1941

And don’t forget that you can spend orbs on boxes too! I always alch gemcutter, jeweler and arcanist, sometimes large or ornate too.

1942

How do you end up with so many alch? I barely have enough to supply my Chaos recipe with rings and amulets.

1943

Most come from drops, some from selling cheap uniques. I never use them on pieces that go into chaos recipe though.

1944

Just wanted to say I have epic timing. Yesterday I purchased a premium stash tab bundle (since I missed them the last time they went on sale).

Today they are on sale!

In other news, my dual flame totem Witch is level 69 and about to hit 70 and I’m about to do my first map and it’s all very exciting.

1945

Congrats! Be careful, maps can be a shock as the difficulty level is a step up from most of the normal zones. Especially if you’re not familiar with the bosses.

1946

Have run a few maps and have survived, so that’ good! Unfortunately I have 7 Desert maps still and the Mirage of Bones boss is a bad mutha who I have learned to just run away from. Fortunately I am getting 1-2 map drops per map so I’m at least self sustaining.

1947

Desert maps are the worst.

1948

I wish the game had an option to put a big red exclamation mark on top of enemies with elemental reflect… I’m happily clearing the entire screen in seconds and BAM!; I’m dead. Oh, one of those dudes had reflect… huh.

1949

Yeah that shit drives me nuts, especially when you’re firing projectiles that get you killed by a reflect that’s off-screen.

1950

What kind of insane damage are you doing if you’re dying to reflect? Are you res capped? And the aura is pretty obvious, but I’m speaking as someone with hundreds of hours of experience with the game so ymmv I guess.

1951

Well, that ended quickly. My level 73 dual totem witch was (I think) one-shotted by a boss in a Cemetery map. Not exactly sure what happened, but as far as I could tell, she was ok, then instantly dead. Maybe it didn’t happen that way, but given the lack of a replay or combat log, that’s what it felt like. Sort of sucks but that’s the nature of hardcore.

1952

Do you mean the main boss or just a champion? If it was the main boss, I highly suggest watching a video of each main boss before trying a map for the first time, cemetery is one of the easiest, the only way to die to him is to get lightning warped on top of and it’s slow as heck. Or not have capped resists I guess, but I assume that wasn’t the problem.

Just random guys out on the map, yeah, I really wish the game had a replay or combat log myself for some of my deaths that went unexplained.

1953

I’ve played it a ton as well but I always played bulky melee setups so I didn’t care about reflect. With this witch girl I’m not that high level yet but I’m probably doing around 6k damage / second and with a very fast cast rate I’ll get off 2 cast before I realize that my health is gone. So if the reflect is 1:1 for the sake of the example, I’m getting hit with 12k damage minus resists in a few seconds. Even with capped resists(they are not though, around 40-50 in merc beginning) I’m gonna feel that.
If you’re fast clearing with tons of AOE damage like this, that small glow to signify reflect is not enough for me. I’m basically killing myself because one monster had ONE mod, that’s not cool, imho.

1954

I don’t think it was the main boss (and it didn’t seem to be in an ‘end location’ on the map if you get what I mean) but tell the truth I have no idea what it was. It might have been a champ with a magic pack. There were projectiles flying around and the map I was in had a “monsters do +60% damage as cold” mod on it (but that hadn’t been an issue prior on the map). Plus my resists were all capped (chaos included!). So I really don’t know what happened. It’s possible a couple of projectiles hit me and I didn’t notice and then I got bursted by something; that’s the only theory I can come up with.

1955

You had Chaos capped? On Merciless? Wow. I had no idea equipment existed in the game that could do that. The only thing I’ve encountered is rings with max of 13% (of which I’m wearing two), and shoes and gloves with about the same. Of which I’m wearing one. End result: I only have -33% chaos resist on Merciless.

1956

Get res capped and carry a resist flask that’s the same element as your main attack. For my EA (which has incredible damage) character reflect from aoe is a complete nonissue, even without flask up. For single target I have to stop at 3 arrows or risk losing over 50% of my hp though. But I’m running fire pen gem and flammability curse and the damage I do with 2-3 arrows is enough to oneshot (with ignite) pretty much every rare in lvl 78 maps.

1957

Are you cursing manually? I find it a pain in ass that I don’t have a reliable way to auto-cast curses. I’m playing an Arc Witch with freeze through the “Three Dragons” helmet and so far 35% chance to shock, around 18% spell crit chance + herald of ice to make them explode. I have a flame totem as backup but by far my main damage output is Arc. The whole point of this setup is to freeze and kill the entire screen before any of them get close enough to stun me and the like. It works beautifully except for the reflect mobs. I didn’t exactly spec for survivability though, this is mainly a power fantasy destroy everything -build.

1958

Yes I’m cursing manually. For non-crit builds you have to rely on CoH if you don’t want to curse manually but it’s essentially the same thing - an extra key to press. CoH is the way to go if you’re using Elemental Equilibrium (or applying some other special effect) so that you merge two spell functions into a single key press. It’s also a must if you’re dual (or more) cursing, like a lot of summoners tend to do. For crit builds you just put CoH+curses on your heralds and let your crit chance do the work for you. The latter is somewhat problematic on single target bosses with no adds around though.

1959

So I now I have a character available for mapping in the Standard league who doesn’t have any maps. Is there a way to get maps that doesn’t involve buying them from other players? I have played Standard very little, so I don’t even have a hideout. Is there a way I can find Zana in the world somewhere (I looked in Merciless Eternal Lab but she wasn’t there).

1960

They just started dropping for me once I started clearing the top-end zones in A4.