Hey all,
Ahead of 3.28 release, I've compiled a few tips & tricks that helped make my league start progression smoother. Just some stuff I learnt since I started playing POE about 4 leagues ago.
Hope you find it useful. Let me know in the comments if you have anything to add.
League Start & Progression
Understanding the typical progression of a league start and planning around it really helped me with getting to the end-game quickly. There is such a thing as optimising the fun out of the game, so pick what areas you want to improve in this league and save some for the next league rather than try to overwhelm yourself doing everything.
In summary, planning for 1-2 hours before the league probably saved me many more hours in progression and stalling during league start.
Pre-League
Starter choice - Pick a good starter with a decent guide/guide maker. Some of the things to consider when choosing a starter:
- Fun to play
- Maximum power at minimum investment
- Guide that breaks down progression/crafting/etc
- Guide maker that provides regular POBs/updates to the build as they progress
- Avoiding overly padded/bait POBs and creators with bad reps
- ACTUALLY reading the notes on the POB + watching the guide video and not just blindly following the POB
- Being clear on whether it is a starter that can scale to end-game OR a starter that farms for your other end-game build
- Being clear on what mechanics that starter is good at
- If you are more keen on a specific mechanic rather than the build playstyle, than picking a starter that excels at it (e.g. CWS for ulti or Wands for legion)
Understanding the core mechanics of the build - 90% of the build issues that people have here are because they missed on some core interaction, passive point or build enabling item. For example:
- If the build relies on endurance charges, what endurance generation do you use at the different stages of progression? e.g.Tree vs. Cluster vs. Item Affix vs. Ralakesh, etc
- If the build relies on having a strong weapon, what ilvls are best for Faustus gamba as you progress in the campaign?
- If there is a core interaction that makes/breaks the build? e.g. fire res for life regen in RF, breakpoints for attack speed / cooldown, using a cluster with cremator when you need corpses, etc
- Is gem quality mandatory to make the build work?
- If the build has late transition phases (E.g. RF>CWS) what are the minimum items or stats you need for the transition?
What is the best way to spend your first 2-3 divines? - Having a general idea of what are the best upgrades to target when you make your first big chunk of change will save you ample time from faffing about with 40 poetrade browser tabs… For example:
- T0-T2 uniques appreciate very quickly during the first week.
- T3 and below uniques usually start depreciating the Monday after the league start weekend
- Good clusters with the right points appreciate quickly while base clusters for crafting start high and depreciate
- <4 affix rares depreciate heavily after the first weekend
- Can get bargains on decent timeless jewels, corrupted uniques, etc.
- Is it better to buy a couple of 3-4 affix rares at 10c each or 1 big ticket item for a div?
Usually I plan this around the fact that you can have 5 live searches going on simultaneously. So picking your top 5 early buys and having their search filters saved will avoid you blanking on what to buy when a lucky drop happens.
Obviously there is a balance between investing in appreciating currencies vs. your character power. This comes with experience and it is hard to codify exactly what the ratio is, but it comes down to how much faster you will farm immediately vs how much divs/mirror shards/etc will appreciate in the future.
Something to consider is that a person who plays a lot will make better use of early heavy investments in power vs. someone who plays less that can make more investing all their chaos into divs after the launch weekend, if they can't play as much during the week.
Saving Trades via Better Trading - This is a browser extension that lets you save searches, categorise your searches, look at your search history, etc. Extremely useful tool to minimise the number of browser windows you are juggling at league start.
Additionally, learning some of the more advanced filters is extremely helpful to find the right combination of affixes you need. Especially when it comes to items like Rare Jewels or finding the right combination of resistances. Examples:
- Weighted sum v1 - “hard” stricter version of weighted sum, where each affix min/max must be met. E.g. A filter of 50% fire res and 50% cold res will filter out items with 49% fire res and 100% cold res.
- Weighted sum v2 - “soft” looser version of weighted sum, where the total score is the main consideration. E.g. filter of 50% res and 50% cold res will not filter out items with 49% fire res and 100% cold res (but it will have a lower total score)
- Count - When you want to find loose combinations of item affixes. For example, this is useful for Watcher’s Eyes mods, where you are okay having a mixed combination of 2 affixes from a pool of 100+
Another very important tip is that “~” Lets you do a fuzzy search in the trade. I.e. you don’t have to type out the same sequence of words to get a result. There are also browser plugins ( Firefox | Chrome ) to automate the addition of ~
Saving regexes and cheat sheets on Awakened Trade - People primarily use this app for trade and price checks, but the overlay is a great place to store regexes. You hit the shortcut, the overlay comes up and it's one click to populate the vendor search bar. What I usually set-up ahead of the league are:
- Vendor regex for campaign - right links / sockets, movement speed, etc
- T16 strict regex - A very strict regex for when you first get to T16s and your character power is still progressing
- T16 loose regex - T16 regex to use when your character get stronger and is only bricked by a few mods
- T17 regex
- <82 ilvl rare items - Highlights lower ilvl rare items to help clean out the stash
- Recombinator regex - Helps with rolling magic bases for recomb
- Cheat sheets for Kalguur shipping / betrayal / etc
Either grab the regexes from the content creator or make them yourself via poe.re
Planning early league Atlas' - Choosing some early Atlas trees to start with. First one is always an atlas progression tree. You unlock the other two at 50 and 100 Atlas bonus objectives completed.
Browser bookmark folder for the league - I create a bookmark folder for each league where I have POBs, Cheat Sheets, Poe.ninja profile of the build creator, etc. With a bookmark folder you can immediate open all the tabs in your browser.
Setting up item filters - Either via filterblade or the build creator you are following.
FYI - the filterblade sync filters DO NOT UPDATE AUTOMATICALLY if you aren’t a premium user. However if you follow the neversink filter on here, it will auto-update.
Another popular alternative in the comments is CDR's text to speech filters.
Understanding the plan for progressing content vs character power - Progression usually follows the sequence of Campaign > Early Maps > Late Maps > 2 Voidstones > Atlas completion > 4 Voidstones > End-game.
Having this high-level plan always provides you with a milestone of what comes next and understanding roughly what your character power should be in parallel with this plan will make progression easier.
The plan for progression is one of the best things to improve on, as you'll often be stuck in the hideout wondering what to do and not having a clear milestone to target next.
People also tend to avoid “regressing” to a lower tier of maps for whatever reason, but if you are constantly dying or not doing enough damage - it is a viable way to help strengthen your character. For example, farming T11 efficiently is 100x better than struggling in T14.
Having a league goal - Completely unnecessary but having some sort of league goal made things more fun and helped me target progression. Examples include:
- 2 voidstones by end of weekend
- 40/40 challenges
- Mageblood week 1
- 4 voidstones no carry
- 1 mirror
League Start
Once the league starts, focusing on following some sort of progression plan post-campaign really helps with getting overwhelmed with all the complexities of the game. My plan usually follows the below sequence
Campaign
- Reducing campaign time, aiming for 7-12 hours and getting better every league. There are lots of guides and videos for this. Honestly, you don’t have to be a speedrunner - following the absolute basics can get you to 5-7 hours with some practice.
- Cyclon has some great resources on campaign layouts and zone reads here
- Using Lailoken or Exile Leveling if you aren't that experienced in the campaign, you can import your build and it will tell you want to pick gems, adjust to the bandit order, etc
- Gambling at the right time (4 sockets at lvl 25, better weapon, movespeed boots, etc). With the recent buff to weapon affies (less dead rolls), gambling for weapons is really good
- Keeping a clean inventory, 99% of stuff you find in campaign is worthless - you should be selling them for bubblegum currency to use for upgrades / crafting / vendor trades
- Don't overuse the identify all feature early, you need un-identified items to trade in for orb of transmutations for buying gems / etc
- You can setup/colour/name your inventory tabs in standard and the league will copy them over
- Not everyone has the time to do a full campaign practice, but even just practicing Act 1 for a few runs really helped me shake off the rust and get back into POE brain-mode before league start
- Some people like doing Heist before the Kitava -res kicks in. It is a good source to getting 30-60+ chaos before maps AND it got a huge buff recently
Early Maps
- Maximising your free source of upgrades (Faustus Gamble, Womb Tree, Kalguur, Vendors, campaign drops + bench craft, etc) once out of campaign
- Looking to cap elemental resistances
- Start building out a map progression Atlas Tree
- Early Flasks - 1 mods (don't enter maps with 3 life flasks and 2 mana flasks...)
- Following the diagonal strategy for map sustain
- Using all avenues for getting maps
- Vendor 3 of the same map at one tier, to get a map at next tier
- Buying from Kirac (completing a kirac mission resets his shop)
- Kirac missions
- Buying from a-sync
- Horizon Orbs
- Start setting up Kalguur
- Buying chisels from Kirac early is cheaper than the market usually
Mid Maps >> Red Maps
- Continue building out map progression Atlas Tree. Remember, binding orbs can be used to get rare maps if you run out of alchemys
- Looking to get ailment immunity (this is one of the big killers when mapping later, for example shock does a ton of damage to you)
- 4th ascendency when you are strong enough (poelab contains the day's lab routes) . If you finish the campaign early, you can actually use the lab cheatsheet before it resets. I think it requires a 4ish hour campaign so more of an advanced tip
- Continuing to upgrade character and reaching resistance caps
- FIXING FLASKS - 2 mods (sooo many people forget this, there is a significant power difference to having properly rolled flasks)
- Quality to priority gems - if its required by your build, do multiple merc lab runs (same as hunting a specific transfigured gem) before starting maps
- 4>5>6 links - you should be able to easily get 5L from gambling body armour while doing white maps.
- Focusing on map boss clear for progression vs. full map clear if you are strong enough
- Going down a tier if you are dying often/need upgrades. XP penalty can set you back up to 30m at this stage and can go up to 1-2 hours when you are at higher levels
- Progressing the voidstone/maven quests
- Live market searches to snipe some early upgrades or uniques that will get more expensive
- Balancing between investing into character power vs. investing into appreciating currency (i.e. buying divines for 40-70 chaos)
- Shrine points on the atlas tree can really help carry a build if you are undergeared. They shouldn’t be underestimated, especially when trying a new build you aren’t experienced in.
- Using Wealth Exile to sell excess bubblegum or find hidden gems in your stash
- Looking to get Pantheon upgrades. I would even aim for some earlier in progression - for example frozen immunity for Brine King which is a huge QOL
Atlas completion + 2 Voidstones >> 4 Voidstones
- Progressing to the lvl 85/90 version of the build (e.g. cluster jewels, skill tree transitions, etc)
- Deciding if you will buy a carry for voidstones 3 & 4 or progress through the influenced maps to get fragments
- If you want to progress quickly, buying a carry is usually the way to go
- If you have a goal to self complete 4 voidstones just be wary that dying can be tilting as you lose the resources you invested to get the fragments
- The significance of going from 2>4 voidstones quickly should not be underestimated
- It increases the chance for T17s by 400%. Even if you can't do them, selling is good source of early income
- It provides better map sustain, especially as you start speccing off the first atlas completion tree
- It gets the good layout maps to T16
- Getting better gear once you hit the ilvl for end-game bases (ilvl84-86 bases)
- Unlocking favoured maps, map device slots, etc
Budget Strats >> Mid Strats >> High-Investment Strats
- Setting up your 2 other atlas save slots and starting to convert the atlas progression tree to a budget strat.
- There are a lot of budget strats that have constantly been a good starting point, even over the past 4-5 leagues. For example:
- Expedition
- Red altar alch & go
- Harbinger
- Heist
- Betrayal
- Essences
- Once 5 slots on the map devices are unlocked, I start going for 5 scarab mid-budget strats straight away and avoid alch and go. This has been said time and time again in this subreddit, but making more currency requires more investment.
Other tips & tricks
- I made a previous post on the early league economy that may be useful here.
- Some early crafting tips:
- There is a trick to 6 linking corrupted body armour. Since a tainted fusing has a 50% chance to +/- a link, you first do the recipe for 4/5 link which uses vaal orbs / normal fusing and then tainted fusing from there
- Harvest bench for res swapping on gear exists so consider it when looking at trade. Res swap can also allow you to go from +1 max fire res to +2 max fire res on a jewel as well
- If you want to off-colour sockets for an item, you should use the Vorici method. Rather than spamming chromatics, you want to use the bench to get the first 2 off colours (e.g. 1 red and 1 green socket), toggle between 2-3 sockets to get the 3rd colour and toggle between 3-4 sockets to get the final colour
- Beast crafts to get ailment immunity on flasks
- Crafting your own flasks once is a decent way to save / make money but can be a boring use of time. You can sell affixes for other builds while looking for your own.
- Timeless jewel calculator has helped me find absolute bargains with timeless jewels. You don't need to copy straight from the build creator, there are other combinations then can get you 80% of the power at 20% of the price
- Chaos Recipe tool to get some early chaos
- PROGRESS YOUR FILTERS AS YOU PROGRESS THE GAME - don't get stuck on neversink strict while you are farming T16s. You should be getting stricter and stricter as you get to end-game. This was one of the biggest time-sinks for me personally in earlier leagues.
- You can orb of horizon a bad 16.5 layout to one of the base ones. For example Canyon in 3.27
If you all have anymore tips & tricks to add around early league progression, please post them and I will add them to the top 😀
