Stuck in low level 80s and finding it hard to progress

Hello. I'm a relatively new player (180 hours) and this is the first league that I've properly gotten into endgame. However I'm having a problem with dying by getting completely 100 to 0'd by bosses and it has made progress really slow since about level 78.

This is making it pretty frustrating to play as I can't spec into any gamemode. Maps I get oneshotted, delve I get oneshotted, TotA is the only real league mechanic I can play comfortably, and sanctum I don't get dropped any tomes.

I'm playing a marauder fire cyclone build and I have maxed out resists, and I don't understand why I'm dying so fast, my damage seems to be alright but I don't see how it would get much stronger going further into endgame (granted I only have a 5L on my armor)

This is my character (the one with the faceroll name): https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Pigeon_Religion/characters

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

"

Pigeon_Religion wrote:

Hello. I'm a relatively new player (180 hours) and this is the first league that I've properly gotten into endgame. However I'm having a problem with dying by getting completely 100 to 0'd by bosses and it has made progress really slow since about level 78.

This is making it pretty frustrating to play as I can't spec into any gamemode. Maps I get oneshotted, delve I get oneshotted, TotA is the only real league mechanic I can play comfortably, and sanctum I don't get dropped any tomes.

I'm playing a marauder fire cyclone build and I have maxed out resists, and I don't understand why I'm dying so fast, my damage seems to be alright but I don't see how it would get much stronger going further into endgame (granted I only have a 5L on my armor)

This is my character (the one with the faceroll name): https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Pigeon_Religion/characters

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Spell supression could be very usefull, as well as adding Determination or physical damage taken as elemental somewhere in the build

I don't know what map tiers you are running at the moment, but looking at your character you should be fine for white maps (tier 1-5) and barely ok for yellows (tier 6-10). For redmaps you are lacking in both damage and defense.

Your defense at the moment consists of 3,3k life 4x% evasion and capped resistances. 75% res in this game isn't really a defensive layer as it is a basic requirement to even play. The game is designed with the assumption you have it and monster damage is balanced around you having it and in a way where you will still take considerable damage even from regular monsters despite having it.

3,3k life can be ok if you have stacked a bunch of defensive layers but in your case with basically no layers you should have 5-6k at least. 4x% evasion isn't going to do much of anything, you still get hit 5x% of the time and your mitigations are weak as mentioned.

As for how to improve your build:

1) Roll your flasks. You can get powerful stuff like curse and shock effect reduction, extra resists, extra armor/evasion and crit/attack speed etc from suffixes while the prefixes can be used to increase your sustain with "gain flask charges when you are hit".

2) Improve your gear, most of your item slots have very little in terms of useful mods. Your amulet has nothing useful aside from a crafted life mod, your rare ring has a crafted life mod and 30 chaos res, your boots have no movement speed, your gloves have neither life nor any offensive mods like attack speed or flat damage. Replace all of those pieces with new ones that have a decent life mod (50+) at least 2 resistances of decent size (30+) and what ever other useful stuff can roll there. I.e movement speed on boots, attack speed/flat damage on helmet, flat damage/attack speed on the ring etc. Shouldn't cost more than a few chaos per piece at this point of the league.

3) Adjust your passive tree. Right now you have a lot of not so good conditional nodes like the blind and onslaught stuff as well as a lot of simple increased damage nodes. Your crit chance meanwhile is extremely low. The melee crit nodes you've taken do nothing for your molten burst so they aren't a good choice.

Here is a changed setup, try to respec towards that by cutting the conditional nodes and replace them into defensive ones. From there you should die significantly less and can take suggested damage nodes when leveling up. Also get the last 2 ascendancy points from uber lab, shouldn't be too hard after getting the defenses i've put in the pob.

https://pobb.in/bNRV-a0k1yRP

If you don't have POB yet, get it asap.

Note: I've switched the cold and lightning res on your helmet to make the resis work out after my changes but it should be no issue if you upgrade your gear with more resis mods on it.

4) Level your gems. Once your assassins mark reaches level 20, sell it to a vendor along with a gemcutter prism to get a 20 quality version. Replace the arcanist brand with cast on damage taken to automate both your mark and wave of conviction. You can keep them at level 8 or so, doesn't matter much for damage. Having 20 quality on the mark allows you to get power charges to increase your crit chance and crit multi. Replace Grace with Determination.

There is probably more but with this you should have a guideline for now. You'll have to up your damage a bit more for high red maps but defensively you should be good with this.

Thank you both for this information, I already have POB and I'll try these new adjustments out.

But also I'm only really running one of my rings and my current amulet for the attributes on them, as taking away from the intelligence that they provide renders my gems unusable. Do you have any advice on how to circumvent this?

Thanks.

There are 30 dex/int nodes on the tree between the marauder and duelist locations, use them. It's not a problem to have attributes on your ring/amulet, but those shouldn't be the only stats you have there. Amulets and rings can roll damage mods and generally resis/life on gear is more important than attributes. As a rule of thumb, you should always try to cap your resistances via gear, getting it from tree is inefficient in most cases. You can't get base life from the tree so having that on your gear is also important. No matter how many increased life nodes you take on the tree, if your base life is low it's not going to do much. Meanwhile, attribute issues can typcially be solved with a passive point or two. If you end up having attributes on a good gear piece then that's fine but it shouldn't be the only reason for that piece.

Alright I see, thank you so much for your input.