1961

This is very useful, I looked it up previously and had all these posts saying that HOI + COH didn’t work so I never tried it. I just looked it up again after you posted and I find people saying that this was fixed a few months ago.

Definitely gonna try this now.

1962

Maps can drop from anything that can drop a level 60 item or higher, so any normal mob of lvl 60 or yellow+ of lvl 58.

There’s scribe rack things like chests in the catacombs and the library side areas that are supposed to have a higher than normal drop rate for maps, too.

I don’t think Zana shows up outside of maps. You’ll first encounter her once you start running level 68 maps.

1963

And worst case scenario, create a new character in whatever league you have maps, get to Lioneye’s Watch to access the stash, put a few maps in your inventory and then die. Boom, character with an inventory of maps in Standard, transfer back to stash. Pretty silly for basic maps, since you can get them from mobs like Adam and RH said, but I’ve occasionally used this method for other items.

1964

I’m pretty sure merciless Piety (A3, not 4) has increased map drop chance; I seem to remember reading somewhere that it’s like a 1/3 drop rate from her assuming that hasn’t changed. I know I’ve farmed her plenty in the past to get my initial map base.

1965

I’ve only been playing a bit each day lately, doing my daily master missions, but occasionally something interesting still happens. Today I found the unique dagger The Consuming Dark, which converts 75% of fire damage to chaos damage and poisons your enemies. At first I was excited, thinking that would work great for my fire totem marauder, but then I looked at the description of converted damage. It converts type before mods are applied, so I’d lose out on 3/4 of the effectiveness of all my +fire damage mods. I could see making this thing the centerpiece of a pretty good build, but not with all the passive stuff I’ve invested in elemental/fire damage nodes. Ah well, it was still interesting to look at!

1966

I think you misinterpreted that. Your fire modifiers do apply. I basically think of converted/added damage being “tagged” with both its source and destination, and then all modifiers are added together additively. There’s a complicated worked example in the bottom of the wiki page for conversion.

So if you had:
100 fire damage
75% converted to chaos
100% increased fire damage
100% increased chaos damage

This results in 75 * (1 + 1 + 1) [fire and chaos bonus additive] + 25 * (1 + 1) [fire bonus only] damage. What some people get confused by is that it does not give you 75 * 2 * 2 [multiplicative fire and chaos] + 25 * 2, in which case everyone would be shoving damage through as many conversions as possible for multiplicative bonuses.

What you lose with consuming dark is all the ancillary bonuses of the fire nodes you are picking up (e.g. ignite/burn) and the opportunity cost of a high increased spell damage + increased fire damage wand.

1967

If that’s the case, then this bit on the wiki page is way misleading:

Damage conversion is done before any increases, or multipliers are applied to damage guaranteeing that they are only applied once.

That sure makes it sound like anything you convert wouldn’t be affected by the pre-converted damage type.

Anyway, I did check my tooltip DPS, and it went down by several hundred when I switched in The Consuming Dark, even though it actually has a higher spell damage than the wand I was using. I know the tooltips can be misleading, but unless it’s completely and utterly broken, I’m losing some bonuses.

1968

That’s correct - all modifiers are applied after the conversion, but all modifiers that the damage was converted through are applied. That is explicitly stated further down. Again, the way to think of it is that the base damage is “tagged” with modifiers, and only at the very end are all “tagged” modifiers applied to prevent multiplicative application of bonuses through conversion (i.e. 50% fire + 50% chaos resulting in 2.25x the damage instead of 2x the damage).

1969

…and there goes my 74 flame totem Marauder. Died to Gnar on one of Zana’s mission maps. I was kiting him around the totems, got hit with a bleed effect, and hit my bleeding flask…and was dead. What? Oh, I hit the wrong key, that wasn’t the bleeding flask. Whoops.

I think that’s enough PoE for me during this set of challenge leagues. I’ve seen pretty much all the tempests and most of the warbands dudes, and gotten 4 different builds up into Merciless. I’d already stopped doing anything more than daily master missions, so this is a good point to take a break. I’ll keep an eye on the news, to see when they add something else interesting.

1970

Village is sketchy as hell. Even if you execute the fight perfectly (killing both at the same time so they don’t enrage) there’s a very high risk of dying. I wouldn’t even attempt those bosses on hc.

1971

New League is out! Anyone else playing? 2.1 is good stuff so far. Not sure how much Talismans really add, but if nothing else it’s a way to fairly easily get a decent rare amulet with an excellent implicit mod.

1972

I’ve been playing a fair bit. SC for the time being while I bang out the challenges and such. Agree about Talismans, but OTOH I don’t have any high level ones and only one tier 1 unique so far, so I don’t have a good sense of the late game impact.

1973

Yeah, I found Night’s Hold but the dumb thing has a green socket, meaning it’s pretty much useless without one of the new green spells. And of course talismans (talismen? heh) are all corrupted, so I can’t chromatic it.

1974

I started a shadow with the new chaos skills. Leveling’s been pretty smooth but I’m hearing rather depressing reports from high level people, apparently the build gets too slow in high level maps. I’m kinda enjoying the playstyle though, even if it’s a bit fiddly.

1975

IMO the high levels are the worst part of Path of Exile. Early on I feel like I’m using combinations of different skills, but when you get a 5 or 6 link I feel like the game starts devolving into spamming one particular ability from the current FOTM list. Absolutely love the game up until that point, though. :)

1976

High levels and 5L / 6L skills are different, for sure. I have a lot of fun a) seeing how ridiculous something like Tornado Shot gets (pretty damn ridiculous) and b) playing around with all the fun combinations of support and trigger gems.

I’d argue that a lot of builds are far more interactive than spamming whatever their primary attack is, though. Managing summons, maintaining charges, positioning, utility/debuff/buff skills – there’s plenty there in a lot of cases.

Of course, there’s also literal one-button wonders like Spin2Win or whatever, but that’s okay too.

1977

For me it’s the opposite. I hate the color matching of sockets, trying to get the right combo of links and colors just to make my skill of choice feel good and actually playable. The real fun for me starts when my build is pretty much done, I have all the auras, curses, links for my main skill and uniques to support the build. Due to the nature of the game at high levels (bursty/hard) I find the simple & well rounded builds a real joy to play.

1978

You could Vorici it. Don’t remember if that needs L8 or if L7 is good enough. But probably not worth for a leveling piece. Also…cast when stunned…so its either defensive only or a 3L melee setup.

EDIT: Or I guess totems. Throw a siege ballista gem in there if you’re using a bow?

1979

Hah, do totems work? I tried traps and they didn’t fire off the trigger. Amusing if the ballista does.

Not that it matters for my current Tornado Shot lady. She would care very little indeed for the occasional free ballista.

1980

I got my Essence Drain character to lvl 80 (softcore talisman), feels pretty good right now. I got ~15.5k dot damage and can kill 3 screens of mobs with a single cast if they’re close enough. Clear speed is decent, build is not dependant on gear, overall I feel like this is a great way to start a new league and comfortably cruise to maps without relying on the same old boring flame totem tactic.