I’ve only played this game for hundreds of hours, and I figured I’d find out eventually myself in the game, but at this point I have to admit it will never happen, so I have to ask: What are maps? I mean, clearly they’re something you can put in the shared tab, and they’re called maps, so my educated guess is that it’s some kind of instanced dungeon you activate from an inventory object? When you activate it, does it open a portal next to where you’re standing or something, and that’s how you get to the dungeon?
And why would having them in a shared stash be advantageous? They’re hard to come by? (I mean, clearly they are, since I played for hundreds of hours but never ran across them in the game).
Maps are the endgame of the game, after act 10. They are items which drop, and can be activated at a map device to create an instance to play. They start dropping about content level 60 and come in tiers, and can be crafted white/blue/yellow like other items before being activated.
You have to encounter another master in the content somewhere, Zana. When you have done a mission for her, you can press the G hotkey to see the Atlas page, which will show all the maps, tiers, etc as you get and explore them. The Tier 1 maps start in the corners, and tier 1 map content can drop t1-t3 maps which are “connected” on the atlas. I’m sure more experienced will have more details.
Map mods are based on the low/mid/high thing. E.g. a low tier map cannot roll “players are cursed with vulnerability” (iirc), as that’s a mid tier mod. Map mods add to the quality and quantity of items dropped, which is why you spend currency on them. Rerolling of low tier maps should be minimal, done out of laziness on midtier (if a map rolls with something bad like your reflect opposite you’re typically better trying to vendor for an alch+ but hey if you have the currency. . .), and is usually done heavily on high tier I understand it.
Each unique “clear” (defined as: low tier “kill boss of magic map”; medium “kill boss of rare map”, high “kill boss of rare + corrupted map”) gives +1% chance that map drops on a given map will be +1 tier. Bosses have a decent chance to drop any map, and for it to be +1 or +2 tier, by which I mean “I once ran like 15 straight maps and they didn’t drop any maps at all fuck you RNGGGGGGGGGG wait j/k ilu”.
The really heavy map stuff comes from shaper/elder influence on the map itself. Zana’s big contribution is that she gives a bonus to quanity/quality based on her level (+1% per level) and you can additionally add special mods in addition to whatever other mods a map has, for a price of Chaos orbs or higher. E.g. you can add Beyond to any map for 3 or 4 c (can’t recall off hand), and as Beyond is also a mod you can roll on a map you can double Beyond.
Also wild zana = Inception, aka free map run! With occasionally brutal victory conditions.
Map pools can be hard to maintain. Low tier is easy. Mid tier is not as easy especially as you go up to the top of the tier. Top tier is not easy at all. I think it does help once your Atlas gets decently filled. I’m currently at 10+ for each of the mid tiers and I’ve been running them steadily, which is something ( I have run perilously low on Alchemy orbs twice now, though). I have never run a high tier map, but I am going to soon.
Oh, maps have variants of the bosses you face in game. The variants come with increasingly nasty abilities as you go up in tier, as you might expect.
Hello, everyone. My name is ineffablebob, and I’m a PoE addict.
Join us on the dark side (of maps)!
Seriously, anyone who wants to run some maps, ping me in-game. The only requirement is that you have to be past the second Kitava fight at the end of Act 10 (and if you need help with that fight I can do that too). Whisper to @ineffablebob should work no matter which toon I’m on. (FYI that’s because I have one toon actually named ineffablebob. For some reason whispers to your account name don’t always work unless one of your toons is named the same.) Or just add me to your friend list. Always up for some cooperative slaughter!
Heh. Don’t worry, I mostly only play hardcore, so I doubt I’ll ever get past Act 5, let alone Act 10. The damage spikes in this game are crazy. I’ll never survive up to maps, I’ve concluded. It’s just not designed to.
The key that the game never tells you: if you want to have a successful hardcore character, there is pretty much only one way – lots and lots and lots of life. Get life on all your gear, get all the life nodes you can possibly reach in the tree, at the expense of almost everything else. Go respec out of those crit and ele damage nodes to get those 4 life nodes, and then start towards those 4 more life nodes.
My current HC char is lvl 70 and only has 3600 life in act 9 and I am very squishy and have been pixels from death several times. My early casual for-fun characters might have had 1800 life at this point, and thats a one-hit death every rare/boss fight. I would like to have about 5K+ life at this point, but I am SSF so had to get some resists in the tree, and my gear is quite poor overall. Also my masters are not very levelled so master mods are not great.
Don’t think I’ve hit 5k that early, but I’m definitely looking to have about 4.5k life before I take on Kitava 10. Although I might be done with PoE, certainly short term. I had more fun in the one day Royale mode than the league.
I think the only thing that’ll get me back playing is a racing season like they used to have; I’m just not interested in reaching end game anymore. Too much grinding and the fights have become too complicated for me anyway. Some 1 or 2 hour races though, I’d be in on those.
Smacked down T6 Elder for the first time with no trouble. Went in blind though, so died to his death nova because I did not read the wiki and know to retreat to Zana’s bubble, ugh.
I think I may finally have gotten the hang of the Elder fight, on my fourth time through. Took him out at tier 12 without a death, despite getting hit with both the mega-slow and the no-way-out cage thing. Really makes a difference knowing when to use flasks! He was nice enough to drop a Watcher’s Eye, although it doesn’t seem like those two mods are the best combination. Still, I dropped it in the guild stash in case someone can make use of it.
4% increased maximum Energy Shield
5% increased maximum Life
6% increased maximum Mana
Immune to Freeze while affected by Purity of Ice
41% increased cooldown recovery speed of Movement Skills used while affected by Haste
RIP my HC 73 in merciless lab. I got a swiftness darkshrine, then Izaro bled me and I ran myself to death before I noticed. Pissed me right off, so I ran through the rest of act 10 but had 2 more deaths at Kitava, so that made me feel better. Now I have to start another HC SSF since I am addicted to OnIG now.
Condolences, that sucks. Bleeding, and to a lesser extent burning, is really hard to see when your eyes are busy trying to avoid threats rather than looking at the little status icons in the upper left. A bit more sound, or noticeable visual effect on your character or surroundings, would really help…if the devs were interested in keeping us alive. Which they’re not. :)
And on the subject of weapons that say weird things, apparently Innsbury Edge does too.
Well, I made my first foray into the Shaper’s Realm last night, and got my ass handed to me. Which is to be expected, really, despite having read/watched various guides to the fight. I made it all the way through all the various minor boss kills to the final Shaper fight, when he’s down under 25%, but my summoner’s spectres just didn’t have the skills to finish the fight. Not enough damage to take him out quickly, and once there were a bunch of those void floor patches, the minions kept dying (being too dumb to move off them). Assuming I can find/buy all the right maps, I’ll probably try again someday, but first some upgrades are in order.
So, first order of business, 6-link for my spectres. Which I probably should have done a while ago, but this experience gave me the kick in the pants needed to actually do it. Bought a new Vis Mortis with better stats and linked it up (took 506 jewelers and 380 fusings, first time I’ve ever actually rolled up 6 slots and links). That gives the spectres another “more” fire damage gem in the form of Chance to Ignite, which should help on the big-life bosses. And I also bought a upgrade to one of my jewel slots to give my minions +9% elemental resists, which should cap the spectre elemental resists (along with my various other bonuses).
Very first map I ran after shifting around the various gear, I got my first ever six-link drop (well, not counting Tabula Rasa) in the form of one of the armor/evasion body armors. Spend a ton of currency on six-linking something, find one right after. Sometimes I’m sure the RNG is poking fun at me.
Good job getting to the last phase on your first try! I bet most people fail on slams, ball management or the Zana phase. And yeah, spectres aren’t the optimal choice for that fight. My personal recommendation for learning fights are totems, you can recast them at will, and you generally have insane life regen and life pool from staying on the left side of the tree.
Here’s my trapper attempt from like two leagues ago:
This is the first time I am really trying to sell stuff on the market. Damn it is a black art. I mean, life and triple res, you can sell it at a decent price, but it’s hard to spot the less obvious affixes in the right combinations, with the right tier rolls that make an item worth big bucks.
Thoughts on my pricing for these? Both 4L with on-colours. The first is a quasi-6L and the second has some weird looking pricing on poetrade for similar - gets up to EX range pretty quick, but mine is held back by the fire (edit) res roll. It’s not even top tier life, but has good armour.
Yeah, really not sure what is wrong with my poetrade-fu on those boots, I was going to price them at a couple of alchs, until I ran a search and ended up scratching my head at the results. I mean, it’s good armour and lightning res, but mediocre everything else.
Good fun running a few red maps today with @peacedog! Killed a couple of elder guardians along the way, though I learned that I need to be running my boss-fighting gear (as opposed to item qty gear) even on a tier 11 guardian. Extra 1.5k life and ~40% DPS makes a huge difference. At least if it’s the Eradicator, all that lightning is a pain in the butt.
Too bad that last run against the Enslaver didn’t count when he croaked right after doing lethal damage to your Cycloner. Spectre damage waits for no man, I’m afraid. We’ll get him next time!
