[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)

Does anyone else have trouble seeing Breach Hands?

For me, so much loot drops that the hands are buried behind loot pixels. Or, if I shut off loot display, the Hands will vanish from active display before I spot them.

Non-MF?

Not here. Maybe my filter's just designed in such a way that they pop out, or I'm restricting more than you are. My issue is circling the Breach appropriately to find them in time in crappy map layouts.

Decided to craft my Atlas a bit to help out with that. Slowly getting rid of indoor crappy tilesets like Necropolis and Torture Chamber for Tiers 11-13.

3/4 on Shaper kills. First two sets, went down to the last portal + ripped one until I realized that despite how close Slower Proj gets you to the target, it's not close enough to be classified as the "melee" range that prevents him from launching the huge orbs at you. You have to sit right on top of him.

Next two runs were 1 death + deathless.

Way over-nerfed IMO. I would like to have seen them remain as was and make them even rarer as necessary.

In Breech League, time is of the essence - you need to be speed clearing maps. In Breach especially, essences are now in the category of "always skip." Too bad, because I thought they were fun.

What?

"

• The values of mods from Wailing Essences of Woe and above have been reduced, resulting in a notably lower value of all mods from higher-tier Woe essences.
• Fixed a minor issue where the Muttering Essence of Woe amulet mod granted values that were 1% too low.
• The gloves mod from Essence of Insanity now grant "Socketed gems have 16% More Attack and Cast Speed" (down from 20%). Existing items will not be changed.
• The weapon mod from Essence of Horror now grants a 16% chance to gain a power, frenzy or endurance charge on kill (up from 10%). Old versions of this mod can be updated using a Divine Orb.
The weapon mod from Essence of Delirium now deals 750 chaos damage per second for 10 seconds (down from 1,000).[/li]

These are not terribly significant nerfs. Still worth getting, imho, so I'd like an explanation as to why you think they're skip-mode, precisely?

Am I misunderstanding something or do you think these four changes were enough to render them useless?

It used be great to get deafening and craft really worthwhile gear in a few tries. Now, you're better off chaos spamming.

Low tier essences serve a niche roll while leveling - but I no longer use essences to craft end-game gear.

Meanwhile, if you spend time to do the essences (open it, kill it, loot it, vendor it, etc.), you'd have been better off skipping them altogether - save for the possibility that the mobs might drop something useful - more below (low level essences do have niche uses per above, but then the niche wasn't affected by the nerf).

E.g., Deafening Essence of Woe - now crafts a T2-ish energy shield value, at a cost of 18c (BSC price on poe.trade). I'd rather spend 18c spamming then on the Woe. And getting enough essences for the Deafening will take forever - should you get them, I'd advise selling.

What was cool about the essences is that it could give a guaranteed stat better than otherwise attainable. And for that, it would be worthwhile pursuing - at least for min-maxers.

Now...? I guess you could collect essences, but it really doesn't seem worthwhile to me.
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I suppose my main complaint is that essences used to offer a chance, albeit really small, of crafting the best gear in the game. Now, they're marginally useful - useful while leveling and at least you can sell them if you want - and have lost the "wow" factor.

I guess the essence mobs can drop stuff (can they drop maps?) - so it might be useful to kill them if you can just for that reason and grab the essences just because they're not entirely worthless having gone through the trouble of killing the guardian mobs.
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At my current level of DPS (it's good, but I have a long ways to go), Essence guardians offer a not-insignificant risk of death - and the reward, such as it is, is very slight. So I skip all of them.

Once my DPS picks up and I can kill them without thinking, I'll probably start killing Essence mobs just because it posses no risk and eventually I can collect enough essences to sell.
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Edit - It looks like some of the essences weren't changed, at least insofar as I can tell. Contempt, for example seems to be unaltered - and it still provides a slightly higher flat physical roll than is otherwise available.

So, I guess I'm confused - either the POE wiki's haven't been updated, or, some of the high-level essences were unchanged. If the later, at least for the unaffected essences, essences are definitely still worth while. Beats me what's what though, LOL.