Path of Exile

The faster clear speed you gain by having a good weapon more than makes up for the cost eventually.

You can get by with just using the rustic sash+whetstone recipe, but if I can get a significantly better weapon for 6 alts, I’m definitely going to do it. Once you hit maps you make enough currency in 10 minutes to pay for 1-2 leveling weapons even if your drops aren’t good so why not get there faster.

I’ll spend up to an alch on a leveling weapon without blinking.

I haven’t done either yet, but I’ll do some trading at some point. As for teams, if a friend is interested, sure. But I’m not into random grouping.

My Righteous Fire totem marauder VuurRegverdige is shaping up nicely. I’m sorta-kinda following this guide, although it dates from prior to 3.0 and has some contradictory stuff in it. You have to read between the lines a bit, but the basics are sound.

For the first 35 levels, I just ran Heavy Strike and Ground Slam with Decoy Totem to group up the enemies nicely and keep boss damage off me. Picked up the various build gems whenever they became available and started leveling them. Once I’d done the Library quest, got the remainder of the important stuff and switched over to using the totems.

The area of effect for the Righteous Fire totem is fairly small, especially at first, but it expands as you level and get nodes like Amplify. For now I’m using an increased AoE support gem, too, though I hope I can eventually drop it. The RF-totem and Searing Bond combination just decimates pretty much every pack I’ve come across, and I’ve got the Scorching Ray-totem to use when fighting big guys that it’s hard to keep in the RF zone (Innocence comes to mind). I just made it into Act 6 and didn’t die to any of the bosses (though it was really close a few times against Kitava).

Sometime in the next 10 levels or so, I’ll probably want to get on poe.trade and find some better gear, particularly boots. Haven’t found anything better than 10% increased speed yet. Running two Quicksilver Flasks and killing stuff as quickly as this guy does, I’ve had move speed any time I wanted it, but eventually I need a better solution.

It’ll be interesting to see how well this guy holds up once I get him to maps. I doubt anything in story mode will give me much trouble, with the caveat that any act boss can of course get you with the most minor of lag or mistakes. Lots of map mods that can give you grief, though. Probably a lot of trading in my future in the Act 9-10 time frame to prepare.

Finally sold my first item for an actual exalt; I’ve had bigger sales in prior leagues but I’ve never gotten an exalted orb coming back in the trade. Grip of the council with near perfect rolls which I had been slowly reducing in price to find a buyer. I had it listed at 39c, so apparently they just didn’t want to bother cashing their exalt themselves because last I checked they were about 45c each.

Happy days. Now I can go shopping, but I don’t know what I want!

edit: so I went shopping for a new sceptre; 1.5 exalts give or take would get me a doryani’s catalyst. And then nestled in the search results was a 5c rare that was even more dps. Good timing I guess.

A new weapon isn’t really what I need. Weapon damage doesn’t help my build at all. It’s all about % spell/elemental/fire damage, which I am actually doing well on. So, after heeding some trading advice, I did manage to pick up a 5L chest slot item with the right colors as a common for 1 alc. I popped it up to rare and on the first try it had 230+ ES, int, life, fire and cold resist. I smiled =) After that success, I managed to pickup a couple of Rare cheapies that were much better then my own for gloves and off hand which now almost rounds out all gem slots. The three pieces cost me like 5 alc total. And now I feel like a god(dess)! Currently at level 65 and in Act 9 and I am sure I must be over leveled for this stuff, because my flask bar is loaded with quicksilver to speed things up and I can’t remember the last time I had to use the mana flask.

Thanks for the tips =)

I did my first trade, woohoo! Painless.

Except I bought the wrong fucking item. /facepalm

I failed to notice it was below my primary search results, so did not match my designated socket colours. Ugh. Guess, I’ll have to flip it.

Do you not have like a million chromatic orbs? I chrome stuff all the time.

It was corrupted! lol!

Haha ok, you done screwed yourself there.

I have to say, I never realized that the problem/upshot of the D3 AH failure was the adjustment of loot drops for the worse. I agree that would suck. But even if no frictionless transaction platform, why not just a centralized searchable listing? Other than following annoying trade chat I don’t know how to find this stuff…

Yeah, a good rule of thumb for me is that you can never have enough chromatic orbs. If something is a GGRR, and you need a GBRR, plan to use all the chromatic orbs in your inventory to try to get that to happen. And sometimes it still won’t. I know certain colors are favored over others for each item, but even then to get the exact combination you want, it usually takes a lot of orbs.

Eh. Unless you’re trying to get multiple off-color sockets (blue sockets on a STR item, f’rex) it’s not that bad.

Make sure your loot filter (again, I recommend Neversink) pops BGR linked items to vendor for chromes, and you should never want for them again.

Well, because that would remove a lot of friction. Free trade in a global or even regional economy is a challenging problem, which is why Diablo3 chose to just remove trading entirely game-wide.

I’m not sure I have a great answer myself, not without adding complexity.

I think Elder Scrolls Online probably took the best approach-- not that it isn’t complex and difficult for new players to understand!

In ESO, each account can join 5 guilds, guilds can have up to 500 members, and you put items up for auction within a single guild only. Trading guilds organically arise from this arrangement, and the market size is restricted so the economy isn’t insanely efficient. You can trade with guilds you haven’t joined, but you need to find their trade dude out in the world, massively increasing friction.

Wait wah… loot filter? OMG this is the most awesomest thing ever. I am giddie over how much this instantly improved my experience with loot on screen…This should be on the front page somewhere lol.

Yes, loot filters improve QoL in a massive way.

There’s also a built-in loot filter now that helps a little if installing filters is confusing for anyone. Not sure if that’s enabled by default.

Neversink’s loot filter thread

I just use his purple-styled filters to make key items pop out without offending my eyes too much :) There are lots more on the forums and sub-reddit. Also, Neversink and some others made a website called FilterBlade which makes it easier to customize exactly what those filters do. It’s in that thread.

Brine King fight was fun!

Got my homebrew themebuild™ gladiator to maps. Did a T13 map at level 69 for lulz to see how the build would perform at high tier and it worked out great - didn’t use any dmg or life flasks, didn’t die. I think this is gonna work out juuuuuuuust fine.

At what point in the game do maps start dropping?

I started getting them in act 10 I think. They are level 68 (t1) but I think I got them before lvl 66 zones.