Path of Exile

People take Iron Reflexes because it's a safe way to build decently without much input and because it used to be the only way to really build. With that said I think it's now the worse of the 2 paths. They also take it because they want Unwavering Stance, and if you get US then why not take IR, I mean, you can't evade anyway so might as well convert evasion to armor so you can equip different types of armor and Grace isn't wasted.

Evasion isn't "streaky". It uses a system that works kinda like adding a number based on accuracy vs evasion into a pool, and everytime the pool hits 100, the hits connects and 100 is substracted. If your evasion is low, the hit is like 90, the starting number is random, let's say 40, so first hit you're at 130, you get hit, you're now at 30, 2nd hit you're at 120, you get hit, now at 20, 3rd hit you get hit now at 10, 4th hit you get hit, now at 0, 5hit you dodge. There's no randomness to it other than the initial hit and what value you start at. Now against a large amount of mobs, you can get hit by every mob on first hit and take large bursts, so that part is fairly streaky, however if you evasion is high, they will all miss their 2nd hit. So you only need enough to survive the bursts. With the right amount of evasion, block(separate roll), acrobatics(dodge which is like block other than you can't get stunned, separate roll), enfeeble(accuracy reduction, up to 80% iirc?) and blind(75%chance to miss), it means you literally get hit once in 100+hits by a given mob, assuming it's properly debuffed. It will never hit twice in a row(unless it's a spell then you're kinda fucked).

The only thing to understand about Evasion is first, you need health, because you will get hit sometimes, and you need to be able to survive, nothing really special there, it's basically the same shit as armor. The second is you need to stack all the various sources of avoidance to make sure you keep a high lvl. Evasion alone sucks, Evasion+acro sucks, Eva+acro+block is alright but still kinda sucks, Eva+acro+block+blind is great, add Enfeeble which both reduces accuracy AND damage and you're golden. Don't even need to lvl Enfeeble(which is int based so annoying to use if not dagger), but a quality gem helps a lot.

On the other hand, Armor sucks everytime you fight something that has high damage. Armor blocks based on the damage done, not as an absolute reduction, and it blocks less the bigger the hit is. That means that for armor to actually matter, you need to bump it very high before the big hits. If you know the big hits are coming and Granite of Ironskin+Molten Shell+End charges, then you won't take a whole lot of dmg. If you don't do that shit, armor alone is fucking useless. Similar to Evasion really, you need all the tools combined for the stat to actually matter.

Well usually people get discouraged in act1 cause it's fairly bland, if you made it to act3 and still don't like the game I would assume it's simply not the game for you. I do find the char building fun, searching for ideas and seeing how they work out, plus everytime you reroll you're better geared than last so you can skip more bullshit and go straight to the interesting part(which is still leveling, but I mean don't have to overlevel everything and all).

Is that first Piety fight or 2nd btw? Lightning resist sounds like first, which is very easy, just 2 topaz rings from the vendor should do the trick really and only have to take her to half hp. The 2nd fight is where shit gets serious, and imo one of the greatest area in a video game, Lunaris is insane. Dominus is also a great fight.

Maybe it's your build that's not fun? Some builds kinda suck at lower levels or require gear to be fun. Like most attack based builds tend to suck if you don't have a good weap, but they're a lot more fun when you have great weapons, like you can drop every mob in one hit and just fly through shit, kill bosses in seconds and what not. Lets you get to higher levels where you can get the nice supports on your skills which make the build cool.

Don't know I think it's a really great game but yeah I can understand people not finding it interesting or fun.

You can kite Dominus too, just need to bring the TP scrolls. My Cruel dominus kill on my summoner was ugly as fuck. I think I burned 15TPs. First 2phases went as expected, the initial mobs wiped all my zombies and spectres 10secs into the fight(that's +1 zombies with minion resist, minion health, all minion health nodes in the tree, vitality+purity aura) then I spent the rest of the time with the skelebro totem, fire traps and my awesome 400DPS EK(or whatever it was at the time, just EK+faster proj+added fire, no spell dmg passives, wand is kinda good though even if it's like lvl 25, 57%spell dmg and 7%cast speed or something like that).

When he went caster lightning form I tried resummoning zombies, nope, his totems kill them near instantly, so again whole phase skelebros, EK, and fire traps. Bunch of TPs but I found some spots in the room where you can stand while he does his lightning shit and he doesn't hit you so it wasn't very hard, just took like 5 solid minutes of running around and doing no damage.

Then last phase, my minions could actually survive for a bit now since aoe damage goes down a lot in that phase, however now I couldn't, so I was portal hopping like crazy. Couple of times I'd just zone in the portal then wait for the invuln timer while the zombies I had summoned last time were getting killed(and doing damage). Ugly ugly fight. Ended up killing him though so it's all fine and I never was really in that much danger, dropped to half hp a few times during last phase but nothing too bad for a 150armor no ES(because of EB) no evasion 1.8k caster.

Funny enough, few levels later my zombies leveled and they're now fucking beast. Merveil? Punched that bitch down in 30seconds, not a single zombie dead. Vaal? Motherfucker smashed into my zombie like 5times and killed ONE, died in 1minute or so and I wasn't even DPSing cause I was scared of hitting a stray slam, just fire traps+minions. Shit changes so much when you reach the sweet spot for minions, but fuck the levels before. I guess had I grinded until 56 or so before doing Dominus I would have crushed him too though. I dropped

Anyway that to say, Dominus isn't all that bad if your build isn't completely awful, but it's definitely the hardest fight in the game.


As for your build Dandai, if it's a witch build I assume it's a caster build, like freezing pulse witch or something? I find these fairly boring, I think melee tends to be more fun, but it's a lot more dependant on finding good weapons though, it can be awful too. The 3skills thing is common to all builds. I mean right from the getgo, you can only have so many active skills due to hotkey limitation and then due to gem limitations. Also in terms of optimization, you're gonna want to reduce them, which leads to builds rarely requiring more than a handful of skills. I personally like fillers though. I always have conversion trap, spectre, fire trap or decoy on my chars and use them to deal with issues in a different way than usual.

Eventually your build is so optimized you rarely can afford free sockets to put shit in, but especially early on, you don't need to 4L all your skills and shit, so I generally use all the empty gem sockets for utility stuff, makes it more fun too. You don't HAVE to only keep 3 skills, even though as a new player one issue is finding the additional skills, I generally multilog accounts to get a bunch of early gems stocked up so I can use a few things.