Can't do the things I enjoy. Always Dying. Please help

Hey,

I had to stop playing a few years ago and think I missed too much stuff or just got very bad, because I have huge trouble to do anything without dying.

I used to enjoy Delve and Incursion for example, but Delve is completly impossible, I just can't do it without dying frequently (I just get oneshotted or get drown in ground effects), even on low depths and for Alva, my damage seems so low, I am often not able to take the yellow mobs down, so that I can't get many keys. Not saying that I get nearly no loot from it.

Same trouble Mapping. I liked doing grinding guardian maps and doing uber elder, even on my very first league, but I don't see myself getting there this time, especially since my mood to play dreastically declines with every sudden death and I just do not know what I am doing wrong.

Another problem is I get stunned, freezed, shocked every encounter. I thought about Purity of Elements but this would make me even more squishy (or weaker in damage)...


I feel like a glass canon that doesn't do any real damage. What can I change or do? I have some currency ~3 divines.

My character is the Kalandra Occultist: https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/DanyDerfel/characters

Playing Bane, ED/Contagnion (I use Bane mainly, because trying to cast ED often kills me)

My defences are:

5k es
13,5k armor without bottles (69% phy reduction), 21k with (not 100% up)
Resi: 75/75/76/11
Block attack damage: 72%
Block spell damage: 8%

Defensive gems:

Determination, Discipline,
Steelskin+Cast when damage taken


Thank you

I think part of the issue is that you are trying to do CI while also trying to invest decently into armour (as noted by your left side of the tree move). Unfortunately that has you spread really thin resulting in you not being able to get a significant amount of either. If you are intent on going CI, I would lop off the left side of the tree and use those points to shore up your ES instead.

It's been a while since I played Bane (Scourge League) but if it helps you, here was my tree. I made L100 that league playing (I don't do rotations or anything like that) and I was the top Bane dps guy on poe ninja. My gear is pretty expensive though. But I'm hoping it can give you some broad idea of how to make the guy work on the passive tree (the tree does not change for me on starter gear). My Bane character was nearly unkillable (due to insane Life/ES recovery on kill) and cruised through Wave 30.


https://pastebin.com/KauwRHk4

i played lowlife bane last league to level 99, and was **incredibly** tanky

now, my *exact* build doesnt work any more, due to the reservation changes this league. and i realize that Aegis is super expensive right now, but a Prism Guardian is pretty good until then.

but you can go ahead and look at Diesa_Bane and see what i did.

my current configuration had 10k es, 40k armor, and while damage vs bosses wasnt great, i could run basically any map and farmed corrupt t16 burial chambers for a long while. That character earned 8 mirror shards by the time the league ended.

The thing you're most vulnerable against is elemental spells, you have 0 defenses against that other than your elemental agegis. See if you can cap your spell block, your tree passes by multiple spell block clusters. Another option is tempest shield if you can afford the reservation.

Get Soul of the Brine King and upgrade it to help with stuns and chills, it also gives freeze immunity, which will free up a flask suffix for you. You can use that suffix to get a flask with reduced effect of shock. With that you'll be much better vs. stun, shock, chill and freeze.

Speaking of flasks, with 5K ES, you shouldn't be using 2 life flasks, replace one of them with a utility flask. Also, one of your armour flaks should have the %increased armour suffix, its a big boost for characters that can't get too much %increased from the tree.

Edit:
One more thing, you can link steelskin with increased duration, remove Cast when damage taken, and put steelskin on your left mouse click, it will auto cast while you move (instant cast, it will not interrupt you). oh, and Molten shell might be better than steelskin since you do have armour.

Thank for the tipps. I got myself tempest shield, got the points into spell damage block.(75% now) I had to respec a bit that it works, upgraded to a 6 link with empower. bane or Ed, but It doesn't matter sadly.I keep dying while my damage is as bad as before. 400 chaos investment and no improvement.

I think I will call the quit, because playing is only frustrating at this point or is there still something fundamentally wrong in my build and gear, that I can't even do normal content properly?

part of the problem is that some of the recent patch changes caused substantial balance problems in delve and incursion, as well as in a few other subsystems. The patch changes also caused random sudden deaths, especially by one shots to greatly increase.

You might need to wait awhile until they patch things into a better state.

I see now. My biggest troubles come from these new rares, leading to an instadeath even in white maps for me. Breaches, delve, incursions. All not doable because of these.
Another problem are gound effects that kill me in 2 seconds. Which is a real pain when you can't even see it under all the animations. Any advice for this?

Either use a much more op build by looking one up, or wait until they patch things.

5K ES for an ES build is... rather low. Seriously one can get that amount right after finish Act10.

Probably remove that glancing blow pathing, feels like waste of points. You are investing into too many aspects and spreading thin.

Why are you linking SteelSkin with CWDT tbh, when you can just put steelskin on your left mouse button? Put something like PhaseRun with low level CWDT.

Might be missing it, but I do not see any ailment immunities on there. People are often too underestimate the deadliness of ailments as they are hard to spot when you got one except chill & freeze that are more obvious. Get ailment immunities, please.

yea why the heck you have a life flask on ES build...

you have no chaos resist on gear, I going to assume your chaos resist is shit as well.

TLDR; your setup is half arsing into armor & block... stop.
Go invest into ES pool, all ailment immunities, higher chaos resist, cluster jewel to sustain ES FAST (Brush with Death, Vile Reinvigoration)
Cluster jewels are huge source of sustain & dps for chaos dot build, and you have none of those.

You still have a poor understanding of the basics.

"

5k es
13,5k armor without bottles (69% phy reduction), 21k with (not 100% up)
Resi: 75/75/76/11
Block attack damage: 72%
Block spell damage: 8%

Defensive gems:

Determination, Discipline,
Steelskin+Cast when damage taken

5k ES is low

This is the kind of ES that low-end or hyper offense CoC builds achieve whilst squeezing in a bunch of weird stats to hit certain thresholds. Switching to LL or CI involves certain sacrifices and adjustments that often means you need a higher 'total life / es pool' than life-based characters.

What are you trying to squeeze in that prevents you from reaching higher ES? Your passive tree has a lot of wasted and inefficient points (weak masteries, some crap wheels and 4 points wasted on a useless large cluster) which you could be spending on ES% small passives or wheels / nodes like Insightfulness or Melding which you are already connected to or even Foresight. I think you could easily hit 7K and probably should strive for higher.


Physical damage mitigation

I won't expand on this since your build is doing okay here, but keep in mind that 13k armour is not doing much against big hits and can be problematic with certain map modifiers. This is why its often good to have a higher total life pool on CI to account for the lower mitigation they will have compared to life-based characters.

Spell damage

Same as above really, but was not addressed initially. It looks like you are spell blocked capped with glancing blows now, but before you were at 8%. So you are running around with a low life pool and zero mitigation against spell damage. I still think you have problems here because I am not seeing any significant forms of recovery.


Glancing blows

Is not always good. It smooths out damage and is only a benefit if you have high regen / recovery. There is no point in smoothing out damage if you have no recovery because you will just die anyway.

Guard skill

If you have armour, you use molten shell.