Nice! I’ve seen two, both while leveling.
Ugh, had my ass handed to me tonight. Cruising through a T6 Spider Forest and came across Zana. Ran her map and got pwned four times. Three times before I realised my stupid bleed flask had moved slots, so I was hitting the wrong one. Then got wasted in the arena against three corrupted bosses. Nope.
Skipped it and then died to the T6 boss rather randomly from something that spiked out of nowhere! Half a level gone. Booooo!
Need more life.
Sounds like racecourse map for Zana’s mission (two big ovals then boss room)? they do a LOT of physical damage and one of them has a massive bleed. Even my juggernaut took heavy damage against those guys yesterday.
Think that spider boss uses detonate corpse.
Yeah, think I stood on a corpse while waiting for my totems to kill the boss. Also fooling around with dropping Orb of Storms (for charge gen) for Vaal Skellies to help burst and distract bosses.
The Zana mission was a cave layout, no idea which one it was at this stage.
oh, ok. you said three bosses and bleeding and I thought of racecourse. oh well.
Act 5 gets insanely hard.
Now even with using the decoy totem and Fortify+Shield Charge, I’m still dying constantly now.
If I were to do this Fire Nova Mine Shadow over from scratch, I wouldn’t go for damage enhancing nodes on the Passive Tree at all. I’d make a beeline for Health nodes, and try to get over to the left side of the tree as fast as possible so that I can get nice health boosts before I hit Act 5. The actual Mine nodes can wait until later.
You could redo some of your passives, that’s why they give you the points.
I have noted that a lot, or most, builds focus on life rather than adding armor increases or other purely defensive nodes. Seems you’d want more of a mix at some point as w/o some reduction in the rate you lose life you’d just drop the added life almost as quickly.
Is there any desirable strategy for playing the Maps? Either to benefit your character or for some quality of life concerns? I read something online hinting at the latter and warning against just playing maps from all quarters. I’m just not sure any of that matters, though. And I’m getting the feeling I’m just playing these maps somewhat aimlessly and I know that just about everything else in the game has some angle to it. Trying to learn what it is with Maps.
From what I understand, there are some advanced tricks where people like to manipulate their atlas to get certain maps to drop more often. My sense is that this isn’t all that important for people that are new to it. I think this is also mostly a tier 10+ thing, but I could be wrong.
It’s somewhat useful to try and ‘follow’ the atlas, only doing maps that are ‘unfogged’ so you can get credit for the bonus objective and thus progress through the atlas. Other than that, idk.
Bateau
3312
Some people shape the atlas so that the only maps that drop have good layouts. This is so they can speed run the maps and get better xp per hour this way. I always ‘clear’ atlas as much as I can, which usually means everything except the few unique maps that cost too much to be worth it.
On a side note, just killed shaper with my wander. I’m now 4/4 with my characters this league, feelsgoodman.jpg. I can still optimize a gear a lot, it’s pretty crazy how well flat ele dmg and attack speed scales on this character. I’m talking at least 50% more damage and I’m already at 700k dps vs Shaper with flasks and charges up.
I already used all my respec points to try to get to the left side as fast as I can. Unfortunately, I only had 6 respec points, and 2 of those orbs of respec. So 8 passives didn’t get me all that much closer to the left side of the passive tree.
Far more text incoming than I intended when I started to write this about Fire Nova Mines:
It might be your gear or playstyle and not passives that are the problem; I’m looking at my fire nova guy who breeezed through and with 50 points spent (somewhere around level 40ish I’d guess) the only life clusters he had were all right side and mid. Blood Siphon, Written in Blood, Blood Drinker, and Heart and Soul, with all the small life nodes around them. Fire Nova hits hard, so you should be clearing the trash without getting hit much if you took the damage nodes.
Now that said, I had a Tabula which definitely makes a difference but I’ve done it without as well in the past. I’m assuming you’re playing Saboteur and went to Bomb Specialist when you finished normal lab. For that matter, I’m assuming you finished normal lab. If not, that’s the problem. At that point you should have more than enough area with all your mines placed to just drop your totem, place a couple mines in fairly safe spots and just run up to the edges of the mobs to place a final cluster of mines and detonate.
You don’t have to run right into the middle of them as fire nova has excellent area coverage, it’s more about avoiding incoming damage and placing your mines at the edge of the mob clusters. Also, you mentioned shield charge+fortify. I do have shield charge with fortify on it, but I’m not sure I ever have the fortify effect up because you don’t want to be that close; I just use it for moving in between mob packs. You’ll be too close otherwise and with no accuracy in the build shield charge will miss fairly often leaving you in the recovery animation after charging without even having the fortify buff up. I mostly use flame dash+arcane surge for getting around and getting more damage.
All that said, Act 5 is definitely a ramp up in the difficulty and the 2 main bosses are total pains until you learn them and then still annoying after you do.
Thanks for the thoughts on maps guys. It really helps just to know what matters and why. I hate to start playing something and then learn later that I should’ve been doing something differently all along.
My reply above made me look at my own build when I just ran another map. Tried shield charging the boss and missed 5 straight times. I’ve been running faster attacks+fortify+culling strike on my shield charge and I can definitely drop the cull so that’ll free up a gem slot I’m not sure what to do with, but hey, bonus gem slot. I could probably drop fortify as well since it’s up infrequently, but it might save me at some point against mobs that emerge from the ground or some such. Haven’t decided yet.
Also, even though I have a high level decoy totem I forgot to use it which would have help greatly against that boss.
So thanks for making me think more critically about my own build Rock8man, I might have gained up to 2 gem slots to use if I come up with anything I’d rather have in there.
Decoy Totem is absurdly powerful. It’s my default for anything that doesn’t use totems as offense.
Brotector is okay for weapon builds, but I haven’t run into needing the extra dps really - the extra defense when I need it from Decoy has generally been more useful.
Then again, I haven’t really run up against many/any dps checks, since those are generally in later maps/bosses.
Fought Innocence in act 5 on my hierophant. This build is not strong at all right now, and won’t get much of a boost until I’ve run the lab twice (would have been a good idea to run a different build initially, but I don’t like doing that). The one thing it has going for it, though, is that I can drop a wither totem then tag a boss and run around for a while until essence drain drops off, then repeat. Innocence fight simply wasn’t a threat.
Maybe that’s it. I’m good as far as the rest of your advice. The main problem is Act 5 has a lot of ranged units firing at me, and the melee units all seem to blink teleport to me. The decoy totem stays up for exactly as long as it takes to cast when I’m going up against Blue Harbinger version of units, especially. So when I’m casting decoy totem, I’m getting hit. And one second after I’m casting decoy totem, I’m getting hit again because it’s already gone. Especially to blue Harbinger version of units.
Now I have to figure out how to do the labyrinth I guess.
Yeah, if you haven’t done normal lab for a fire nova saboteur it’s an incredible improvement. I never use more than 9 mines at once, but that’s still a 72% increase in area; if you run all 11 for an 88% increase I’d imagine it’s about half the screen. That Bomb Specialist node enables you to kite the mobs rather than getting right up in their grill. Once you have it you can stop using decoy totem too, except against bosses which will speed things up.
That’s why I keep forgetting to drop my decoy vs bosses, I never use it anywhere else now. And do make sure to bring it to lab, decoy totem makes the boss there much easier. Harbingers can always be a bit nasty now though, I’ve had quite a few close calls against them. And I think that’s great because they were a pushover at the start of league.
I seem to vaguely recall someone asking about the QT3 guild a while back, but search didn’t find anything so maybe it my imagination. Figured I’d mention it, just in case. It’s nothing special, basically just access to the guild stash, but that can be helpful on its own! If anyone needs an invite, let me know. Message me in-game at SarahNiekramant. I believe most of the other folks in the guild are officers and can invite also.
