My problem with bows was always figuring out a properly layered defensive strategy. Glass cannons tend to hit a pretty hard wall in early/mid maps in my experience.
KevinC
5468
Here’s a snippet from the bow section:
Since explosive arrow doesn’t care about bow damage from what I recall, it likely wasn’t buffed unless the skill itself was adjusted.
Yah I think it’s all about attack speed, ignite, etc, but explosive arrow was already pretty great, adding base damage possibilities to it, especially with something like elemental overload (as the explosive part procs after the initial hit), I’m guessing you could do some shenanigans. If you used say…ice to proc EO, giving you -25 to everything else, and then ignite procing, giving you -25 to your next shot leading with ice again. Seems like you could have a perma loop of elemental overload.
Arc witch might be pretty interesting to try as well. It’s a really fun playstyle, would be pretty amazing with more damage.
Freeing up hit-based bow builds to allow for more defensive nodes might be a great solution.
Arc Witch is tons of fun and a great league starter.
I am not one of those players yet, maybe later this weekend, but it’s good to see the game is still popular.
I got in and played a bit so maybe I was one of them!
Zephyr
5473
I went with a toxic rain champ and enjoying the play style. I was blessed with an exalt during leveling, so early endgame gearing was less painful than normal. So far the atlas passive tree looks like a great improvement over the whole watch stone system.
Looked at bows, then rolled a summoner. Halfway through Act 6. Had one nice unique drop which I flipped for 40c to pick up a Tabula. Levelling was pretty damn smooth, even without the Tabula.
Need Dead Reckoning though. Two days into league they were 10c on poetrade, now they are around 1ex. Sigh. No biggie I suppose, that is affordable enough and will come down over time.
Bateau
5475
I’m in a similar situation, except I went EA, which I haven’t played since 2016 probably. First time playing a champ and I love it, the extra tank is more than welcome. Lucked out a bit and got a Demon card (current value 9-10 exalts, although some guy did try to scam me about 15 times for it last night lol) so hopefully I’ll be able to get a +3 bow soon.
KevinC
5476
Tell me about it. I was chasing dead reckoning since league start, no matter how many chaos my friend and I put together we were always just behind the price inflation.
That changed by Sunday morning though, price crashed 25% overnight (GMT -7 reference). Picked it up for around 60 and was still trending downward.
Romalar
5479
Hmm, I’m clicking The Eater of Worlds button on my map device for running some T9-10 maps and it doesn’t appear to do anything. Anyone know if this is purely for higher-tier maps?
Edit: Ugh, now I’m getting the blazing encounters but can’t actually click the choices.
Eventually, a T11 Eater finally worked and I got the next progression.
Bateau
5480
In the quest log it says what tier of maps is needed for the next threshold, and the buttons themselves should say something along the lines of “has no interest in map because level is too low” when they are disabled.
Took my usual leisurely stroll through the story and got VitalityChallenged into maps. Physical skeletons still work just fine for leveling and early maps, and I expect will probably be fine through mid-tier as well. I’ll probably have to min-max a bit for upper tier stuff, assuming I persist with the league that far. I haven’t played in a few leagues, so there’s been some adjustments - flasks work a bit differently, passive tree changes, and so on. Nothing major, though.
Archnemesis is fine. I’m not super excited about it, but it’s not problematic, as they seem to have largely learned the lessons of prior leagues. No need to clog up inventory space with the special items, there’s plenty of opportunities to trigger the boss fights, and the basics of the recipe system are pretty straightforward. I’m sure it gets crazy complex when you’re after the top-level mods like everything else in PoE, of course. I ran out of mods to use pretty regularly while leveling, but I expect in maps there will be more drops since there’s more rare monsters.
Romalar
5482
It absolutely did tell me I could do it at T10, and it was bugged multiple times in different ways. However, now that I’ve tried to fight the Eater of Worlds from my T11 invitation, I’ve completely lost interest in this boss progression since it completely disables my build. Maybe on a re-roll.
Bateau
5483
The boss design continues to be terrible across the board. I still don’t know what to do with the orbs in that fight, fortunately I had enough damage that I only got oneshot twice.
Also, I learned today that you can activate Maven to witness the guardians. Did it on a minotaur. Bad, bad idea.
Romalar
5484
Yeah, it’s too bad since I’m liking the other changes to mapping and the Atlas tree.
I haven’t hit any of the new bosses yet, but I’m in no hurry. My experience over the years has been that the new big fights are almost always overly hard in the first couple of weeks of the new league. Then they do some kind of balancing, plus the community comes up with tactics options, and things settle down to more normal difficulty. Which is usually still too hard for my taste, but is at least possible.
Bateau
5486
It’s mostly the sheer amount of shit the fight throws at you, and the frequency with which it comes. I’m patting myself on the back every day for sticking Vitality in my build, it’s a huge help. Even if you have dps coming out the ass there are still threshold moments in the fight where you cannot damage the boss (and therefore leech), but the spells and all the degen ground continues to do damage. And the level of precision that is required to avoid some of this stuff is absolutely insane, especially when you factor in how fast endgame characters can move.
Other than that, A++ patch, I’m having tons of fun mapping and casually running T16s. I think I finished my atlas (with bonuses) in 2 days completely solo without trading. And the number of encounters on each map is through the roof, you can easily get 3-4 different league mechanics on a map, and that’s before you factor in scarabs and map influences and so on. Last night I ran an exarch influenced T16 Dungeon with Beyond modifier, and thanks to my atlas passive tree with a hint of nostalgia to it and lots of points in Beyond I must’ve killed about 30 or 35 Beyond bosses on that map. Pure insanity, Bameth Na’em and that lightning dude literally around every corner.
The new league desperately needs a new UI though, I’ve completely given up on it until it gets fixed, and I’m far from the only one who thinks like that if reddit is anything to go by.
