Tormented Scarab of Peculiarity feedback

Hello,
I've been playing with scarab of peculiarity last league and this one too, and I kinda like it, but there are several things I wish to communicate about it.

TLDR: scarabs, maps, but super bizarre to run and some bugs preventing to push the rentability further



I will explain briefly trivia on how the scarab works currently:
Scarab of Peculiarity : 'Tormented spirit in area are replaced with unusual variants'


This scarab will replace any tormented spirit spawned in the map (the haunting ones) by unusual variants that goes by 3 forms:
1-Betrayer
2-Heretic
3-Graverobber

And every unusual variant has a special effect added when possessing/touching monsters:

1-Betrayer possessed mobs will drop one SCARAB (100%), the touched monsters will also drop one but with a lower chance (10%)

2-Heretics possessed mobs will drop a MAP (100%), the touched monsters will also drop one but with a lower chance (10%)

3-Graverobbers possessed mobs will drop a league specific item (100%), I have no confirmation if the touched monsters loot anything special

It does look like the touched monsters chance to drop is not scaled with quantity (might be wrong on that)



Now that I've explained pretty much what it does, I would like to address a potential common mistake:

As said, it will replace any haunting spirit in the map, not the tormented spirit that will be possessing a monster at the start of a map.

That will explain that this scarab doesn't work with the nodes 'Exiled Will' ('Wild Rogue Exiles in your maps are possessed by a tormented spirit') or 'Seance' ('Up to 5 Rare Monsters in each of your map are Possessed and their minions are touched'). It will not work with the 'Tormented scarab of Possession' either.

However, this might be totally unintended as someone reported it as a bug, and it was passed on by Jatin_GGG on August 12 in this post : https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3525768



How to farm with the scarab of peculiarity:

TLDR: be ready to facetank the whole map + have phasing

First you have the classic way, you enter a map, you kill the monsters too fast for them to be possessed or touched and the tormented spirits die without giving you any loot.
It is a known problem with tormented spirits as a whole and I didn't push this strat much

The Second way is to use the Keystone 'Speaker of the Dead' that let the tormented spirits possess you and you can touch monsters yourself in return.

So the aim is to push the tormented spirits into the monsters for them to be touched without killing them, and when a spirit is out of juice (is not touching any more monsters), you stand on it to get possessed and possess 40 more monsters.
Then you kill the touched monsters and loot.

For it to be a minimum productive, I recommend using a Silo map. I've tested many layouts, but Silo is simply the easiest map to push Tormented spirits into monsters

Then, you put as many monsters as you can in your maps that doesn't need you to spawn (not beyond, legion, breach, abyss, blight, expedition for a few examples)
What I do is Delirium, Shrines, Eater of World/Searing Exarch.

You have to take in mind you need to tank all of this while sometimes being immobile to get possessed by a tormented spirit

Then you clear the map, and finally, you have a full inventory of scarabs and maps.
You can further push by converting the maps to 8mods corrupted maps or with a scarab of conversion (I don't recommend considering the prices atm, but do as it suits you)

Altas Tree wise, take every torment nodes but 'Seance' as their touched monster cannot be retouched, and not 'Unrelenting Torment' as it is currently bugged

The Scarabs you want are at least 2 'Torment Scarab' and a 'Torment Scarab of Peculiarity', then you do whatever you want. I go with 2 'Domination Scarab' for more easy to touch monsters in the map



Now some notes and problems I've encountered:

First of all, in 3.25 GGG reduced the number of Tormented Spirits you can put in a map by nerfing the 'Torment Scarab' (15 tormented spirits to 6 now), but buffing the 'Speaker of the Dead' node to touch 40 monsters by yourself, making it pretty even for my strat (prob slightly worse)

Gameplay wise, it's kinda bad ngl, mostly due to the tormented spirits being clunky when they move. They stop every few meters, they get caught on walls most of the times.

It's better when they aim for a rare without the keystone but that limits the number of touched monsters. Plus the fact that they get released after isn't big because you killed every monsters nearby or you kill the tormented spirit on release. I can't find a way to take advantage of it.

On an other note, I didn't play the sentinel league, but I feel like tormented spirits is quite similar to sentinel, but faster, easier and you have the control on it
I think I could like sentinels to replace the tormented spirits with good atlas passive tree nodes + scarabs (I have some ideas)

I don't think the Graverobber touched monsters loot anything special like the other two (again, might be wrong) but if they could, it would be nice

Adding more peculiar tormented spirit can be cool, but keeping few of them can help to scale the rewards (influencing scarab drops, map conversion etc)

There are also some annoying bugs that I already reported:
-Heretics dropped maps are sometimes unidentified normal maps
-Bertayers dropped scarabs are not influenced by the nodes supposed to block specific scarabs to drop (ex: 'Scarabs found in your Maps cannot be Abyss Scarabs')

I believe that the nodes that say 'Scarabs found in your maps are more likely to be *** Scarabs' or 'Scarabs found in your maps are more likely to be less common varieties' don't work either



In conclusion, if you can facetank a map and navigate through it, you can have a ton of scarabs and maps, but some bugs prevent to push the strat further.

NB: Just read some of the wiki for sentinels, it sounds really cool, hope it will get its place in the atlas tree someday