Noob tries SSF - my thoughts

This is a just a general thoughts post. Hopefully there are a few things a new player might take this.

To preface this post, I played PoE for the first time in the Syndicate league (pretty sure). On the tail end of it. Hit a wall after mapping for a while and gave up. A year later I started it up again and decided to play SSF to learn more about the game.

Toon-wise I had tried melee and ranger builds. I generally like playing rangers in various games.

Why SSF? Well I tried purchasing things a few times when I first played. It was painful at best and a minefield at worst. The difficulty was the breaking into the unwritten 'rules' on how to go about it. It's a bit much to think that a new player is going to know how to join parties, travel to other peoples hideout, unstack currency, use the multitude of chat channels, whispers etc etc. It's clunky. Top that off with people who expect your trade to take under 30 seconds while your coming to grips with all these mechanisms.

I've pumped a lot of hours into this game and it's pretty cool. So I purchased a bunch of stash tabs to get their benefits and to support the developers.

As somebody who had over a year off - it was good to see the step change in the Atlas. Much nicer in presentation and purpose.

SSF vs standard. Well, two totally different approaches to the same game. One game you grind on anything to get currency to just skip all the game drop mechanics and purchase gear for your theory crafted toon. According to the general consensus on theses forums and similar, it's just easier and safer to buy stuff rather than craft.
It turns out that currency is actually something you can use for crafting. An aspect of the game you almost entirely skip in the standard league.
SSF you have to spend your currency on crafting. It's nailbitingly exciting spending your exalts - your precious precious exalts.

There was a post a while ago on this forum about about how most build guides are a thinly vieled humblebrag - and I agree.

In no particular order - a non definitive list:

* Get Neversink loot filter. Life got a lot better when I did.

* Chasing down vieled mods for crafting was interesting at first but soon got tedious as existing mods stayed in the pool. So you don't always advance. This can be seen as free craft on an item, but as it is a random drop the odds of it being useful are slim to none.

* One shot deaths. I know some people reading this will always say you didn't have all resists/armour/health/shield/avoid ailments etc. Don't listen to them. It's not actually possible to have everything in SSF when you are reliant on rng rather than theory crafting and purchasing in standard league.
I tried a bunch of different setups with armour/shield passive combination - nothing much helped. One shot deaths are just baked into the game for the 1%ers with their uber toons who would otherwise be near invincible.

* The pre-grind grind before the main grind to get to that other grind which gives you a chance to fight something which has a tiny chance of dropping something useful for your efforts.
This is referring to the Atalas end game content. I quit this game at level 97 - which as I understand isn't bad. But I just can't get XP because I'm starved of T16 maps to even try grind on. One death sets back hours of mapping.

* Bosses loot is super stingy. Risk and reward is very poor. When leveling my character, I skipped most of the bosses. To easy for them to wipe you out. Their XP payout was not worth the potential loss. This leads to a situation where I just killed trash to level up. Then at zero XP I would go kill bosses and do other content for a while. Especially when you have never encountered a boss before, you are near certain to perish.

* Most boss fights are in stupidly tiny arenas. Then they spew aoe onto the whole floor and you melt.

* Six link six socket drops are rarer than exalts. They only give you a Divine orb when sold. Way out of line for the rarity. I had 2 weapons drop and got a 6L base armour from a incubator thing. I had about 10 exalts drop.

* Oh yay - another blessed orb. How many implicits do need to reroll?

* Never six linked anything. Didn't even get to the recipe from delve. Got down to 300 in delve with some sideways action. Never found it. To that end I think I only had about 2000 fuses ever (from trading in jewlers orbs).

* Delve is awful. I found I could roll most T16 map content. But in a corridor of delve they waste you their magic sonic breath. Not to mention they are invincible when slighlty in a shadow. If only the game bosses knew that turning off a light......

* Vendoring uniques is worthless. I don't follow the logic of an item being unique, so the sales guy offers you 3 twentieths of a super common orb as payment.

* So many currency items are pointless. Engineering orb springs to mind. When you get a chest with orders are magnitude item rarity then your orbs can apply, and then it spits out junk. Well.

* At level 95 I finally had collected fragments. Boy was I disappointed to roll through a low level map to get an upgrade to a weapon. Both useless. Same goes for timeless war thing. Forever to collect the parts. Utterly underwhelmed as to the content it gave me fleeting access to. Bear in mind I missed these leagues, so I was niave.

* Ran out of currency to upgrade map content. I don't know the exact way it all works, but map drop rates seem to go up a lot when you alch orb a map. But I kept running out. Sometimes I got a good pile going on, but I found it hard to sustain. Especially when I needed to reroll a map due to relatively nasty mods.

* I fear those exploding porcupine things that fire the needles

* Exploding anything was mostly fatal to my toon

* Blight maps were near impossible solo. FPS slowdowns aside, the tanky large things there wander up to your glass machine are insane. Wailing one them with 600k choas damage over time take ages to kill them. They always win by weight of numbers. Also coupled with the crappy randomness of where the spawn portals are - i.e 1 m from your hub. I found upgrading the nodes became very unresponsive when it job busy. And yes - I had my ring upgrades for cold and fire tower damage.

* Why do I keep getting super low level map drops. It's insulting.

Character progression vs content:

For my toon progression I started off as split arrow. Ok for clearing some maps, but uselss against boss. Morphed it in Choas damage over time using caustic arrow (and sometimes Nova arrow support). Went thought some massive step changes in damage.

The biggest change was crafting a +3 bow. which turned out not to be hard. I used the core games desert map or something to grind the imperial legacy 6L bow. This was a great, because it turns out I was never going to six link anything given the slow pace of fuse collection. Oh and since I never even found the recipe in delve.

Next change was leveling up gems in the alternative slots and corrupting them. A level 21 gem was a major dps boost. Lastly you will eventually get a empower gem. This in a +x gem level weapon makes a leap in dps.
So now I was able to start actually dealing with the elder slayers.

The problem came that I was ready. But I just struggled to get the chance.
You fall out of the system. Can't get T16 maps get the chance at the pre-boss fragments required to do the actualy boss. When you get there you get rolled. Because you don't know that fight.
To me a good game should not require you to watch yub-tub video's on what to do.

I managed the elder/slayer combo fight and that about all. Sirus was impossible in the last phase for me. Got down to about 5%, but to random for one shot deaths or being torn to shreds by the swirly death. Grinding to get another shot at it wore me out. I tried 6 six times I think.

As for that grind, having the slayers spawn in a region where they won't drop a stone. Super annoying. Having to meta-game the stones around to manipulate this was tedious.

I lot of the things I've noted here are particular to SSF. I understand that the game is designed around just buying 50 of the same map and smashing out your XP or grinding for divination cards.
I just find it bizarre that this is so. I have no idea if this was the original intent when the game was first made. Perhaps somebody could enlighten me.

If you made it this far. Well done. I have enjoyed this round of PoE, and I will likely come back in a year so see how the core game expansion goes. I've just had my fill for now.



:)

Hey there

I had a real pleasant time reading through this thread with a lot of relatable issues of PoE being presented by a new but really dedicated player! I play this game since ~7 years and my highest character is lvl 96, so gratz on getting to lvl 97 :)

Usually I play tradeleague and season only but sometimes at the end of a league I play HCSSF to get that oldschool grindy Diablo 2 feeling.

Advice for sustaining High Tier maps: Use your master missions! I find Alva (Incursion) to be the most valuable, because the mobs in the temple can drop maps and usually a lot of it. Try to construct the temple in a way that you would a map:
Get rooms that add additional monsters to the temple over rooms that add rewards (except for the map room ofc.). Even if you can't get them to T3, choose them over shitty rooms that give you weapons/armour. Sure, you might miss out on that 1 unique weapon or so, but as you experienced they suck 99% of the time and vendor for alc shards anyway.

My preferred rooms are:

-Hall of war --> T3 packsize room
-Atlas of worlds --> T3 map room
-Sadist's Den --> T3 ghost room, architects are possessed by torment spirits, meaning big loot explosions
-Hall of Legends --> T3 legion room, big loot with huge variety of loot (from fossils to maps, veiled items, legion uniques, legion splinters, etc.)
-Court of sealed death --> T3 strongboxes, lots of monsters, chance of getting cartographers strongboxes
-Factory --> T3 Boss life room, adds quantity to the temple
-House of the others --> T3 breach room, lots of monsters

Honorable mentions:
-museum of artifacts --> T3 misc chests, almost every of the incursion reward types of other rooms can drop there, including maps and league specific uniques that might be interesting to play around, esp. in SSF since you're much more limited in acquiring those
-wealth of the vaal --> T3 generic currency room, always useful
-Hurricane engine --> T3 tempest room, might give you quant/rarity or corrupting tempests for 6links

Also there are some good incursion mods available on items, just check this out: https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Incursion_room

Ok enough for Incursion, for map sustain and itemcrafting Delve is absolutely insane. Try to get the fossils behind the fractured walls, you can check out which fossils are dropping in which biome here: https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Delve#Biomes
For map sustain, always go to the abyssal/vaal cities when you find them. In general, going deeper is better than going sideways. Sadly, getting some form of corpse explosion is pretty mandatory for deep delving.

Another important point for map sustain: Do your master missions at the higher end of your map tiers. What I mean: Save your "white" master missions for when you reach T5 maps, "yellow" for T10. For red maps, I usually start doing them at T13-T14ish since it becomes a bit harder to go up in Tiers at this point, at least for my experience.

One-Shot-Deaths: I'm totally with you there. Most of the time I'm cruising through content with my char feeling insanely tanky. Then, out of nowhere with almost no time to react and not even that nasty map mods I get 1-shot, often accompanied with frame drops. No matter how much defense you build, you're never really safe, which is an ongoing issue in my eyes. It gets really frustrating at lvl 93+ where every death is a big setback. Still, I'm against the removal of the death penalty and more for optimizing the game fps wise and improving visibility of a lot of skills.

Which gets me to the Sirus fight: That one is a shitshow imo. The first phases are a joke, once you get behind the ingenius storm mechanic. The real clownfiesta starts in the last phase: Sirus blinks out of you vision with a dark arena full of fps drops, spawning dark red clones in a dark red arena, it's a visual no-go in a game where you are supposed to react to every attack in such a boss fight. Not a fan, they really dropped the ball there.

Still I'm enjoying this game a lot, despite its flaws and trigger points lol. The longterm motivation for me is creating my own builds and trying to min max those to the point where they can compete with the streamers who play so much more. It takes me a magnitude of the time they take to perfect the build but that's not demotivating, rather the opposite.

I hope some advices will help you sustain your maps in future and you'll continue playing and enjoying PoE.

Best regards

You shoulda stick to the regular league before you try ssf. It seems like there is more for you to discover in game mechanics. I am not writing this to put you down. You can learn and improve faster there so you would be more prepred for ssf. You should partly isolate yourself in trade leagues so you can be more prepared for the ssf. Like, dont buy maps and try the self found method to reach to tier 16s. I bet you can do that easily even in trade league.

I mean as the title states, a lot of the shortcomings are there because you are inexperienced.

If you think that an item is not worth your time picking, either because you will not use it (perhaps you have enough blessed orbs already) or its not worth your time trying to sell (in trade-league), then don't pick it up, and consider updating your loot filter.

SSF is also a mode where you can't just patch up your build by picking up odd rare pieces from the market to patch up your build. This is why certain builds are better than others in SSF.

I'm not going to bother quoting specific parts of your post, it would take too long, but some general comments below.

-Agree that veiled mods are terrible and a pain to get..

-One shots is a common complaint by inexperienced players. Playing around with /armor shield passive is inidcative that you haven't explored the many defensive layers offered in this game. If you could get away with tanking everything with limited investment in defence, then nobody would play this game. Currently, anything that does not kill you poses almost zero threat because you can just pop your instant heal flasks. If you are struggling against one shots, then you have problems with your build or you aren't playing your build properly. You can take a look at pre-harvest races to see how these guys built there characters, especially for the races with crazy mods. Alkaizerx is well known for his approach to HC and rarely dying.

-Bosses frequently drop maps, provide master missions and progress your atlas. Really the only time you should be skipping bosses, if ever, is if you are trying to level and aren't confident you can smack the boss. You can complain about boss aoe all you want, you need to learn how to fight each boss, or else whats the challenge here? Do you just want a training dummy to whack?

-Delve is good for plenty of reasons. If you are inexperienced, then you won't get much out of it.

-Conquerors not dropping watchstones is player error and running the wrong maps

I mean in short, if you do not know how to build a character properly and efficiently, then you will quite obviously struggle in SSF. You should have a basic understanding of currencies, crafting, the atlas and end game bosses if your goal is to push and complete all content.

That said, poe is what you make of it. Everyone enjoys something different. I think that SSF can be a fun experience for a newer player with some experience provided they go in with more realistic expectations.

"

Unxious wrote:

In no particular order - a non definitive list:

* Get Neversink loot filter. Life got a lot better when I did.

Or make your own. I highly recommend this, as it gets you more intimate with the items in the game.

"

Unxious wrote:

* Chasing down vieled mods for crafting was interesting at first but soon got tedious as existing mods stayed in the pool. So you don't always advance. This can be seen as free craft on an item, but as it is a random drop the odds of it being useful are slim to none.

Sometimes you get a good base. Not infrequently, you get good leveling equipment from the craft alone -- something which is useful for SSF, since rolling multiple toons is a winning strategy.

(Again: rolling multiple toons in SSF is a winning strategy. Just emphasizing a helpful tip.)

"

Unxious wrote:

* One shot deaths. I know some people reading this will always say you didn't have all resists/armour/health/shield/avoid ailments etc. Don't listen to them. It's not actually possible to have everything in SSF when you are reliant on rng rather than theory crafting and purchasing in standard league.
I tried a bunch of different setups with armour/shield passive combination - nothing much helped. One shot deaths are just baked into the game for the 1%ers with their uber toons who would otherwise be near invincible.

Besides very telegraphed attacks, you really shouldn't be getting 1-shot. If you have at least 6K Life, you should be able to avoid most of them without any super mitigation.

"

Unxious wrote:

* The pre-grind grind before the main grind to get to that other grind which gives you a chance to fight something which has a tiny chance of dropping something useful for your efforts.
This is referring to the Atalas end game content. I quit this game at level 97 - which as I understand isn't bad. But I just can't get XP because I'm starved of T16 maps to even try grind on. One death sets back hours of mapping.

97 is good. I've never shot for 100, but highest I've gotten is 95 (without trying to push for 100).

"

Unxious wrote:

* Bosses loot is super stingy. Risk and reward is very poor. When leveling my character, I skipped most of the bosses. To easy for them to wipe you out. Their XP payout was not worth the potential loss. This leads to a situation where I just killed trash to level up. Then at zero XP I would go kill bosses and do other content for a while. Especially when you have never encountered a boss before, you are near certain to perish.

Once you progress with your Atlas, you should be getting more Maps from bosses. When your Atlas is nearly filled out it should be fairly frequent....

"

Unxious wrote:

* Most boss fights are in stupidly tiny arenas. Then they spew aoe onto the whole floor and you melt.

Yeah, yeah. And then with Sirus, the Arena is too large -- right? :P

"

Unxious wrote:

* Six link six socket drops are rarer than exalts. They only give you a Divine orb when sold. Way out of line for the rarity. I had 2 weapons drop and got a 6L base armour from a incubator thing. I had about 10 exalts drop.

Before PoE2, their intention is that the League Mechanics make getting 6Ls much easier. Heard it on a Baeclast from Chris.

"

Unxious wrote:

* Oh yay - another blessed orb. How many implicits do need to reroll?

* Never six linked anything. Didn't even get to the recipe from delve. Got down to 300 in delve with some sideways action. Never found it. To that end I think I only had about 2000 fuses ever (from trading in jewlers orbs).

* Delve is awful. I found I could roll most T16 map content. But in a corridor of delve they waste you their magic sonic breath. Not to mention they are invincible when slighlty in a shadow. If only the game bosses knew that turning off a light......

Delve is an excellent way to grind levels... provided your character can survive :P

I view it as fine as-is.

"

Unxious wrote:

* Vendoring uniques is worthless. I don't follow the logic of an item being unique, so the sales guy offers you 3 twentieths of a super common orb as payment.

* So many currency items are pointless. Engineering orb springs to mind. When you get a chest with orders are magnitude item rarity then your orbs can apply, and then it spits out junk. Well.

* At level 95 I finally had collected fragments. Boy was I disappointed to roll through a low level map to get an upgrade to a weapon. Both useless. Same goes for timeless war thing. Forever to collect the parts. Utterly underwhelmed as to the content it gave me fleeting access to. Bear in mind I missed these leagues, so I was niave.

* Ran out of currency to upgrade map content. I don't know the exact way it all works, but map drop rates seem to go up a lot when you alch orb a map. But I kept running out. Sometimes I got a good pile going on, but I found it hard to sustain. Especially when I needed to reroll a map due to relatively nasty mods.

Do you use the chisel recipe? (20% Hammer & Map = Carto's chisel?) Do you chisel your maps before you Alch them?

"

Unxious wrote:

* I fear those exploding porcupine things that fire the needles

"

Unxious wrote:

* Exploding anything was mostly fatal to my toon

* Blight maps were near impossible solo. FPS slowdowns aside, the tanky large things there wander up to your glass machine are insane. Wailing one them with 600k choas damage over time take ages to kill them. They always win by weight of numbers. Also coupled with the crappy randomness of where the spawn portals are - i.e 1 m from your hub. I found upgrading the nodes became very unresponsive when it job busy. And yes - I had my ring upgrades for cold and fire tower damage.

Blight maps = nearly impossible SSF: +1.

SSF is more a mindset that we had for years so they gave us a label. Players who see this as a challenge, rather than a different mode of play, don't really get why we have it. Leave it for the people who play SSF by choice... not for bragging rights.

"

Shagsbeard wrote:

SSF is more a mindset that we had for years so they gave us a label. Players who see this as a challenge, rather than a different mode of play, don't really get why we have it. Leave it for the people who play SSF by choice... not for bragging rights.

"Back in my day, we had to self-designate SSF. And there were only three Acts! And we had to repeat them three times!"

OK, gramps.

"

drklrd wrote:

If you use Vaal orbs on Blacksmith/Armourer strongboxes you have a high chance of getting corrupted 6Link.

That's a great tip. Haven't been doing this.

"

bwam wrote:

"

drklrd wrote:

If you use Vaal orbs on Blacksmith/Armourer strongboxes you have a high chance of getting corrupted 6Link.

That's a great tip. Haven't been doing this.

vaal side areas are very good too,even when you just run the fragments from your hideout

I play mainly SSF and could not agree more. I have many of the same thoughts as well - so good feedback!

I have found two mirrors in my time playing and I think maybe two six links, one of which was corrupted. These are way way too hard to get.

I love Delve, but you touched on a great point - the game is very very rippy which is aggravating. You can go from rolling through everything to oops why I am dead??! in a heartbeat. It doesn't really matter how much mitigation or ES you health you have if it can be removed so fast you cannot possibly respond to it.