Stuck in Act 2 Cruel

So to start off I'd like to say that I'm a new player going after the Mojocoptor build with my character GiveEmThePointyEnd. So I'm sticking pretty strictly to the passive tree. I heard that the Oro Crit Flicker was a really good and fast build.

That being said, I'm having trouble leveling / surviving in Cruel. I don't feel like I have enough resistances/defense and/or health/shield to keep myself alive while going through the areas. I've resorted to going back to Act 1 Cruel and farming a bit to try to get myself overleveled for Act 2. I don't know if level alone will be enough to do what I need to do though, maybe my skills are the problem. I can't really use Flicker + Blood Rage efficiently yet and am unsure as to what I should do to try to beat the enemies. I've been resorting to focusing everything into 2h + Ice Crash + More Damage and I still die quite often.

If anyone can give some advice based on my current gear and passives, it would be greatly appreciated. I'm really struggling right now.

MojoCoptor for Reference
Spoiler
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1617333
Last edited by Darkfyre84 on Jul 26, 2016, 1:30:23 PM
Last bumped on Jul 27, 2016, 9:51:38 PM
I dont know anything about that build, but for the obvious starters, you have no resists which is the most important defense. You'd probably also want to change ice crash to earthquake since it is just for lvling.

Since you are very close to the attack leech at duelist you may want to get 0,4% life and the life/mana node, which will cover all mana need for EQ and keep your life somewhat up while lvling.
When you get the regen from golems blood it becomes much more easier to sustain blood rage, even though you probably want 1% more regen, guessing the build is heading up to "master of the arena" as well, in that case you would want this before you swap to oros and flicker.

I'd grab pretty much any lvl 30+ armor/eva 4 link and transmute it for some life or res, maybe a few other pieces as well. If you try to stay mostly selffound or try to find most gear yourself you can alch a few items here and there(leather/rustic belts and 16 res two stone rings), alchs are easy to get anyway. Your current gear is pretty bad :D Rigwald is fine tho.

Edit* If you want i can give you some lvling gear since i dont play on PSC anymore(free ofc), you can PM me ingame and hopefully we're both online at the same time :)
You just wasted 3 seconds reading this.
Last edited by Tian_Yihao on Jul 26, 2016, 1:47:45 PM
Lol, I know that my gear is pretty bad. But then I don't have the reservoir of 500c that a lot of the players that have been around for a long time have to just 'buy' all their gear. I'm pretty much having to rely on Self-Found through leveling, though I did buy Ringwald to update my weapon from the axe I was using in Normal. I'll look into Earthquake and was wondering about that to see if it was any better than Ice Crash.
"
Darkfyre84 wrote:
Lol, I know that my gear is pretty bad. But then I don't have the reservoir of 500c that a lot of the players that have been around for a long time have to just 'buy' all their gear. I'm pretty much having to rely on Self-Found through leveling, though I did buy Ringwald to update my weapon from the axe I was using in Normal. I'll look into Earthquake and was wondering about that to see if it was any better than Ice Crash.
You don't need 500 chaos to get capped resists in cruel, more like 5 chaos(or less).
Here's a video that might help, including how to search for specific things such as resistances:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV7NVBnvKDI
The trading website is poe.trade, btw.

Btw, here's a tip:
It costs 10 Jeweller's Orbs to get a guaranteed 4 sockets on an item(with the Vorici crafting table) and 5 Orbs of Fusing to get a guaranteed 4-Link on those sockets. In this league, that's about 1.1 chaos plus 2.5 chaos. So It's usually a good idea to pay a little extra if an item already has 4 links versus a slightly cheaper item that doesn't.
Last edited by srt746 on Jul 26, 2016, 2:12:28 PM
"
Darkfyre84 wrote:
Lol, I know that my gear is pretty bad. But then I don't have the reservoir of 500c that a lot of the players that have been around for a long time have to just 'buy' all their gear. I'm pretty much having to rely on Self-Found through leveling, though I did buy Ringwald to update my weapon from the axe I was using in Normal. I'll look into Earthquake and was wondering about that to see if it was any better than Ice Crash.


You typically shouldn't need to buy gear at this point in the game, and nobody but the most dedicated twinkers is spending a lot of currency on leveling gear. You just have super terrible gear, probably because you haven't played long enough to learn what affixes are actually good yet. Life and resists are all that matter before you hit merciless, and you barely have any of either on your gear. I'm guessing you've already sold the usable gear you've found to the vendor, so you probably need to spend a little on some cheap gear with life and resists.

You also picked a build that's ridiculously bad for leveling if you're going to stick to the passive tree. That build relies on having tons of crit to be functional, which you won't get until very late in the game. Optimally you'd take regular damage nodes while leveling and then respec into crit which you can stack enough that it becomes decent. You currently have very little increased damage combined with very low crit. That's not a good combination.

Even with bad damage, you should be okay as long as you have decent life and resists. It'll just take longer to progress. Like Tian said, switch to Earthquake for now. It's superior to Ice Crash in just about every way. Then buy some cheap, decent gear with life and resists and push on.
ya, this isnt a bad build, but its a bad build for someone like yourself to be trying to make. If I was leveling that build I would use spells up to the point where I switched to flicker because that tree does virtually nothing for melee without having an oros and being high enough level to use an oros.


I would stick to far more generic builds, nothing built around uniques or focused for endgame. A lot of builds ppl make are completely focused on endgame revolving around req lvl50+ uniques and when they talk about its fast killing blah blah, they mean in endgame presuming you will find a way to stumble through the leveling process using alternate skills.

It can be hard to new players finding builds because ppl are only excited about extreme endgame builds that require a bit of trading. Really what you want is a simple build that picks life, some defense, increased damage and maybe some crit, just uses rare gear and simply scales in power as it levels rather than becoming something else when X level is reached and X unique can be used.

If you want to go crit melee shadow I would just make a generic crit claw build with life, then u can play with reave, flicker, dual strike, whatever you fancy, and its essentially the same build all the way from start to finish. If you need help with trees etc post up and Im sure we can all come up with some suggestions.
Yea, I thought about that. I actually have a Witch I'm working on that seems to be a much 'easier' build just doing the Blade Vortex and running through things. At least so far. Need to find a way to pump up the damage on it though or I'm going to be outclassed before the end of Act 4 Normal, even with me being a bit ahead on levels.
To beat cruel all you need is life on gear, capped resists, and OK flasks for your level. Maybe some life nodes if you want. It doesn't really matter what your other stats are.

If dps is an issue, just get a better weapon. For blade vortex, a weapon with more spell damage would be the best. Your current weapon has no extra spell damage at all.

Face it, all of your suggestions are worse than this idea:
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/657756
With your Shadow, you have your Earthquake linked with Faster Attacks, Fortify, and Life Leech. All of those supports are wrong. With Earthquake, you want to time it so that the aftershock is faster than your attack speed due to the massive damage multiplier. That means Faster Attacks is terrible and Less Duration is excellent. You should also be using Melee Physical Damage on every melee skill where you want to scale physical damage. Added Fire is probably your best bet for damage after that. It's almost never a good idea to waste a slot on the Life Leech support, and that's especially true when you're doing a physical attacking build.

Your gear is also still terrible, even though you've changed some of it. Three Dragons is a worse Goldrim, but it's not the absolute worst if you need resists. That chest is vendor trash, though. You want either a 5-link for the extra support gem or something with very nice defensive abilities. Since this is a couple of months into a standard league, you can usually get a really nice 5-link for a couple of chaos. Tweak the numbers on this search until you find what you need. At the time I posted it, there was a very good 5-link up for 2 chaos. If you don't have actual chaos, trade some of your alts, chromes, regrets, or whatever for them on poe.trade's currency site. Odds are you have quite a few chaos worth of other orbs lying around.

On your witch, you're basically using a white wand. The fire damage on it is added to attacks, not spells. I saw a bunch of other things to comment on, but I won't. I'll just strongly advise you to go read some beginner's guides. POE is a complex game and you're going to fall flat on your face in many, many ways if you don't understand those complexities. It's easy to coast through normal in a softcore league with terrible gear, poor support gems, and a subpar tree. As you learned from your first character, it's not so easy later on.

Edit: I just realized that since you don't have any life nodes on that witch and are heading to the right, you might be going for CI. Please don't do that. You don't level as CI, especially with trash gear. CI is something you spec into once you have a tree with tons of increased ES and very good gear with tons of ES on it. If you are planning on leveling as CI, my advice is to invest in a Cast On Death Portal setup. You're going to need it.
Last edited by Jennik on Jul 27, 2016, 9:28:56 AM
Yea, as you guys can see I really have no idea what I'm doing but I've only really been back playing for a week and this is the first time I've ever been past 'normal' difficulty. So gear, the passive tree (extremely confusing, I mean, it could go sooo many ways), skills and link combinations. I am trying. This is why I ask for help, I do want to learn. I have one more experienced player that invited me in and is helping me with lots of advice as to what to do and where to go. I'm also learning that post-normal (somewhere around level 40ish), leveling up slows down quite a bit.

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