My 0.3 Story Time Wall (tl;dr at end, spell levels, mapping, crafting, and anti-synergy)

Pretty quickly, it became apparent that the most convenient options for me were to run the chaos damage spells, spreading curses with contagion. And I did enough research to know I would play witch, and go lich. I also, somewhere in a small and naive part of my heart, held on to the hope that infinite duration curses would mean infinite duration for decaying hex, but we'll get to that rabbit hole later.

So I start crawling around the tree gathering more and more curse and slow magnitude. There are a few times that my gear falls behind, or my build isn't pumping enough raw numbers in either direction. In particular the act 1 boss was a battle of attrition I lost with so much of my early tree going into speeding towards curse magnitude. Partied up with friend and moved swiftly on, didn't hit that problem again until I was getting one-shot constantly by the Seer of the Sky for my second ascendancy, but I think my gear was falling behind hard, and that was the last time there were any problems.

Quick additional context, I've never successfully ran a build in PoE 1 or 2 all the way into the deep endgame before. Mapping in 1, sure, but never even normal versions of uber bosses, and I didn't even get to the atlas last league in PoE 2, trying to make a minion/melee hybrid in 0.2 simply felt awful and I ended up leaving.

So when what I viewed as a dumb curse meme build ends up being able to solo all of the t3 pinnacle bosses set to 2p scaling, I can run nearly any 6 mod map modifiers without paying attention to what I'm putting in as long as I don't run into a scary boss at the end, and I see my first ever divine orb across either game? On my dumb meme build? I'm surprised, and having a great time!

All the while, my temp chains have scaled so high that only uniques are below slow cap, and enfeeble is cutting boss damage in half. I've realized at this point I can put my curse nodes on weapon set points and damage nodes on the other set, so I run two wand+focus sets and get to scale into both damage AND curses! Pretty consistently, the only thing I have to worry about is getting surrounded before my DoTs get enough momentum to kill things and I'm still casting some 5 seconds worth of spells to get that ball rolling on every single pack of mobs. This is still somehow, objectively, the most effective build I have ever played across either game!

But I'm starting to hit a wall. I have all the curse magnitude I can have. Got as many +4% jewels into as many jewel nodes as I could, started even running a tabula rasa for more! My single most expensive purchase is 3-socket gloves with the 100% increased effect so I can have 30% more curse magnitude there, I occasionally even give up the huge bonus to my energy shield from my good helmet to run the unique with +1 to all skill levels.

Ah. There it is. Skill levels.
Unfortunate.

All of that context to get to the first real point of this thread, heh. I learned rather immediately that I had almost an illusion of choice, as a mage of any sort. My build uses spells. It doesn't even have particularly many spell- or chaos-damage nodes in it, or on its gear. So I would've hoped that a wand with some nearly 200% combined increase would really impress me, that would actually be something close to double my previous damage considering previous increases.

Nope. Doesn't have +levels on it, so I actually lost DPS.
Well, uh, it's also got nearly 30% added [I forget the element] damage!
Well, that's for hits, and my build does less DPS with most hits than the DoT on decaying hex. That almost isn't even an exaggeration for the pre-endgame experience, even fire spells with blackflame covenant tended to do less or around the same hit damage as essence drain at the same skill level. What?

Okay. So. I swap back to my old wand. Damage is back. A near identical wand has its +3 spell levels to keep my curses happy. I wanted the defensive option of blocking, and stuck to that wearing a shield through nearly all of my leveling.
But, no. +3 spell level focus. And heck, with all those spell levels, my spells sure are expensive! Good thing that focus I can't get rid of can also have +% spell efficiency. Kinda sucks to lose manual blocking, but I can get a bit of survivability back from the amulet that gives my focus a chance to block! Oh, wait, amulet is +3 spell levels.

Well, maybe I could try using a staff? Well, then I lose energy shield. And spell levels. And I don't really... gain... anything, oh. Do I at least get to use quarterstaff skills with a staff?! Nope!
Maybe a different wand could be cool? Nope, not really, the only wand that contributes literally anything besides a wasted button press is the dueling wand. Which, by the way, I pretty much have to run a dueling wand with the fancy new lineage gem to ignore curse limits, if I want to run curses to strip defenses for both myself and the times I play with my friend.

Spell levels are so important both in general and specifically to making curses better, I switch off witch and make a new character so I can go gemling legionnaire, get those +2 levels and the +gem quality to really eek out a few more points of curse magnitude while I'm at it.

Again, I was leveling with a shield equipped, I could buy time for my DoTs to kill things and still engage with the active combat style GGG is pushing for. Can't wear that anymore, no spell levels. Remember the only thing I was having trouble with was being surrounded? Can't run a melee weapon to leap out of those swarms, no spell levels, and now both weapon sets are wands so I can still both deal damage and get almost every single curse+slow node. Blink was helping for a bit, but honestly, it started to get me killed as often as it saved me because the new sprint, while awesome, tends to automatically turn on after blinking even if I give the button the most gentle of taps, and I immediately get stunned and killed by something I blinked into offscreen.

But! I eventually did it! I hit the slow cap for uniques!
Which was anti-climactic since so many boss mechanics only have their cast times slowed and then go off at normal pacing, so, I ripped apart my passive tree again to put together the same build but with less ES and all of the aura magnitude nodes, put enfeeble and temporal chains into blasphemy, and nearly quadrupled my clear speed because I'm not casting 5s worth of spells for every single pack of mobs, I'm just casting contagion, maybe decay with cursed ground and all those lovely curse damage supports that. Oh.

Oh, wait. All of those curse damage supports scale off of int and nothing else. I have about 150 int. That's... not doing damage, basically. And not a single one of those does anything slotted into blasphemy, so I can't even get some passive chaos DoTs going to have dark effigy attack things. In fact, as far as I can tell, literally nothing anywhere on the tree or any item besides my intelligence stat does anything to the damage on any of those support gems, and most of them don't even show up in the tooltips on the passive tree or my curses, so I can't even 100% confirm that for anything besides decaying hex.

Okay. Well. At least my clear speed is still okay. I go looking for funny interactions with the breachlord lineage supports and my chaos spells or blackflame covenant flame spells, but really, nothing seems to impress me besides maybe incinerate's DoT, and how about that, but that's another spell that doesn't do its damage with HITs. That trend has locked me out of a solid half of interesting looking interactions! So many things need to HIT or do the bulk of their damage with a HIT for anything interesting to happen. Like, say, inflicting ailments? Ah well.

At least they announce they're going to make us stop chasing towers! That was kind of annoying, and I didn't like that I had to run 6 modifier maps honestly, because sure, that was a thing I could do, but I'm really not that hardcore a player at heart and I absolutely got used to having several map portals to work with in PoE 1.

Oh. Towers have been replaced with... always... running... 6 modifier maps... At least now we only have to kill the map boss? Wait, but that doesn't help me at all, I'm interested in the things my tablets put on the map so I'm still doing full clears, and boss gimmicks trend closer towards filling your entire screen with damage the closer to the end of an act the boss is from, which tends to translate to my now measly 3k ES 1.5k life self getting one-shot with 6 modifiers! Oh dear...

And for the record, no, I still wasn't being saved bumping my max resists from 75 up to 79 from gemling. Especially not against all those scary physical damage nukes that seem to be so prevalent in specifically boss fights, and slowing the boss doesn't seem to do much of anything to prevent them from aiming those, and dodge rolling is wildly inconsistent an answer to those, and armor was never an answer to anything boss shaped have you seen those damage calculations? Not to mention how implausible it is I would ever have been able to find sufficient life sustain, or armor from my gear and tree, to be worth a damn when so much of my scaling for curses comes from int or dex or int/dex gear.

I guess I'll do some crafting to fix up my gear, huh. I've been doing a bunch of research about tags and omens and how all of these mechanics come together to give you influence over each change to your item!
Oops they're all some of the most expensive currency in the game.
Oops none of the middling t2-3 mod filled items I've been getting or cobbling together are selling for even 30% of the prices people are listing similar-to-nigh-identical items for. I would assume because everyone else just did the same exact thing I just did, since that's all I could afford to do.

Oh dear. Well, maybe I won't be upgrading my gear, then. I just don't seem to be getting lucky, and the few things of value I made, I could only make because they were guaranteed off of the roughly 4 divine worth of input base items and currency, and yet I still can't seem to sell any of them for a profit.

And I won't really be doing any mapping, since I can't really afford to craft or buy better gear to be able to survive mapping more consistently. And no, guys, I'm not still wearing my tabula at this point, but I did have to swap my helmet out to alpha's howl to be able to run my auras and defensive buffs.

By the way, endurance charge generation felt nearly inaccessible for casters. Even manually spamming physical damage spells with armor break 3 and then immediately removing the break using a orb of storms with exploit weakness, I couldn't keep charges up on boss fights for charge regulation.

WHICH! Brings me to my final point.

Cobbling together all of the different moving parts for my build had me doing some truly esoteric science and answering questions I never thought I would have to ask. Honestly? That's usually the most fun I have in a game, and I was entertained enough early on here, too. But the fun started to fade when the question was almost always, "Does x interact with y?" And the answer was almost invariably, "No."

Does added damage interact with my DoTs? No.
Does anything I do to increase other damage sources work with my curse supports? No.
Does stacking spell damage on my gear and tree get me enough oomph to reliably apply ailments like chill or shock off a ridiculous +14-16 level to my 17-20 spells? No.
Does any combination of persistent buffs seem to do anything to reduce how likely I am to be one-shot by a boss? No.
Does blasphemy's status as an aura mean it can benefit from increases to presence radius? No.
Can I run two blasphemy auras, one with the massive additional 25% less hit from the curse limit lineage gem and one without? No.
Can I fix that the way I was before on a dueling wand without 5 sockets that was clearly someone's failed corrupt hand-me-down and that's why I could afford to buy it with +4 spell levels and +2 more from sockets? No, because the night after I bought that wand, the spellslinger in that broke and it refused to be active locked OR equipped in slot 2 where my damage was.
Can I just slap all of my curses into an invocation with curse ground, overabundance, and the lineage gem? No, first because that's only 2 curses now, second because overabundance doesn't work with cursed ground so I can't even do something else to increase my curse limit.
Can I run a melee weapon and synergize at all with my spell level gear? No, equipping a melee weapon costs me anywhere from 3-9 spell levels, if we count a shield as a melee weapon.
Can I get enough passives to hybridize melee with casting and still start at the opposite end of the tree as a gemling? No, and I really really want to play Scion in PoE 2 right about now.
Can I get more curse magnitude with, say, timelost jewels? No, even on lich there were basically no clusters all aligned enough with what I'm building to be worth more than the 4% magnitude I would get from a normal jewel.
Can I lean more heavily into the aura magnitude I find myself with now that I'm running blasphemy? No, scepters are, weirdly, not a caster weapon, and do not give spell levels, and almost all of the auras are pretty terrible anyway.
Am I an ally in my own presence? No. For some reason. What.
Can I relive some small piece of my aurabot days through the power of a companion with haste aura? No, not only are a majority of those too expensive for me to run with nearly 300 spirit and some 40%+ effective gem quality for spirit reservation on both blasphemy and the companion, but finding specific beasts with specific modifiers is horrible.
Can I settle on one of the typical recommended farmable companions that I miraculously might have spirit to afford? No, none of those keep up with even 30% movement speed, completely defeating the purpose of getting that haste aura.
Can I think of a single time that I tried to do something esoteric where the game said "Yes" instead of "No" to add to this list? No, not really, at least not after contagion spreading my curses, which is invalidated by the time I reach endgame and run entirely cursed ground+blasphemy, and arguably also invalidated by the existence of hex bloom. Every step of the way I've chosen options in spite of the game, not because there was any synergy whatsoever.
Can I add a bunch of physical damage to my spells and run armor break 3 to get endurance charges? Not really, no, even some 350%ish spell damage increase doesn't get any spell anywhere near high enough.
Can I slot a breachlord lineage to make my chaos damage break armor? Well, yes, on paper, but that was unaffordable to me for 95% of the league, and I'd already seen the result in practice that endurance charge generation from armor break 3 simply isn't consistent enough for bosses even if I broke armor and stripped the debuff on cooldown.
Can I run the resonance passive and generate power charges consistently instead? Yes, technically, but no, not really, it's both incredibly awkward because profane ritual looks like a great addition to my chaos damage on paper but is incredibly awkward because it's small, I want its duration short, it requires corpses in short supply during boss fights, I could scarcely afford the two extra skill gems and spirit to have both a minion that would always be dead and a sacrifice gem, and to top it all off the dang ritual circle is just kinda tiny and not very damaging, and also seems to be ignoring all of the damage increases I slot into it?! Best solution I found was skeletal cleric. Still couldn't afford to run all of blasphemy with 2 curses, vitality 1 for any health regen between fights, clarity 2 for still completely insufficient mana regen to cast level 30-35 spells, sacrifice, skeletal cleric x2 for any amount of consistency, and charge regulation, with 291 spirit. And that's after dropping ghost dance, and moving withering presence to a 0 spirit skill innate to my unique body armor!
Can I choose to give up many of the above comfort options to force endurance charges+charge regulation and at least be alive? Yes, but damn does casting profane ritual every 5-10 seconds get tedious as hell, and I can't find a way to effectively automate or "automate" it when spellslinger keeps on breaking. The most sensible option in this case seems like cast on minion death, but that necessitates manually casting the spell or not having a minion alive to sacrifice, and is yet another 60 spirit sink.
Can I start trying to patch up some of these problems by crafting better gear? No, after spending a total of about 20 div on my gear, representing half of what I'd made since the league started, the only path I could see forward where I could afford to guarantee every step besides the desecrated mod still cost me 4 div per attempt, leaving me with pretty much just boots and rings that I would have to replace nearly all together and at individual cost per item of over 10 div, completely out of my range. Any and all of this ludicrously implausible to have potentially done SSF, if that was ever a thing I wanted to try, given the very first time I got an omen of homogenizing exaltation from my rituals was the day I made this post.
Can I just zoom around effectively kiting entire packs of mobs by dropping DoTs and then leaving? No, it seems the game just wipes their DoTs and debuffs off when they're no longer rendered. Especially surprising, "infinite duration" curses would stick and my friend, when we were still playing together, would laugh because he found mobs still cursed somewhere in a corner of the map several minutes later. Meanwhile, the same chestpiece I switched to after dropping lich and losing infinite duration curses, was one that gave infinite duration curses, and also infinite duration wither. It came with withering presence. The withered debuff was still being purged from enemies off screen, even when curses weren't, even when manually applied via wand instead of gambling on the game considering the aura built into the item not to originate from me, and thus, not be infinite. No, just purged offscreen regardless. That was awesome to realize.
Did my aura magnitude interact in literally any way whatsoever with the aura I'd been running nearly since the level I could equip it, withering presence? No, not in the slightest. It didn't apply wither faster. It didn't apply a larger amount of wither. It didn't increase the maximum magnitude of wither. Withering presence behaved the same before and after getting every general aura magnitude node on the passive tree. Arguably a better reason to get aura magnitude than blasphemy, and there wasn't even any synergy there either!
Could I reliably inflict ailments by running overwhelming presence? Well, I could ignite pretty consistently, there was at least that. I also finally started to see the chill ailment at all, after like a month of trying to fit chill into my build, but usually only on trash mobs that were in the process of being melted by DoTs anyway. Freeze was pretty cool though! If... really inconsistent. And shock was pretty much right out the window even in scenarios where I could nearly instantly freeze bosses and had upwards of like 25% max chance to shock per hit.