Summoner is pretty rough starting this league, I felt. Abysses are rough for quite a while. I bailed on mine for ice shot.
Sarah recently cleared out a Marshes map, which contained two Abyss spawns. I’ve noticed that you have to be extra careful in maps when this happens, because the cracks can run pretty close to the second spawn point. If you run over the second one while the first is still active…well, that would be a life-limiting move.
Anyway, the first abyss was a real pain, spawning multiple rares at the end with fun mods like faster attack aura, regen, and extra life. Took a good while to take them down, but I was pretty happy at the end when this dropped:
A summoner unique in SSF! Wonderful!
And then I looked closer. It’s two handed, so I’d be giving up my wand/shield at 3 sockets each. That’s losing sockets unless I spend a lot of currency rolling six slots. And for a summoner, losing gem slots is a very big deal.
On top of that, there’s no defenses other than the 18% block chance. That’s a huge step down from a shield with 94 ES and 111 life, not to mention all the resistance bonuses.
So, the old Femur is probably going to end up sitting in the stash. So close to a really good drop, too.
Yeah, I’ve thought about a build for that staff. Figure it would have to be 6linked for SRS. Then something like zombie+spectre+minion life+minion res, and a skeleton totem cluster. With enough life that many meat shields should keep you alive while your fiery skulls wreak destruction. Not a build for SSF though; getting 6 sockets isn’t that hard even in SSF but linking it would require stupid amounts of time or luck.
I do want to try it at some point; I’m pretty sure I have one of those staves lying around in some league or other. Actually I wonder how well SRS would do with just 5 links; that should be possible even in SSF. Maybe after all the current plans are ground into dust by abyss mobs.
I’m at lvl 82 on SSF Abyss with an ED/contagion build which by far the best SSF build I’ve ever tried. 4k hp 1k es and 30k aoe dps clears maps easily n it goes to more than 100k at bosses (with wither and blight). Can do all map mods(highest tier is 11 so far) although the ‘monsters cannot be slowed’ mod can be tricky. I have had no good drops except the Heartbreaker dagger (which isn’t great for dps but does improve survivability and allows whirl blades).
I’m now close to getting lvl6 Vorici which will allow me to start converting my 1k alts and 300 jewels into fusings, which I need to upgrade a decent armour to a 5link.
This league is great, probably even better than Breach when factoring all the improvements in the game since Breach was released.
Apparently it is pretty easy to farm Tabula Rasa, which seems to be a favourite for the ED build.
Apparetnly it does not take too much longer than 2-3 hours to farm the 9x Humility you need from the Blood Aqueduct.
I just bought mine, but I am not limiting myself to SSF.
I’ve never liked Tabula Rasa and I can’t put my finger on why. I will get a 6link armor drop sooner or later and then I’ll chaos, scour/alch or even scour-alt-regal-exalt it. It’s not like the thousands of orbs I’m gathering have any other use. :)
The best thing about the ED build is that I don’t need to waste chaos orba to reroll maps, I do them all regardless of mods and keep the chaos for item rolling only.
I’m rooting for you but my money is on the ‘later’.
Oh, sure, now they nerf him! Still gonna avoid that guy if I roll another HC melee toon, though.
Yea, I’m not a hardcore player so I don’t think I’ve ever got more than 3 6link drops per league and if they are all weapons or high dex/high str, I won’t have much use of them. However, armours with decent rolls drop more reliably and I can easily craft 6 sockets and 5 links on them which would put me at ~20% less dps which is not much of a tragedy.
I died to that stupid ant too…
https://i.imgur.com/ae1h8VY.png
I’m a hardcore player and I think I had one or two 6 link drops over the last 3 leagues, lol.
I mean, I do get a 6L (multiple, in fact) every league without fail but that’s either by spamming fuses or trading for it.
Hm I was under the impression 6 link was close to the drop rate of an exalt but I think I confused it with its vendor value so it’s probably less than 3 drops since starting to play the game 3 years ago rather than per league (700 hours according to Steam :P).
I went ahead and took Sarah through the 3rd Lab, taking Beacon of Corruption for the chaos resist. It’s nice to actually be in positive territory on chaos resistance, and the extra chaos damage when a minion dies doesn’t hurt. When I hit something that can actually knock down a zombie, the extra 700-ish chaos DoT per zombie is a nice little boost. The only downside is that there are constantly little poison cloud effects everywhere from dying spirits and skeletons, so it’s pretty much impossible to know if I run into a cloud that will damage me. Have to keep a closer eye on the life bubble whenever there’s poison around.
Right after that I ran an unidentified rare Arid Lake, figuring that the boss would be no big deal with all my newly obtained chaos resist. This was indeed the case, but getting there was a challenge. One of those unknown mods was a Beyond mod, and the very first group spawned Ephij. After that I was much more careful about what I killed and how fast! Same map had a breach in it, and several strongboxes, but I avoided those in the interest of staying alive. Probably could have handled it, but why put yourself in a situation where a lag spike could kill you, if it’s avoidable?
I might be trying a Detonate Dead build later on in this league, since Sarah just found a 20% quality DD gem off a prophecy.
Kitava is down with my ED/Contagion Trickster. Still died twice, but it seems they toned down the adds a little?
ED is a bit annoying to play with a laggy connection - either my contagions don’t go down properly, or the subsequent ED’s don’t fire off correctly, either of which results in mobs not dying and potentially swamping me.
Need to run merc lab and get into some mapping.
So I hit a wall at lev 50 and Act 6. Couldn’t budge Tukohama’s health bar. Dying stopped my xp. So I took a break and farmed the early Act 6 areas until I hit 52. I had crafted armor and a 2h axe that were both 52. Went back and killed him with only ~4 deaths.
Well that sucks. Running a quick Maze map to get the soul for pantheon and game crashes. Repeats every time I try to zone in to one of the remaining portals. Scratch one divine vessel. Blech. Oh well.
Lately I’m getting a couple of crashes a day. As opposed to none last league.
Yeah, it’s a lot crashier in general for me, too. One of the few things I’m unhappy about.
You can try dx9, maybe it will help with the crashing.
I’ve had zero crashes this league, compared to a pretty steady diet of them last time around. Whatever they did in 3.1.x has been an improvement on my end. For the record:
Windows 10 64-bit
NVidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
Driver version 388.43
Now watch, I’ve just jinxed myself into a crash…
Huh, been rock solid for me and I’m even running a silly crossfire setup.