase run before returning to attack again. The running around he does accomplishes nothing but wasting your time, it even makes the fight easier by giving you free time for your life regen to work.

2 out of 3 bandits dead. Easy stuff. I'm unstoppable but now I'm tired and must stop =/
I've still got so much left to kill. Oak needs to die. Vaal needs to be knocked out. And after that...well I'm very curious how hard act 3 will be.



HERES MY GEAR AND BUILD

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMAAuMHYwelCPQVUBZvGYUaOB0UHwIkqij6LJwtHzGIMZ41kjbFNuk64T1fQYdEq0WdSbJN4099UlNVrlXGVytX4maeZ71wfXNTdhF5A3qqfq-AVoIQgseI8Y0Zj0aPppBVmuCboaZXpwinhKxZtz64k8AawFTBtM9l0NDYJN2M37DgEuNq5OznY-vu7DjyRfno-tL-Cv6P

Yes I'm getting weapon elemental damage nodes to reach the life/mana section in the templar. The weapon elemental nodes are completly dead points but they are a shorter route than going the armor/es path. Besides my base armor is low that the armor nodes wouldnt help at all.

I plan to get more shock chance once I reach the barracks section of act 3 with lots of lightning resist mobs/resist all element mobs. Maybe I'll get the 4% block node too. For now I need mana and life. My damage is fine but I need good mana flows to continue to leech.



Gear is Ok. I wish I had better life rolls and a scepter that didn't suck. Devouring totem is the newest addition to my arsenl. Its not ever going to save my life but its a good way to eat coprses (I still keep zombie incase I want to despose of corpses while using a certain totem). Ice wall hasn't done anything yet, maybe it can have a use when it gets more xp? Probably not.



Heres my switch gear. I have a trinity of boots now. I almost never touch this stuff, just keep it to juggle resists

Here is my wealth. Its back to a decent size thanks to some lucky drops but I still don't have an urgent need to shop.




Well act 2 is going pretty well. I'll be heading towards Vaal soon which will be a big dififculty spike.

Name: NemesisBluesOnly

I also got +2lvl fire gems/30 mana regen and 75sp/45 mana regen shield coming up lvl 60 so I can trash my other mana regen and still run artic armour