I will never be good at PoE

"

EpicMaster207 a écrit :

I've been saying since 2012 off and on (more off than on) and I really only made one good character as of yet. And when I say that, I mean it moderately good. (Varunastra earthquake gladiator. Very fun btw)

It's only got 4k life.

But what I've learned is you need to see what other people have done with whatever build you are wanting to make, ask for some help, and spend at least 1hour planning gear, skills and passive tree. 1 hour minimum. At least for me. And then Incorporate every fail into your next build. I have beat merciless dominus wayyyyy too many times to count each with a different failure. Guessing around, eh, 200 or more?
I also still use two emergency insta-life flasks. Bleh. Waste of a potion slot.

But, hey, I'm not (yet) a pro at PoE, but just a few things I picked up on.

lol, I play build theorycrafting more than I play PoE itself, dead serious, I spend much more than 1 hour planning things, sometimes it's all I do to entertain myself

and then my builds suck...

"

toyotatundra a écrit :

4k life anything isn't a tank, it's a squishy character that is begging to get one shot.
To reach 10k life, you need Kaom's Heart and shit ton of life on tree (around 250% maybe?), plus life on every piece of gear except your weapon obviously. Take as many jewels as you can, life roll on every one. Take endurance charges as well. All the rest goes into damage. Btw, 10k life isn't really mandatory.

You can make a decent 2h character, you'll need a good weapon. For melee builds, 2h choice would be something like Atziri's Disfavor, Hegemony's Era if you want to go crit for whatever reason, or Marohi Erqi if you can't afford anything better. For bows, Reach of the Council if you can afford it, Voltaxic Rift if you can't.

ES builds are much better than life, but you also need better (more expensive) gear.

How much HP do people in general think a character needs? 8k?

How much life on the passive tree do you need to take to get there?

How much armour should a character have?

How much armour on the passive tree should a character get?

How much life to armor do you need? (ratio)

How much chance to block should you get?

How can you spec your tree to have the right amount of everything?
there's just never enough skill points and things are always too far away from each other, because it's all math, you never really know how much of everything you need

Forget about the Trypanon Build, this thread is not about one build, it's about builds in general, it's about "what the fuck I am doing wrong" it's about how do you win at PoE?

.

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I think that my problem is that I do not understand the math behind the Tree. % life; %armor; % damage etc. I don't really know which numbers are being changed. When I was was at 2000 life and I took two +5% life nodes, my life didn't go up 200 points. The easy path is to follow another's design and not understand what it is doing. The math of PoE is very complicated. I'm not sure that my ancient brain will ever fully get it, but moving into the merciless lab and maps is a sure way to find out where your weaknesses are.

Isn't there a tree builder somewhere that shows you important stuff as you build a design?

"

Coal48 a écrit :

How much HP do people in general think a character needs? 8k?

How much life on the passive tree do you need to take to get there?

How much armour should a character have?

How much armour on the passive tree should a character get?

How much life to armor do you need? (ratio)

How much chance to block should you get?

How can you spec your tree to have the right amount of everything?
there's just never enough skill points and things are always too far away from each other, because it's all math, you never really know how much of everything you need

Forget about the Trypanon Build, this thread is not about one build, it's about builds in general, it's about "what the fuck I am doing wrong" it's about how do you win at PoE?

As Sarang said, this isn’t really the right approach.

Different builds in different places have different ways of dealing with threats. An Acro/Evasion character in Kintsugi using archery or Frost Blades can get away with, effectively, no armor at all because they mitigate damage through not taking it, and catching what few spikes do get through on Kintsugi’s ‘Recently’ reduction. There’s no plug-the-numbers formula for spitting out a good build every time, especially since ‘good build’ is as much if not more dependent on gear than it is tree and skills. There’s a few general points to consider, but frankly even those are more guidelines than rules.

The other thing is that a lot of your own personal rules are holding you back pretty sharply. You have one skill set-up you like to use – damage skill, CWDT set-up with curses, movement, and other. You hate any sort of RNG spikes, and you tend towards the same build layout with all your builds. You’re consistently using the same approach, and consistently having the same problem – lousy boss-killing. Might maybe be time to vary up the approach?

Try Ancestral Warchief in your next melee build. The Chief is boss as hell. Stuff the Chief in a 4-link with Melee Phys, Faster Attacks, and Conc. Effect (or preferably Bloodlust, if your main build Bleeds things), and it adds significant single-target DPS to your build without compromising your regular clearing at all. Drop the Chief on bosses, get extra melee damage for your own attacks and watch the Chief go bananas on the fat angry thing while you do whatever else it is you’re built to do.

EK is notoriously weak for single-target. Try splicing Bladefall into the build. Again, drop Bladefall > Conc. Effect > Controlled Destruction > Poison into a 4-link, pop Bladefall on bosses, then scoot away from reprisal and do it again.

Once more – bad damage is a huge ‘Less’ modifier to your defenses, because letting things live longer means they have a lot more time to pound their way through whatever you’re staying alive with. If your regular clearing skill is weak on bosses (hint: a lot of the best lawn-mowing skills are going to be weak on bosses), then snag a secondary supplement skill to help beat through the big guys.

As for your questions?


How much HP do people in general think a character needs? 8k?
Depends on how awesome you are, what your other defensive layers are, and what your build does. Melee/point-blank characters usually need more life than ranged characters because they get hit more, which also means they tend to benefit more from armor/flat damage reduction than ranged characters, which tend to benefit more from evasion/Dodge/avoidance since they take a lower overall frequency of hits.

if you have to have a benchmark – and as Sarang said, ‘benchmarks’ are not a great way to go about PoE builds – I’d suggest 4k as a minimum for ranged builds, with 5k as a minimum for melee/point-blank. Neither is a hard-and-fast rule. My own personal rule is “enough to avoid as many stuns as possible”, whilst remembering the points below.

How much life on the passive tree do you need to take to get there?
150% life on the tree is a good starting point. Less than that tends to require some clever defensive redundancies in your build to compensate; more than that tends to be a higher-level concern. Life is the one exception to the “don’t fill out clusters, just grab just enough points for the notable” rule. Every dinky little 5% Life point is something a lot of players feel is crucial, but filling out those dinky 5ers is something you generally get to in your eighties.

Random spitballing? Aim for 120% life by level 50-60, with a good plan to get more whenever you have the opportunity, and shoot for 150-200%. Again, the more time you spend within melee range of enemies, the more life you should be shooting for.


How much armour should a character have?

As much as you can reasonably get, if your build is an armor build. Armor gets better the more you invest in it, there’s no minimum “okay, you can stop now” breakpoint. The key word is ‘reasonable’. Don’t go ten nodes out of your way for a crappy threebie armor cluster, that’s hugely inefficient. If you have to path, try and path in such a way that you path by armor clusters and can snag them on the way. Ideally, you shouldn’t have to go more than two non-armor ‘road’ nodes to get to any given armor cluster you intend to grab.

Also: armor builds do not ‘settle’ for low armor pieces of gear. 400% armor rating applied to a 400-armor chestpiece is 1600 armor. 250% armor rating applied to a 1200-armor chestpiece is 3k armor. 250% armor rating in the tree is eminently doable; 400% is not. Armor builds DO NOT run Tabula Rasa – your chestpiece is your single most important piece of armor and needs to be at least 1k, if not ideally 1200 to 1500, if you want to make an honest stab at armor. Every other piece of gear you have should have armor on it as well. The way armor works, the higher your number is the better the armor works against a wider variety of attacks. Armor isn’t linear – 20k armor is much, much more than twice as effective as 10k armor.


How much armour on the passive tree should a character get?
Again – as much as you can reasonably grab. Designing a really good passive tree takes more than an hour. Planning your pathing to run by things you need without going so far out of your way that you lose too many points to skillgrimages takes experience and time.

How much life to armor do you need? (ratio)
There is no Golden Ratio. You get as much life and armor both as you can manage without compromising the rest of your build. Life and armor both are “more is always better” things. The key thing is to ensure you’re not sacrificing too much of your overall resources to life and armor. Remember – bad damage is a “Less” modifier to all your defensive layers, including life and armor.

How much chance to block should you get?
Are you a block build? If you’re running a 2H build, the usual answer is “none”. While any block chance is technically a plus, block isn’t reliable as a defensive layer until you get enough of it to…well, rely on. If you can only get ten or twenty percent block chance, then don’t bother with block nodes or anything but incidental gear-based block on stuff you were going to use anyways. If you can easily/reasonably get 40+% block chance, then the answer flips to “as much as you can reasonably manage”, up to the cap of 75% block chance.


How can you spec your tree to have the right amount of everything?
Blood, sweat, tears, copious research, trial and error, painful experience, and the (often post-character) understanding that you will end up with characters that just don’t work. Even high-end streamers, people for whom playing Path of Exile is literally their job, end up with A4M duds sometimes. You end up learning what builds tend to need versus what builds, or you as a player, tend to want.

For example: I am a complete and total movespeed ho. I want 60% faster movement whilst standing in my hideout, sans Quicksilver flasks or any other conditional movement. My really early builds would often path four or five nodes out of their way to grab things like Celerity, and do that more than once, because I wanted lightning feeties. This meant those builds often ended up with ten or fifteen or even twenty points spent in weird places that didn’t cover the character’s needs, and as a result they stunk hardcore. Few of them even made it past Cruel, and most ended up stripped and deleted.

Nowadays I grab movespeed where I can and as it makes sense, but I do not go more than a node or two out of my way to get it or forego more efficient pathing for the sake of running by a movespeed cluster I could otherwise grab. I still can’t resist the siren call of Avatar of the Hunt for most of my theorycrafted archery builds, but I’ve learned what those sorts of builds tend to need.

You need life. You need damage. If you’re running armor, evasion, or other defensive layers primarily in the tree, then you need those nodes. The more good builds you check out in the ‘copious research’ stage, the more you’ll see that the skeletons of most builds on a given class/build type tend to be pretty similar. That’s because those skeletons are what get you the nodes you need, with individual players fleshing out their Wants as they can.

There’s no magic “Get good at Path of Exile” formula. If you have a specific build you’re working on, you can post it here or (if you’re feeling brave) in the appropriate class subforum and see what people can do to help you with your tree, with gear suggestions, with gem set-ups, and the like. One of the most important things to remember, though?

If something just isn’t working, then don’t keep doing it.

"

ChanBalam a écrit :

I think that my problem is that I do not understand the math behind the Tree. % life; %armor; % damage etc. I don't really know which numbers are being changed. When I was was at 2000 life and I took two +5% life nodes, my life didn't go up 200 points. The easy path is to follow another's design and not understand what it is doing. The math of PoE is very complicated. I'm not sure that my ancient brain will ever fully get it, but moving into the merciless lab and maps is a sure way to find out where your weaknesses are.

Isn't there a tree builder somewhere that shows you important stuff as you build a design?

Most "+[X]% Stuff" nodes are increasing your base total of that node. You have 2k life, you take 10% extra life in nodes, but those nodes aren't applying to your 2k life; they're applying 10% of what your base life would be if you had no other life nodes in the tree at all and adding that less-than-200 number to your total life pool. The exception would be a "+[X]% More Life" modifier, as "More" is a multiplier that magnifies any "Increased" modifiers you have as well as the base total...but I don't think there is actually any such thing as a "More Life" mod anywhere in PoE. if there were it'd instantly become absolutely required in every build everywhere.

Anyways. Basic 101: "Increased" modifiers add +[X]% of your base, unmodified total of [Y] back into Y; "More" modifiers take your base [Y] plus the sum of your "Increased" modifiers, and multiplies it by the given percentage. I.e. you have 2k health, of which 1k is your base, unmodified health and 1k is from "Increased" life modifiers (100% increased life, in this case).

You take two +5% Increased Life nodes in the tree. Each of those nodes adds 5% of your 1k base life (50 life) to your total life pool, for a total of 2100 life after you take those nodes. You then find "GGG is Insane", a unique belt that has +100 Life, 10% Increased Life, and +25% More Life on it.

The 100 life is added to your base life total, for a total of 1.1k base life ('Base Life Total', or BLT, for the interim). Your 110% increased Life in the tree is then applied to your 1.1k BLT, leaving you with another 1.21k life (BLT + (1.1*BLT) = BLT+[I]). Your BLT+[I] is thusly 2.31k life.
Then you take the 25% 'More' modifier and apply it as a factor of BLT+[I]. Thusly:

(BLT+[I])*1.25 = 2.8875k, or just under 2.9k life total.

This is why 'More' modifiers are so incredibly powerful/desirable - they scale all your Increased modifiers as well as your base total (whatever). Also why there's no such thing as a 'More' life mod in PoE, come to think of it.


As for a tree builder tool: PoE Planner

This is the one I use. Shows you what all of your currently planned tree gives you, as well as how far from your tree any given node you hover over is and what the shortest route to get there is. 600% incredibly much nicer than trying to plan a build on the official website.

^^^ Most helpful 1453R. Thanks very much. I will use that planner.

I'm level 68 duelist. Here is what the planner said for my current tree:

Max life: +109%
life regen: 5.2 per sec
max life +50 (equip?)
Melee Damage with Duel wield +150%
Melee Damage +142%
Damage with 1 handed weapons +49%
Damage with Attack +26%

Plus more of course.

IIRC I have about 2200 life and do about 15000 dps