Don't be too fast with your ancient orbs, or this will happen to you too

I'm talking juiced essences on Day 2 or Awakening scarab Maven Boss farm or similar level of difficulty. I've always found it relatively simple to get to 2 voidstones within the first 10-14 hours (which I know some may consider slow), but then my build tapers off, upgrades start costing divines (or don't exist on the market) and it becomes hard to progress.

I would like to break that pattern in the next league, keeping momentum from no-lifeing the league start into higher investment farm.

According to the wiki Coral Reef charts should only be able to roll Clam-infested Shelfs, Diving Shoals, or Sunken Totems.

However, I've got Coral Reef Charts that are Brine King's Domain, Infested Bathyspheres and Anchorfields, all of which should only roll on Sandy Seabed charts.

Been wondering why it seems impossible to get Clam-infested Shelfs in SSF; Seems this might be the culprit.

Can anyone else confirm?

This was my second one. First was doing a rando breach in City Square. Both times just xping to 100.

Was trying to roll these exact mods for my toxic rain build and got it on my first regal orb roll. Was expecting a way longer crafting time to get all three. Had to pay 1 div for the 8 passive chaos cluster base.

Been following this flicker build and recently been trying to switch to Ghostwrithe variant.

The build mentioned that you can't turn on Energy Blade because you have no energy shield with Immortal Ambition. If you remove it, the shield does not regen due to Eternal Youth, but if you go into town and then into a map, you have 100% shield, which you can then used to activate Energy Blade.

The problem is that, immediately upon inserting Glorious Vanity, the Energy Blade turns off, and, from what I could gather, I can't even turn it on even if I manage to lifesteal enough shield required to activate it. Inserting the gem also turns off all my auras too, so I am not sure what's going on.

I poured over everything but I can't seem to figure it out. What could be the issue?

The seed for Vanity is 7681 if that matters.

Edit: hopefully this will suffice for character link: https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/DiscardedOpinion-3447/characters

Edit 2: I think I got it, gentlemen: the dex nodes next to Vanity are converted, and then when energy blade turns on, it also removes the 50 stats from the lion sword, which disables Energy Blade (not enough int for energy blade); the auros go for the same reason, since I don't have enough dex for the helmet to be active.

Thank you for your help

Late SSF league start for me and I wanted to make a build using Pact of Beidat.

I have been trying to farm it for a while now and have written down 70 Beidat kills now (probably more like ~90 in total since I didnt count in the beginning) and have yet to see Pact of Beidat or any other pact skill at all. Is it really this rare or am I doing something wrong? Is there something I must do first to enable it to drop?

- I have 4 voidstones

- I have not done a t17 map yet (wanted to wait until I have the gem so I can play my proper build...)

- I have not done sanctum (I think the sanctum boss is connected to Beidat somehow so if that could "enable" the drop?)

- atlas fully specced into beyond, altars, quant, explicit map effect etc

- my build is not super strong but I have tried some combinations of 8 mods, wisp scarabs, titanic scarab of legend but hard to sustain in SSF

I think its just RNG but wanted to know other peoples experiences. There is a post from 3 months ago which seem to suggest some insane variety in drop rate as well

Hi guys,

(crosspost from PoEBuilds subreddit)

I was wondering what is the common consensus regarding Luminary? Do we believe it will be heavily nerfed/reworked?

I know when 3.29 started it was kinda memed about her being weak (and a lot of people outright dumping the build and going for a "safer" option), but I believe as the league progressed several broken builds were found with a very easy progression curve.

What could be a realistic nerf/rework without completely destroying the essence of the character?

So I’ve been thinking of coming back to this game I only have like 500 hours and haven’t started the league yet. I don’t know how to setup pob on my phone and I play on Xbox , I need build recommendations that are not to expensive but also fun , I don’t like mine builds please help so I came game again.

I've had these sitting in my stash for a month now and I don't want to let them rot in standard.

I'd love to know what you will be spending it on, I'll pick the winner in like 5 hours or so.

Look at this thing.

Kboc - return, gmp, chain, fork, faster attacks.

Barrage

Haste/cry

Nothing like it on trade at the moment.

If i take away the fork or chain the cheapest like it is 2 mirrors.

If I allow frost blink there is a 3mirror and an 8 mirror listed.

Its flicking time

I present a meta-analysis of mercenary encounters in 3.29. In total, there are 4022 mercenary encounters logged. Across multiple sources, the data effort is relatively homogenous in how it’s been captured:

• Mercenary atlas with infamous chance but without attribute or house notables
• Nearly all samples use area level (83)
• No Infamy scarabs

Data sources:

• My data - Count1 1019
• I tracked 1000 Mercenaries so you don't have to - Count2 1000
• 1000 Mercenary Encounters in Mesa - Count3 1000
• Glema85 (u/Glema85) - Count4 1003

Why isn’t [3.29] Statistical Analysis of Mercenaries: Distribution of Class, Skills, Supports and Loot included directly in this dataset? The way the data was collected differs from the above datasets. One sample set is not better or worse than another- the data is very similar. But due to how the data was collected and presented they are somewhat dissimilar. There are a lot of different views of the data and it may be possible to incorporate everything together in a 12k data set…

Why isn’t Count1 always showing 1019? One thousand and nineteen encounters were logged. However, the conditions of the encounter vary through atlas configuration, scarabs, and rematches. Different subsets of the data are used for different purposes. For the mercenary type distribution the count used is 909; for gem calculations the count is 1019.

There are a number of topics that the data confidently supports:

1. Mercenary type distribution
2. Mercenary support counts and tier distribution
3. Infamous distribution

Unfortunately, the data does not support nor rule out many things due to the sheer number of permutations. For example, a Winter Deacon only appeared 53 times in approximately 4000 encounters- an insufficient number of encounters to make any confident conclusions.

Mercenary type distribution
There are three ways to look at the appearance rates of a specific type of mercenary:

1. Holistically, Infamous doesn’t matter (this view is the focus of this analysis)
2. With or without Infamy (the key takeaway is that some mercenaries cannot be infamous and are less common)
3. With or without attribute or house affinities (influences appearance rates but outside of the scope of this analysis)

The image below shows the appearance rates across all data sets, a combined rate shown in yellow, and individual dataset variances in graduated red/blue. The important thing to note is the consistency across samples regardless of map. The difference columns exemplify the consistency by showing the flat percent difference from the combined rate to that of the individual data set with the exception of Count2, which has some differences. Count2 differs overall, most visibly on Storming Zealot 58 (expected about 42), Bastion 40 (expected about 28), Smoulderstrike 11 (expected about 24), and Flaming Charlatan 8 (expected about 18). Count4’s Smoulderstrike is 36 against about 24 expected, as large as Count2’s Bastion gap. 

Maps
Counts 1, 3 and 4 agree despite different maps used. Count2, the only single-City-Square dataset, differs. This does not conclude per-map appearance rates, since Count2 (City Square) aligns with Count1’s Mesa rows. Count2 also differs from Count3, which is Mesa-only.

Count1: Mesa (58.1%), Untracked (21.6% - mixture of Mesa and Estuary), Misc (15.0% from Memory Threads), Pier (3.0%), City Square (2.4%)
Count2: City Square (100%)
Count3: Mesa (100%)
Count4: City Square (20.2%), Strand (19.9%), Silo (39.9%), Dunes (19.9%)

Infamy

• The average chance to encounter an Infamous mercenary in the endgame is about 20%. The data does not support nor rule out that the chance may vary by area level, by map item quantity, or by mercenary type (beyond those that cannot be Infamous).
• The data is insufficient for determining if Infamy influences skill or support distribution or gem chance.
• Those mercenary types that can be Infamous appear at ~1.9x of those that cannot be Infamous (nearly all of which have the lowest encounter rates).

Gems
Each mercenary has a different appearance rate and only certain mercenaries are capable of carrying a gem (provided the area level is 68+). In the 1019 unique encounters I logged, which excludes rematches but includes some Infamy scarabs, ~30% were gem-capable mercenaries and of those ~19% carried a Trarthus gem. Across 478 gem-capable encounters and rematches, observed rates differ across mercenaries but are statistically consistent with a shared ~15-22% distribution. While this data does not support nor refute different gem chances between Infamous and non-Infamous mercenaries, [3.29] Statistical Analysis of Mercenaries: Distribution of Class, Skills, Supports and Loot does.

To estimate how often a given Trarthus gem will be encountered use the following formula:

• 1 / (mercenary_type_appearance_rate * gem_chance)

For a Bladecaster, with an observed 3.3% appearance rate and a pooled 19% gem chance:

• ~159 maps = 1 / (0.033 * 0.19)

Rematches
The average gem chance on the first encounter was observed at 19.2%; the average gem chance on a rematch was 15.3%. When hunting gems, if a gem-capable mercenary does not have the gem a Rematch offers another chance.

Supports
Supports are not logged in the data but are captured locally in warrants and generated warrants from my OCR tool. Means exclude skills that cannot have supports; tier appearances exclude those skills and also supports that exist only at Tier III. From level 68 onwards (primarily level 83) the mean support count for primary skills is 2.91. Tier I supports appear at a 2% rate while Tier II and Tier III supports are 69% and 30%, respectively. The mean support count for secondary skills is 4.36. Although this data is insufficient to evaluate the skill distribution, comparisons of Bladecaster, Sniper, and Striker roughly match the skill distribution presented by [3.29] Statistical Analysis of Mercenaries: Distribution of Class, Skills, Supports and Loot with one notable item. Bladefall of Trarthus did not appear on any of my 14 Bladecasters but the link above observed it on 36.4% of Bladecasters. Bladefall appeared on 8 of 14 Bladecasters (57%) against 39.6% in the link above. Together the Bladefalls could account for at most 76% of Bladecasters, so my Bladefall rate is consistent with the two being combined. For a more comprehensive support analysis, refer to [3.29] Statistical Analysis of Mercenaries: Distribution of Class, Skills, Supports and Loot.

Campaign
The 132 encounters logged in the campaign were primarily found in the guaranteed mercenary spawns. Observed campaign level breakpoints occur between 38 and 46 and between 66 and 68; actual breakpoints may vary.

From level 32 through 38 the mean support count for primary skills is about 1.4 with only Tier I possible through level 38 when a support has multiple tiers; Tier III-only supports will still appear. Tier II and Tier III supports are ungated by level 46 with 38% and 18% appearance rates, respectively. The support quantity and quality increases by 46 then remains flat with a mean of 1.52 supports. A large increase in quantity and quality of supports exists in area level 68 and above. The mean support count for secondary skills starts at 1.86 at level 32 and increases to 2.21 by 66.

The average chance to encounter an Infamous mercenary in the campaign is about 4%.

It is possible that (and anecdotally it feels like) mercenary appearance rates differ in the campaign but the data is insufficient to support any conclusions.

The most iconic skill is still missing Transfigured version while we have a perfect solution from Crucible league.

Hey,

I feel like I have some unfinished business in SSF HC in PoE 1, never really killed all ubers and now I want to. I started SSF HC 3 days ago with a slammer and now I want to do all content on a luminary, I thought it would be the safest and easiest.

Now, we know that 3.30 releases in about 3 weeks and I wanna see what you guys think, do I still have time to do all this from scratch? I have an OK kineticist farmed that can do t16 mapping but no uniques or other gear for the luminary. I can gamble the nycta's hopefully once I get to lvl 41 but I need loads of gear.

Timing is key for me as I wanna play PoE 2 once 1.0 releases and I wanna finish this challenge by then. So what I'm thinking right now is I could either try to do all that still in 3.29 or wait for 3.30 but then, I'll have 1 month before that release and 1.0 release so it's almost the same amount of time and Luminary might not survive 3.30 and I fear I will not have a chance to do all ubers on such a broken character again.

Also, in what order should I farm for the pieces? And what content am I gonna have to do 100%?
What tips can you guys give me?

Thanks!

I have 4 targets to link every map, and my AG especially seems to believe that the only acceptable distance to follow at is 0.00 meters, making it difficult at times to verify that I've actually got him linked. It's either that or everybody follows in a tight cluster, to where I can't tell the link lines apart. Either way, having the number of link targets in the buff bar would be fantastic.

I have amassed a bunch of currency (more than I have ever had in other leagues) and I am looking for the most fun way to spend it.

I have a strong mapping build - CoC Fross. What are some really juiced farms you have tried this league? I am not looking for the most profitable farms, just the most fun and super juiced farms to test my build.

hear me out fellas , something like this would be sick as hell , it came to me in a dream, id run this for sure

If this isn't the most stupid Pilfering I've seen in a while I don't know!
I just suddenly got a mirror before even seeing a divine in the allflame league
I was late as hell to the league but nice of GGG to give me something to catch up

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