{3.10} Speaker for the Dead | The Mass Minion Summoner | League Starter, Leveling Guide 💀

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Hercanic wrote:

Looking at all your supporter badges, for this to be your first time on both, that's quite significant! Congratulations!

Yeah, I have been playing since closed Beta WAAAYYY back in 2011 or 2012 (I honestly don't remember when it was). I just don't have a ton of time I can spend playing, so getting a character to Level 90 is pretty tough for me and usually only happens in the rare leagues that I get a lot more time to play than usual, or when I find a really good build like this. This is actually only the second time I ever attempted Shaper with any character. So while I have been playing (and supporting) PoE for years, I still have far less actual play time than most players.

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Hercanic wrote:

You may have missed the EDIT in my earlier reply, but you're missing Chance to Bleed affix on your gloves. Meaning Bloodlust for Skeletons was never working. You beat both Shaper and Elder with only 63% of the total Skeleton DPS you could have had. =o)

WTF. How did I miss this? Thanks for catching it. I will need to get this fixed. Unfortunately, now I am broke from chaining T15 maps...back to the grind

EDIT: I picked up these for just over 1EX (now I really AM broke). They don't have as much life as my last pair and I lost my 'Word of the Grave' enchantment, AND they are corrupted, but I have bleed now.


Second Edit: dang! I feel like I want a redo with Shaper now! These gloves make a HUGE difference.

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Hercanic wrote:

I haven't looked into it since the reshuffle. Do you want XP or valuable drops?

For drops, investigating the maps that sell for the most is a good place to start. A high price might indicate either a high demand or low demand/low supply and thus no competition. So some digging is necessary.

I think I am looking for the best way to keep a high-level map pool if that makes any sense. I doubt I will level my guy past about 95-96 if that, and I am AWFUL at pricing rares to sell. Like....REALLY bad at it. So if I am trying to sell for a profit, I would want it to be from Uniques, Div cards, or pure currency. So just running T15-16 maps over and over as often as possible is probably my best bet. Any advice on that is welcome.

For what it is worth, I WAS looking at Desert Springs or Moon Temple and for the exact reasons, you said. Desert Springs seems better, but dang that boss fight is a grind. Not hard, not dangerous, just long. I think I cleared the entire map in the same amount of time it took me to end the boss fight.

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GingerBeast wrote:

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Hercanic wrote:

For what it is worth, I WAS looking at Desert Springs or Moon Temple and for the exact reasons, you said. Desert Springs seems better, but dang that boss fight is a grind. Not hard, not dangerous, just long. I think I cleared the entire map in the same amount of time it took me to end the boss fight.

that boss fight is more or less the sole reason why desert spring is a popular map to use the elder orb on. all those monsters that spawn in the transition zone are EXTRA monsters. without the boss, it would probably have 200 monsters less.

@ GingerBeast:

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GingerBeast wrote:

EDIT: I picked up these for just over 1EX (now I really AM broke). They don't have as much life as my last pair and I lost my 'Word of the Grave' enchantment, AND they are corrupted, but I have bleed now.

Second Edit: dang! I feel like I want a redo with Shaper now! These gloves make a HUGE difference.

Faster Projectiles feels great while mapping, but just be aware that it cuts Ball Lightning's hits roughly in half. So against a single target it'll be harder to maintain max Virulence and you'll get less out of Life Gain on Hit from Spells. Also, unlike Slower Projectiles, the max travel distance of Ball Lightning doesn't change, it just gets to the end faster.

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GingerBeast wrote:

I think I am looking for the best way to keep a high-level map pool if that makes any sense. I doubt I will level my guy past about 95-96 if that, and I am AWFUL at pricing rares to sell. Like....REALLY bad at it. So if I am trying to sell for a profit, I would want it to be from Uniques, Div cards, or pure currency. So just running T15-16 maps over and over as often as possible is probably my best bet. Any advice on that is welcome.

You can research current Divination card values, then go here and use the Search field to filter for those cards and find out where they drop. Conversely, filter by the maps you're interested in to see what Div cards you can expect.

Do a Google search to see whether other players have gathered any data on how often the card drops, and divide the value of the card by that to compare different cards and figure out which will net the best return.

For valuing Rares, your best bet is to check out the most popular builds and look into the gear they're using. Winter Orb comprises a whopping 29% of all high-level players, for example.

City Square is good map; a fantastic layout, three bosses for more drops, and you can use white sextants. Graveyard also has three bosses with a nice open layout. Both can drop the Three Voices card, which gives three of any essence.

Moon Temple is especially good on its own because you can use Zana's +5 mod to run them as T15s for a few Chaos Orbs. Our build can easily handle random map mods, too, like Reflect and No Regen, so this is perfect for us.

To reliably sustain a specific map of your choice without trading, you want to rig the odds. When a map drops, the game first rolls what Tier it'll be, then it rolls the specific map from that Tier's pool. The pool is comprised of completed and adjacent maps. Knowing this, you can guarantee that the only map in the pool will be the one you want. To do this, Uncomplete all maps of your chosen map's Tier and one Tier above it (when the drop pool is completely empty, it is forced to lower the Tier by one, giving you even more of your chosen map). Only your chosen map should remain completed. Since adjacent maps are automatically part of the drop pool regardless of completion, you must block them off using Shaper/Elder orbs, causing them to no longer be of that Tier, which has the added benefit of allowing you to still use sextants on them.

For general strategies, there's lots of videos out there covering it, so I'll leave the rest to others.

Personally, since I don't get much time to play, either, I just play whatever I have without much worry, and keep my builds to what can be afforded off the Chaos recipe. If I get a lucky drop, then I can splurge.

GUIDE UPDATE
These days, Path of Exile has grown to where it places much demand on a player's memory. To ease this burden, I have created a new section, called Cheatsheets, in Acolyte Guides. Within is an assemblage of all manner of reference guides made by the community. Since finding these scattered nuggets of wisdom is a tall order for new and old players alike, I decided to put the best ones I find in one place.

I have also merged the Shopping List and Crafting sections into one, called Trade & Craft. As players are likely to do a mix of both, and both sections are sorted by gear slot, it made sense. (But the secret reason is my neurotic desire to maintain the 3x3 balance of the supplementary sections.)


Art by Zeen Chin

Question does ball lighting have to have lesser poison or can the specters for this build to work? I currently don't have any other way to create chaos damage.

I made a character that is trying to follow this guide in the Synthesis league.

I don't know much about the game. I only played one other character before, back in the Beast league.

But I got my Necromancer to level 82 so far in Synthesis and I'm confused about this: the guide says that the gear for this build should only cost a handful of exalts.

Yet when I search poe.trade and attempt to find items with stats that replicate the gear shown in the OP, the decent items usually cost 3 - 8 exalts just for one piece. And a lot of times, those items are still not great because they have little to no resistances on them, and lots of useless mods on them.

Also, a lot of times I find very few (or zero) matches which contains the same mods as the gear shown in the OP (that is, even when I specifically search for those mods).

So now I'm confused as to what gear I should buy for my character now. My gear isn't good enough for surviving at the level I'm at, but at the same time, I can't afford to buy items equivalent to those shown in the OP.

The other night some kind souls donated a lot of stuff to me, so thanks to their help, now I have 1 exalt and 100 chaos orbs.

I'm reluctant to waste it on gear that isn't very good (yet which also seems to be very expensive, at least as far as I can tell), yet I have to do something to make my character more survivable.

I don't know how to decide what is worth buying, or what mods I should be searching for right now that I can actually afford, so at the moment, I'm kind of stuck.

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AncientRedDragon wrote:

I made a character that is trying to follow this guide in the Synthesis league.

I don't know much about the game. I only played one other character before, back in the Beast league.

But I got my Necromancer to level 82 so far in Synthesis and I'm confused about this: the guide says that the gear for this build should only cost a handful of exalts.

Yet when I search poe.trade and attempt to find items with stats that replicate the gear shown in the OP, the decent items usually cost 3 - 8 exalts just for one piece. And a lot of times, those items are still not great because they have little to no resistances on them, and lots of useless mods on them.

Also, a lot of times I find very few (or zero) matches which contains the same mods as the gear shown in the OP (that is, even when I specifically search for those mods).

So now I'm confused as to what gear I should buy for my character now. My gear isn't good enough for surviving at the level I'm at, but at the same time, I can't afford to buy items equivalent to those shown in the OP.

The other night some kind souls donated a lot of stuff to me, so thanks to their help, now I have 1 exalt and 100 chaos orbs.

I'm reluctant to waste it on gear that isn't very good (yet which also seems to be very expensive, at least as far as I can tell), yet I have to do something to make my character more survivable.

I don't know how to decide what is worth buying, or what mods I should be searching for right now that I can actually afford, so at the moment, I'm kind of stuck.

The league is "dead" at this point. There are very few items on the market for the build (believe me I am constantly checking for upgrades since the start of the league).

Even in the beginning of Synthesis the items were pricey - maybe because of the build increasing popularity.

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Dcart533 wrote:

Question does ball lighting have to have lesser poison or can the specters for this build to work? I currently don't have any other way to create chaos damage.

for ball lightning to poison enemies it has to:
1. have a source of +phys or +chaos damage. it can be done with a jewel, an item affix or lesser poison support, but it has to be present.
2. it has to have a chance to poison on hit. herald of agony provides 20%, which is a start, but not much. (lesser) poison support increases chance to poison and therefore higher virulence stacks / more poison stacks for vile toxins support.

@ Dcart533:

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Dcart533 wrote:

Question does ball lighting have to have lesser poison or can the specters for this build to work? I currently don't have any other way to create chaos damage.

Minions cannot earn Virulence for you. Herald skills are not auras, so Herald of Agony only applies to you.

(Minion poisons would work with Vile Toxins Support, though. The gem only cares how many poisons are on the target, not who applied them. But we also want Virulence, so this doesn't matter much.)

So yes, you'll need to use Lesser Poison Support with Ball Lightning in order to give it Chaos Damage so that it can poison and earn you Virulence. All you need to replace it, though, is any Hypnotic Eye jewel from an Abyss. Scour it and use Alteration Orbs until you get "Adds x to y Chaos Damage to Spells". This shouldn't be too hard to roll.

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@ AncientRedDragon:

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AncientRedDragon wrote:

I'm confused about this: the guide says that the gear for this build should only cost a handful of exalts.

Specifically, it says this:

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Hercanic wrote:

Cheap - Only needs vendor gems to start. Grows with steady investment. Maximum cost depends on gear availability, but should not exceed more than a handful of Exalted orbs. I funded this build through the Chaos vendor recipe, several natural Exalted drops, and a few sales in the range of 1-3 Exalted orbs.

This was written back during Delve league. Although I had anticipated price fluctuations in the future, especially if my build were to become popular, the basis of my forecast hinged on the fact that the core items of this build were either so common and historically cheap (Victario's Charity, Mark of Submission, Unending Hunger) or were not used in practically any other build (poison/bleed gloves, +1 Maim 1-hander, LGoH Spell ring).

The most expensive items, therefore, would be a six-link Belly of the Beast (~5ex), +3 Minion Damage helm (~1-3ex), and T1 minion jewels (~1-2ex), all of which are commonly in demand among Necromancers and thus shouldn't vary too severely in price.

Boots, belt, and amulet are entirely up to the player.

Any of these items can, of course, become much more expensive the closer you strive for perfect rolls, but if you settle for "good enough" then they generally shouldn't be expensive at all.

However, right now, Synthesis League is at its lowest population. The league mechanic was not very popular, it had many problems for the first month, Syndicate had/has severe loading-lag (resulting in unavoidable deaths from Intervention popping in and freezing the client while the server continues to play out the encounter so you literally cannot do anything while being beat on for 10 seconds straight), and GGG just announced a Flashback event for next week that gave many players a reason to quit until then.

All this culminates in a very small market, where prices can easily rise on uncommon items like the rares we want. There's just not enough remaining seller competition to establish a consistent downward-trending price.

Speaker of the Dead is also the 7th Most Viewed build thread of all builds this league (nearing 400k new views since Synthesis began 8 weeks ago, for an average of 7k views per day), so there's definitely buyer competition going on, too.

Aside from understanding what's outside of our control, the one thing we do control is how we search for items. You'll run into trouble if your search terms are too specific. If you've been looking for matches to what I have on my own character, without realizing which stats are important and which can be ignored, your search results are likely to turn up empty. It's for that very reason I made the Trade & Craft section.

I was coincidentally working on that section just the other day, too, so it might be of more help to you now, though it is still far from complete. When it's done, it'll present each piece of gear in order of priority, with multiple search options in the range of barebones to full to luxury. Then it'll just be a matter of people going in order and adjusting for budget and availability.

@Hercanic,

I followed your last guidelines on what to upgrade on my gear. I swapped some jewels with more life, got a helm with life roll, bought some 21 gems etc. I die less often now. I want to ask you what to aim to upgrade next other than buying a Belly (which will be my next move)?

Currently my progress in this league is:
1. Level 95, going for 96
2. Delve 306, going for as deep as i can
3. Full atlas completion, Shaper + Guardians + Elder Guardians dead, only Uber Elder left

Thank you!

P.S I have one major problem with this build - while looking what to play next league, every other build is feeling slow or lacking utility in some aspects...