5226

Behold, a new hat!

Kinda cool they’re just giving it away for getting through the story.

5227

I’ve been keeping an eye on youtube prior to the league launch and have seen someone talking about a cremation build which seems… interesting. Unfortunately it’s one of those streamers who blitzes through a build and I like my builds written and made for dummies.

Another interesting thing I’ve noticed about the PoE youtube gang is that all the streamers seem to be trying to hone their racing skills. There is a streamer named tytykiller who is a master racer, and I’ve seen a couple of other streamers (ZiggyD, Zizaran) paying him to coach them in being more efficient/faster in leveling. I guess if you’re leveling stuff for a living it makes sense to be as efficient as possible (whereas I tend to dawdle along and don’t feel forced to go as fast as possible so long as I sort of have an idea as to what I’m doing). It does strike me as amusing when a youtube dude says “it should only take you 8 hours to get to level 80.” And I’m like… sure, dude. A lot of times in new leagues I spend an hour or two trying to figure out the new mechanic (which a lot of these guys don’t even touch until they hit endgame).

At any rate now my 3 potential starters are:

  • minion build focusing on spectres ultimately using Redemption Sentries or Redemption Sentinels(?). Dudes you can only get from a conqueror map, so you don’t get them until level 70+.
  • Volatile Dead Spellslinger Necromancer
  • Max Block Warcry Cremation Berserker… though this build is just something I saw in a video this morning, so it might be a half-formed idea. But the streamer (tarkecat) says he’s going to use it as his league starter and will keep updating it so odds are I will be able to follow what he’s doing.
5228

He’s already used it before FWIW so it’s tried and tested.

5229

And now I’ve just become enamored with a Dominating Blow Guardian. I’ve never used that before, and it’s a minion build so maybe It will satisfy my love of minion builds. Plus it seems pretty tanky so it’s a bit of a twist on the traditional Necromancer summoner.

5230

I did one of those a while back. The one I did was a low-life, gazillion auras build. It was fun but I haven’t run it for a few leagues, so I’m sure there’s been improvements!

5231

I think it was Blight? But maybe not. Admittedly the memories of various flavors of murder hobo bands can blend together.

Enki has reworked his Arc build to use Necro + Spiritual Aid and build large hp/mana pools/good tankiness and have good but not great DPs. I’m going to lead with it, I think. Arc is one of my five favorite skills and I haven’t touched it in quite awhile.

5232

I was looking at the Arc build again and the 3.11 version is there, but the Path of Building link doesn’t work because PoB seems not to have been updated with the new passives. At least, it tells me it’s using the latest version (1.469 or something).

5233

Are you using the old vanilla Path of Building or the community fork? It needs to be the latter (the devs hired Openarl and he can’t give it the proper attention anymore). I’ve got the arc build imported and it’s working fine.

5234

Ah, must be the old build. I never heard of the fork, and didn’t play the last league. Thanks.

5235

Well, I hadn’t planned to play day one, but my prior plans for today got moved. So now we can answer the most important question of the day:

The AgriculturalEngineer has begun to farm! Decided to go with Dominating Blow, more or less following this build, although I’m gonna find a way to shoehorn in the new Rallying Cry.

Through Act 1, the farming seems pretty straightforward. I like that Oshabi tells you when there’s something ready to harvest, whenever you come across her in the wild. I do not like that there’s no stash access or way to sell stuff when you enter the farm that way. I forsee myself doing a lot of waiting until finishing the current zone, then going to the farm via waypoint. And of course, forgetting about it, failing to harvest stuff on time, and wasting growth cycles.

5236

There is. When it’s time to use life energy, there’s a button that allows you to access your stash. You7 cannot take items, but you can “remote craft”.

5237

Better than nothing I suppose. But it doesn’t help with “look at all this crap on the ground that I can’t pick up or sell” which is the most annoying part. Won’t matter later on, I suppose, but it sucks early on.

5238

At first I was surprised at this comment because I’m not seeing lots of anything, but then I remembered I took the unusual move (for me) of running a Strict filter from the get go. I have seen like 1-2 rares at most from the packs.

5239

That’s funny. I’m doing the same build with DominationWithoutPants, more or less following this build by BalorMage. The build has been great so far - I’ve just started using Dominating Blow and I love it. My biggest difficulty so far is trying to find the correct links. I am still looking for two three-links that are R-R-B.

I haven’t tried the gardening at all yet, thought I’d hold off until later on. Been gathering the seeds though but haven’t planted any. I also didn’t free Navali from the cage because I hate her.

5240

I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how accessible the gardening is at low levels. A lot of prior leagues have either been death traps for lowbies, or really didn’t do anything interesting. The ability to do little crafting exercises after a harvest, though, is great for helping out your crappy lowbie gear.

Aw, poor Navali. I always free her, but then largely ignore her until I’m into maps. Not sure which of us is treating her worse. :)

5241

After thinking about my gear for a while, I finally figured that I haven’t been getting much in the way of drops because GGG wants us to do the crafting associated with Harvest. So I started doing that. So far, not terrible.

Also, this Dominating Blow build is taking off - I started steamrolling stuff around the end of Act 4 (maybe not coincidentally that was when I did my 1st Lab). I just scoffed at Innocence (a fight I hate so much that I regularly scream “FU” at the screen when I kill her. Did it deathless, which is rare for me).

Right now the biggest issue I have is trying to fit all the links into the build. Zizaran did a Path of Building guide to BalorMage’s build and they are slightly different while leveling. I realized I’d forgotten to add War Banner (at level 4!) and Enduring Cry to the build so I did that. But now my mana is soooo tight. And I accidentally way over leveled my Clarity so I can’t even use the one I have!

There are worse problems to have.

Regarding Harvest - when you have life essence and nothing to craft with it what do you do? I have been buying some pylons and condensing the left over. Not sure what else I could do. But I’m planting more and more seeds.

Is there a reason to plant lower level seeds (say level 10 seeds when I’m level 20) or should I just save them for some other character? Do the different seeds unlock different crafting options?

5242

I’m baffled by the harvest stuff. I’ve done a couple of harvestings I guess, and planted a couple of different seed plots,but beyond that, I have no clue what’s going on.

5243

Here’s ZiggyD’s guide:

The answer, naturally, is it depends. As Ziggy’sd video points out, there’s really two sorts of life energy. There’s the energy you get from a specific harvest, and it is what you use to craft and make new harvest gear. this energy is temporary; you’ll either spend it all right then or condense it. Condensed energy can only be used to fuel growth, which becomes important when you start doing T2+ seeds, as they will require condensed energy from the other seed types.

So condensing it doesn’t hurt. But if all you have is your harvester, the condensed energy goes to waste. So I think getting some storage units built for each color is pretty important, as they can hold 300 condensed energy. They take 75 life energy, which is easily accomplished from a full harvest.

The final structure allows you to store crafts, which sounds very cool. It costs 1800 life energy, which seems like a lot but can be achieved from a non full (but probably 70-80% full) T2 harvest, I believe. T1’s give like 7 life energy base, T2s 40 or 60 (can’t recall), and the higher level it is the more energy you get but I don’t know specifics. T3’s give like 200+.

The goal is to accumulate and harvest t1 stuff, get extra structures and the occasional gear craft, and accumulate T2 seeds so you can start harvesting those. It’s more complex due to the growth requirements - you’ll need condensed energy fed into those t2 seeds - but not too bad. The video includes a link to some visual guides on setting things up.

Note that you can reclaim planted seeds at the cost of losing growth and any condensed energy that contributed to that growth, where applicable. If you pick up a building, it keeps what ever energy it had on hand where applicable. E.g. if you need to move a full storage it remembers it had 300 condensed energy and it’s waiting for you when you put it back down.

So, apparently there’s some level restriction where if you are in zones beyond some threshold below a current level seed, they will not grow when the pod is harvested. Don’t think the mechanics are known yet. I don’t know if the seed storage is account wide, assuming yes. So yes saving some won’t hurt. But I’m not sure it’s super important. Your brand new character wouldn’t be able to grow high level plants. If the garden is account wide, it does mean you could store choice high level crafts for your alt to leverage of course.

5244

Condensed lifeforce also buffs the enemies and improves item drops.

5245

Good to know.

That may be impacting what I am seeing because early act 5 and I have a whopping 3 t2 seeds. I don’t harvest at every opportunity but I’ve done a good bit. I feel like I should be seeing more but shrug maybe it;s still too early for that.