Beating Nemesis without rares or uniques
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Its becoming a mess chasing these posts around. I'll try and be more concise with my texts.
>backwards in log http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/698071/page/11/#p6118433
Log14:TheKeyToHeaven
In this log I kill piety in cruel and survive a punch in the face by kole. I've been back and forth between barracks many times and I still say its the most dangerous zone in the game. Even the black guards in the lunaris temple arn't a problem because they always spawn in the same areas so its easy to memorize and predict. I go through Solaris blowing stutff up tanking hits with granite flask and shell's aid. Sometimes I use totems in my place if see the enemies ahead and they dont havnt been agroed. Easy stuff. I fight brutus 3 ways. When I first got to him I pulled him away from curse spamming friends. With Brutus alone I lay the skeleton totem infront of me. He spends all his time hopless trying kill the never ending wave. Even if he uses his chain the totem infront of me takes my place and I resummon it. When he gets to 50% health I cancel the totem and decide to fight him normally just to show that I can. A new location is needed. I lure him into a room with many small doors. I am faster than brutus and I make him chase me through the doors. I plant lightning bolts infront him so just as he turns a corner he gets thunder in his face and I have already turned another corner: I am hitting my desync macro about every 2 seconds but brutus still does his fucking teleport trick and ends up right in my face. I swerve right and dodge punch. I probably would have survived it anyway since I keep him permantly enfeebled and my granite flask buff refreshed. I go to town to refill my potions and play around the hallow flasks I found. The promised currency massacre did not happen. I get the mods I want with just a few of them: very lucky. I choose hallowed flasks over sanctified flasks because they have more charges: I don't want to get caught in dangerous situation with no charges. Apart from that, being a HC standard resident, I am more familiar with hallowed flasks. I have good feel for how much they recover and when they recharge. My #1 flask is just a Catalyzed flask with a worthless secondary mod: to be honest I don't need any mod other than catalyzed on this flask. Burn,Shock,and Freeze removal mods are really only for mappers. If you have max resists and good health (as I do) than you will almost never have these debuffs anyway. Catalyzed is a good mod because it has the best health per second of any non instant flask. If you prefer sanctified flasks I'd advise the charge recover mod. My #2 flask: seething with bleed removal. Everyone needs a seething a quick injection of health is almost a universal problem solver. Bleed removal is important because bleed is a form of crowd control and crowd control removes your options as a player. Theres also that annoying corrupted blood #3: curse immunity and extra speed. I already mentioned why I choose this before: it lasts longer than other flasks for curse immunity and I'm already very fast so I dont need the more speed mod. Maybe i will craft a curse immunity of increased recovery later #4: life saving granite flask of iron skin, everyone needs one, EVERYONE maybe il craft a new one with perpetual later #5: Nothing special just extra charges. Once I get all my mana nodes I'll experiment with replacing this with another granite or seething. maybe a jade or elemental flask but probably not While I was crafting this my portal to Solaris despawned and I had to do the whole fucking thing over again: I was really pissed about this. I was quicksilvered past most of the guys. Crap Brutus again. Well I've already decided that I am going to start skipping this guy from now on. I tried to do a fair fight with him but even with /oos spamming he still teleports. I sit up a skeleton totem for him to play with and make the dumb mistake of running RIGHT INTO HIS FUCKING FIST. Good thing I was drinking my granite flask or I would have just died there. Fucker took off more than half my health. I leave and head into the 3rd level. Nothing too dangerous using totem to scout ahead avoids ambushers, my curse immunity flask makes those curse-on-hit monsters into babies. On the part of the level with cages I manage to kill several rare mobs before they leave their cages. Piety's difficulty hasnt changed much since normal. I already described fighting her in one of my other logs but I'll mention a few more advanced tactics on her. Her minions spawn from the blood pool. Its best to hang out far away from the blood pile behind the line of sight, that way you almost never agro them. Recover flask charges through going to town not through fighting monsters. You can kill her seals on the ground that let transform. Kill the ice ones but let her take the red ones because you can face tank her and get easy damage on her with a granite flask. I discovered that sometimes when behind a pillar I can hit her ice form but she can't hit me. LOL blind spots. I could probably do her entire pattern this way if I wanted but it would take forever. You can make her cancel her forms using town portals. Her form change has a timer duration before it expires and that timer is still sticking if you are in town. If she went into ice form and you are in a bad position just take a town portal, grab a soda and come back. Pretty easy stuff. She goes down. Well I'm 1 bar away from level 55 so I head to docks and kill a few monsters. I look onward towards the tower of God. Pretty short log so I'll just rant a bit here. Someone asked me about how I will handle merciless and cap resists. Capping resists is very important in PoE and I dont mean just getting them 60 and calling it even I mean 75. Due to how effective health works the closer you get to 100 the stronger something is. 50% damage reduction makes you live double time. 75% makes you live quadruple time. One thing I do is I balance my gear. I always have back up gear because a big part of PoE is juggling. If I am wearing 3 piece of fire resist gear maybe I can swap 1 out of a lightning or ice resist. This is way resist all is so valuable: you dont need to do silly gear swaps. When I purchased my expensive end game gear (my shield and amulet) I made sure they had different resists. I am also wearing an angelic shield with an innate +24% resist all. This is huge. I will also be using purity of elements once I hit merciless: pretty much every build in the game should be running some sort of aura, maybe 2 or more. As I said before I never used my auras before but I kept giving them xp in my off weapon because I figured I would eventually. I have relatively few resistance nodes. I will get 1-2 more once I reach merciless. Resistance nodes should be treated as crutch. Feel free to load up on as many ones as you need provided that they are in areas you can easily unspec from. Once you gear up properly and do no need them refund them and get something else. If you are completely fucked and desperate you can change your gear to adapt to the zone you are in. For instance the pirate graveyard in act 1 only has lightning and cold resist, you could remove all fire resist gear for extra lightning and cold. This is a desperate move and you should only use it if you have no other options. A rare monster or rogue exile could spawn with fire damage, you may make a mistake and not know the elements right. Once you get into mapping this strategy doesnt work at all because maps can spawn any monster at any time. And most simple I prioritize resist (in addition to health). If my resists are not capped I wont wear that nice spell damage ring, I will wear a resist ring, even if its a white ring. This sounds pretty harsh and like there is no choice in gear but remember I am dealing with only blues, not rares or uniques. If I decided I wanted to get lots of crit to shock stack, item find to hunt treasure better, mana, or whatever than it would be extremely easy to do with rares or uniques. A lot of new players come into this game with a background in WoW like games and think they can just go all dps with no health or resist. You can: if you want to play like contra and die in 1 hit from everything. But than again there is no desync in contra or undodgable damage (reflect, corrupting blood, etc) Cap your resists, get a life roll on as many gear slots as you can, get life nodes, do whatever you want with the rest of your resources. Another topic: How do I decide my tree? The simpliest answer is that I look for areas with large life nodes and connect them. What I do in between the life nodes however is a lot trickier. Its ok to take small detours away from life (like I how get the 'area damage' nodes in the witch starting area and my future shock chance nodes) but life nodes are really the highway that you travel along and all the other nodes are places you stop a long the way. I decided early on I wanted strength armor because: a) I like strength armor in both how it looks and the consistent damage reduction b) I knew I would use an angelic shield which has a strength requirement c) I knew the utility spells I would relay on were strength based. The witch can go to the templar or the shadow area. Guess which one has strength? This probably isn't usful information for your build because you will actually have armor or evasion I grab some nearby +10% resist all when using a shield because I knew capping resist with only blues would be difficult. I have avoided getting block or armor nodes: remember that concept about effective health and how the closer you get to 100% the stronger it becomes. That also works in reverse. When your armor is pathetic getting 25 or even 50% more doesnt help much. I am getting the witchs mana because I need some sort of mana boost to properly run 2 auras. It also means I may throw away my mana flask in favor of another seething or granite flask. Im also considering using the 5th slot to run jade or to swap it our for zone-appropriate resist flask (eg: a ruby flask in a fire heavy zone) I don't use any keystones but if I did than I would certainly build around those as well. I purposely got all the damage nodes early (I planned to get the shock nodes way earlier but I started to need more strength by the time I got there) to level faster. I'll mention one other thing. I use a desync Macro: its not bannable. Chris, the fucking head of GGG, made a post saying its ok. GGG's server connection sucks. We always had desync but until the game got big on steam it wasn't nearly this bad. They really need to upgrade the servers. Apart from that there things like kole which would desync even if only 1 player was on the server because they are programmed badly. I have absolutely no pity or forgiveness for GGG's bad programming and cheap servers: but what the hell its not like there's much else to play. At least theres a macro to fix it instead of it being a permanent problem. I use auto-hot key for my desync macro (theres a thread about doing this and a popular youtube tutorial already up). I bind it to ctrl and I hit it like every 5 seconds. I also hit it every time I or an enemy does a teleporting spell. I also use premium tabs: go buy em. Extra storage space means you can hold onto goods longer trying to sell them or use for later instead of vendoring. Its pay to win but so is my gaming mouse. Support Razor and GGG. Here is my build after slaying piety http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMAAuMHYwelFVAWbxmFGjgdFB8CJKoo-iycLR8xnjWSNsU26TrhPV9Bh0SrRZ1Jsk3jUlNVrlXGVytmnnB9c1N2EXqqfq-AVoIQgseI8Y0Zj0aPppBVmuCmV6cIp4SsWbc-uJPAGsBUwbTPZdDQ2CTdjN-w4BLjauTs52Pr7vJF-ej60v4K_o8= Here is my gear and build The prismatic ring is a new addition; I purchased it for 1 chaos pure and 1 scour, maybe I shouldnt have given up a hard chaos for it. But I don't see myself shopping much anymore Guys please, no more trying to sell me blues. My gear is good enough right now and I want to actually use these transmute orbs. This is gear I have to switch to incase I need to juggle resists. Here is my wealth: Absolute trash. Piety is gone but Dominus remains. Cheer me on and look forward to my victory over the high templar and angry scrubs.
COMMENTARYLOG1:ThoughtsOnTradingAndCrafting
I have been criticized for doing some on my adventure: people say it makes the game easier (it does). There several reasons I trade. First of all I enjoy it. Secondly I wanted to demonstrate good trading concepts to the community: I show the power of for items in hard chaos, the value of currency conversation, how to find good gear on a budget, lots of things. I personally think I do good job of restricting myself on trading: Just about everything I am wearing I could immidiently upgrade through trading. I could get a high item level wand rolled with 60+ spell damage and 30+ mana regen for almost nothing. . It's difficult to resist the temptation myself. Even the flasks I crafted right now: I could have purchased them for less currency than i used to craft them: that is true for almost every thing in this game. I am trying to do a large variety of things on my adventure: I wear items I find, I craft, and I buy I play aggressively with face tanking via potion chugging, I play defensively with totem tricks or kiting, I think it makes for a more interesting read and more variety in discussion/things learned. In addition playing 100% self-found requires a lot of planning. I did not fully plan out my build and I'm still figuring it out as I go. For instance I didn't know concentrated effect was not a quest reward. If I intended to 100% self-found than it would need a very specific build that can work well without 5 link, only uses quest reward gems, etc. I would have done things very differently if I intended not trade: I probably would have been marauder or templar and gotten less damage nodes and more resist/life nodes. I might have chosen a spell that that doesnt relay on concentrated effect. I fully believe that doing no rares, no unqiues self-found is possible. If any of you want to 1up me and do a playthrough of all blues with no trading what-so ever I would love to see it. Let's teach these scrubs a listen together! Maybe you can even teach me a few things!! Anything to push this game further is good news to me. Now for my giant rant on trading and currency. This has nothing to do with my adventures so you can stop reading now if you want. When PoE was first released players loved to contrast the 'bad' currency of diablo 3 and the 'good' currency of PoE. The truth is that they are the same currency: they always have been. The only difference is that in d3 you have 'gold' which is used to purchase crafting mats OR gear from other players and in PoE you have 'orbs' which you can use to craft to purchase gear. Since gold in d3 can easily be turned into crafting mats, and crafting mats can easily be turned into gold: its not a stretch at all to say that d3's currency IS crafting mats. So PoE is not impressive for its currency system, whats impressive is that unlike d3 crafting is actually kind of good every once in awhile. Not that there haven't been many, many games where crafting is good before. Many players including myself lament that orbs are gold coins. When i see a chaos orb drop I do not think about what new item I will have craft: I think about what I will buy with it. To me a gcp drop is the exact same thing as 2 chaos orb drops. You can craft with these orbs yes: you will get a good item eventually but you could have gotten one better from poexyz auction house. Maybe this will change once I get to higher level but probably not by much. I should mention that high level players do craft often. However we do not do it for profit. If crafting was truly profitable than us high level players would simply grab 100 chaos orbs, craft 100 rares, and than sell them for more than 150 chaos orbs. We would than repeat this and our wealth would increase exponentially until the entire economy was ruined. The reason high level players craft is because we simply have nothing better to do with our orbs and we have piles and piles of them. Sometimes we will alch 10 items. 9 of them will be crap and we vendor them. The 10th we sell to new players for 2 chaos. We don't care too much about the currency lose because we can earn it all back easily through mapping or piety runs. One can still play PoE crafting with all their currency instead of saving it: but just because you can play that way and still win doesnt mean the problem is fixed. As an example suppose you have an action game with 10 characters (or 10 weapons) 2 of them are much better than the other 8. You can still beat the game with the 8 bad characters/weapons but the game would be much more enjoyable if they were actually good. In PoE crafting is like picking the bad character/weapon. During closed beta currencies did not have a very fixed value: people would just trade things away very freely, little to no haggling, no item flipping, we actually crafted with our orbs. It was what most people would say is 'perfect'. The reason we had this wasn't because we had a better community (we did but that wasn't the reason) it was because your character got fucking deleted every 2 weeks so there was no reason to hord things or pinch pennies. Once we got into open beta (no more character wipes) the economy we have now formed with very fixed currency price: prices were set almost immidiently and within 1 week everyone seemed to know their ratios. Diablo also had an economy where people would just trade without a care (at least sometimes) this was because there were bots and items were freely available. I knew a guy who would run a bot, gather the items than give them out to new players. People don't give a shit about prices when its free. I'd love to see the ratios go away and people to just do whatever but thats not how economics work. If 90% of us played without caring about prices or conversions and 10% of us do than through ripping you off in trade the 10% would become economic gods: not only would we be filthy rich but we would use our wealth to run content the 90% cannot and than be the sole-provider of 'good' items. Thats already how the game is already. Our insane economy where people have fucking BROKERS, STOCKS, AND LOTTERIES http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/631497 http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/631789 Is inevitable though given the nature of the game. Even though I like trading myself I have to say its a pathetic element of a games. Strategically deciding what type of magic and armor to wield. Developing the attributes of a warrior. Exploring a dark cave filled with monsters. Running around dodging arrows and slaying the undead watching their bones fall apart. Opening a treasure chest found in a moly old tomb. Teaming up with other heroes to take down a horde of bandits (and maybe later betraying the heroes and siding with the bandit) Sitting in town trying to talk a guy into paying 1 extra orb. Buying items you do not intend to use only to sell them later at a profit. Scanning a fucking search engine to find an item with the right parameters. Which ones sound better? Well its obvious that trading is pretty lame compared to monster hunting and dungeon crawling but some of us happen to like (including myself) maybe we are sick in the head. Many of us do not like it but participate in it anyway because its much better than crafting sort of like, in our action game example if you did not like the 2 strong characters/weapons but you still played them because you got tired of the other 8 being so weak. Maybe its that some of us are bad at the game and literally cannot win self-found, maybe its that some of us just like the feeling of having good gear, maybe its just that you want something very specific that could easily be earned through trade but would be unlikely to be made though crafting. Theres a lot of players who are trading but don't like it. Crafting can never be equal to or greater than trading because trading allows you to purchase items with a much higher item level than the content you play on. Take my awesome 99 life 41 cold resist shield for instance. I could not craft this myself because these mods only appear on itemlevel72 stuff (only level 72 monsters will drop it). Crafting is also random: even if i get a good item from crafting it may not be what I want. More often than not when you craft you get an item that is good for SOMEONE ELSE'S build. Trading is selective; I can get whatever stats i want. As a matter of fact if you go through the trouble of using alching or transmuting a lot of in an attempt to craft a specific item you will probably end up with tons of items you do not want but could trade away for orbs. Trading has a funny way of working its way into crafting. We trade so we can craft and we craft items to trade. This is the sad truth: no amount of tinkering with the numbers would make it so that crafting is equal to or better than trading. GGG would need to alter core rules to the game like removing the concept of item level or something similarly drastic. Our mad, mad economy where we all be penny-pinching accounts is here to stay. Those of us like myself who have extremely bad taste and actually enjoy this garbage will continue to enjoy it. Those of you hate it: well you can enjoy watching all the chaos unfold. The bots are in full swing, the economy is flooding with noobs from steam that will be ripped off for everything they have, we have players with THOUSANDS of chaos orbs who can mold the shape of the economy like puddy in their hands, GGG is trying to tinker with it all (no doubt for problem they fix they will create a new one) and YOU yourself are stuck in the middle of it all trying to just enjoy the fucking game. Things are just gonna get crazier from here!!! Who knows what will happen.
Log15:TheTrueFaceOfGod
In this section I defeat dominus on cruel and have a miserable time in the worst designed section of the entire game. I relax with some music before heading towards the tower of god for my showdown with Dominus. I put on a purity of lightning aura, all I get from it is +2 max resist all but I want to get used to how it feels on my mana to run clarity+a 40% aura for when I do purity in cruel. I revisit the gardens. I confuse a bringer of bones rare's skeletons with my own skeletons which was pretty funny "why are my skeletons betraying me?" I experiment on the corpse spitters and found that if you let them start eating a corpse, than turn it into a zombie than they continue to play their animation eating the non-existant corpse (it doesnt give them ammo). In the tower I find my dps is lacking and I need to use many portals to refill my potions. At this point in the game a normal player would have a wand with a much higher damage roll, but I'll struggle with it for now. I get my 5 link soon. The tower of god is surprisingly easy, although strong attacks from leap slammers and annoying bubbles that force me to go into melee ranger sound like a death sentence the tower itself has a a map shape that is the most beneficial to the player out of any zone in the game. Just about every room is connected by a tiny door and you can see the enemies inside and assess the threats before opening it. Once you open it the melee oriented enemies will run towards you and the ranged ones will stay in the back. I guess GGG figured the melee guys would act as a shield to guard the ranged guys but thats now how it works out. I run outside the room behind a wall, the melee guys followed and are picked off with the usual molten shell+enfeeble+storm call while the ranged enemies de-agro and wait for their friends to die. Than I go in and take out the ranged enemies. Spine shooters are pretty easy, you circle strafe, wait for them to attack than hit them while they spend 3 seconds shooting at nothing. If I am lucky than I will only pull half the melee enemies instead of the full bunch and even the molten shell/enfeeble is not needed. Sometimes even the enemies I pull behind the wall will fail to see me because a piece of the wall (the door or a candle) is slightly in front of me and they will leave having 'lost' me right as I am about to hit them with spells. Doing this also really, really fucks with the games movement prediction. Ever had an enemy come to you and than disappear suddenly when you try to attack it and reppear somewhere else? That happens all the time when I do this. Its really frustrating laying down 6 storm call marks only to have the enemies despawn, pull them again, have them despawn again, and run out of mana charges doing this. The map shape really seems designed to give the player every advantage possible: I always see enemies over walls before they see me. The area is litered with small obstacles like pillars or statues that if you stand behind, you lose vision on some enemies and they start wandering off. There were several times where I fought 3 enemies, I hid behind a pillar/statue and 1 of the 3 stopped fighting me while I kill off the other 2. The enemies here hit pretty hard and are very tanky but I think GGG did a terrible job with the level design. I have never been able to abuse ai this badly in any other zone. AI abuse is a core feature in pretty much all games, in small amounts it adds more depth like how I will pull enemies away from a boss or rogue exile to isolate the big enemy. In large amounts (like this) it makes the enemies look like bafoons and the development team seem like they never even played their own game. When I got to the unique lizard enemy (the one that regenerates his health by eating corpses) I tried to zombie the bodies around him before damaging the unique. To my surprise the unique monster started eating corpse even when he had no damage on him, saving me the trouble. He spent about half the fight running around looking for corpses to eat instead of fighting. I know this is probably my most pessimestic log which isn't fitting of my triumph but god dammit the ending of act 4 is really terrible. Everything about the end of act 4 feels really rushed. The devourers in the hedge maze that let me just hit them with lightning storm when a wall is blocking his vision while they stand there and don't fight back. The corpse eaters that become buggy if you use zombie, and all the problems I mentioned in the tower of god. When it was first released (piety used to be the end of act 3 and the gardens area didn't exist) Dominu's fight would crash peoples computers and they would log back on dead. To be honest the desync issues in this run of tower of god were worst than average. I also put a lot of effort into finding ever exploit because as I said before my dps is really starting to lack. I'm done with the tower of bad ai. I head up to the top. I've played this fight over in my mind before and had a pretty good mental of image how I wanted it to go. I figured his first wave of uniques would be deadly with the leap slamming fire-hammer guy and the cycle guy almost instantly bringing my health to half unless unless I was very carful to always have a granite flask on when being struck "i might even get 1 shot if they crit!" "this is going to be very dangerous. I might even die if desync happens at a bad time" This is what I thought over and over. I figured dominus himself would be just a 1sided fight. Run around till he does his lightning stream attack, swallow some pots and trade blows. Repeat till his devil form than just nuke down the devil form, swallow bleed removel flask when I need it, and kill his pathetic spawn almost instantly. Well interestingly enough none of that happened at all. I knew that the most dangerous enemy would be fire-hammer guy. Heavy physical damage (leap slam) is my weakness. There is a cyclone guy but he is pretty slow at chasing and he doesnt burst, he does sustained damage and you can deal with sustained damage better than burst. I placed a decoy totem infront of his face than trigger the fight. I enfeeble him and throw a few bolts up, getting a good chunk of his hp off. This phase of dominus may be the most deadly because its not very easy to predict what will happen. Like all enemies these guys obey the line of site rule: if they can't see you than they get lost. I lure the fire hammer guy to the big wall at the bottem. If you do this early on and are lucky than you only have to fight 1 guy at a time. I get lucky and we have a 1v1 duel with no interference. (Its amazing how much I abuse walls in this section) I stay in melee range of the hammer guy because he wont leap slam me unless I am far away and in melee range he does fire element instead of physical. An enfeeble and a few basic healing potions and he is dead. With the only guy that bursts dead I can move around freely. I run around picking off the normel black guards. They arn't too deadly but the less things I have to keep track of the better. I make sure to run behind a wall whenever I can (makes you lose agro on them for a second) Next I lure the cyclone spinner to the same wall at the bottem. This is a really perfect set up: usually 1 of the uniques ends coming down to the wall to help his buddy but not this time. Another 1v1 with the cyclone guy. Dont even need armor flask. Just molten shell and enfeeble. I was amazed at how easy this was. If I can face tank the cruel versions WITHOUT a granite flask than the merciless one will be no problem WITH the flask Next do the lightning mage. her damage is the most harmless, if you have max lightning resist (i have 77) you can practically kill her without even drinking potions. She is still annoying because she turnst he entire screen into a seizure inducer with her sporks. I kill her but she has her revenge. Just as she dies she spawns a totem in such a way that I am trapped between it and the wall behind me. This is part of why I pull enemies apart before fighting them. Tower of god has design issues even at the last boss I suppose. The other uniques are no threat. I circle strafe the fire spitter, wait for her to miss than nuke her down. If I am forced to face tank her hits potion chugging and 75 fire resist fixes it. The chaos damage one is a joke because my chaos resist is out of the negative. If yours isnt just gear swap for this boss. The smoke-miner: it is important to keep him off screen and kill him last. If he comes on screen run away till he cant see you. He is slow but the other uniques are fast: they will come to you and he will not. His damage isnt very high but if you can avoid it why not do it, also he blinds you. The 'pull behind the wall' trick doesnt work too well on these new enemies because they chase much better than the original set of uniques but I still try to run around as much as I can to split them up Overall this set of uniques are a lot of fun. I run around dodging fire spitting shots, playing head and seek with the smoke miner: not much of a challenge but it so is exciting. My personal favorite part of the fight. I love the sound effects of the fire spitter narrowly missing me and hitting a wall. I love being surprised when the viper striker catches me from behind like some sort of serial killer movie villain. I love that horrifying sound the smoke miner makes. Ok those bastards are dead, time to face roll dominus. I run around waiting for him to shoot those lightning bugs at me Curse of conductivity, storm calls over the head and HOLY CRAP HIS ATTACK HURTS. I spam potion buttons. What is going on? I have 77 lightning resist. I could just face tank that attack on my other characters. I run around trying to find a new way of fighting him. I dodge around laying down small hits every once awhile, running from that blue lightning hose whenever it comes. Even worst his 'trash mob' minions fucking hurt because I don't have armor. They spawn infinity so I can't just use granite flask. Looking back I probably should have kept molten shell refreshed. My totems are no good, he teleports around and ignores them too much. My old friend the wall still helps a bit. It always great when Dominus hangs out near there because half the time his minions can't see me behind it. A few times Dominus was in a position where the wall blocked his shots but I could still hit him: but I can't relay on that, it only happens once or twice in the fight. Very tricky. I had to portal out many times to restock my pots. Its a slow fight where I run around with exploding minions chasing me. Dominus won't stay still so many of my lightning strikes miss. Let me tell you pressing 'i' and right clicking a portal when you have dominus and his minions on you zero potion charges and only 50% health is scarey. They never got me below 1/3 health but that fucking aggression: just non stop damage. My dps is way too low to use the spawn to refill my flasks too. I experiment with using enfeeble on him but he has a lot of health and I'm short on damage. I take the risky approach and stick with conductivity. This was probably a bad idea. I should have used enfeeble. Not being able to face tank his lightning hose means there is no safe time to damage him. He's either doing hand of god, teleporting, or hosing me. I manage to get shots in at times but its very uncoordinated. I "Crap this is only cruel dominus. I'm slowly bringing his health down but I dont see how I can handle the merciless version? Did I actually make an unwinnable build? When he was about half done I realized why I couldn't tank the hose. All my other characters I played had like triple the life regen of my witch: life regen counters sustained damage. I think this fight actually be easier for a non-spell caster: Warlords mark curse might give you the sustain you need to face tank the lightning hose and get in easy damage. Well geeze. I guess I could run vitality but than I'd have no mana for purity in cruel. I'll definitly need more life regen nodes. Maybe all it will take is a big dps once I equip my 5 link and find a better wand. We will see. Merciless Dominus will definitly be a challenge I think. Some more frantic dodging: I get a better feel for how to get him to teleport to that bottem wall where his minions cant see me and I start to damage him more often. Its a crude fight with lots of portaling and no solid strategy. I'm not happy with beating the form like that. I found a safe way to damage him at one point: go up to him and bait him into doing a hand of god: move out of range and throw down bolts while he punches the ground. I did this a few times: extremely suicidal but it works. With this method he stands still more often. 30% movement speed boots or a quicksilver make it doable I just discovered this method of tricking him into doing punches in this fight while experimenting. Kind of nice to learn something. I only discovered it when he was almost dead so I didn't get to see how reliable it was. I had relayed on the 'face tank the lightning house' method too much but now i have a new technique, maybe I can perfect it? After some tricky footwork he goes down. Good fight, was frightening but a lot of fun. This is a completely different approach than what I normally do. I was panicking, trying to figure things out as I went along, I need to practice this fight: maybe I'll go back to normal dominus and develop my technique there. "This world is an illusion exile!" "this is where it gets easy" I think Well I was wrong again. As usual I stand still the entire fight. Dominus himself deals no Bleed removal flask makes me laugh at his debuff. But damn those spawns. In the normal dominus fight I just blow them up almost instantly. Cruel ones I need to use conductivity and than I barely manage to kill them at the same rate they spawn. I do like no damage. I want to use enfeeble but I than I would clear them even slower and they would overwhelm me (again I forget I have molten shell, im dumb) Again I couldnt use the spawn to refill flasks quick enough. I need to portal out to get more potions (after you portal back in you are invulnerable use that time to open another portal you can click on whenever you need, continue the process as much as you want: this is another bad design choice, since dominus never moves around you can do this easily) Like I said I barely clear them fast enough. If I had less damage I could not clear the boss because I would just get swarmed. My damage is really, really shitty: My wand is crap. I probably wouldn't have the kill speed I needed without the witches damage nodes: path of life nodes my ass (than again if i was a marauder maybe I could handle it better with life regen and bonus armor, who knows) After some truly painful moments Dominus is dead. This was by far the most interesting Dominus fight I've had in a long, long time. This last phase is a gear check: if you dont have enough dps you lose. However I think its a fair one considering I pass the gear check with fucking GARBAGE. I played horribly, horribly sloppy. I forgot I had molten shell, I overly relied on portal scrolls to refill flasks instead of using the spawn, I didn't have a propper technique, and neglecting to upgrade my wand really came back to haunt me. I should have used enfeeble on his human form instead of conductivity. My storm call gem was close to leveling up and I could have just grinded docks to get the dps boost I needed. Terrible, shameful, play, but I won. Cruel is finished. No paying for a boss kill, mediocre build with a completely average spell, solo fight, no rares, no uniques. Dominus is fucking dead and I'm going to go to merciless and kill him again! I pick up my vendor trash and head off to the beaches! Round 3 with Dominus will be much, much harder. His lightning hose will hit way harder and his spawn are going to have way more health. Sloppy play like that will get me killed. I will need more dps and better technique. Well this log was surprising. None of my predictions of the Dominus fight were right but I managed to pull through. Here is the trashy gear that took down cruel dominus. Please do not fight Dominus with a wand this shitty http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMAAuMHYwelFVAWbxmFGjgdFB8CJKoo-iycLR8xnjWSNsU26TrhPV9Bh0SrRZ1Jsk3jUlNVrlXGVytmnnB9c1N2EXqqfq-AVoIQgseI8Y0Zj0aPppBVmuCmV6cIp4SsWbc-uJPAGsBUwbTPZdDQ2CTdjN-w4BLjauTs52Pr7vJF-ej60v4K_o8= Here is my pathetic bank Here is my switch gear, some of it hasnt been touched in ages but i got space to hold it so why not What a rush.
Commentarylog2:WhyYouShouldNeverPayForADominusKill
I've ran a lot of people through cruel Dominus on my main in standard HC. A lot I can't count how many chaos orbs I earned from it but its definitely a sizable amount so it sounds odd that I am telling you to NOT give me orbs but thats what I am doing. I've already demonstrated you can beat Dominus with total crap gear and not even having a solid battle plan. I've shown that you CAN beat dominus yourself and now I'll tell you why you SHOULD. Theres a certain desire to improve your character in this game and I can understand it. Making your numbers go up is fun and feels rewarding: it feels great and you want to get past this big wall in order to get to the better gear and xp. But there is another type of development: self development. The feeling you get from improving as a player is immensely pleasurable. I feel much happier about my blue only dominus kill than I have about any item or level I have ever gotten. Gear or Xp based 'progress' are fleeting: a new expansion or act comes along and all your hardwork is obsolete: you leave the game to find a new one and none of your gear or xp from the previous game carry over, you roll a new character on a new server and nothing carries over. Improving yourself, rather than a character, is much deeper, its much more personal than just a virtual avatar. Its much more real. When you pay for a boss kill you rob yourself of more than just a few chaos orbs, you rob yourself of the pleasure of learning and development as a player (and the power that comes with skill) Boss fights are fun, a lot more fun than sitting at the bottom of the stair case waiting for some level 80 to say 'ok hes dead pay me now' I understand that some people have shitty computers that crash on dominus and some people just fought him a billion times before, already know how to beat him, and just want to skip it. I can sympathize with the people with bad PC's this is an exception. The people who just want to get it over with and already mastered it. I can understand where you are coming from but you set a bad example for the nubs. We don't want GGG to say 'well everyone is skipping dominus lets just nerf his damage%' New players emulate 'pro' players and you don't want to send the message that you beat Dominus by paying NotRegret 2 chaos orbs. Do not rob yourself of one of the most fun fights in the game and deny yourself the pleasure (and power) of skill development. I understand that I am better than a lot of players: I make a half-way working build, I use good tactics, I react quickly, and I never let the panick get to my head. However even the unskilled have their options: You can go practice on normal dominus to get your technique right or experiment with new techniques (i will be doing this myself) Try to learn things yourself, dont just go on a guide and do what it says (even this guide) discover is more fun than just following instructions. If all you do is follow a guide you won't ever advance beyond the guide. You can try switching gear, gems. You can form a party, gathering other unskilled players, and make it much easier: don't just rush in develop a strategy (theres more party strategies than just tank n spank). Coordinate auras, agree on what curse to use and whos job it will be to keep it refreshed, figure out some totems to use, create party rolls (you kill the minions I kill the boss). Organize it so there is a TP in every corner. Distribute 'bleed removel' flasks or topaz flasks to party members who dont have their own. Run some weird leer-caster build. Think of anything. Indivualy you may be a unskilled players but together you can kill a God. Personally I think a bunch of unskilled, inexperienced players banding together to take down Dominus is just as heroic as what I am doing. At the very least you could grind docks a bit or shop/craft better gear. Any of these things is going to be more fun than sitting on your ass for 10 minutes while you wait for a high level guy to kill Dom for you. You may die: but you will learn and it will make your victory that much sweeter. Everyone starts as newbs and unskilled players: newb and unskilled are great. GGG needs flesh blood to buy their hats. Its great being new and discovering everything, learning, and marveling at the simplest things that more experienced players have long grown bored of. Its only when you choose to stop learning: that you call something impossible or make up excuses "hur its a gear check! only top tier builds work! GGG please buff the drop rate! Everything is overpriced!" that you stop developing. You blame your mistakes on petty things instead of trying to fix them, you stop looking for new solutions. You become a scrub: a scrub is not a noob or an unskilled player. A scrub is a player who refuses to learn. A scrub will never get better, he will just blame and complain even worst he may UNLEARN as he closes his mind. Don't be a scrub. Don't pay for Dominus kills. " CRUEL MODE CLEARED LEVEL 55 NO RARES NO UNIQUES My tale of adventure and skill continues here! http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/698071/page/16/#p6177342 Last edited by NotRegret on Dec 21, 2013, 3:55:10 AM
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Nice work there.
5 days is quite a haul, c'mon, hurry it up to Merc, the mob's getting restless! |
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I've really enjoyed following along with your progress. Your entries are also full of good advice for new players, and old bad players like myself.
Hope you fall Big Dom. Best wishes in your quest! |
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" If any of you want to 1up me and do a playthrough of all blues with no trading what-so ever I would love to see it. Let's teach these scrubs a listen together! Maybe you can even teach me a few things!! There's good reason why there were few takers on previous self found/gambled challenges Notregret. Even the Kripparian couldn't manage to interest but a small portion of actual participants. As with your challenge,you've got more interest in following your progress than you have interest in partaking of it. As far as I know the last challenge got around 5 people participating for roughly 2 to 3 weeks and also as far as I know the only player to trudge on through merciless was myself. (everyone else stopped posting). No big deal to me as that's how I play anyway,but it did show that given the choice of trade or no trade,most players choose to trade. On topic of your personal challenge.Keep up the good fight mate. =) Last edited by Temper on Dec 18, 2013, 9:06:22 PM
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I do have a question for you- is there any particular reason you've held off on getting the Static Blows node up to now? It's one of the ones I would have thought you'd get right away.
Thanks for keeping this really fun and informative thread going. Keep up the good work, and best of luck on your continued adventure! |
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" I originally planned to get static blows in normel mode where I was loading up on offensive nodes. I underesitimated how quickly I would need to stack strength in order to wear certain gems and than decided to wait on the node until later. I was clearing act 1&2 cruel much faster than I anticipated so I put it off again. I played act 1&2 extremly aggressive almost always using conductivity over enfeeble. When I got to act 3 cruel I considered getting it again: my clear speed in act 3 went way down because I switched to using enfeeble over conductivity and there were annoying enemies like black guards and librarians that resist element damage. This would have been a good time to get shock chance but than I started to not have enough strength to continue to level up my gems or wear the newest tier of strength gear so I get more health/strength stuff. I'll also mention why I am not using a 4 link. +1 to lightning wands are incredible strong. The +1 bonus is about as strong as getting an extra support gem (say added lightning or faster caster) but without the added mana cost. I will get it eventually but honestly I didn't think it would take so long. | |
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Thanks for the thorough reply. I really enjoy your thread also because I'm loving Storm Call as a main skill despite the people who are saying it's weak and worthless.
Looking forward to reading more. Good luck! |
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Bump
Dominus put up a good fight but he's dead now. | |
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Gogo NotRegret!
Now for the real challenge merciless! Could you tell me your hp value i would be interested to see the difference between your hp pool and mine. Looking forward to see the merciless progression. Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
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Epic post!!
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