I love how you really explore all options to maximize your build. Alot of people tunneled themselves into a particular build and call it a day with just expensive gear upgrades
One of my biggest issues with POE1 was their Passive Tree and Orb of Regrets, I never felt like I could play around and test things, so for me, that might actually be the best change from POE1 to POE2!! Can't wait to see ideas from other people to test out too :D
Honestly i rarely comment on yt videos BUT i was looking for a poe build for my witch and i spend countless hours on different websites and UA-cam videos.. the most guides i found overwhelmed me with information i couldn't really use since i am new to the poe universe. Your guides just hooked me and even tho i am only about lvl 60 i am doing fine in the game. There is something about your channel that feels really charming, i cant tell you what exactly it is but u are definitely my favorite poe2 youtuber. Thank you Sir.
POE is an insanely complicated game, with my hours in both POE1 and 2 combined, I've not even scratched the surface, so whenever I look up content, I typically have to spend a good while looking up other bits to make sense of what they're talking about - or pause the screen so I can read all the effects and start piecing how it all fits together! My goal is to take everything about POE2 and break it down into videos that are easy to digest and everything is hopefully laid out so new and experienced players alike, can understand! I'm very glad you decided to comment, the feedback on these videos have meant to absolute world to me, and to ever be called anyone's favorite any kind of tuber, is honestly a dream come true!! Thank you :)
I only play weekends and SSF, got the unique chest and the Ullr boots I mentioned, but only starting act3 normal, so you have plenty time to test your new ideas before I'll get to them! Cheers again for the great guides. You deserve more subs
Those boots are so good, I wish they had movement speed on them, but I'm so glad you told me about them! I'm very glad to hear people are enjoying the build, and even happier picturing people running around using it! Feels really special :) thank you!
Of course!! I care a lot about my viewers and I've been blown away by the support from the POE community, so I want to make sure I put my best work forwards!
Unlike content providers like Moxxsy (who I find informative but obnoxious, loud, and grating), your videos are calmer, just as informative, less hyperbolic, and more my speed. Keep up the good work, and good luck with your channel.
Thank you so much :) I think one benefit of being a smaller creator is I don't actually rely on the money I make from UA-cam, so I can afford to spend a few days working on the script, graphics and editing!
I've only got 500, 600 hours in POE1, so even though POE2's tree is A LOT more simple, I still have baby numbers compared to the people that can make proper good builds :D i'll always take advice :)
Hey Don -To give you some more insight your analytics, the reason you're blowing up is simple but effective. I clicked your video, "Farming Trial 10 of Chaos", and it was EXACTLY what I was looking for. For most players in the level 70-80 range, maps can be quite hit or miss and very demotivating to farm with zero loot. A build specifically developed to run short-ish trials with guaranteed soul cores (worth 30-40 exalts equivalent) is brilliant. That’s why so many players, including me, jumped on it and copied your build! Now, about your build: I’m a level 73 Witch Infernalist with 4 points, a +3 Rattling Scepter, Oak Spirit Shield, and +75% resistances to all (including Chaos). Even after copying your passive tree (1.2k HP and 1.2k ES), all 3 link gems only, I still die at Trial 7. I think it would help if you could explain the skill combo a bit more clearly. For example, am I supposed to use the active skill on the Skeleton Warriors or not? Also, my skill gems don’t show the DPS for some reason- I really really want to do the trials but the initial results are quite underwhelming as my earlier build with skel arsonists did trial till 7 level quite easily. I've re-speced a lot and want to make this work. Regardless, thanks for your video and guide, you rock.
There's definitely a few things that stand out to me, the resistances are great, but you're still fairly low level, I'd be tempted to just grind out maps of the highest tier you can run and try get a high level, which would help get a bigger life pool to convert into energy shield since 1k is a little low! +3 Scepter is good, but if you can afford a +4 easily, I'd recommend it! Also make sure you have +2 levels on your helmet and +2 or +3 Minion levels in your amulet until you can afford a +4 Levels to fireskills on an amulet called Fireflower. If your snipers are currently 3 link, that needs some attention too, try get them fully linked out, but for now, even just get them so you can slot 4 support gems! Hope this helps mate :)
90% of the crap UA-camrs just post "BEST CLASS BUILD" or "NEW OP BUILD DON"T MISS IT" or some other click bait video just copying the most popular builds already being used. Honestly, I think just your out the box thinking, and testing builds and using the disclaimer "this is for testing, etc", "be careful using this" is fine as you put out good quality information. Don't worry about recommended us the best, thats what all the other crap people do.
My aim is to always put something good out there that people can take away and adapt, or even use as it is! The game is still incredibly new, I don't think anyone out there isn't still learning new things from time to time, so calling anything 'best', seems disingenuous. I've always been bothered by people who put out guides the moment a game releases, as they're always riddled with false information. I'd rather the creators that do this just play the game and actually learn it first!
That's so cool to hear man :D I'm hoping I can check out some of the variations in the future and try build them myself! Would love to see how it evolves :)
I see what your issue is with the MOM version I recomended testing. As I said before, currently EB is only transitioning the value of the items, it's not adding any ES increases from the tree and you were hoping for this transition to be a 1:1 so when it wasn't, you didn't had a lot of mana and you didn't get the belt either so you didn't have sustain nor even a high enough HP pool. In order for this to work, generally you want to early on search for gear with mana on it as the primary defense, after that, you want local ES because since it's local it applies. Mana regen on gear is a bonus but that's all it is, a bonus, generally your tree should have more than enough considering you'll have at least 70 recoup with the belt. You do lose on ingenuity + ventor's gambles sure but since the point was for it to be a budget build, good ventors costs hundreds of divines and good ingenuity belts aren't cheap either. Also if we consider the idea of return per investment, your return for a ventor is at best 2 extra minions for the ingenuity itself as the ventors can also be added without a need for ingenuity. However I'd argue that the damage is already solid enough, even more so with gas arrow that both ingenuity and ventors are surplus to demand. It would be better to just use that kind of currency to upgrade mana and ES on gear or invest in a better scepter. I changed my summoner to try it out and with cheap gear I had 2.5K mana and that is with 2 ascendencies. On a tier 8 map I wasn't dying to anything so long as my minions were up. unfortunately I couldn't properly test the build because snipers have a base low damage and without some pretty considerable investment into a +4 scepter and that amulet, my damage really was subpar despite a gem level 16, a +1 scepter and a +1 helmet. But If I had more expensive gear I'm sure they would be demolishing. Lastly on the crit. It's not that crit is worthless so much as that it isn't worth the investment if gas arrow is in the picture. You don't need crit if your minions are deleting trash mobs and for bossing the gas arrow far surpasses anything the crit will do so the points can be better invested elsewhere, namely defensive layers.
Aaah, I finally see what you mean! When I was testing MOM out, it was a really unfortunate time and I was super busy, so I didn't get to set aside enough time to fully play around with my tree, and clearly, I didn't read through your comments clear enough! Do you know if the ES from the tree is supposed to affect EB? I never used MOM in POE1, so I don't know if this is a bug, or intended. But you are absolutely right, this was meant to be a budget build and I think since it was earning me so many divines so easily, I forgot about that by the end and really wanted to see how far I could min-max it. You're also right that we deal enough damage, especially if we can get Gas Arrow back into the build, so I think I should retest that, because I think it could work far better on a budget, or on SSF than what I was planning! I'll test out recoup nodes and mana nodes over ES too, and see if we can work without Midnight Braid for SSF characters! Again, you're actually probably right there too! If we drop the crit only nodes, we can actually put even more points into mana, mana regen and recouping, to ramp up our defenses!
@don_holiday In PoE 1 it works a little bit differently, it puts the ES in front of mana so you have mana being protected by ES but it also lets you use the ES as mana and it transfers fully. My guess is that in PoE 2 is a bug however it can be a matter of balance to prevent cases of getting things like 16K+ mana. For SSF I'm not so sure. problem is, you need a unique belt and the unique amulet ain't easy either. Not saying it's impossible but the more SSF friendly builds are the ones where you don't get too much bang for buck out of gem levels and don't need uniques. Lastly, nothing wrong with having a high budget version of the build, however at that point you still need to do a cost comparison between investing hard into MOM or swaping out of it but losing the gas arrow is a big deal and investing bigger generally is also easier as it doesn't needs a whole new gear setup, just swap a piece with a better piece.
I can attest to how strong mom is, my alt sorc was running it pure mana, took every mana regen nodes and gear too. Never died ever since even with t18s juiced. You need to invest in es recharge rate, speed and es nodes itself, there isn't any recharge continues with damage taken and the unique chest is bugged and doesn't work. So you are purely relying on grim feast for that extra buffer and hope to evade and wait out 2-4 secs if its depleted. And for sure grim is gonna take a hit soon.
@don_holidayit seems EB takes base amounts of Energy shield and converts those. After that ES based abilities and gear do not affect, but instead you need to use mana based boosts. If you press shift or alt (don't remember) while hovering on EB node, it explains that.
Until the late game, snipers + 1 storm mage + raging spirits is the best setup for sure, but at late game when you use the market, frost mage stacking crit and levels is the best for sure
I have started running 1 storm mage just for the shock debuff, not sure I notice much of a difference, but it definitely feels stronger! But I'll be honest, I've tried Frost Mages and my clear speed is noticeably slower, as are bosses! I just think the snipers have far better options for support gems and they're much cheaper!
@don_holiday Frost mages when builded right do more than Double the damage of the best snipers build. You need to have at least 9 good jewels of Minion damage + crit chance + crit damage. With the right setup, the Frost mages reach 30k on tooltip while using scattershot, and considering the shotgun (snipers dont have), this is 120k. The best snipers build with everything setup perfectly only reach 50k on tooltip, with no more than 30k using scattershot
I can see where you're coming from, but then sometimes you run into maps or bosses with insane cold res, with snipers you can do poison, fire or phys! Though I gotta be honest, going all out on raw phys is working the best for me! Also, I've managed to get my Snipers down to about 15 spirit cost each at this point!! I haven't tried Frost Mages for a while, maybe I've actually managed to get their cost down too! I'll give it a fair try soon :)
@don_holiday theres no resistance for bosses, hyphotermia and exposure removes all when you need it. Also, with the frost mage setup, you can do even more damage dedicating physical runes for the raging spirits.
The +4 Fire Skill almost certainly affects the SRS minions, but I feel like their damage kind of falls of late game, but I never fully tested them as I wanted this build to try be a bit different :)
Yeah you can!! I was wrong, which I'm very happy about haha!! I didn't want to buy a second one to test cause they're expensive, so I trusted google when it said you can't!!
I've been testing and playing around with that for a good hour or so now, thanks for the suggestion! I bought the Unique club he's using and added eye of winter, just did a 20s Trialmaster! My fastest by far!
I love how you really explore all options to maximize your build. Alot of people tunneled themselves into a particular build and call it a day with just expensive gear upgrades
One of my biggest issues with POE1 was their Passive Tree and Orb of Regrets, I never felt like I could play around and test things, so for me, that might actually be the best change from POE1 to POE2!! Can't wait to see ideas from other people to test out too :D
Honestly i rarely comment on yt videos BUT i was looking for a poe build for my witch and i spend countless hours on different websites and UA-cam videos.. the most guides i found overwhelmed me with information i couldn't really use since i am new to the poe universe. Your guides just hooked me and even tho i am only about lvl 60 i am doing fine in the game. There is something about your channel that feels really charming, i cant tell you what exactly it is but u are definitely my favorite poe2 youtuber.
Thank you Sir.
POE is an insanely complicated game, with my hours in both POE1 and 2 combined, I've not even scratched the surface, so whenever I look up content, I typically have to spend a good while looking up other bits to make sense of what they're talking about - or pause the screen so I can read all the effects and start piecing how it all fits together!
My goal is to take everything about POE2 and break it down into videos that are easy to digest and everything is hopefully laid out so new and experienced players alike, can understand! I'm very glad you decided to comment, the feedback on these videos have meant to absolute world to me, and to ever be called anyone's favorite any kind of tuber, is honestly a dream come true!! Thank you :)
I only play weekends and SSF, got the unique chest and the Ullr boots I mentioned, but only starting act3 normal, so you have plenty time to test your new ideas before I'll get to them! Cheers again for the great guides. You deserve more subs
Those boots are so good, I wish they had movement speed on them, but I'm so glad you told me about them! I'm very glad to hear people are enjoying the build, and even happier picturing people running around using it! Feels really special :) thank you!
He apologized for making us make change and now if we choose we have to make more. You get my sub. Considerate of your viewers. That’s love brother.
Of course!! I care a lot about my viewers and I've been blown away by the support from the POE community, so I want to make sure I put my best work forwards!
Unlike content providers like Moxxsy (who I find informative but obnoxious, loud, and grating), your videos are calmer, just as informative, less hyperbolic, and more my speed. Keep up the good work, and good luck with your channel.
Thank you so much :) I think one benefit of being a smaller creator is I don't actually rely on the money I make from UA-cam, so I can afford to spend a few days working on the script, graphics and editing!
Nice to see you taking viewer comments on board! Really refreshing to see from a content creator :)
I've only got 500, 600 hours in POE1, so even though POE2's tree is A LOT more simple, I still have baby numbers compared to the people that can make proper good builds :D i'll always take advice :)
Hey Don -To give you some more insight your analytics, the reason you're blowing up is simple but effective. I clicked your video, "Farming Trial 10 of Chaos", and it was EXACTLY what I was looking for. For most players in the level 70-80 range, maps can be quite hit or miss and very demotivating to farm with zero loot.
A build specifically developed to run short-ish trials with guaranteed soul cores (worth 30-40 exalts equivalent) is brilliant. That’s why so many players, including me, jumped on it and copied your build!
Now, about your build: I’m a level 73 Witch Infernalist with 4 points, a +3 Rattling Scepter, Oak Spirit Shield, and +75% resistances to all (including Chaos). Even after copying your passive tree (1.2k HP and 1.2k ES), all 3 link gems only, I still die at Trial 7. I think it would help if you could explain the skill combo a bit more clearly. For example, am I supposed to use the active skill on the Skeleton Warriors or not? Also, my skill gems don’t show the DPS for some reason- I really really want to do the trials but the initial results are quite underwhelming as my earlier build with skel arsonists did trial till 7 level quite easily. I've re-speced a lot and want to make this work. Regardless, thanks for your video and guide, you rock.
There's definitely a few things that stand out to me, the resistances are great, but you're still fairly low level, I'd be tempted to just grind out maps of the highest tier you can run and try get a high level, which would help get a bigger life pool to convert into energy shield since 1k is a little low!
+3 Scepter is good, but if you can afford a +4 easily, I'd recommend it! Also make sure you have +2 levels on your helmet and +2 or +3 Minion levels in your amulet until you can afford a +4 Levels to fireskills on an amulet called Fireflower. If your snipers are currently 3 link, that needs some attention too, try get them fully linked out, but for now, even just get them so you can slot 4 support gems!
Hope this helps mate :)
90% of the crap UA-camrs just post "BEST CLASS BUILD" or "NEW OP BUILD DON"T MISS IT" or some other click bait video just copying the most popular builds already being used. Honestly, I think just your out the box thinking, and testing builds and using the disclaimer "this is for testing, etc", "be careful using this" is fine as you put out good quality information. Don't worry about recommended us the best, thats what all the other crap people do.
My aim is to always put something good out there that people can take away and adapt, or even use as it is! The game is still incredibly new, I don't think anyone out there isn't still learning new things from time to time, so calling anything 'best', seems disingenuous. I've always been bothered by people who put out guides the moment a game releases, as they're always riddled with false information. I'd rather the creators that do this just play the game and actually learn it first!
As a minion lover and player, I appreciate your work, another sub and keep it up with the amazing work
Thank you so much :) I'm testing lots of combinations right now, seeing if we can mix and match some other summons in to boost our damage output!
Good video bro I've been following your summoner build with some different variations it's a great template. Keep up the good work. 1st Comment
That's so cool to hear man :D I'm hoping I can check out some of the variations in the future and try build them myself! Would love to see how it evolves :)
I see what your issue is with the MOM version I recomended testing.
As I said before, currently EB is only transitioning the value of the items, it's not adding any ES increases from the tree and you were hoping for this transition to be a 1:1 so when it wasn't, you didn't had a lot of mana and you didn't get the belt either so you didn't have sustain nor even a high enough HP pool.
In order for this to work, generally you want to early on search for gear with mana on it as the primary defense, after that, you want local ES because since it's local it applies. Mana regen on gear is a bonus but that's all it is, a bonus, generally your tree should have more than enough considering you'll have at least 70 recoup with the belt.
You do lose on ingenuity + ventor's gambles sure but since the point was for it to be a budget build, good ventors costs hundreds of divines and good ingenuity belts aren't cheap either. Also if we consider the idea of return per investment, your return for a ventor is at best 2 extra minions for the ingenuity itself as the ventors can also be added without a need for ingenuity. However I'd argue that the damage is already solid enough, even more so with gas arrow that both ingenuity and ventors are surplus to demand. It would be better to just use that kind of currency to upgrade mana and ES on gear or invest in a better scepter.
I changed my summoner to try it out and with cheap gear I had 2.5K mana and that is with 2 ascendencies. On a tier 8 map I wasn't dying to anything so long as my minions were up. unfortunately I couldn't properly test the build because snipers have a base low damage and without some pretty considerable investment into a +4 scepter and that amulet, my damage really was subpar despite a gem level 16, a +1 scepter and a +1 helmet. But If I had more expensive gear I'm sure they would be demolishing.
Lastly on the crit. It's not that crit is worthless so much as that it isn't worth the investment if gas arrow is in the picture. You don't need crit if your minions are deleting trash mobs and for bossing the gas arrow far surpasses anything the crit will do so the points can be better invested elsewhere, namely defensive layers.
Aaah, I finally see what you mean! When I was testing MOM out, it was a really unfortunate time and I was super busy, so I didn't get to set aside enough time to fully play around with my tree, and clearly, I didn't read through your comments clear enough!
Do you know if the ES from the tree is supposed to affect EB? I never used MOM in POE1, so I don't know if this is a bug, or intended.
But you are absolutely right, this was meant to be a budget build and I think since it was earning me so many divines so easily, I forgot about that by the end and really wanted to see how far I could min-max it. You're also right that we deal enough damage, especially if we can get Gas Arrow back into the build, so I think I should retest that, because I think it could work far better on a budget, or on SSF than what I was planning! I'll test out recoup nodes and mana nodes over ES too, and see if we can work without Midnight Braid for SSF characters!
Again, you're actually probably right there too! If we drop the crit only nodes, we can actually put even more points into mana, mana regen and recouping, to ramp up our defenses!
@don_holiday In PoE 1 it works a little bit differently, it puts the ES in front of mana so you have mana being protected by ES but it also lets you use the ES as mana and it transfers fully. My guess is that in PoE 2 is a bug however it can be a matter of balance to prevent cases of getting things like 16K+ mana.
For SSF I'm not so sure. problem is, you need a unique belt and the unique amulet ain't easy either. Not saying it's impossible but the more SSF friendly builds are the ones where you don't get too much bang for buck out of gem levels and don't need uniques.
Lastly, nothing wrong with having a high budget version of the build, however at that point you still need to do a cost comparison between investing hard into MOM or swaping out of it but losing the gas arrow is a big deal and investing bigger generally is also easier as it doesn't needs a whole new gear setup, just swap a piece with a better piece.
I can attest to how strong mom is, my alt sorc was running it pure mana, took every mana regen nodes and gear too. Never died ever since even with t18s juiced.
You need to invest in es recharge rate, speed and es nodes itself, there isn't any recharge continues with damage taken and the unique chest is bugged and doesn't work. So you are purely relying on grim feast for that extra buffer and hope to evade and wait out 2-4 secs if its depleted. And for sure grim is gonna take a hit soon.
@don_holidayit seems EB takes base amounts of Energy shield and converts those. After that ES based abilities and gear do not affect, but instead you need to use mana based boosts. If you press shift or alt (don't remember) while hovering on EB node, it explains that.
Until the late game, snipers + 1 storm mage + raging spirits is the best setup for sure, but at late game when you use the market, frost mage stacking crit and levels is the best for sure
I have started running 1 storm mage just for the shock debuff, not sure I notice much of a difference, but it definitely feels stronger! But I'll be honest, I've tried Frost Mages and my clear speed is noticeably slower, as are bosses! I just think the snipers have far better options for support gems and they're much cheaper!
@don_holiday Frost mages when builded right do more than Double the damage of the best snipers build. You need to have at least 9 good jewels of Minion damage + crit chance + crit damage. With the right setup, the Frost mages reach 30k on tooltip while using scattershot, and considering the shotgun (snipers dont have), this is 120k. The best snipers build with everything setup perfectly only reach 50k on tooltip, with no more than 30k using scattershot
I can see where you're coming from, but then sometimes you run into maps or bosses with insane cold res, with snipers you can do poison, fire or phys! Though I gotta be honest, going all out on raw phys is working the best for me! Also, I've managed to get my Snipers down to about 15 spirit cost each at this point!! I haven't tried Frost Mages for a while, maybe I've actually managed to get their cost down too! I'll give it a fair try soon :)
@don_holiday theres no resistance for bosses, hyphotermia and exposure removes all when you need it. Also, with the frost mage setup, you can do even more damage dedicating physical runes for the raging spirits.
the possibility of doing 3x damage with scattershot and having 11% base crit instead of 5% cannot be beaten
why not srs and sniper ? because the +4 fire skill? or not needed for the damage ?
The +4 Fire Skill almost certainly affects the SRS minions, but I feel like their damage kind of falls of late game, but I never fully tested them as I wanted this build to try be a bit different :)
Im pretty sure you can wear 2 ventors?
Yeah you can!! I was wrong, which I'm very happy about haha!! I didn't want to buy a second one to test cause they're expensive, so I trusted google when it said you can't!!
Take a look at this and see what we can combine so we get more dps ? ua-cam.com/video/3z4PgH1duNk/v-deo.htmlsi=MsxokqPL25Jqnoh-
I've been testing and playing around with that for a good hour or so now, thanks for the suggestion! I bought the Unique club he's using and added eye of winter, just did a 20s Trialmaster! My fastest by far!
@don_holiday nice will be waiting for the video update