[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

After reading the GGG announcement about Darkshrine I was underwhelmed - seemed like a bunch of recycled content with no cool rewards/challenges.

But I decided to give it a go... and it's a blast.

The Darkshrines are really cool. You sacrifice a rare item in a Darkshrine and then various outcomes occur depending on the affix selected from the rare you offered. Among the cool things that might happen:

* An item in your inventory becomes 20 quality. I've gotten nearly all my gems to q20 this way.
* Dailies are reset. I've sped up Master leveling quite a bit in this fashion.
* One of the Warbands tribes spawns in your instance. GGG seems to have up-ed the loot dropped by Warband members. This outcome is nice b/c it means quite a bit more loot.
* All unequipped items in your inventory are scoured. For each rare that's scoured, an alch drops; for each magic item that's scoured, a transmute drops. Use this to mass scour and generate alchs for item level 75+ jewelry.
* Other cool outcomes are also possible.

The Procurement program was designed to help make trading in POE easier. When run, Procurement scans your inventory and stash and then allows you to update your trade thread in the POE forums. It even has the capability to bump your thread if you want.

Initially, I was skeptical about Procurement. I read somewhere that it scans all your tabs across all leagues and if you have a lot of tabs it takes forever to run.

In practice this isn't true; Procurement is configurable. You can adjust it to scan just the stash tabs you want it to scan. You can also configure it to scan/update just for one league or as many leagues as you like. Finally, it can auto-price items based on stash tab; for example, if you organize your stash tabs by buyout price, you can simply drop new items into the appropriate tab, run Procurement and have it bump your thread. Trading couldn't be easier.

To get procurement to work in this fashion you'll probably need a bit of programming/web scripting savvy. Procurement stores its settings in XML files. You'll want to edit the XML files to get it to work the way you want.

Edit Settings.xml to configure which league(s) and stash tabs it should scan.
Edit Buyouts.xml to set buyout prices for each tab.

Procurement even works if you log in using Steam. It does this by using a session ID to access the forums.

If you're interested in Procurement, there's a forum thread for it located here.

Awhile ago there was some discussion in this thread about alternative Magic Finding builds in case Poison Arrow is nerfed in the next major patch.

It now looks as if Poison Arrow will probably survive the patch largely unscathed so the following discussion about Dual Incinerate Totem (DIT) magic finding isn't as useful as it otherwise might have been.

I've been playing DIT magic find in Darkshrine since the league began. It's a blast; so long as you don't mind the totem playstyle I recommend giving it a shot for variety.

DPS is very nice. My tooltip DPS with level 21 Incinerate gems is just over 7K. But because of the way Incinerate works (4 stages, each successive stage adding 100% of base damage) and because it's a dual totem build, the actual DPS is somewhat over 56K.

Needless to say, clear speed is very nice. I haven't benchmarked this build against my Poison Arrow character but I'd say the two builds are very comparable in terms of clear speed and magic finding effectiveness.

I describe my DIT character "TwoTotems_" underneath Fendril's Dual Incinerte Totem thread. My post is here; the post begins with the words "Let's hope this build remains viable."

Advantages of DIT Magic Find:
* You can swap out of magic find gear and perhaps respec a bit to achieve incredibly high life, armor and DPS (the DPS really jumps with appropriate gear). This might allow you to more easily kill very high level bosses (for example, if an achievement/challenge requires you to do so).
* Dual Flame Totem can be used to level pretty much eliminating the need to respec once you switch to your main skill (Spell Totem + Incinerate).
* High DPS
* High life regeneration. This makes it possible to completely ignore degeneration ground effects.
* Reconfigure for Righteous Fire - if you want to drop magic find and go all out nuts for DPS, you can regear/respec for Dual Incinerate Totems plus Righteous Fire. Needless to say, DPS is crazy high. But you lose a lot of survivability doing this; I tried this briefly and didn't like it.
* Totems - playstyle is very safe making it easy to level while magic finding.

Drawbacks of DIT Magic Find:
* Totems - some people hate this playstyle.
* Probably needs a 6-link to work - In softcore you could just use a Tabula until you get a nice 6-link chest. But in hardcore, you probably wouldn't want to do this.
* Harder to gear than Poison Arrow - you need a q20 Incinerate Totem, Rain of Splinters jewel, and a 6-link.

At any rate, if you're looking to play a different magic find character, either for variety, or, hypothetically speaking, because Poison Arrow is nerfed (again it doesn't look like this will happen), DIT is very nice; but, the nerf-hammer could hit Incinerate in the next major patch, so DIT may or may not be viable in the future.

So which do I like better? Poison Arrow or DIT?

Well, I like both, actually. Because of gearing issues, I think Poison Arrow is the better choice for Magic Find at the moment. But DIT is really fun too if you can overcome gearing issues and if you like totem builds.