Path of Exile

You might see a few in Act 9. I got my first map drop for VuurRegverdige today in the Solaris Temple.

I got a fair few in act 9. I have a an ilvl 58 Jungle Valley map and ilvl 59 Arcade map in my stash. Certain they dropped when I was low 60’s.

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Found a new belt. Think I’ll keep this one.

Them some defenses right there.

Vaal or no balls.

Sooooo tempting… But unlikely. RNGesus and I have a rocky history. ;)

Ok then at least bless the implicit to 38+, that low roll is just bad to look at :).

For + to gem level?

Yeah, thinking back to my Diablo 3 experience at launch, I would say the time I spent in the game, and the time I spent in the gold auction house were about equal. So for every hour spent playing the game, I then spent an hour in the auction house looking for a good deal I could afford. And this was hardcore, so there was no real money auction house for us, only the gold one.

So my overall memory of Diablo 3 back then was the auction house, not the game.

Everybody was super concerned about the real-money auction house, but in the end it turned out to be a complete non-issue.

The gold AH was the problem. Nobody anticipated the apocalyptic effect that an efficient global market would have on core gameplay.

How many sockets do you see on belts? :^)

The best corruption you can get on a belt is +1 endurance charge - this isn’t useful for all builds but on the kind that @ReptileHouse posted that would be a killer and would easily raise the price by 5x.

That would be an excellent point, lol. I was so caught up trying to figure out what you were referring to, I spaced.

Incidentally, got a Tear of Purity yesterday. Should I drop a Vaal on it? No idea what the odds are. Only have 2 Vaal orbs so far (got my second one yesterday courtesy of a prophecy)

Tear of Purity is worth less than 1 vaal, so no. It’s the very definition of a trash unique, 5 minutes out of Lioneye’s Watch at level 1 and you’d likely end up with a better rare amulet.

Note that there are some cheap uniques that are definitely worth vaaling though - several unique onehanded weapons are very cheap and are worth vaaling for Culling Strike, The Anvil amulet costs maybe 5 alts and is definitely worth vaaling for extra block (or +1 curse, depending on spec), etc.

Original Diablo III’s AH problem was a symptom of underlying shit loot/gameplay, where the only 2 worthwhile item stats where +primarydamagestat and +HP no matter what you were playing. Having no AH wouldn’t have helped the game.

POE doesn’t have that problem, there’s a metric ton of useful stuff for differing builds and niche markets, and where trade enables unique builds that are unfeasible to put together in solo play.

Mmmm…Kitava. Some fight that. I died a bunch, probably 6 times. Forgot to review that on youtube first so went in sight unseen. Not to bad for a dual totem build, most of the time. Kitava herself one-shot me a few times, but the biggest drama was the adds between forms, they were just relentless. Took until the third rotation to find a good technique for just keeping moving through them and timing CWDT IC cooldowns to cast more totems.

One death, however was due to a glitch when upon reentry, Kitava’s animations and effects were bugged - like there were none. So I died to a something I could not even see.

The ground fire DOT right at the end was a damn pain in the ass as well - fire resist flask for sure, just for that.

Worst of all. Worst of fucking all, the game auto-TP’d me to the Epilogue BEFORE I COULD PICK UP ANY FUCKING LOOT. And of course the two zones leading up to the final fight had reset, so goodbye Orb of Regret and whatever else was lying there before I got a chance to examine it. Thankfully no uniques. Ugh.

Other than that, the build is kind of going ok. Nothing in Act 10 presented any particular challenge until Kitava cost me half a bar of XP, but clearing those zones at level 71 was reasonably fast. I’ve not done cruel lab yet either, so only rocking two totems. I’ll have to see, but my gut feels is that it will be missing enough DPS to get too deep into maps. Another 7 or 8 levels, some more crit and totem nodes, and gear upgrades will probably help out though.

I meant because it has a unique variant (Blood of Corruption). As I said, no idea what the odds of getting that are, but it seems pretty nifty (unique Vaal skill that makes elemental damage heal you)

Completely disagree. You can have really great loot with limited number of affixes, just increase the numbers. All that impact is build diversity. As long as the core gameplay of killing monsters was fun and rewarding the game would have been fine.

And it was fun initially on release, just not rewarding. And not fun after an extended period of time due to the lack of build diversity.

What’s the story on Prophecies? Should one spend on them liberally at all stages of the game? Or should one wait for an optimal time? And what would be that optimal time, if so?

There’s cool stuff that can happen at any time, including starting long chains. I don’t think it makes sense to wait. But be aware that some of them are quite valuable. If you get something that seems quite good, it would be wise to look it up and see if it’s worth selling (assuming you are interested) or saving for later (as I did with this:)

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/The_Jeweller's_Touch

That’s a good one! I could certainly use that…