A Call to the Builders Extraordinaire

To the Mods: I'm posting this in each class forum because it's not really class-specific. If you'd prefer it go into a different forum or something, feel free to delete and move whatever posts you want. I understand.

Hey gang... I'm nobody. No honestly, I'm nobody. I'm sure you can ignore my post and my request for help and literally nothing would happen and no one would care.

But if you care, I have a humble request.

I'm looking for some good build ideas that *DON'T* cost hundreds of EX. I don't mean "starter builds"... I've played with plenty of those. I mean builds that can actually rock the faces of the end game bosses, guardians, shapers, elders, whatever. Starter builds always hit a wall. If you are interested in helping me, I implore you to read on.

I've been playing the game for a very long time (took breaks and returned, obviously) and have managed to get *right to* some of the end game bosses but no matter what my characters just fail. Not for lack of skill (I'm sure many of you will claim)... but because I don't have *quite enough* of something. Just barely not enough health not to get one-shotted, or just barely not enough Chaos res, or just barely not quite enough DPS, or evade, or armour, or whatever is required.

I love this game. Honestly, I do. I used to play way back when every time you used a movement skill you would desync from the server and loved it even then. But I don't have the time to put in just to farm until my face melts just to get a couple more EX.

There are so many builds out there that I want to try, but I look at the POB and almost every item is 20+ EX... or sometimes there will be that one crucial item that the entire build revolves around and even in standard it costs 50 EX.

Yes, I can craft, but because I can't spend days and days farming (My wife would tell you I play too much as it is), I just don't have the currency to really craft what I need. I actually spent some time and currency trying to craft and ended up with pitiful failures every time. It is just agonizing.

I've got a handful of EX (around 30) and I've worked very hard on my top characters to be able to *MODESTLY* make it through most maps, but it's like when I get to the "end"... I hit a wall that just will not relent and the only explanation I can come up with is that my builds just aren't quite strong enough - and that I need to spend 25 EX on a new single item. Is this how you guys do it?... farm for months for the EX you need to replace *ONE* item at a time?

Look, I know I'm nobody. But I truly love this game and really want to see and accomplish some of that end game stuff.

Can anybody help?

Not sure what do u mean by rock the faces of bosses, but if you are just looking for builds that can kill those bosses, there are actually many of them that can kill sirus at a very low budget (and by very low i mean 2~3Ex or even less than 1Ex). So if you are not able to kill those bosses, then either you are picking the wrong build guide, or it is true that you lack skill. Since for a boss like sirus, a very skilled player can dodge almost all the attacks and skills, and can finish him with pure trash gear.

If you are looking for builds that can melt sirus in 1 second, then hundreds of Ex does not sound too expensive for that level of dps.

Also, just would like to mention that standard economy is totally fucked up, things are much much cheaper in temp league. So if you are not rich in std, you might just be better off playing temp league.

From my personal experience you can find a build that will be able to complete the game on a 20-30ex budget, but that build will NOT faceroll the game. You will not instaphase bosses, you will die sometimes, you will have to avoid big attacks, you will take time to clear things.

If you want to fly through everything and look at the videos of people who do, most of these builds are 100ex+ budget. And no, these people didn't farm it through picking alterations and selling chaos recipe.

They either craft for profit (which imo is boring and requires IMMENSE knowledge and starting capital) or they play in groups with aura and curse buff-dispensers so their characters can farm 20x more efficiently. A proper aura bot can have 20 auras with increased effectiveness of them while a single player will have 2-3 auras with not much to them. They run 100s of maps per day or w/e else content is "best for profit" and treat game as a job. For many, it is a job cuz they're streamers or youtubers mainly.

Question is which builds did you try and what was the problem. The problems like "I have to learn the boss before I can kill him" or "I sometimes get 1-shot in dangerous content" is something you have to deal with if you use a budget build.

There are few builds that people advertise as tanky, but will you like them, nobody knows. They might be clunky, slow dps, annoying to play or w/e other problem that makes these builds not be super meta and getting insta nerfed.

Few ideas:
- lacerate bleed max block gladiator or max block facebreaker cyclone gladiator
- chieftain bladefall + bladeblast or righteous fire + flamewall
- necromancer cremation
- trickster essence drain + contagion
- occultist vortex + cold snap
- champion earthshatter (+ lots of warcrys)
- dominating blow + herald of purity guardian
- caustic arrow raider
- earthquake juggernaut
- pestilent strike pathfinder

Totem hierophant and mines saboteur are not very tanky but you can throw your totems / mines in front of you and play from safe distance.

P.S. I looked briefly at your characters and 1 cheap trick to improve characters is use proper flasks. If you have 3 life 1 amethyst 1 stibnite on every character you're losing a lot of potential tankyness.

Chaos damage is quite rare and unless you're planning to fight al-hezmin there's no point running with it everywhere.

Jade / granite / quartz / basalt are the most potent defensive flasks together with unique rumi's concoction for block builds.

Also flasks should be used all the time while mapping. If you don't do this, the character will feel more flimsy than it is because the game is balanced around spamming flasks during mapping because everyone gets charges from killing mobs. Bosses are different story.

Not using flasks, temp buffs (vaal skills, warcrys, the new frost shield / void orb) and guard skills is a big power loss, no matter how annoying it is to press multiple buttons.

I think you simply have unreasonable expectations. POE endgame is reasonably difficult, and won't be trivialized on low budget characters.

Some characters can indeed kill endgame bosses on a very minimal budget (miners, some summoners), but most of the time they can do that by saying fuck all to defensive layers and survability to get as much damage they can.

Piloted by a seasoned player, they allow for fast atlas progression and the first endgame kills, on virtually no budget. But each attack will be lethal and needs to be dodged, so a less experienced guy will just die time after time on this kind of character. Any mistake in a late game map (allow a metamorph to attack, get frozen, whatever) is a 10% xp loss.

For content which require both DPS and survivability, such as simulacrum 20/20 or be able to mindlessly farm juiced up T16s, you'll need a character featuring both good DPS, good clearspeed AND good defensive layers. It's unlikely you'll get there at less than 20ex.

Here are some personnal benchmarks for being able to respectively complete (= do everything) and trivialize (= facetank and kill everything in seconds) endgame content :

DPS : 2M shaper DPS // 5-8M shaper DPS (real life, not POB warrior theoretical DPS)
Life/ES pool : 5000 / 7000 with fortify. +20% without.
Defensive layers : 70% mitigation against attacks*, 0% against spells** to complete endgame // 90% attacks, 40% spells to trivialize it.


* Combination of phys reduction, block, dodge, evasion, MoM etc... For example 50% evade + 40% phys reduction = 70% mitigation.
** Combination of Spell Dodge, Spell block, MoM, resists above 75% etc..


Now, in every league there are multiple farming strategies allowing for 2ex+ income per hour, even solo. It might be what you miss and need to work on to get to the powerlevels you want to achieve.