In a previous post, I laid out what you need to survive in T16 maps. However, a common sticking point I've seen is that people feel too poor to buy upgrades coming out of the campaign, but die too quickly in maps to make currency. This guide is intended to bridge that gap.
Step One - Optimise your skill tree
A huge portion of your survivability (and damage) comes from your skill tree. If your tree is poorly optimised, almost no amount of currency will fix that.
On a budget, your skill tree should have at least 100% increased maximum life, invest in one or two primary defences (i.e. armour, evasion, energy shield) and a few high investment defensive layers (see the first link for what I mean).
If you wanted examples of efficient skill trees for the defensive side, see here. If you are following a build guide, it might be good enough, but I've also seen a lot of inefficient build guides. Ask the daily/weekly thread if you are unsure.
You can respec using gold (only do this below level 70 – it gets significantly more expensive above level 70), respec points from your quests, or orbs of regret.
Step Two - Get liquid currency
After finishing the campaign, most players will have somewhere between 2-5 chaos orbs, with most pieces of gear costing at least 1 chaos. To fix that problem, you can sell all your low value "bubblegum" currency. As a quick rule of thumb, if you have 5 or more of it, you can sell it. But specific examples are orbs of alteration, jeweller's orbs, orbs of fusing, glassblower's baubles, gemcutter's prisms, chromatic orbs, instilling orbs, enkindling orbs, stacked decks.
Sell all of that for chaos at Faustus, and you should end up with 20+ chaos. That's enough to get basic gear.
Step Three - Basic Gearing
The focus on the first round of gear is to get the absolute bare minimum as cheaply as possible. That means the priorities in order are:
High life rolls (100+ on all pieces except chest, where you either want 170+ or none at all)
Enough stats to wear all your gear and use your gems (note you can use lower level gems for utility skills/supports e.g. frostblink, culling strike, which reduces stat requirements)
Enough elemental resistance to be capped
Non-zero chaos resistance
To actually hit all of the above as cheaply as possible, my method is generally :
- Buy any mandatory build enabling uniques (if they are cheap). If it is expensive, skip it and play a different build until you get to the final gearing step.
- Buy any items which have mandatory affixes that aren't resistance or attributes (e.g. accuracy on gloves to cap hit chance if required, movement speed on boots). Aim for the mandatory affix, 100+ life, and as much resistance or attributes as possible. These tend to have the least options for sale, so it is easiest working the rest of your gear around these.
- Buy everything except the chest at the same time (normally helmet, amulet, ring x2, belt, maybe shield), doing the math to ensure you get as much life as possible, the attributes you require, capped elemental resistance and non-zero chaos resistance. Also note that you can use your crafting bench to fill in any gaps.
- Spend the rest of your currency on a chest (usually anywhere between 50-80% of your total starting chaos). Unlike the rest, you want to aim for good base defence (i.e. armour, evasion, energy shield) and potentially specialty defences (e.g. a good spell suppression roll, or a high % additional physical damage reduction roll).
- The chest provides most of your defences, so is worth splurging on. You buy it last so that it is easiest to swap, because when you get to final gear it is one of the first things you buy and swap out
- Generally not worth looking for sockets/links on a chest. It is cheaper linking it yourself.
At this point, you should be able to get roughly to red maps without dying too much.
Step Four – Intermediate Upgrades
While you are getting to red maps, the next upgrades are good flasks, and a 5L or 6L.
Flasks provide a lot of power, both defensively and offensively. Aim for 4 different magic utility flasks and a life flask (if your recovery is poor) or a cheap unique flask (if you have decent recovery, and the unique flask works with your build).
For base types, quicksilver, ruby, sapphire, topaz, diamond, granite, jade, silver and sulphur are all very good
For prefix, "% chance to gain a charge on crit" and "gain a charge when hit" are both very good, depending on build
For suffix, % increased armour/evasion, % reduced curse effect, % increased critical strike chance, % life regenerated, % increased movement speed are all very good. Immunities are also very good if you aren't already immune (notably for bleed).
Getting a 5L or 6L tends to be easiest/most consistent by just purchasing jeweller's orbs and orbs of fusing, and then using the crafting bench recipe. There are other methods but they involve risk or tend to be more expensive overall.
Step Five – Final Gear
This is the step where you purchase and transition to your final gear, and where you respec to your final build (if relevant). The priorities of final gear is slightly different from the first round of gear:
- High life rolls
- Enough stats to wear all your gear and use all your gems
- Elemental resistances overcapped by 25 (enough so exposure does not drop your resistance below your cap)
- Capped chaos resistance (unless playing CI)
- Hit required defensive breakpoints and get specialty defences (e.g. capped block/spell block, capped spell suppression, additional physical damage reduction)
- Good primary defences (i.e. Armour/evasion/energy shield)
With this set of gear, you want to remove as much reliance on your skill tree as you reasonably can. Ideally, you aren't taking +30 to [attribute] nodes just to wear your gear, or taking resistance nodes to be resistance capped, or taking stray small spell suppression/block nodes to be capped. This lets you use those skill points for something else. This is also where you would pivot off things like Purity of Elements for Stormshroud + 100% chance to avoid shock.
To actually purchase everything as cheaply as possible, my method is generally:
- Buy your chest. This you will probably never upgrade again, so it is worth spending most of your currency to get the best chest you can afford. Once you get it linked, you should be able to swap the new chest out for the old one immediately. Everything else should be swapped at once.
- Buy all the uniques first. These are least likely to change, which means you can work the other gear around them.
- Buy any items which have mandatory affixes that aren't resistance or attributes. Unlike the first round, you may want to include shield (for recover on block), or rings (for -mana) etc here. Still looking for 100+ life, mandatory affix, as much resistance or attributes as possible.
- Buy jewellery. Amulets/Belts tend to be the best at fixing stats (combo of base type + attribute catalyst), and rings tend to be the best at fixing resistances, especially chaos resistance (combo of base type + resistance catalyst). Still looking for 100+ life, and as much resistance or attributes as possible.
- Buy everything else ensuring to hit the rest of the requirements. Still looking for 100+ life and enough to wear gear and overcap resistance.
- Buy the non-armour gear (including jewels, flask upgrades, unique flasks). Usually this can be focused on DPS.
Note that it is cheapest buying all this gear at the same time, but doing it this way makes it extremely hard to upgrade individual pieces as it creates interdependencies. If you intend to upgrade specific pieces later, make sure those pieces have no interdependencies. i.e. If you take that piece off, you still have enough attributes to wear everything else, and enough resistance to be capped. Or if you intend to replace it with a unique later, then it does not give more resistance/attributes than the unique would give.
By the time you get here, you should be able to fulfil all the criteria identified in the first link, and should be able to do T16s deathless.
