Path of Exile 2

GuardianX said:

It represents a desperate diagnosis for OCD / Autism Spectrum from an actual doctor.

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Fight said:

Either of these any good? I am playing a caster, so I don't know the desirability of their effects for the melee types.

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Lumi said:

Btw pro tip once you get to maps and start getting Atlas points. Spec EVERY point at first into a) more waystone drops and b) higher tier waystone drops

The difference it makes is actually insane. I just did a T15 and I got 5 T15 maps in it and I hear streamers talking about how high tier maps don't drop shit. It's because you really need to spec into every single map thing on the atlas. Once you have a nice pool of high tier maps you should probably switch them to item rarity/quantity.

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Fight said:

Either of these any good? I am playing a caster, so I don't know the desirability of their effects for the melee types.

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Yaamean said:

Stolen from Reddit, just in case it helps anyone else when they get to maps.

So, You're In Maps Now: A quick, dirty guide to mapping in POE 2, highly incomplete, based purely on my own personal experiences​

Discussion

Hi!
I think a lot of people are hitting maps and discovering that a lot of the systems are super fucking opaque. If you don't do mapping "right", it's going to feel really bad. I'm going to try to help you solve this problem, and hopefully people in the comments will chip in, correct any mistakes I make, or offer their own good advice.
I'm going to start with a brief mechanical overview of mapping and then go into some more specific problems/trouble shooting. I'll do one of the ol' line break thingies after the "here's how mapping works" segment if you want to jump straight to the "BUT MAPPING SUCKS AND I'M NOT HAVING FUN" help section.

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OK so mapping in POE 2 is radically different from mapping in POE 1. You still have Waystones, but the Waystone only determines the difficulty tier of the map. The actual layout you'll be running is decided by The Actual Fucking Map.
Each node on the map has icons indicating things that will be in the map when you run it - most notably it will mark bosses, any of the 4 league mechanics, and irratiation + corruption. Irradiation and Corruption do basically the same thing, which is increase the level of the monsters in the map by +1. These are the most important mechanics in the entire map, and a bunch of this guide will be dedicated to explaining to you how to make sure that as many of your maps as possible are Irradiated and Corrupted - especially if they have a Boss.
Corruption and Bosses cannot be "put into" your maps, so let's talk about that first. Some areas of the map will naturally be corrupted, and some will naturally have bosses. Often this overlaps, and that's good. You want to "build on top of" the corruption and boss nodes.

The first thing to understand about this mapping system is that you don't want to spend good waystones on bad map nodes. If you only have 1 tier 7 waystone, you don't want to spend that waystone on a map node that looks like this. That's a shitty ass map. It's not going to drop you a bunch of tier 7 or 8 waystones. If you need to path through a map like this, you should do it using a low tier waystone.

Like I said, corruption and bosses occur naturally. Everything else, you can force with Precursor Tablets. Whenever you clear a Tower map, you can insert a precursor tablet which has 2 effects - first, it will add a mechanic to X number of maps in an area around the tower, and second it will apply two modifiers to every map in that radius. The most important Precursor tablets are the basic Irradiation tablets.

Now, if you're paying attention, you might have already realized what we're going to do here. If corruption and bosses occur randomly, but we can force Irradiation, then what we're looking for is areas which have lots of towers around them and a big, juicy pocket of corrupted bosses in the center that we can irradiate.
Here's what that looks like: this map was affected by 5 towers (one of them is under the text box, and the other is clipped because I wanted you to actually be able to read the text on the map icon lol. I'm sure imgur had some way to fix that, but alas, I am stupid. And bored of messing with the image. Anyway.)
This is the core mechanic of POE 2 mapping. Your goal is to path to towers and activate them around the area you want to grind in. Here is an area I just finished setting up to farm. Notice how there was a way more direct path to most of those towers - I cleared in a huge circle around that corruption patch, rather than cut through it even though it's way faster. Why? Because now I have a solid pocket of 5 corrupted nodes that all have a shitload of tower buffs on them and are almost all irradiated. If I had cut through the center, I would have missed out on several juicy corruption + irradiation maps, because I'd have cleared right down that center strip.

So, for me, that means I did all of that clearing around the outside circle using tier 12-13 waystones, and then as I started piling up buffs, I'd use tier 14 waystone on the kinda juicy nodes, and tier 15s on any really juicy node I had to path through early. I'm not just blindly slamming my highest tier waystone into map after map. I'm using my tier 15s on good map nodes.
So, that's your goal. Set up your farm with mid waystones, do your farm with your good waystones. Let's talk about problems.

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1. I CAN'T SUSTAIN WAYSTONES OMG OMG OMG.

a) You're not juicing properly, go read the stuff above for how to set up maps and when to use good waystones.
b) you're not running at least 2 mod or ideally 4 mod waystones. Start alching your waystones. Buy them from the currency exchange.
c) The atlas has some waystone sustain, I'd spec into it.
d) you're dying. Don't die, it's really really bad.
e) don't waste good map nodes by doing really hard waystones. So you finally got everything lined up perfectly and you're doing your first tier 11, but you rolled a pretty gnarly waystone. Mindlessly, you plug it into the beautiful map node you've created - you know, the one with +35% rares, irradiated, corrupted, has a map boss, good layout, everything. So you slap that gnarly ass waystone in, walk into the map, and fucking explode. Don't do that. That map didn't need an insane waystone to make it good, it was already good. Run it with a nice, safe, easy waystone.
f) Do run your gnarly waystones though - use them in travel segments between towers, or on easy map layouts that don't have anything that you care about in them and aren't in good spots to juice with several towers. Bad waystones drop shitloads of other waystones.
g) bosses drop lots of waystones. Save boss map nodes, run them as juiced as you can make them, at the highest tier map you have, but like I said - play it safe on the waystone affixes. I set aside "easy" yellow waystones specifically for boss nodes.
2) I CAN'T STOP DYING OMG OMG OMG.
a) Figure out what's killing you. If you're dying to being swarmed it's probably physical damage. If you're dying to on death effects it's fire, chaos, or lightning damage. If you're dying to Ritual it's probably chaos damage. In general max resists are important, but if you figure out what's killing you at least put on a charm or work on that resist. My life got way better when I stopped having 30% lightning resist, but the immediate fix was just putting on a charm and that alone dramatically cut my deaths.
b) Read your waystones. Some mods are basically free - monsters are armored, more monster life. Others are fucking scary. Scorched ground, 40% more monster damage, 40% damage as chaos damage, etc, etc. Pay attention. If you're going into a hard waystone, play it like it's a hard waystone. If you're going for prog, especially for more atlas points, don't be afraid to run the waystone blue or even white if you're close to an important atlas node.
c) don't put hard waystones into hard maps. Augury fucks my shit up. Crypt fucks my shit up. I'm a minion build. If I roll a map with monsters deal 40% more damage, scorching ground, and monsters deal 40% damage as lightning damage, I'm sure as fuck not putting that into Augury, where all my minions get body blocked, I have to pull fucking levers with a 5 second animation, and I can't see shit. I'm going to run that map on fucking Savannah where I can stand six billion miles away and off screen everything. And I'm sure as fuck not going to run that map with a boss.
3) THE GAME ISN'T ANY FUCKING FUN OMG OMG OMG.
a) Go buy gear. https://www.pathofexile.com/trade2/search/poe2/Standard I guarantee you that at least 80% of your problems could be solved with better gear, and we're at the point where a lot of entry level gear is down to 1-2 exalts.
b) If you don't have the currency to buy gear, note the following: Items that drop with Quality can be scrapped for Quality currency. Items that drop with Sockets can be scrapped for Socket currency. Both of these things still sell pretty reliably. I don't personally think the "pick up every rare for the regal recipe" thing is worth it anymore, regals are down to like 9 per ex and too many rares drop. In general my rule of thumb is if you're going back to town mid map you're picking up too much shit. This held for me all the way until tier 15s, with the occasional exception for really lucky maps. Convert all of that shit to exalts, and then go back to point A.
c) Stop trying to force yourself to play above your build's comfort level. Not every build in POE is a Tier 15 speedclear monster with 0 gear fresh out of the campaign. If you are dying every 2nd map, you are in content that is too hard for your build. If you are dying in normal combat situations, something is broken in your build. If you routinely get dogpiled, buttfucked to death, and lose your map, that is not the normal gameplay experience something is wrong with your build or gameplay. Fix it, or drop down to lower content where you can brute force it, either way you'll have more fun.
4) BUT I'VE BEEN DYING EVERY 2ND MAP ALL GAME OMG OMG OMG
a) POE 2 is a game about defensive layering. You need to be investing in defense on your gear, in your ascendancy, and in your skill tree. If any section of your build doesn't do defense at all, then you need to invest extra hard elsewhere. My current build spends almost 40 skill points purely on defense nodes (energy shield, mana regeneration, maximum mana, and life recoup... though really I should spec out of the life recoup hmmm.....) If I look at my gear, I have max life on every single piece except weapon and amulet. I have resists on every single piece except weapon and amulet. My shield is the most expensive item I own and it has 119 total resistance on it as well as 40% block and 165 life. I spent almost 100 exalts on this shield because I was tired of dying every 2nd map. You probably can't afford that shield, but a shield with 40% block, 100 life, and 2 good resists costs 1ex instead of 100. And I guarantee you that two or three good defensive upgrades like that will dramatically improve your experience in maps.
b) Anoints are extremely, extremely, EXTREMELY GOOD. Many are very expensive, but a lot aren't. Flashy Deflection, for example, costs I think about 5ex and gives you +12% block and 40% increased defenses from your shield. Every single build in the entire game has tons of nodes that would be amazing for it on the skill tree but are nowhere near its pathing. Look at those nodes, find one that uses cheap Distilled Emotions, and put it on your necklace (don't put it on a really really bad necklace, upgrade your neck and then anoint it.)
c) If your build is really really really really bad, you have to fix it or you won't have fun. I'm sorry, there's no nice way to say this. POE allows you to make shit builds that are bad and don't work. If you built a shit build that is bad and doesn't work, the game will not be fun for you. If you are having to buy 50 exalts worth of gear to do tier 2 maps, the problem is that your build is shit and it doesn't work. I didn't have to do any special/specific upgrades when I transitioned from acts to low tier mapping, and my build had been mulching act bosses since act 3 without using the trade site at all. Builds should be online by like act 3 or act 4. If your build is not online at that point it is either a hyperspecific endgame build or it is broken. And frankly, I'm not betting on it being the first option.

Will edit with a direct link when I'm home if I remember.

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Gravel said:

Seems good. About what I'd gathered from watching probably 30 min of videos on maps.

Except then they always throw some weird shit in at the end. What the fuck are annoints? Person just made a guide for people who are clueless and then throw in some random shit at the end without explaining it.

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Caliane said:

yeah,frost bolt is super effective at freezing. accell to get it off screen. scatter shot, for spread. faster cast to not slow me down as much. (wish there was better options here, but its what we got atm.) im 4link atm. 5 link opens things up a bit.

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I do have 105% or so of freeze build up. freeze is op.
(im at about the 82 point version linked)

frostbolts off screen. strong freeze. if i had enough spirit for archmage+clarity+cast on freeze frost walls, I would. (and blink... and grim harvest..)
that said, manual frost walls, and bombs as needed. popping walls does massiv aoe damage/freeze. frost walls cast DIRECTLY on medium or larger nemies instantly pops them for massive aoe damage.
frost boltcan be massive dps itself in the right situation. "aka" if the enemy is up against a wall, and the frost bolt impacts shotgunning aoe.

coldsnap is .5s base cd. so can be spammed. consumes the freeze of your target, but can chain freeze. the rest, if not using elem focus. esp if it pops walls.

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• Artillery Ballista's explosion radius increased to 1.8 metres (from 1.4 metres).
• Artillery Ballista's Damage increased by approximately 21%.