The Cohhilition

So I have been playing since early beta, and I hope to provide some basic tips to help people out leveling. I will just add to this as I see things during the stream I see. Even though I have been playing forever, I do not play the META speed run builds. I am old and have become an average player. For newer players, I recommend finding defensive builds that allow you to see all of the content, but just progressing slower. If you get caught in a glass cannon build without the game knowledge or the ability to pull it off, you will not get to see all the content.

Leveling-
- Keep your resistances as high as possible. 75% is the max (can increase with items, skills, etc). As you get into higher acts, you will incur penalties to your base resistances. This just means you have to get better gear to stay at max res.

- What items to pick up?
* Blues you might wear. ID them and sell if you don't want. I pick up most necklaces and rings hoping to get a good life/resistance roll.
* Pick up all rares to ID and sell/use.
You just won't get enough wisdom scrolls to ID everything. That being said ...

- All the orbs you get early (and portal scrolls) can be sold for wisdom scrolls. You can either sell orbs and ID blues to upgarde incrementally, or just wait and try and upgrade through rares and using essences and alchemy orbs. This is all dependent on your loot RNG. I am having a crumby run this league, so I am ID'ing a lot of stuff to keep my resistances up.

- Get movement speed on your boots. A pair of boots with 30% movement speed and life is far better than 10% movement speed with resistances and life. Avoiding damage is always better than mitigating it in this game.

- Don't horde orbs you see dropping frequently. Use augmentations and transmutations to get life and res on gear while you level. Use alchemy orbs on your weapons and two stone rings. Leveling faster means more time to loot in end game. This isn't a game with an end, so looting faster is better than going out of your way to loot everything out of one zone

- You get enough passive respec points to fix some things, but not the entire tree. Do not go down one path and expect to be able to redo your entire tree. 20-25 respec points is ok, 50-60 points respecced will be expensive. Get POEplanner or POEbuilder and think about your build early.

Vendor Recipes to take advantage of during leveling i.e. items you should pick up
- Item with R-B-G linked colors sells for a chromatic orb
- Any item with 6 sockets sells for 7x Jewellers orbs
- potions with a sum of 40% quality sells for a Glassblower's Bauble
- a white quality stone hammer at 20% quality sells for a Cartographer's Chisel
- gems with quality totaling 40% sells for Gemcutter's Prism (GCP)

Other stuff to clarify during Cohh's stream.

Evasion vs. Armor
PoE is different than a lot of games here, as Evasion has what GGG calls entropy. It keeps track of your evasion rating and how may hits it has been since you evaded. If you have 50% evasion, you will evade every other attack (within a 6 second entropy check). To oversimplify, it is guaranteed you will evade at a rate very close to your listed %. There is no "bad luck" streaks where you can get hit 5 times straight with 50% evasion. Highly recommend you look at the PoE wiki searching for evasion to learn more.

What this yields, is that avoidance (evasion) is better than mitigation (armor) most of the time. The exception is when a single hit is lethal without mitigation. Because you can not get 100% evasion, there is always a threat of being one shot. So if you are an evasion build, you should have a basalt flask, granite flask, or one of the elemental flasks that increase max resist for a short time to help mitigate damage.

Armor builds are still played and highly accepted though, especially for melee characters. Melee characters just can't avoid all the damage coming in liked ranged/casters. If you like to play without relying on utility flasks, then armor builds are for you.

Block
When you block in PoE, you functionally "avoid" all damage. You don't mitigate part of it. Thus it functions similarly to dodge (no entropy like evasion). It isn't to difficult to max out block (capped at 75%, though it can be increased to 78% with the Anvil amulet). It is desirable to block spells as well. Through gear or ascendencies you can achieve 100% of block chance to spell block, meaning you can achieve 75% (or 78%) chance to block attacks and spells. The left side of the passive tree favors block (some block on right) and right side of the tree favors doge/evasion. I like block, because a lot of the block nodes have increased defense from your shield (roughly 200%). That means you can get a 1.5k armor shield (4.5k after increases) and not have to use a armor based utility flask. This opens you up to gear your other slots as needed far cheaper.

Thanks for the tips. Appreciated

Since I know a lot of you will probably play Cohh's build, I wanted to talk about how damage scales. So let's talk about a bow. Outside of unique bows that have only elemental damage, most bows are physical damage (like the rare bow Cohh is using). Cohh's build looks to scale his damage by using physical damage nodes from the passive tree, not elemental damage nodes.

Let's look at his auras:
Hatred- an aura that provides bonus cold damage based on the physical damage of the caster and their allies.- What this means is that he gets more cold damage from hatred because he is increasing his physical damage. Consider a simplified calculation

- Cohh does 100 physical damage without Hatred - Cohh does 140 (40%) damage with Hatred.
- Cohh can either get a 20% increased physical node on the tree or a 20% elemental damage node on the tree:
- With physical damage node Cohh does (100*1.2)*1.4 = 168 damage
- With Elemental damage node Cohh does (100* (1+(0.4*1.2))= 148 damage
- The elemental damage node only scales the portion of the damage added by hatred. The physical damage node scales the physical damage up front which in essence scales all damage.

Herald of Fire- grants a buff providing fire damage based on your physical damage. So the same mechanic as Hatred.

Consider if he would use Herald of Ice, which adds cold damage to spells and attacks. here none of Cohh's physical damage nodes modify this damage. While the ice explosion effect is nice, his physical scaling nodes means far more damage with Herald of fire.

Let's Look at a few skill gems
Physical Projectile Attack Damage (PPAD)- Supported Skills deal (30-49)% more Physical Projectile Attack Damage

Ice Bite Support- Supported Skills have (8-69) to (12-103) added Cold Damage

Recalling the numbers above, all of Cohh's physical damage nodes will scale PPAD (and the subsequent damage added from Hatred and HoAsh), whereas his nodes do not scale Ice Bite AT ALL.

If you want to scale elemental damage, then you pick elemental damage nodes on the tree, use weapon elemental damage gem, and get elemental damage on gear. Cohh's build just rewards him to stick completely with physical auras/gems/gear. I should also add that there are ways to scale phys damage with nodes then use things to convert the damage to elemental damage. See avatar of fire passive node or Ice Shot skill gem. I would not recommend conversion builds until you understand the mechanics.

Chance/Chaos/Regal Recipe
The main way to "farm" currency in the game is the "chaos recipe." This method includes either identifying rares or leaving them unidentified for extra currency. Each have their merit. But we will discuss that more as we go.

1 x Chance
1 identified rare item for each gear slot (2h, 1h + shield, shield+shield are interchangable for weapon slot)- ITEM level 1-59 (ilvl)
2 x Chance
1 Unidentified rare item for each gear slot or 1 identified item for each gear slot with 20% quality- ITEM level 1-59
3 x Chance
1 Unidentified rare item for each gear slot with 20% quality- ITEM level 1-59

1 x Chaos
1 identified rare item for each gear slot (2h, 1h + shield, shield+shield are interchangable for weapon slot)- ITEM level 60-74 (ilvl)
2 x Chaos
1 Unidentified rare item for each gear slot or 1 identified item for each gear slot with 20% quality- ITEM level 60-74
3 x Chaos
1 Unidentified rare item for each gear slot with 20% quality- ITEM level 60-74

1 x Regal
1 identified rare item for each gear slot (2h, 1h + shield, shield+shield are interchangable for weapon slot)- ITEM level 75-100
2 x Regal
1 Unidentified rare item for each gear slot or 1 identified item for each gear slot with 20% quality- ITEM level 75-100
3 x Regal
1 Unidentified rare item for each gear slot with 20% quality- ITEM level 75-100

Mixing item levels
If you have even one item ilvl 60-74 and the rest 75+ you will receive chaos orbs. If you have one item < 60 ilvl and the rest > 60 you will receive a chance orb.

Commentary
The rings and necklaces are always the long pole in the tent for these recipes. On top of the fact you are always trying to upgrade those slots, they drop sparringly, and you need 2 rings. This is why the identified recipe is the most popular. Not only do you get to look for upgrades, but you can use Essences and Alchemy orbs to craft rare rings for upgrades/recipes. If your plan is just to farm chaos orbs and buy gear directly, then doing the unidentified recipe is for you. Rarely will you quality rare gear, as rare items only net you 2% increase per whetstone/armor scrap.

Crafting or "rolling" an item

I don't want to get caught up in item level and tier's, other then saying the higher the ilvl the higher tier rolls an item can get. You can have ilivi 83 crude bow ... but you would never roll it because the base stats are to weak. This also just the tip of the iceberg in crafting. When you are rich you can start using master mods to try and craft the 100 ex bow ... good luck. All this being said, you can probably buy one cheaper then you can craft one. If you are playing SSF obviously you need to craft.

An item has 6 explicit mods and some have 1 implicit mob (sometimes they are hidden). Let's look at bows for phys/crit build. The ideal bow for this is a low speed, high phys /crit base bow, namely a Harbinger bow (Decimation would be the next step down).

Harbinger bow
Physical Damage: 35–91
Critical Strike Chance: (6.50% to 7.50%) The initial value is 5% multiplied by the implicit (5*1.3 - 5*1.5)
Attacks per Second: 1.20
Weapon Range: 120
Requires Level 68, 212 Dex

(30-50)% increased Critical Strike Chance - This is an implicit mod.

You should always try to craft one that already has a high implicit, but let's say you got a 5 or 6 link with a low implicit, Blessed orbs can be used to reroll the implicit. There is only one tier for an implicit, so the roll can vary widely here.

For Harbinger bows, you want exactly ilvl 83. Check out PoEAffix.net to look at the different tiers for items. I wouldn't start crafting with a bow less than ilvl 67.

The mods we want (in my preferred order when crafting)
- Critical Strike Chance (suffix)
- Hybrid accuracy/phys % (prefix)
- Flat Phys (prefix)
- % phys (prefix)
- Attack speed (suffix)

Two main methods for the average player exists, Alt/Regal and Chaos spam. I think chaos spam is pretty self descriptive. You are just going to chaos a rare item until it hits something you like.

The "controlled" method to craft is Alt/regal.
1) You start with a white item and transmute it. If it doesn't meet your standards go to #2. If it does meet standard go to #3
2) Then you use alterations until you get one mod you prefer.
3) Use an Orb of augmentation to craft a second mod. Note that if you craft a prefix with your alteration, the augmentation will give you a suffix, and vice versa. Once you have the two rolls you go to #4
4) Regal orb, which will add a third mod (and make it a rare item) being either a prefix or suffix. If you don't like the regal, you go to #5. If you do go to #6, #7, or #8
5) Scour orb and start with #1
6) Master craft the item for the best remaining mod and use, or
7) Multi mod master craft, or
8) Prepping to exalt without using the multi mod master craft

Lets say you hit:
Crit chance (suffix with alt)
Hybrid Acc/Phys % (prefix with aug)
Attack speed (suffix with regal)

#7 Using multi mod master craft- The multi mod is a suffix. Thus once you regal and end up with the 3 mods I showed in the example, you would put the multi mod on (suffix) and then master craft the 2 prefixes you want. You can not get top tier rolls with master mods. You can definitely buy a bow of similar quality cheaper versus crafting this way (outside of some niche items/builds such as Elreon rings). If you are playing SSF this method would be cheaper to get an endgame bow than not using multi mods, but will not be as good as what is possible without using multi mod.

#8 Not using multi mod master craft-
With these 3 rolls we want to master craft a prefix. But you really want to hit a prefix with your exalt then come back and master craft the other prefix (Note you can't master craft hybrid rolls which is why I order it so high to alt and aug). If this is the case, you will master mod the 3rd suffix, then exalt, guaranteeing a prefix with the exalt. Finally, you remove the master mod craft and recraft with the other prefix you want. And if you got this far, you will just yolo exalt the 6th mod.

Note at anytime where you get a bad mod, you might just scour and start again!!

Read this a few times and just go through the motions in game once. You need to know what mods are prefix and suffix so look at PoEMods or PoEaffix. If you want to see how the rich craft check out this video. This is way beyond my in game currency, but does show you how you craft insane items:
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I will probably edit this for clrarity after I read it a few times. Please ask questions.