Help! Keep hitting a ceiling at 70ish

I'm pretty decent at getting up to Act 4 in Merciless, but at that point, it's all stop.

First was in Standard, named Enthalia. Was firestorm and then I screwed her all up. My own fault. Waiting to kinda repair her.

But in Breach, I built a Vortex witch, Lady Entha. Kept my resistances up, tried to do both ES and Armor . . . I have NO idea what I'm screwing up. Can anyone give me a nudge? I just can't get past 70-72. I've tried running the Dry Lake in parties to level up, but I can't do much of anything on my own.

Not looking for hand-holding, just can't figure out what I'm screwing up. Am I THINKING wrong?

I just don't know. Need a kick in the butt to get me moving!

Many thanks (heh, I'm thanking people for a kick! LOL - be gentle! Heh)

If your characters aren't public when someone clicks on your profile, they cannot see your builds and cannot offer advice.

Same problem here, please make your profiles public though. Mine is always survivability from 60+ I can't quite find a good balance on defences and dps. I made a hardcore character with massive amounts of regen / hp / es, and hope to pass my softcover characters, once I do, drop each run throughs defences (es or life) by 25% until I hit a "comfortable" spot where it's balanced.

hugely sorry - kinda stupid of me. I unclicked "hide Characters tab" - that should do it, right?

Quick glance:
* You don't have enough life. Ideally, any non-unique non-weapon piece of equipment should have a decent life-roll. Also, if you play life-based, try to have around 150% increased life from the tree (you are at about 50%)
* I did not check if you capped your resists. Please make sure you do.
* If you go ES-based, you need high ES on gear and high increased ES as well. Make sure you have a working mechanism for replenishing your ES ready.

* You are using bad supports for your skills:
** I don't see any conversion of cold to fire for your Freezing Pulse. Why would you use Fire pen and Increased burning damage (the latter is going to be bad anyway)?
** Cold to fire on Vortex is bad as it does not affect the DoT part of the skill
** Same for added lightning damage.
** Why Blood Magic on Vortex?

There is probably more but I am in a hurry right now.

First thing, if you plan on going life, go life, if you plan on going energy shield go energy shield.

Life based builds use armor OR evasion for a secondary defence. Armor reduces % damage from physical damage ONLY, think of it as a physical resistance.

Evasion works like this:

Monsters have an accuracy % and you have an evasion % and the game has a randomized number of 0-99

Also your accuracy / evasion is based on monsters of your exact lvl.

So that random number is called entropy.

So its you versus monster A, lets say he has a 40% accuracy against you. That means you have a 60% evasion against him.

1. Entropy rolls, number is 68.
2. Monsters accuracy is 40% so he has 40+68% chance to hit you. He hits with a hit chance of 108%. Every time the hit chance goes above 100%, it loses 100 from the hit chance for the next attack and successfully hits you anything below 100 is a miss.
3. Monster attacks again, 8+40, 48, misses
4. Monster attacks again 48+40 monster misses
5. Monster attacks again, hits, number is now 28.
6. You've successfully not had a attack roll for a hit on you for 6 seconds, at 6 seconds the entropy value is reset.

Evasion only works for attacks, NOT spells. Dodge works outside of this system.

With armor and evasion, they are called implicit bases as in each armor piece that drops can have energy shield, armor or evasion. Since EV and AR's life pool are EXPLICIT (meaning added values like +life or added fire damage to spells), you can't stack life as high as ES and thus use armor or evasion for damage mitigation.


With ES though, your "life pool" aka "ES amount" is your defence. So ALL of your items should have ONLY ES as implicit, with a good starting ES value twice that of life at the same area.

Guidelines for life 300 life per act while leveling so 1200 by reach a4n malachai,
and 3600 for farming dried lake.

Good ES for dried lake (if going ES, get co once you can reach this value, never before) is 7k, white maps is 8.5k, yellow 9k and 11k for red maps. With CI, you should either be using ghost reaver with vaal pact, or zealots oath, or ghost reader and zealots oath, as es has "recharge speed" that stops when damaged.
Try a build like Dy'ness tank, and get it to 70, and then start a new character once you hit 70. Each time reducing the defences and increasing the damage. You will find a very nice balance eventually.

Also, Dy'ness is a scion build (search it in the scion forums by typing Dy'ness), he links to a incinerate tank build. Use his build in the leveling section, and use firestorm + faster casting + conc effect + fire pen and flame totem + faster projectiles + elemental focus + fire pen both in 4 links. Those in 4 links can get you to mid 90s, a guy in my guild has a level 90 with that setup.


TL;DR fix your defences first by making a uber no dps tank, and your dps will sort itself over time.

Goodluck, have fun.

Also, just focus on getting one build working, I suggest flame totem + firestorm as that is very basic and very good with scaling but has good base damage. Also learn how spells work, and what are the best support gems for them and why.

Spells don't gain anything from "Added # to # damage to attacks", but there are too many such rolls on your gear.

I would suggest just put all your focus on life for now. Energy shield based characters require very meticulous planning because the gears are expensive. That means you need at least 160% increased life nodes from tree. (Once you begin to venture into mid-tier maps you'll realize that's not even enough.)

Don't invest 20 points just for sake of getting those chaos resistances. We should get all our elemental and chaos resistances from gear. It's nice to get all ele resists to above 60%, but for chaos resists, maintaining at -40% or so might be enough for you at this point. Prepare an amethyst flask or Atziri's Promise if you know you are facing a boss with high chaos damage such as Maligaro. You can improve these numbers later on when better gears drop from higher level areas.

It looks like you are making vortex cold build, as I see you have taken plenty of cold damage nodes. Might be a better idea to drop firestorm and replace with freezing pulse.

I wonder you were able to reach merciless ....

Yuu should check this "vortex build" (life + ES hybrid witch elementalist) - https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1700706

Although your passive tree can´t be perfect till full respec (coming in some weeks with 2.6.0 or maybe later with 3.0 dno) but with some respec points would work past lvl 70 (in maps).

unless you want to play smth else (freezing pulse or whatever) :lots of build here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1774022

Although some builds aren´t good for novice (lack of stuff and such)

Ok your gear is trash every single piece . Pick one man life or ES, id go ES since you are a witch. You need to spec out of all those life nodes , and take energy shield nodes instead, also spec out of that long path to the chaos resistance , instead take chaos inoculation , and the es behind it. Then swap all that shitty gear for pure ES gear NO MORE HYBRID GEAR , make sure you get a couple resist and plenty of ES on each piece , for fairly cheap stuff go 200 ish ES on helm , 600 ish on chest ( maybe 5 chaos for a 5 link maybe less ) 150 ish on boots , and 200 ish on gloves. Personally if it was me id just reroll , take what you know and start over and not make a supremely borked via that skill tree hero but you could fix it if ou have 20 ish respec points or regrets.

The best advise is to look at the builds in the forums and use them instead of trying to make your own.