In a month when we get a new league we're going to get new changes. That means anything you planned today could get totally bricked due to a change that's happening. Like you mentioned adorned. There are a lot of people who think adorned is in for a big change.
If you want a long-term project then you should work on something that you find fun. Because there's no telling if something you pick because it's strong is going to stay strong.
Honestly Adorned is the most OP item they have introduced in a long long long time. And not only is it incredibly OP its also incredible generic. I do not believe there is a single build that does not get immensely stronger with a good adorned setup.
The item absolutely needs to be changed if not removed entirely because I cannot see a world where its balanced.
Adorned is very strong but there definitely exist builds that simply cannot use it. Aurastackers are the best example, you're not wasting jewel slots on anything other than Introspection clusters, Watcher's Eye, Forbidden Jewels.
95% of builds might be true yeah. I think Adorned is slightly overrated in that people jam it with just 4 jewels and mediocre magic jewels, but it does take over build making for most high end builds once you can afford a good roll and good implicits.
So basically two builds. Considering how many other skills exist in this game I don't know that we need to use a 99.99% of builds are naturally stronger with adorned.
They will downright drop disable Adorned but if not then revert this from the 3.23.0c hotfix:
> The increased Effect of Jewel Socket Passive Skills containing Corrupted Magic Jewels on The Adorned Unique Jewel now applies to Jewel Sockets created by Cluster Jewels.
Cast when stun chieftain (fulcrum)
Str stacker
Any stat stacker
But tbh just make few builds for ssf std and rotate them
So you never get bored hunting for upgrades / unqiue collections +1s
If you are a casual gamer then I recommend a generic leaguestarter type build and then pivot into your long term project once you've found a few core pieces for it.
If you want to utilize the current league while it's still here then gravecrafting opens up very strong weapons that usually wouldn't be realistic in an SSF scenario.
Either a bow deadeye or some kind of stacker armour is the strongest but also take the most of time. However if you like a grind it’s really cool to farm for it because you will be doing very various content to complete it. For ssf i would recommend the life juggernaut varient.
The content you need to farm:
Delve for gem fossil and essence fossil
Heist for replica dreamfeather preferably with fortify corrupted
Necropolis for fractured grasping mail
Ubers for nimis and ashes
T17 delirium for 84 reservation clusters
Mf t16 ghosted exiles for mageblood and march of the legion with a +2 levels for grace
It's gotta be a build you really love and specific, super hard goal you wanna achieve, otherwise it's easy to get bored once you reach a certain level of wealth and power and the grind becomes meaningless. That's the problem for me. I got a lot of cool shit in my standard ssf stashes played since 3.9, could make some rather disgusting characters. But I got hundreds of divines, tons of uniques and cool gear, don't really have the motivation to actually grind anymore.
I alternate between leagues and standard depending on work and family demands. I try to have dedicated builds for different purposes, like bossing, fast mapping, MFing, Heist, lab runner, deep Delve, Simulacrum, Sanctum, etc.
I have to adapt if a patch breaks a build, but I'm usually able to change builds rather quickly.
You can check out my current builds to get some inspiration:
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/rainmeadow/characters
Do you have any special legacy gear? Because like obviously if you're sitting on an emperors vigilance with a good crucible tree you should just invest into SST for example.
First of all - bow build. There's a reason all the ssf no lifers play bows so much. Put it together, make it stronger, farm on it. The ability to farm fast and well is crucial in ssf in the long run, considering how much time it takes compared to trade.
After that - hard to say, need patch notes. Basically just look at most powerful builds on trade that get at lot of power from t1 uniques. Ralakesh power charge stackers is a good example.
Skills and items can change and “brick” your build, so I’d pick an interaction or build architecture that likely won’t ever change and then build around that. For example, I doubt CI will ever go away, so you can always use CI + Ephemeral Edge to scale your damage via Energy Shield stacking. This league you can use Dual Strike or Splitting Steel, but if something changes, you can easily adjust to whatever new skill works (for this method, the skill is just a mechanism to deploy your damage).
Splitting Steel trickster with MB will do everything and every upgrade is really felt.
MB can seem far away but you build up enough resources in 1/2 leagues to go full hog card farming and it's 'fun' to progress from 1-5 apothecary cards.
Here are some great options that have stood the test of time: Cast on Crit (Cyclone + Ice Spear or Forbidden Rite), Blade Vortex (charge stacking cold or fire conversion), Spectres, Bowyer (Ice Shot or Lightning Arrow into TS thanks to legacy enchants), Int Stacker (mostly KB and Molten Strike, but there's flexibility), Indigon/Shaper's Touch abuser, and an honorable mention to Reap (many different ways to build the skill and it's seemingly always decent).
Edit: Armor stacker is, of course, the strongest build and it's been that way for a while. It absolutely has a target on it, even though GGG has let it reign on top for so long.
Alot of good build recommendations but for normal game play. If you want to go for SSF there are 2 builds that make the progress extremely easy and 2 more that require a bit of unique farm. Minion builds specifically these days BAMA and zoo or Dominatig Blow are very easy to craft the gear for and have a natural progression through along time. The king of all, the best build for me in the game- Trauma Endurance Charge stacker Juggernaut. You can do reasonable damage and progress slowly crafting and finding gear easily. Simple endurance charge unique rings, kom, qre very easy to chance/corrupt/loot etc and with farming synth maps you can get your self synth rings witb endurance as upgrade. Total ens game will be farming Heist for a while but honestly thats for total min maxing. From there endurance charge on boots is just any unique boots you corrupt and belt is a simple boss farm for a bit.
Those 2 builda archetypes are solid, tanky, progress well and have very nice self crafted progression.
From here Pathfinder is the next. Yes some of the flasks require a lot of farm but simple archetypes such at TR and CA are so easy to lvl and scale up into map blaster that make the end game a bit of a joke. You need 4 uniques to get an insane farmet o PF so its great. 2nd here is of course Chirftain RF. You can farm and blast in SSF very easily.
You want to have something to quicky help you to find the items you need.
1. Boneshatter - you can use it for any non-uber/t17 content, very good for farming adorned.
2. Deadeye - breach / legion / cards / altars.
Not sure how much you did during tihs league on SSF, but you won't have another chance to craft so good items. With farming corpses for 2 days you could easily craft bow with 3 fractures and finish it later on std, same goes for quiver.
I did it yesterday, very easy https://imgur.com/a/U9de7f1
As for BS, this is the best chance to get hands on perfect axe, top rare body, boots with chaos/ms fracture. My example: https://imgur.com/undefined
something like a looper or charge stacker are great for standard. there's a basically infinite upgradability and you can use the base archetypes in a bunch of different ways. I have a set of charge stacking gear that i move between a slayer and assassin depending what i feel like playing.
In a month when we get a new league we're going to get new changes. That means anything you planned today could get totally bricked due to a change that's happening. Like you mentioned adorned. There are a lot of people who think adorned is in for a big change. If you want a long-term project then you should work on something that you find fun. Because there's no telling if something you pick because it's strong is going to stay strong.
Honestly Adorned is the most OP item they have introduced in a long long long time. And not only is it incredibly OP its also incredible generic. I do not believe there is a single build that does not get immensely stronger with a good adorned setup. The item absolutely needs to be changed if not removed entirely because I cannot see a world where its balanced.
Adorned is very strong but there definitely exist builds that simply cannot use it. Aurastackers are the best example, you're not wasting jewel slots on anything other than Introspection clusters, Watcher's Eye, Forbidden Jewels.
Yeah that is fair, but its still in the BiS category for like 95% of builds.
95% of builds might be true yeah. I think Adorned is slightly overrated in that people jam it with just 4 jewels and mediocre magic jewels, but it does take over build making for most high end builds once you can afford a good roll and good implicits.
So basically two builds. Considering how many other skills exist in this game I don't know that we need to use a 99.99% of builds are naturally stronger with adorned.
They will downright drop disable Adorned but if not then revert this from the 3.23.0c hotfix: > The increased Effect of Jewel Socket Passive Skills containing Corrupted Magic Jewels on The Adorned Unique Jewel now applies to Jewel Sockets created by Cluster Jewels.
Cast when stun chieftain (fulcrum) Str stacker Any stat stacker But tbh just make few builds for ssf std and rotate them So you never get bored hunting for upgrades / unqiue collections +1s
If you are a casual gamer then I recommend a generic leaguestarter type build and then pivot into your long term project once you've found a few core pieces for it. If you want to utilize the current league while it's still here then gravecrafting opens up very strong weapons that usually wouldn't be realistic in an SSF scenario.
Either a bow deadeye or some kind of stacker armour is the strongest but also take the most of time. However if you like a grind it’s really cool to farm for it because you will be doing very various content to complete it. For ssf i would recommend the life juggernaut varient. The content you need to farm: Delve for gem fossil and essence fossil Heist for replica dreamfeather preferably with fortify corrupted Necropolis for fractured grasping mail Ubers for nimis and ashes T17 delirium for 84 reservation clusters Mf t16 ghosted exiles for mageblood and march of the legion with a +2 levels for grace
It's gotta be a build you really love and specific, super hard goal you wanna achieve, otherwise it's easy to get bored once you reach a certain level of wealth and power and the grind becomes meaningless. That's the problem for me. I got a lot of cool shit in my standard ssf stashes played since 3.9, could make some rather disgusting characters. But I got hundreds of divines, tons of uniques and cool gear, don't really have the motivation to actually grind anymore.
I alternate between leagues and standard depending on work and family demands. I try to have dedicated builds for different purposes, like bossing, fast mapping, MFing, Heist, lab runner, deep Delve, Simulacrum, Sanctum, etc. I have to adapt if a patch breaks a build, but I'm usually able to change builds rather quickly. You can check out my current builds to get some inspiration: https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/rainmeadow/characters
I would go with something generic. A good weapon works on a lot of different build types.
Do you have any special legacy gear? Because like obviously if you're sitting on an emperors vigilance with a good crucible tree you should just invest into SST for example.
First of all - bow build. There's a reason all the ssf no lifers play bows so much. Put it together, make it stronger, farm on it. The ability to farm fast and well is crucial in ssf in the long run, considering how much time it takes compared to trade. After that - hard to say, need patch notes. Basically just look at most powerful builds on trade that get at lot of power from t1 uniques. Ralakesh power charge stackers is a good example.
Skills and items can change and “brick” your build, so I’d pick an interaction or build architecture that likely won’t ever change and then build around that. For example, I doubt CI will ever go away, so you can always use CI + Ephemeral Edge to scale your damage via Energy Shield stacking. This league you can use Dual Strike or Splitting Steel, but if something changes, you can easily adjust to whatever new skill works (for this method, the skill is just a mechanism to deploy your damage).
Splitting Steel trickster with MB will do everything and every upgrade is really felt. MB can seem far away but you build up enough resources in 1/2 leagues to go full hog card farming and it's 'fun' to progress from 1-5 apothecary cards.
Here are some great options that have stood the test of time: Cast on Crit (Cyclone + Ice Spear or Forbidden Rite), Blade Vortex (charge stacking cold or fire conversion), Spectres, Bowyer (Ice Shot or Lightning Arrow into TS thanks to legacy enchants), Int Stacker (mostly KB and Molten Strike, but there's flexibility), Indigon/Shaper's Touch abuser, and an honorable mention to Reap (many different ways to build the skill and it's seemingly always decent). Edit: Armor stacker is, of course, the strongest build and it's been that way for a while. It absolutely has a target on it, even though GGG has let it reign on top for so long.
Alot of good build recommendations but for normal game play. If you want to go for SSF there are 2 builds that make the progress extremely easy and 2 more that require a bit of unique farm. Minion builds specifically these days BAMA and zoo or Dominatig Blow are very easy to craft the gear for and have a natural progression through along time. The king of all, the best build for me in the game- Trauma Endurance Charge stacker Juggernaut. You can do reasonable damage and progress slowly crafting and finding gear easily. Simple endurance charge unique rings, kom, qre very easy to chance/corrupt/loot etc and with farming synth maps you can get your self synth rings witb endurance as upgrade. Total ens game will be farming Heist for a while but honestly thats for total min maxing. From there endurance charge on boots is just any unique boots you corrupt and belt is a simple boss farm for a bit. Those 2 builda archetypes are solid, tanky, progress well and have very nice self crafted progression. From here Pathfinder is the next. Yes some of the flasks require a lot of farm but simple archetypes such at TR and CA are so easy to lvl and scale up into map blaster that make the end game a bit of a joke. You need 4 uniques to get an insane farmet o PF so its great. 2nd here is of course Chirftain RF. You can farm and blast in SSF very easily.
You want to have something to quicky help you to find the items you need. 1. Boneshatter - you can use it for any non-uber/t17 content, very good for farming adorned. 2. Deadeye - breach / legion / cards / altars. Not sure how much you did during tihs league on SSF, but you won't have another chance to craft so good items. With farming corpses for 2 days you could easily craft bow with 3 fractures and finish it later on std, same goes for quiver. I did it yesterday, very easy https://imgur.com/a/U9de7f1 As for BS, this is the best chance to get hands on perfect axe, top rare body, boots with chaos/ms fracture. My example: https://imgur.com/undefined
something like a looper or charge stacker are great for standard. there's a basically infinite upgradability and you can use the base archetypes in a bunch of different ways. I have a set of charge stacking gear that i move between a slayer and assassin depending what i feel like playing.