A Guide for the Self-Found Exile.

Are there any specific builds you find are better suited for this style of gameplay? Obviously builds that have required gems as quest rewards, but any room to elaborate there?

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harklark wrote:

Are there any specific builds you find are better suited for this style of gameplay? Obviously builds that have required gems as quest rewards, but any room to elaborate there?

I'd really like to know this, too.

I also play almost exclusively self found. Here's a bit more advice:

1. Craft your flasks. Once you hit Hallowed, make 20% flasks and roll them until they're good. Your survivability gets a big boost when your flasks heal 20% more life and you can deal with effects like curses and corrupting blood.

2. Sell every bad rare you find for alts. You'll eventually trade those up to fuses with Clarissa when you finally have a chest worth 5-linking. Two stacks of alts turn into five fuses, and you build stacks fast.

3. If you don't know all the recipes (and most people don't), go to the wiki and read them. The unid'd alchemy orb recipe in particular is fantastic for self found, since those are always in very short supply, especially when you want to start master crafting.

The only drawback with recipes is how clunky they can be, like having to check for quality on rares before identifying them and then looking for blues and whites. The new drop sorting scripts will be a huge help with that when they're out. Make sure you have a good script that makes it obvious which drops are which so you never miss recipes.

Keep a tab of the various hammers for when you're in maps and need chisels. Keep a tab of quality flasks until you have four columns, then sell them all to a vendor for glassblower's baubles. Keep a tab for the chaos recipe (one each for unid'd and id'd if you want, though I only do unid'd), the alch recipe (only worth it unid'd), and so on.

4. I've had self found characters that had solid defensive gear with 180 MF and some like my current one in the 1-month that couldn't get over 20 without wearing a "Ring of Rarity and Light Radius." If you're in the latter category around level 70-80, it can be worth it to link and chrome some crappy MF gear and do a bunch of fast and safe Docks or low maps runs in order to get some decent drops.

5. Find whatever unique you need most and Chance every base you come across. I'm 0 for maybe thousands on chancing for Cloak of Defiance by now, but some day one of my self found characters is going to live the dream (I got super lucky and ground one one the hard way on crap-MF-gear Plateau runs).

6. It was covered earlier, but seriously, make sure you can do your build without trading. The quest reward system is currently still awful, so the vast majority of builds are either impossible or kind of bad simply due to not having access to skills. Sometimes you can make compromises and use Added Cold instead of Added Fire, but try to find a build where you don't have to do that. Some good builds for that are stun marauders and various lightning witches.

Crit builds are much more reliant on gear than non-crit builds. It's going to take longer to grind gear good enough to hold you together. Builds with weapons have a similar issue, where sometimes you will just literally never have a good weapon drop. Master crafting really helps here, but there can still be points where the game just sucks. You might have to push through some of those if you're not a caster, who are pretty much easy mode for self found.

I play self found too aside for the rare gem trade and strongly disagree with most of your post.
The fact that I play HC may play a part in that though.

Rarity is useless
What's the point of going rarity if you're not gonna trade?
There are two possible outcomes:
1/ You get an upgrade:
a- You remove your rarity item and use the upgrade.
->You no longer run rarity.

b- You keep your rarity gear:
-> Why are you running rarity?

2/ You don't get upgrades:
Tough luck, you just gimped yourself for no reason.

To avoid pointless arguments, if upgrades are only items with rarity for you then you're just running rarity for rarity and you're actually harming yourself.

Overall going rarity slows you down and forces you to rerun area. It also makes gearing even more difficult by adding a necessary affix.

In HC safety>all.

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harklark wrote:

Are there any specific builds you find are better suited for this style of gameplay? Obviously builds that have required gems as quest rewards, but any room to elaborate there?

I find casters to be especially suited for playing self-found, if you get a decent wand you don't need to bother looking for a new weapon for a long time.

Now that we got masters it's reasonable to expect being able to buy common supports like LMP at some point even if your build doesn't get them naturally. After Awakening goes live we will be able to swap gems at vendors so it will be even less of an issue.

However, you should avoid spells that require a 5-link for basic functionality because those won't come easy, as simple as possible is the key. For instance, BallLightning-Echo-Penetration-Leech-FC is fine because FC is optional, but Incinerate-GMP-Echo-Penetration-Leech isn't as good because each of the gems contributes a lot to overall usability.

Another good advice is keeping purities levelled in secondary set if you find them. Masters help a lot with maxing resists but sometimes it just won't come together so having that extra bit is helpful. And being able to have fire and lightning resist above 75% if needed is a boon versus soem bosses, it's worth the levelling slot.

...

My story is pretty similar, say, this last league I wasn't planning on playing self-found, but I was too lazy to trade and Shockwave totem I played was working pretty nice with the junk I dropped anyway. When you start doing maps you usually start finding some decent stuff so it's just surviving until then.

Build-wise for self found there are quite a lot of options. The main thing is to consult the quest reward table and figure out something you can build with only the gems you have available to your class - also consider when you will get the gems. If you absolutely need one of the Merciless Library gems (CWDT, Multistrike, CoC, Chain, GMP, Conc. Effect, Spell Echo) then you might want to either consider a different build or at least figure out how you're gonna get there without it. Obviously you can get lucky and have one drop, and you can push the odds in your favour by rolling your gem boxes suitably but I'd suggest avoiding anything where a lack of a lucky gem drop is going to cripple your leveling speed.

I never start trading before day 2-3 in a new league anyway (after all I need something to sell).

My best advice would be (hardcore):

-make sure you've got enough (and it could take quite a few!) alturations to get staunching flasks.

-make sure you level your masters, but don't craft gear unless you need to. Masters will be great for extra maps and currency-upgrades (and Elreon-rings and gems) later.

-Know how hard you can push, and push as hard as you can. For me it means paying serious attention to my gear in act 3 cruel for the first time, better players run to maps without caring. By caring I mean sorting out my resists and life. If you have yet to level a billion chars, you may want to start paying attention much sooner.

-I am not sure how good rarity is. Normally I don't care about it, but I think I might have a lot to learn still. This race I am going to try to get some rarity where I can.

-Avoid phys builds. In the 1MHC race I didn't listen to this advice, and it was a pain in the butt to have to upgrade weapon constantly, even with vendor recipe. You can be lucky ofc, but you won't. Go elemental caster, +1 on one or two 20% elemental base scepters from recipe and keep running to maps.

-I kill Dominus cruel at lvl 53 (hallowed flasks) and even though you can kill him much sooner, I doubt it is worth it for me. It is super-fast to grind docks to lvl 51 (that will make you hit 53 just before Dominus), and you get a much easier fight with hallowed flasks.

Best of luck people!

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BRedd10815 wrote:

Just leaving a tip here. I prefer vendoring armour scraps for wisdoms. You find lots of them and like you said, as fast as you upgrade gear before level 65 or so, there's no point in using them on gear that you will quickly replace with better gear.

Here we think a little bit differently. You may very well be right.

I pick up every scroll that drops, and it gives me a heavy surplus of portals. Whenever I run out of wisdoms, I sell most of my portals and it evens out nicely most of the time.

I hate to sell useful stuff for wisdoms, I try to get at least one very good armor-piece and it isn't easy to get armorers in a hurry if you are out of them.

But again, I suspect you are right. I do waste a lot of time picking up scrolls.

double post for some reason

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JoyfulPineapple wrote:

I play self found too aside for the rare gem trade and strongly disagree with most of your post.
The fact that I play HC may play a part in that though.

Rarity is useless
What's the point of going rarity if you're not gonna trade?
There are two possible outcomes:
1/ You get an upgrade:
a- You remove your rarity item and use the upgrade.
->You no longer run rarity.

b- You keep your rarity gear:
-> Why are you running rarity?

2/ You don't get upgrades:
Tough luck, you just gimped yourself for no reason.

To avoid pointless arguments, if upgrades are only items with rarity for you then you're just running rarity for rarity and you're actually harming yourself.

Overall going rarity slows you down and forces you to rerun area. It also makes gearing even more difficult by adding a necessary affix.

In HC safety>all.

Maybe you didn't see the parts where I explain that MR gear is situational.