First 100 hours of SSF and making it up as I go

I'm not new to ARPGs, in fact I'm about as old an ARPG as it's possible to be. In early 1997 my parents got a call from our ISP asking what the heck we were doing because we were using all the bandwidth. My parents told them I was playing Diablo 1 online. Since then I've played Diablo 2, 3, and 4, Titan Quest, Torchlight 1 and 2, Grim Dawn, Loki, Path of Exile 1 (about 350 hours there so a bit of a newb there), and probably others I've forgotten about. The point is, I've been around the block enough in ARPGs. I don't say this to brag but to give context to my opinion, good or bad you decide. I'm writing this because it's early access. Maybe somebody will get something out of it whether a dev or a player.

Now if it wasn't obvious from the above, I'm old which means I'm a bit slower and that effects how I approach games. I'm not looking for the ADHD-Mash-All-The-Buttons-Make-Big-Boom build. I tend towards either minion builds or builds that generally don't require massive numbers of buttons. I had heard POE2 had a novel approach to minions with the auto-revive mechanic and I thought that sounded wonderful (no I didn't do research before playing). So taking what I knew of POE1 I rolled up a witch and away I went to explode the bad zombies and use their bits to create good zombies (well maybe not GOOD, but they're mine at least).

At first I thought minions seemed okay but they spent a lot of time chasing enemies that were ignoring them and trying to put their pointy bits into my squishy bits. This seemed to be a result of a combination of a lack of minion aggro control abilities and their tendency to spontaneously experience the overwhelming urge to play hide and seek with me. Unfortunately for them I'm a terrible minion owner and I didn't notice they were lost until they despawned from distance and then reappeared next to me while I was trying desperately to not get new unwanted piercings. I decided the obvious solution was just more minions. That way I don't have to care if a few of them get lost, they can take turns it'll be fine.

I didn't realise that more minions meant more problems. Doors. If you've played minions you know what I'm talking about. It's the 3 stooges doorway gag but I'm not laughing. I'm playing witch, I put my points into minions, I picked up minion skills and I can't do anything without my troop of directionally challenged tag-a-longs. I refuse to sit there telling my minions to run from one side of the room to the other until enough of them manage to beat their friends to the door that I can move on. So I do the only thing I can do, I start cosplaying a sorceress. I find Ember Fusillade and that seems to be a good mix of damage and not having to push a lot of buttons, at least after I put Unleash and Scattershot on it. One button push, wait a second and 7 little fireballs race off towards my cursor with a bit of aim assist. I'm in slow old man heaven. I can even fit Contagion and Essence Drain into a rotation. I'm starting to feel like I have something resembling a build coming together. I put my DoTs on an enemy and my little fireballs murder it and the DoTs propagate out and everything dies. My rapidly multiplying army of 3 stooges impersonators even sometimes find the time to participate.

Eventually I give up on Skeleton Warriors, apart from the free 2 from the scepter. If they aren't going to participate in my journey to find all the shiny bits hiding inside the local wildlife then I'm not wasting Spirit on them. More Archers! I fairly quickly discover that Gas Arrow with Ember Fusillade makes explosions and those explosions do a LOT of damage. Now I'm cooking with gas... or so I thought. I didn't consider the fact that when I gave the Gas Arrow command I had to rely on my easily distracted army of Robin Hoods needed to both be in range AND have line of sight to where I wanted them to shoot. This resulted in many wasted button presses by me telling them to shoot their Gas Arrows and... nothing would happen. I'd then have to try to figure out why what I thought should be happening was not happening. Did they get stuck in a door? Were they off fighting an enemy I didn't know existed? Was there a tree in the way? Did they get killed by an enemy or being left behind? Usually by the time I figured this out I had killed the enemies and I had a few Skeleton Archers looking at me like they expected a participation trophy. Even when they did actually do what I told them to do the gas cloud would explode long before it had time to spread, or I had to do my bet impersonation of a punching bag not using any fire abilities in case I ignited someone. Oh well, these are low level newbie minions. The arsonist will save the day right? Right? Arsonist... Where did you go?

It was around this time I learned that Reviving Minions share a cooldown and each time one times the cooldown resets. Conveniently when one minion dies it's usually followed by another one, and then another one, and another one until you run out of minions. Then they all respawn together after leaving you alone and defenseless for a few seconds. I thought if I just had enough of them they'd cycle and one or two dying here and there wouldn't matter because they'd just keep replacing each other. Well, at least I discovered Raging Spirits worked really well with Ember Fusillade. I tried Firewall and Fortress but I prefer not to stare at bright orange everything and honestly Firewall didn't seem to do anything but make SRS. Besides, Ember Fusillade -> Contagion -> Essence Drain just felt good.

Over the next few levels I tried just about every Elemental and Occult ability there is and found nothing too appealing to me. Corpse manipulation abilities are fine unless you have no corpses, which is every new pack of enemies and basically all bosses. So I ignored those for now but made note of Sacrifice at MUCH higher levels thinking that might be a good use of my army of stooge cosplayers if I ever want to play a cat herding simulator again. At least I'd get to blow them up for some catharsis, (haven't played with it yet). The elemental abilities seemed interesting but I didn't pick a sorceress. So I soldiered on with Ember FuSRS (Ember Fusillade with SRS) and Chaos DoTs for filler and fun.

I had learned that Minion Instability and Infernal Legion makes Raging Spirits into little burning bombs. I'm not sure how good this is/was but it felt good to use FuSRS to deliver little exploding skulls right into peoples faces while putting DoTs on them. I was getting a little tired of having to manually apply Contagion, especially because it's a little fiddly to get it on the target you want in my experience (maybe I'm just old and bad). Then I got Cast on Minion Death and wouldn't you know it, FuSRS Bombs counted as minion death. Well, no more casting Contagion myself. I'll just automate that and spam chaining Essence Drain to spread the lover around while Contagion is auto-cast every 3-4 seconds on the nearest target. Somewhere along the way I put Hinder on Contagion too which just made sure the target slowed down to let his friends catch up before he exploded to better spread my DoTs.

Somewhere around this point I started to look at my passive tree and ask myself why I was invested in minions. Raging Spirits are minions but most of their damage was from Infernal Legion and Minion Instability which was based on their max health. I got to the end of Act 3 Normal and my build didn't work. I don't know if it was minions or my equipment or my passives or a combination of the things but something wasn't working for me. Now as I mentioned I played POE1 and I also did it SSF and made it up as I went so I wasn't too surprised I messed something up and I started over. Witch Number 2. If at first you don't succeed do the same thing but better. Forget minions, chaos damage was the way to go (I know what some of you are thinking...).

I stuck with what I knew but I did my passive tree differently and went hard into spell damage and chaos damage. FuSRS, Contagion on Minion Death, and Essence Drain. Bosses could be a bit slow at times but I've beat the dark souls games I know how to be patient and dodge. I got through Act 3 Normal and all the way to Act 2 Cruel. I had automated Essence drain, added Blasphemy with Despair and spammed Hexblast between FuSRS casts. Life was pretty good. I destroyed packs of enemies and I could take down bosses with patience and letting FuSRS and my auto-DoTs do the work. I had 0.5 seconds of necessary cast time and 1.5 seconds of focusing on dodging and maneuvering. I tried Cast on Ignite but I didn't really light things on fire, Raging Spirits did but that didn't count. I tried Cast on Freeze with Ice Nova figuring I could freeze things will my DoTs did their work but I couldn't freeze things enough with my build before they just died for it to be worth it. Having something proc once every 10+ packs just isn't worth 60 spirit, maybe with another build it could work but not mine. Cast on Shock was a no go because I just didn't have the ability to shock. I was going to try Cast on Crit but before I got high enough level to get it, I asked myself a question. Why am I playing witch? I didn't have an answer.

So I went and found a built planner (thank you Maxroll.gg) and I looked at the ascendancies and started to actually theorycraft a build. I was convinced I was going to go all in on Chaos damage and that meant Event Horizon. So I had to deal with the -3% health and energy shield when casting a chaos spell. I was going to be casting a LOT of chaos spells. I was going to use FuSRS to proc 3-5 Cast on Minion Deaths. The only solution I could see after looking at uniques and the skill tree was Chaos Inoculation (can't have -3% of 1 health) and Eldritch Battery (-3% of 0 is still 0). Obviously grabbing Mind Over Matter as well. Conveniently all of these are around all the Chaos nodes. Unfortunately Chaos Inoculation makes Witch ascendancies completely useless which feels weird. The game advertises Witch as using Chaos magic but the heavy Chaos investment pushes you into Chaos Inoculation make Witch useless, literally useless. Demon Form doesn't work with 1 HP. Beidat's nodes don't work because 25% of 1 is nothing. Infernal Flame is the only thing that might work but I'm not trying to do fire damage so that's pointless. There's just no good use of 8 points in Infernalist if you have 1 HP from Chaos Inoculation. Blood Mage isn't as terrible strangely a lot is obviously still wasted. So I rolled a monk.

If I'm going to be using triggers from Cast on Minion Death Invoker was the obvious choice. I considered Mercenary Gemling and Ranger Pathfinder but both start too far away from the nodes I want. So I set off on my path to make a Chaos Monk that used FuSRS to auto-trigger all the things. You know, complete chaos. I had a build all planned out. I got almost all the chaos nodes, the trigger nodes, a good amount of mana regeneration and energy shield nodes to boost my mana and I didn't realise the problem. Maximum Energy shield nodes do not translate across with Eldritch Battery so all those big +40% and +60% ES nodes were worthless for Mana and there just isn't really any good Max Mana nodes. Again, I'm playing SSF so a heavily gear dependent build is a no-go for me. On my way to this very disappointing realisation I did however find something that works.

I was determined to make my FuSRS chaos build work. So I began to fine tune what I had. Once I picked up the Pure Chaos node I realised that meant Ember Fusillade now did Chaos damage and it fires 7+ little fireballs every 2 seconds or less that hit and then explode in an AoE. Withering Touch reduces the damage by 25% which is fine this isn't my damage spell, and then applies Wither for 4 seconds. With the wither nodes on the tree you can easily make a boss or a group of enemies take 70% more chaos damage 100% of the time. This is all while casting a spell I'm already casting to produce Raging Spirits for Cast on Minion Death procs. Every cast of FuSRS procs Contagion with Hinder and Chaotic Freeze, Essence Drain with Chain and Swift Affliction, and Hexblast with Evenom. Hexblast almost always goes off because I've got Blasphemy with Despair, and I'm constantly putting down another curse with Decaying Hex, Impending Doom, and Cursed Ground (currently flammability, might change to Temporal Chains or Enfeeble). The Whispers of Doom notable gives me two curses and Cursed ground makes the Activation Delay zero. I've also added in Ice Nova on another Cast on Minion Death. I have 359 Spirit. I hard cast Ember Fusillade as priority 1. I put my ground curse in front of enemies and I manually cast a second copy of Hexblast if I have actions economy to spare.

I recently picked up Corpsewade and now all the bodies explode into poison clouds which get exploded by my FuSRS and all I can say is that I'm finally starting to feel like I'm cooking with gas.