How do hardcore players survive act 4?

Experienced players always use the most effective leveling skills, often combined with powerful leveling uniques, even if they want nothing to do with those skills in their final build. Keep in mind that killing things fast, even bosses, is a great part of survivability.

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often combined with powerful leveling uniques,

They help but are not required, Getting them on league start is veru unlikely.

If you change your privacy settings so that you are not hiding your Characters tab then when you ask questions the more experienced players can help you with your build.


Wolf

@Wolf287:

Done. But you actually will only see how poor my items are, and the skill tree isn't very exciting either, at least I feel confident that I haven't done many mistakes for my shadow so far. The witch is currently not in duty, the marauder was just to see this class, and the duelist is already retired again since I had made some wrong assumption when I decided to try a new character. And I don't like his face.

Gear suggestions won't help me much, I think. I'm usually not into trading, and I am somewhat sure I have the best of my items on the shadow already.

Last evening I made tests with the coc gem, and I think I'll make over my witch into a build a that can make better use of the coc gem, and see how that works.

@Col_Jessep:

Yes, there is much to learn. It seems I've been just scratiching at the surface so far, and I am a bit surprised to have made it into act 3 merciless without much trouble. In Diablo II, many of my characters ended somewhere in act 1 hell or act 2. So POE has less stepp difficulty in merciless, but it has the maps, which D2 did not have.

I have found 3 maps so far, but just yesterday opened acess to the eternal laboratory, so today I can try my first map, juts out of curiosity.

What bugs me is that the vendors are so picky about the character class. E.g. my shadow can't buy a summon skeletons gem. My witch can. Do I need a character of each class, and level, to buy all buyable gems? Looks strange to me - IMO at some level, vendors should sell all gems that they have in stock to all character classes.

I didn't know that there are instant healing flasks.


@Phillybear:

Glassblower baubles have been few for me. In the four weeks of playing I found only 6. And since my characters leveled fast, new flasks came into use in quick succession and it didn't seem sensible to use them already. I want to wait till I am sure that I'm going to use a flask for a longer while.

You are right, shuffling gear is a good idea. At the moment I know too little though of what to expect from new areas, so besides the well-known bosses, I am usually just running my normal gear. When knowing more, I will be able to prepare better.

@Zed_:

I've been pondering to raise a new character, and the question how to get quickly through norm while reaping good exp came to my mind also. So far I have avoided respecs in the passive tree, but at some point I see it coming that I'll do just this - have gear and skill layouts just for leveling a new build fast, until I can switch to the interesting skills.

That will happen once my testing with coc gave me some ideas, and I make a new character to fully make use of that. The witch most likely will become a testing character till then.

Didn't look at the passive tree, but looking at the gear there are immediate problems.

Basically you want to aim to have life in every single piece of gear except the weapon. Your helm life roll and resists are great, but most other pieces of gear has little to no life. At level 62 you usually want a life total of 2.5k to 3k life total. I assume you have like 1.5k right now.

These pieces of gear are easily farmable, though it's more efficient to pay 1-2 chaos for gear and those pieces can easily get you to maps.

Also are your resists capped? Where are you now? How is your damage? Sorry if you've already posted those. It's not in the opening post so it's hard to find.

EDIT: I highly suggest you make your helm into a 4 link because that item is solid enough to last right into maps. Shouldn't be too hard, taking around 5-6 jewellers and 3-4 fusings. After that link your most damaging skill like spectres or zombies. A good offence always helps with defence.

At your level you can start farming merciless ledge if you really don't want to trade until your life and resists are okay.

I haven't been doing any farming yet. I just went through the game and used what dropped. I might even have missed items, because at times I did not pick up and id each yellow item.

Damage - not sure how to calculate. Arc does 60-1900 lightning damge, some cold and fire added, not sure how much. The spell echo gem makes it cast a bit faster than usual.

Lightning tendrils are ??-800 damage, again some cold added, and culling strike.

Vaal ice nova I can use only seldom, but I like the effect.

At the moment I can clear the battlefront and the ebony barracks fairly swiftly, also the solaris temple, and the marketplace area in act 3. There are single mobs in between which are much harder than the rest, and which kill my PC now and then. The docks have such a unique crazy thing, which I can't kill with reasonable effort. Other than this one, the docks are also doable.

Life is 2k, with 900 ES on top. I know that is below par, but I favored resists over life on the items. I am not 100% sure because last evening I shuffled items a bit, but before I had the elemental resist close to 75, not capped, and a very bad chaos resistance with -30 or so ...

I am a good part through act3 merciless, next steps are the lunaris temple and piety, then the sceptre of god and dominus.

I've been worried that it will take quite a lot of orbs of fusing to make a 4 linked item. Besides the helm I also had pondered to give the boots a forth link, but at that time I had been almost out of fusing orbs, and since then only been collecting orbs, so that I won't ruin an item by ending up with no links and no orbs ...

Is the ledge a good place to farm items? I don't have it in good memory, I don't like the enemies there. Last evening I did most of my testing in the battlefront, the barracks and the marketplace. Does the ledge differ much in drops from those?

If you're in act 3 then docks is the best spot. Once you get to act 4 you can farm dried lake until 75 then go to maps.

If you haven't chosen your skill yet, arc is a solid choice. Auto target, solid damage with a 4 link and is ranged. I'm reasonably sure the links should be spell echo, lighting pen and faster casting.

You want fire, cold and lightning resists all capped. Don't even care about chaos resists now, best defence again chaos damage is high health.

Start farming docks, avoid the fire guy if your fire resist isn't 75. Run once and kill the most convenient mobs, don't run in circles, then tp out and start a new session. Getting good enough gear to get to act 4 merciless dried lake should only take around 3-4 hours.

Double posting due to separate topic.

Checked your passive tree in detail. You'll need quite a few more life nodes than that. Easiest and best nodes are the Melding circle. If you're set on going hybrid (energy shield + life) then start getting the energy shield nodes around the witch area as well.

Onto items, general rule during leveling is that you should pick up only rare weapons that are useful to you (elemental damage base sceptres and wands and some daggers), pick up all rare rings, amulets and good base belts (energy shield, life, strength etc.) as well as some magic rings amulets belts if your current ones are bad.

Sample good wand (for fire spell characters):



Spell damage, elemental damage, flat damage on spells and cast speed are most essential. Ignore projectile speed because that's good for things like Flame Totem or Incinerate.

Armour pieces are more complicated. There are a lot of item bases and it takes quite a long while to learn what are the good ones and what are the bad ones. Can try using a loot filter that automatically hides bad items and highlights good item bases. I recommend Neversink's loot filter.

I highly suggest you go hybrid, so you can prioritize energy shield, armour or armour energy shield items.

For example:

You can see that these two items have the "trifecta" stats. High life, double good resists. That's what you want to aim for for MOST armour gear.

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Ferrocet wrote:

I didn't know that there are instant healing flasks.

Glassblower baubles have been few for me. In the four weeks of playing I found only 6.

All healing flasks are of the "Heal X HP over Y seconds" type, but you can roll mods on them that make them instant at the cost of some of their healing power. There are two mods that make it instant: one makes it instant at all times, the other makes it instant when on low life (= less than 35% of max life).
An example of the second type:


You can get Glassblowers from vendors by selling superior flasks with a combined quality of 40%.

Ferrocet,

Another suggestion would be to watch some youtube videos that cover the mechanics of the encounter you're coming up to or even to see some suggested gameplay for your area/act.

ZiggyD has a ton, including a full walkthrough series as well as discussion on what items to look for with what modifiers, etc.
LiftingNerd Gaming has some.
Bunch of others - not as much as with Diablo or WoW or something, but are still plenty.

I've watched a ton of ZiggyD's - he doesn't play the way I do, but there are still quite a few things you can take away.

The game definitely has some steep difficulty curves here and there and it's not a "sin" to watch some videos to get an idea of what's coming up! :)

Heck, in some games it's even expected that you watch a video before you run the encounter. . .