I need help, I die too often

Hi,

any tips how to survive against red beasts, Incursion rares and syndicate Members?
Ive got 6k health, 4 endurance charges, decent leech, chieftain powered life regen, fortify, some defensive flasks, CWDT enfeeble and molten shell, and ele weakness proof overcapped resists (if endurance charges are up).
They still rip me apart like wet paper.

I want to start to actually do those encounters.
Last bumped on Dec 20, 2018, 10:12:40 AM
With your gear and that many layers of defense, you should be facerolling those encounters. What tier maps are you having trouble in? Aside from just better character control, I am not really sure what more you can be doing to increase your defense. How good is your offense, cause a lot of my best survived characters had insane offense as part of their main defense. Dead mobs don't deal damage, and all that. I assume you are not running Immortal Call because you would rather have your endurance charges up, rather than having them consumed by IC. To me, CWDT > IC > Increased Duration > Enfeeble / Molten Shell is one of the best mechanical defenses available, and building charges is easy. Set your CWDT threshold to be roughly 30 - 40% of your total HP, and that way anything that can hit you that hard will have their first major attack nullified and you are instantly alerted to their presence because if Immortal Call just popped off, that means something just tried to take a huge shit on you.
Last time I died was in a tier 3 map with a single "additional damage as X element" mod in terms of damage mods. Janus Perandus crushed me.

Yes, I avoid IC because Im playing a chieftain. I dont have instant charge gain nor some charge gain on hit, only on kill and EC.
CWDT is at level 8, which triggers at about 20% of my max life in damage.

Im playing Consecrated Path with around 60k tooltip DPS (a little more than 100k fully buffed). I have no troubles against any map boss so far. I dont have higher tier maps than 6 currently.
So is it just the new Syndicate encounters that are giving you trouble? It would make sense, because they are way harder than your average content (especially that butthole Janus Perandus) and when they are all ranked up AND under map mods... they can be scary to say the least. Just for the sake of brevity, I am going to copy/paste a little blurb I wrote to another person that was having hell with Syndicate bosses. You may already know all this, but it won't hurt to post it. Maybe it will help another reader.

Syndicate Difficulty Factors

Ranks: 0 - 3 stars

This is the easiest factor to control as you can easily manipulate each members ranks. The higher their rank, the tougher they become, so if you are getting shredded by a 3 star Haku, the next time you defeat him make sure to interrogate him. Interrogation is the easiest way to de-rank a syndicate member, and execution is the easiest way to increase their ranks. Their ranks also scale their rewards, so the tougher they are the better their loot is likely to be.

Items / Gear

When you mouseover any given syndicate member you can see what gear they are wearing, and each piece of gear basically serves as a map mod that applies to that member each time you encounter them. If you are doing very little damage to Vorici, he may be wearing something that greatly reduces your damage type, and you will want to eliminate this gear asap. Again, the easiest way to remove gear is to interrogate the troublesome member as at the end of the interrogation they are returned to the board with -1 rank and all their gear removed.

Later on in the game, you will probably want to manipulate these things to favor more challenging and more rewarding encounters, but for now, you should just interrogate the hell out of the foes that give you trouble, and take the edge off them.

Friendships and Rivalries

Some of your decisions will make some syndicate members friends or foes of each other, and they are represented by the red and green threads that connect between them. When two members are friends, they will assist each other in their respective encounters. So if Rin (Transort) and Elreon (Research) are friends, then Elreon will show up in Transport encounters to assist Rin and vice versa.

The opposite is true of rivals. They will appear in each other's encounters to hinder each other, rather than aid. This is another way in which you can tone down the difficulty. You can work on ways to remove friendships or even turn them against each other so they help you. This is the more difficult factor to manipulate as it is dependent on a bit of RNG to pull the relevant choices. There may be easier ways to manipulate this, but so far I have not noticed it.

Walk Away, Exile!

Another dimension to your strategy is to know that you don't HAVE to make a decision. If none of the options you are given work in your favor... just walk away. You, don't have to choose... or more accurately stated, you can always choose to walk away. The same is true of engaging them in the first place. You can usually see them well in advance on the map, and if you know that your map is a little rippy already and you see an encounter ahead that will have Janus in it... just walk away.
Thank you for the long answer.

No, its not only syndicate members. Thats only the last death I can remember. My death count is 19. Of which one was Gruthkul. The rest are either syndicate members, red bestiary hunts or incursion rares.

I already know how to make those fights even more dangerous, but not how to properly survivng them. Taking away their items as betrayal option is probably my favourite betrayal option.

I know avoiding those encounters is an option, but I want to actually interact with the league mechanics.
You should be fine but some of these encounters are really overtuned.

I try to help you ….

The problem with CWDT + enfeeble is that it will activate while you´re dead or close to.
You can try blasphemy + enfeeble instead (high level enfeeble if you can deal with requirements - getting some inteligence on gear or +30intel node is worth taking).

It will not only reduce incoming damage but also helps to avoid some attacks.

I am using it with stibnite flask (blind reduce enemies hit chance) and Dread banner (same thing + increased effect of fortify; you can just turn it on).

If you can add Jade flask with 100% increased evasion even better.

Stibnite + enfeeble + banner should be enough.

Enfeeble reduces chance to be hit by crit damage and reduce critical damage taken (some extra passives / items or pantheon that fight incoming crits is welcomed).

Get some chaos resistance (having negative chaos resistance is not a big deal).

Some incursion monsters (constructs,..) and probably some Syndicate members (Tora?) deals larger amount of chaos damage.

If not enough you can try decoy totem (linked with minion resistance)
Btw Stone golem seems better (can taunt enemies) than flame one but it´s up to you.

Frost bomb should help you with high regen members (there are also healing totems you need to kill or separate them).
Besides that try to kill them one by one (not always possible but decoy totem might help).

Use pantheon that will fit your needs.

Anything that can blind (abyss jewels) / slow down the opponents is good (Tombfist gloves that can maim etc).

That´s all I can think of right now. I´ll hope it helps a bit.
Last edited by Rakiii on Dec 13, 2018, 2:23:27 PM
Thanks for your ideas.

Blind and maim are must haves these days, huh? I try to work them in.

Socket space is already tight. Not sure if I can put all of these ideas to use.
"
Vias_Myton wrote:

Yes, I avoid IC because Im playing a chieftain. I dont have instant charge gain nor some charge gain on hit, only on kill and EC.

Then use your warcry. Not sure skipping immortal call is the way to go here.

With your current defensive setup, you really shouldn't struggle in low tier maps.

But it is bound to fail you later. You cannot just have "a big (but not crazy big) life pool, some regen and some armor" in higher content. That's not enough layers.

First, I'd incorporate some avoidance: Evasion, block or dodge.
Most likely evasion (+ blind on a jewel), as the other two are too far away in the tree or impossible.
You can take "cloth and chain" for two skillpoints, and wear some hybrid armour/evasion gear. Just avoid some hits, don't have to go crazy on it.

Then find more ways to mitigate incoming damage. Take the remaining endurance charges, upgrade your Pantheon and choose wisely, maybe use resist flasks, of course use immortal call...
3.5 build: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2299519
At 6 endurance charges, using IC means losing 4.2% max life regen per second, which is around 260 life per second at 6.2k life, and 20% flat physical reduction (as well as 30% increased fire damage).
IC would grant me around 2 secs of invunerablity to phyiscal damage only.
Against 3-5 enemies EC would restore 1 charge only.

Unless Im fighting against a fast hitting physical only damage dealer, I think not using IC is better.
Against Janus however, Im probably forced into using IC...

Well, I do struggle. League mechanics and huge variance in numbers means either Im breezing through them or Im dying miserably. There is almost no inbetween.

Wouldnt be taking evasion make me even weaker to enemies like Tora and Janus? They hit so hard, every mitigation I have is worth its weight in gold. And Im not able to upgrade into evasion without losing mitigation of some sorts.

Im thinking of switching either a instant life flask or my basalt against a stibnite. But both would make me weaker against Janus, as hes using physical spells.

Blind on jewels sounds nice, but they provide 4% chance to blind at best. Not the most reliable method out there.
I tried CWDT + Ball Lightning + Blind in the past, but sockets space is really tight now.
Last edited by Vias_Myton on Dec 15, 2018, 2:29:46 PM
"
Vias_Myton wrote:
Wouldnt be taking evasion make me even weaker to enemies like Tora and Janus? They hit so hard, every mitigation I have is worth its weight in gold. And Im not able to upgrade into evasion without losing mitigation of some sorts.

Im thinking of switching either a instant life flask or my basalt against a stibnite. But both would make me weaker against Janus, as hes using physical spells.

Blind on jewels sounds nice, but they provide 4% chance to blind at best. Not the most reliable method out there.
I tried CWDT + Ball Lightning + Blind in the past, but sockets space is really tight now.


You can incorporate evasion into your build without loosing other source of mitigation.
You´re right about Janus dealing spell damage.

I would try blasphemy enfeeble (despite 60% less effectiveness on Syndicate bosses is worth using) + Dread banner + stibnite flask (blind) and drop one herald.
Grace aura + stibnite is also an option.
You can compensate damage loss with six link body eventually.

Are you able to keep your fortify up?
Btw you would deal higher damage with Avatar of fire allocated too (you would deal fire damage only - it would require penetration though).
Last edited by Rakiii on Dec 15, 2018, 6:35:11 PM

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