hey man, how's it going? All good? Yeah, waiting for 3.25 forever, but yeah, yeah, thank you for being here today. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Hell yeah. So, you're a dream core, right? A content creator on YouTube, and that's you. And I remember first seeing you, I think it was like somewhere here. It was about, I want to say something about glorious vanity or petrified blood. For the first time was back when I looked into my toxic way Pathfinder with petrified blood, all that going on. And you have a really good way of explaining things in general, and you have really good insights on defensive mechanics. What would you say is your channel for in general? What do you like to do mainly? I mean, I do have a big focus on defensive mechanics because that's just something that I'm really interested in the game. Yeah. But generally, I just like to talk about how mechanics interact with each other, 'cause I think there's a lot of things that are really easily misunderstood in the game.

and there's so many misconceptions, you know, about different things. So, yeah, it's just generally explaining how mechanics work and then talking about interesting interactions that exist with items and things like that, okay? And if you had to like name some of those misconceptions, what would come to mind for you? Well, one of the really big ones is like damage calculation in the character sheet for things like armor, which is just, you know, and even evasion with, you know, how much you're going to evade or how much damage reduction you have. People look at their estimated damage reduction, you know, for armor, and they think that that's the damage reduction they're going to get to every hit that's coming in. Yeah, so you're talking about physical damage reduction around here, for example, right? So, if I put in plus 50,000 to armor or something, and then I increase, I mean, 50,000 maybe a little bit too much, let's do 20,000, and then I increase enemy skill physical

damage to like yeah and all of a sudden it drops from 90 to 65. Yeah, and obviously in the character sheet, how it's working is it's giving you an average monster of that level with like an auto attack, right? And then it's, it's calculating your armor versus that attack, yeah? And, uh, obviously armor is better when it's against smaller hits. It provides more mitigation, and against larger hits, it provides a lot less mitigation. So, um, I think that's something that is not explained well at all in the game and something that's just so easy to misunderstand. I think that's also an issue of, I mean, PoB is an awesome tool, but it is one of those tools where if you don't know the basics of the game, it's really hard to use it correctly, right? Yeah, it deludes you into thinking certain things 'cause, for example, it would be obvious for me to think if I put in Pinnacle boss, it's going to be a girthy Fizz hit or something, right? But

then there is way crazier outliers in the game right. So if you go to Uber pinle boss, I mean sure the damage goes to like 3,000 or something. It's like, uh, I don't know about that, right? Um, yeah. So yeah, it's a little bit. There's a lot of that in the game. Yeah, it's, um, I, I mean the game could do a much better job of explaining these things, I think. Like especially armor and evasion is another one, you know. It's obviously just taking a monster of that level, taking the accuracy that they have, but there's, there's so many Monster modifiers and things in the game. You just never know what you're going to encounter in a math. Yes, they could explain the stat, but the player still wouldn't really know what they're going to interact within a map. So it's, it's difficult. Yeah. It also depends on the situation, right? Like if you do Expedition and you're fully like you don't have bleed immunity and you're fully reliant on your V chance and

literally, every single time you have hits can't be evaded on your remnants, then it's going to be a little bit of an issue, right? So you, yeah, and tier 17s have kind of exposed that as well, right? Like the more layers you have, in a sense, the better you're off, but in a sense, the more mods you also have that destroy your build, kind of, right? Exactly, yeah. So you take out, I mean, some builds are fully reliant on one defensive layer, and then as soon as that layer is completely not working, for example, you know, smoke suppression does nothing, then you're just getting one shot by something. So tier 17s are one of those. They're almost a little bit like Valdo's maps in that way that they're just, I wasn't really expecting them to do that, you know, kind of like put these modifiers in that are basically All or Nothing modifiers because that doesn't really exist anywhere else in the game, exact, yeah, that's actually, it's like immunity is almost, right, like where

you're like what does this do in the game it's it's weird. Yeah, yeah, I'm not a big fan of that on tier 17s. I think on Valdos it's perfect. It makes sense on Valdos. You know what you're signing up for. T tier 17s are weird in a way where they are meant to be played 'cause they're like they're Lally called tier 17s, which is a new player would assume, Oh, now I go from tier 16 to tier 17, and not, Oh, this is something very specific that I have to have insane amount of currency into my build to do it right. Yeah, it's a little little bit weird, those modifiers, but maybe they're going to change them. We'll see. What do you think about like effective hit pool versus max hit taken? What do you think like the relationship is there with um people kind of misunderstanding what's going on there? I think a lot of actually comes down to block in a lot of cases. People have some like Block in their build even like a

little bit of block and suddenly they're effective hit just jumps up like crazy because what the calculation is doing is it's saying you know you're taking these hits and if you have 30% block well 30% of those hits are de no damage to you and therefore you know your effective hit will jumps up like crazy it's only really useful when you're talking to it in context of like you know you're doing a map that's pretty Juiced and you have like a very reliable block chance or something and you have a lot of other defensive layers as well MH because you know only relying on block is not a great idea yeah um but yeah otherwise you want to be looking at your max hit because that that is the number that determines whether a hit kills you or not ultimately mhm so if if your max hit is is low and often times with a lot of builds the max hit problem usually comes from physical damage you basically either solve it with like damage taken as is a really popular way at the moment

mhm um and a lot of builds just can't really get enough armor. We go back to that problem with armor scaling and you know there's so many ways to deal with elemental damage now even though like most Monster damage numbers in the game for Elemental damage are much higher because of resistances. Like there's just so many ways to deal with elemental damage and even chaos damage as well that you almost just want to convert. Yeah and just own it that way. Yeah I mean it's interesting because for me it's kind of like at a certain point you definitely want avoidance some form of avoidance should be on almost every build because it's just cheap right. It's like very rarely actually do you die from a one shot. It's like most people think it's a one shot but it actually is more of an issue with recovery or it's an issue with your avoidance right like being able to just slam on a little bit of evasion and a jade flask and having 50% avoidance is

absolutely crazy, but it doesn't make you so involved with avoidance that all of a sudden if an enemy has like can just go through your evasion. Doesn't just oneshot you, right? So you can have to set your max it to a certain point, and after that, you can kind of look at. But for example, as a bow character, not having evasion is a death-like sentence. But on non-b characters, for example, if you just have 30-40% chance to block, that is already okay in terms of avoidance. You can rather maybe look into armor and stuff like that, right? Yeah, exactly. And like a lot of the physical damage is coming in from those monster attacks. So if you got like, if you got like, yeah, like you said, 30-35% chance to block, that's a huge amount of mitigation in a mapping environment. And that's a little bit of an issue with me with Block in general is it's so much investment for something that doesn't increase your max hit. That is like.

Okay, spell suppression is actually pretty easy to get nowadays. Every build has spell suppression. If the squishiest of builds have spell suppression, you know it's easy to get, right? Like, I see people in the top 50 DPS on uh P ninja have 100% spell suppression. I'm like, okay, that's crazy. But block is an investment, right? Like, the nodes are so expensive, and getting to 75% is such a huge investment, right? Yeah, it's hard to invest in Block on pretty much any character that isn't a necrom mon. So it's like you're going to go, I mean, okay, Gladiator, but well, yeah, that's what I was going to say next, right? Like, this old node here that basically converted your attack block to spell block was what held block together, almost. And yeah, now it's like gone, block is kind of gone as well. It's kind of weird, yeah, the death of gladiator, sad, yeah. But maybe, maybe it's coming back next League, who knows, maybe we here's hoping, let's hope assassin also gets the all damage can

poison right from Ruthless, but yeah BL block is just. I think a lot of people make that comparison between block and spell suppression CU. It's the left side of the tree kind of has a lot of access to block and you know spell block, attack block, and the right side of the tree is lots of evasion and spell suppression, but spell suppression is just the superior stat there when you look. If you just look at those, those four things, you know that it's kind of ridiculous. So, and there's like glancing blows, which is in earthed, you know, yeah ever since a 65, although like with 50%, it would kind of be like a no-brainer at that point. They could. I don't know. It's like I understand why they nerfed it. It should probably be like 55%, so there's because 65 is a lot. So most of the time when you take glancing blows, you're just losing. Um, you're basically taking more damage than you otherwise would have. The best way to make use of that Keystone is

if you have some kind of recovery, and you know you're not going to die from those hits, then that's good. If you have recovery on block, but otherwise a lot of the time you click that node and you're actually taking more damage now than you were. I honestly also think they could buff it just because Igus fell a little bit out of favor. Now that we have instant leech again, right? Like ever since instant leech is back, Igus kind of lost a little bit of its charm, I would say. Cuz yeah, they basically moved it over to the core tree, and then everybody was using it in that patch, and then they nerfed it. I think the Nerf was a little bit heavy-handed, but pretty rough. But to be fair, literally everybody was using it, right? Like it was, yeah, it was, it was insane, yeah, yeah, it was. But it was also the time when that happened, at the time when glancing blows was moved onto the cry, the access to defenses in the game.

was just so limited. It was actually ridiculous. We had armor and evasion hadn't been reworked at that point. Oh, so it was before spell suppression even, right? Yeah, no, yeah, no, no. Spell suppression, a lot of these def mechanics that have come into the game now, things like fourth vow, things like armor and energy Shield Mastery for armor being applied to chaos damage, mhm. None of those things existed. So it was block was just really good then. Block and Dodge, obviously on the right side of the tree, you were just going attack and spell Dodge. Dodge here, everybody would just take uh, Acro phas. Acro, yeah, yeah. That was definitely interesting times but also very squishy times, yeah, yeah. It just, it was all or nothing defenses basically. You either take no damage or you die in terms of like players and their defenses and what they usually like. One of the problems I have with, for example, League starters is how tanky do I want to go because a lot of people think, oh, he doesn't go tanky, he's just

like evil or something. He doesn't want to be tanky, but it's obvious a trade-off, right? It's like you're sacrificing something to be tankier, and that something might have been more important than being tankier. And what I noticed is some people are super fine with being squishy, and some people are, let need to be extremely tanky. They will literally play a Ballista build, run into the middle of the pack before they start placing their ballistas, and then just chill there, right? And they want to be able to tank everything. How do you kind of like approach that in your content where you understand that there's different kind of players, and what would you recommend for people to do kind of in those situations where I don't know maybe they feel too squishy on every build? It's definitely a player perspective thing, as you highlighted on there. It's like some people don't really care if they have a really squishy build. They'd rather invest everything into damage, and I think

that whole sentiment definitely comes from that Old P that we were just talking about there where investment in into defenses just didn't feel like it was worth it. It really didn't feel like it was worth it. It was, it was literally phas Acro Acro and everything else a few life noes and you're done. Yeah, yeah, and I think that gdg have done a really good job ever since the huge Nerf patch in 3.15 and then 3.16 when they kind of reworked determination and Grace and added spell suppression and ever since then they've been adding more and more mechanics into the game. The Players actually want to invest in because they are they're actually good defenses once you get invested in into them. So if you're someone who you feel like you're squishy on builds but you do want to you know build into defenses start to kind of think about different damage types so you know I mean physical damage is is the is a real problem for a lot of builds especially those right hand side.

builds, and more recently we've had buffs to damage taken as gear. That's why Lightning Coil has become really popular. Cloak of Flame is great as well. Basically, if you have a mix of things to deal with each damage type, so for armor, you could just, you know, take Determination. You have a little bit of armor, even if you don't have a lot of armor scaling. If you combine that with Lightning Coil or with a Cloak of Flame, suddenly you are massively improving your mitigation against physical damage, which is one of those huge problems for those right-hand side builds. Like, as soon as they get to mapping, that's what's chunking them most of the time, is the physical damage. Yeah. And I guess I would add an early Granite flask can be really relevant. Like a Granite and a percentage armor roll early on. That's enough armor to tank, like, to give you like 50-60% damage reduction. Yeah, it's a massive difference. It's massive. Yeah. I play a lot of left-side

bows like Chie and things like that League start. I like to just I'll be running a granite flask and a jade flask. I won't have any kind of Grace or anything but just running that Jade flask means that I'm not going to get Jade flask is uh. Yeah, Jade flask is almost always that's why that's why uh whenever I see people run uh what's it called on W Wing stance it's kind of there's a yeah there's a bit of a TR off there. Lightning coil is definitely one of those things where something I guess people also don't realize is how much better Fizz damage taken as gets the more you get so kind of getting towards 80 90 100% is actually pretty crazy. I think there's also a thing where you actually need to get to 101% or something. I forgot why that was was it because of bleed or something. Yeah well that I don't exactly remember we think that's a bug at the moment we think it's

a bug because how how it's supposed to work with um damaging ailment is the the the calculation is on the attacker side not on you know not on the defender side so it should be that even if you take a hit of physical damage that would bleed you and you take none of that damage as physical it should still still inflict bleeding. That came from a developer who actually said that so okay but we we've had absolutely no word on it at all and and it's been bugged for leagues at this point so maybe it's just not a bug and maybe maybe internally it's changed at some point but for the thing with damage taken as and obviously going back to armor as well if you have uh damage taken at is obviously like you said it gets better and better the more you have of it but also if you have even a little bit of armor because the damage that you're taking now is being taken majority of you know lightning for example with lightning coil or maybe cloak of flame you're

taking as fire that remaining physical damage is smaller, which means that the armor that you have is then more effective against resulting smaller hit, which is guess that's also misconception where people think it's either one or the other, but a mixture is often actually exactly so yeah mixtures are really strong. Another big part of your content, especially lately where you've uh popped up in my inbox a lot, uh is your forgotten unique series that has kind of been a mainstay on your channel, and I I really like this series, namely because a lot of old uniques kind of get forgotten like you say in the title, literally, and putting them in context in a new setting can often reinvigorate a lot of new ideas, right? For example, when I played Kitava's first uh this league start, I was surprised by like just I I looked into a lot of the old uniques and uh I was surprised by how many are not used even though they're very very close to actually being strong, being good, yeah exactly. I think that that series for me like

when I first sort of thought of the idea of doing that series, I really had the idea in my mind that I wanted to kind of inspire people to make builds with these items, you know, because it's like there are so many new mechanics coming into the game every League, like lots of new unique items and things, and I think a lot of this stuff people just completely forget about it because like there's new things coming in, it's the new flavor, you know, this is what's popular now, but there's such a huge backlog of stuff that people have forgotten about, and in a lot of cases, yes, these items are a bit weaker than what we're using right now, that's kind of how it is, and some of these things do need buffing, but you know, I think it is fun to look at these things in the context of what we have in the game now and see what's possible because you know a lot of people do enjoy that, that's why a lot of people play PO is because of just all of

the possibilities that we have MH. So yeah, it's fun to look at those in the context of what we have access to in the current po. It's also like one of these knowledge. I wouldn't say knowledge gaps, but I feel like a lot of people don't think this is really important game knowledge, knowing all the uniques, but like whenever a new patch comes out, it's so much easier to apply what's being said in there and finding old stuff if you already know what's going on, right? So videos like this really help understanding the game as well. And for everybody who's starting out, I would really, I would really just tell them to go and look through list of uniques and L. You just see what's available, right? Yeah, exactly. I remember when I first started playing and you know, that experience of learning things for the first time and you kind of see one mechanic and then it leads you to another and it leads you to another and by the time you know it, there's like 50 tabs open on your on

your browser. You know, yeah. And yeah, with with uniques, it's just like that. You're kind of going down this rabbit hole, and there's like so many uniques and doing all these crazy things, and you you're just thinking all these possibilities, you know. It's just, it's, it's, it's super exciting, and that's one of the things that I really, really enjoy whenever a new league comes out. It's one of my favorite things about a new league is knowing that there new unique items coming because it's always happening. There's always these, you know, new unique items. I mean, this league, we just had a bunch of new Uber drops. We had things like the apostate, which was just insane, you know. I think you made a You made a video on that, right, like a life stacker? I did, yeah. The apostate is a really cool item. What I really like about the item is the fact that they chose it to be a body armor because they could have had this. It could have been like a jewel or

something maybe it would have been a bit weaker in that case. Or it could have been a different slot, but with it being the body armor, you're basically saying you're going to be fully relying on life stacking because you can't use like. Yeah, it is rough. Yeah, it's rough. It is, it absolutely is. Yeah, but it's, uh, it's an item that makes a lot of sense in that way that you're basically all in at that point. And that's, this is like the prime example of a Path of Exile unique item for me. It's just, uh, yeah, it's everything that I think it changes the way you play, right? Like, yeah, exactly. It completely defines a build. Good uniques also make for different rare gear, right? Like, it also influences the choices of rare gears that you have. For example, I don't know if you have, right? All of a sudden it's like, Oh, um, yeah, every attribute, right? Like, you're just going to stack. And you see items that you would otherwise not see. That's like the

Allure for me when it comes to like aost. I guess it's the same problem as on strength Decker. It's like life as your only defense is just pretty damn rough. It's like I guess strength ster also has block, but we already talked about how block is underland a little bit, right? But in general, the problem I often have with uniques and Poe is some of them really feel outdated, and you want to make them work. And you make the PO, and you're like, Oh, the only bad thing about this, I don't know, um, so and so unique build is the unique, right? And if I just take out the unique and I just use, I don't know, rebuke of the ball, right? Like the build starts with reuk of the ball, and at some point you realize, Oh, I can probably for two divise make a better weapon, and your build is just, I don't know, vle as again, right? This is one of the things that I think what I would really like to see from from gdg is a

big balance pass across a lot lot of the unique items because I think every leag the content is creeping up you know there there's always more and more things to do everything things getting harder over time and these unique items are just kind of left behind because you know the rare items are the things that are being kept up with things like eldrich implicits and stuff like that that are you know synthesized implicits corrupted implicits all this stuff that you know continuously can power creep those items yeah and uh in the case of unique items although some of them are very very strong and build defining there's a lot of them that are really interesting and fun but they're just not quite good enough you know and like you said you could use them if you wanted to and you would basically be gimping yourself a little bit because at that point what's the what's the point yeah exactly that's also an interesting topic I guess in general uh when it comes to uh crafting leagues and stuff like that

I feel like GGG doesn't really use uniques all that much in those leagues. It's mostly rares that just get overpowered. I mean, once again, Necropolis is just one of the examples, right? Rec combinators in Sentinel like Harvest. Right, it always feels like uniques kind of get left out. Maybe they're too afraid of stuff. Do you think there is a lot of design space there where they could make maybe a league where uniques matter more? It would be really interesting if they done something with uniques. They tried to do a little bit with Crucible MH. Um, I think Crucible is a league that that's true that a lot a lot of people, but they were also harder to make, right? You had to like chance or exactly see. I I didn't I wasn't a fan of that. I'm not sure why they just made that decision that uniques were harder to sort of build trees on. I mean, that is there space there for it, yeah, absolutely. I think they could do some crazy stuff.

with uniques you know in terms of like a crafting League. I mean imagine a Le where you could like take a modifier from one unique and like somehow smash it onto another unique or something like that like some kind of crazy. It's interesting that you say that because that's what both last Epoch and for example torch light now as well are doing. Last Epoch basically lets you with LP get normal stats on your legendaries right on your uniques and porchlight has kind of like a middle thing where all their legendaries are now basically just they trimmed all the fat from all of them and only put in the two to three unique mods that are on each legendary and the rest is craftable just with normal crafting. They're basically like rares with two to three fixed affixes that are unique and have upsides downsides and everything else so so where for example I don't know a pee item uh like I don't know let's say k Spirit or something you have Kum spirit and there's some random mods in there.

right, you obviously have the regenerate rage per second for every 300 recovery, right? But all the other mods are kind of weird. It's like life fire R. And depending on if you actually need those mods, it makes them better or worse for your build. So what Tor infinite did is just like trim all that fat. They would only keep the last two mods, and then the rest you could just craft yourself. I think that's that would be that that would be crazy. Like that, that would be so much fun if they basically like you said, they took away the mods that are not unique, right? The ones that are actually unique to that item. Yeah, keep them on there like something. And then you can actually build really interesting unique items. I mean, why not do something like that and experiment? They don't seem to have a problem with things being completely overpowered from leagues and then you know moving on into down exactly. I'd love to see that with because unique for me unique item design in PO is something that's just so

fun. It's, you know, it's amazing that they continuously come out with crazy unique items like the design space. You'd think it's completely F by now, but it's just like, it's just crazy. I'm just fascinated because, uh, if I look at other RPGs that are very concerned about their balance and whatnot, right, a lot of these games kind of make the builds themselves and then just kind of give you, sell you the illusion that you made the build, right? The devs kind of make the builds for you with their uniques, but in this game, they just release nemis, right? It's like, just like, okay, let's see what happens, right? Like, that's crazy that, like, if you see other games, you know, that would never happen. Yeah, I remember watching, I think it was hershi in an interview. He was talking about how they'll make a unique item and internally they have discussion about, you know, what builds could come out of this item, but sometimes the item will

just sit dormant for maybe even years at a time, and then suddenly there will be like this crazy build that someone finds. Sometimes even with mechanics that have existed for leagues and leagues at a time, someone just finds it, and that's kind of the beauty of unique items. They're just like, there's so many of them, and a lot of people just completely forget about them. And then yeah, all of a sudden there's this crazy mechanic, crazy interaction, and there you go. It's suddenly everyone's using it. So yeah, yeah, it's fun in general. Definitely looking forward to every single of your episodes there in general. When it comes to content creation, where do you kind of want to go now? Where you, what's your end goal? Do you want to do this full-time? Is it kind of like a hobby on the side? I think it'd be fun to do it full time. I'm not sure how much the channel will grow. It's hard to say really. I mean, with, you know, with path

bile 2 coming up. There's always a completely new game to get into. A lot of the mechanics we already know are going to be completely different. Like ailments are being changed, you know, stun threshold and things like that is completely being changed. There's going to be tons of unique items. So I think it a lot of the case it will be a more of the same for most things. I should think just like more more Dives on items. You know, one of the things that I do really enjoy doing is looking over other people's builds. That's like something that I really enjoy doing. Just covering someone's build like there's some crazy build. That's some of your most popular, uh, videos, right? Yeah, yeah, like, like that one there Kogi's Pathfinder with the 55% resistances. I mean, that was just completely crazy. No, nobody at that point as far as I aware had done that. And it was just like the guy just made a crazy build. And it was, yeah, it's just

really fun to cover that sort of stuff because you know it's always with other players creativity, and a lot of the time these builds don't really get the spotlight, so it's uh, it's nice to make a video like that and kind of um, immortalize it in a way. So in general, uh, you're going to continue the series, I guess. Yeah, I'll be doing a lot of the same. Yeah, yeah. When it comes to pe2, do you look forward to it? I think you made some content on pe2 recently as well. Yeah, I've done a little bit of poe2 content. I think for a while I was a bit cynical of poe2 because I think that especially after they announced that it was a separate game, um, there was a bit of a strange feeling there where they had been saying for a while that some of these things like Melee is a big one right. They have been saying that, you know, poe2 is coming and

it's going to sort of fix melee. I mean, a lot of people had that in their minds, right? That it's going to fix melee. And now it's not going to happen. So what happens to melee in PoE now? We don't know. But from what I've seen with PoE 2, especially recently, I think I'm just excited to play the game. I think it looks great. It looks very different. Yeah, and it is going to be a very different game. I think ultimately it is going to be very different even once we get into it and get to end game and things like that. But different is not necessarily bad. So I think it's going to be a fun game once it gets it. Yeah, I think so as well. Like I've big hopes for GGG in general. Like I mean, having played PoE for like over a decade, I just I cannot imagine a world where this game even if it's bad on release, right, even

if that actually happens, I cannot imagine them leaving it in a bad state. It just doesn't. They're just going to make it good eventually. The only fear, I guess, I have is that it is good for a lot of people but not for me, where I'm just a little bit more in a different direction like Path of Exile definitely skews people a little bit from meticulous gameplay to more degenerate gameplay, right? So maybe, yeah, I can't appreciate PoE for what it is. That's definitely a fear, but otherwise, um, I'm just I'm kind of take it as it comes and uh, seems like you have a pretty similar approach. I just wanted to like wait until I get in there so I can actually judge it for what it is. I think a lot of the time like I have one really big concern for Path of Exile 2 is the hotkeys thing. If I'm not playing on controller, you know, is there just going to be way too many hotkeys to press?

just been a concern and it's basically ever since they added WD. And now we kind of know that WD is going to be the go-to way to play the game because if you're not doing it, you're kind of at a disadvantage in a way. So um, yeah, I just want to get in there and play it, really. I'm just excited to get in there and try out. Yeah, sounds good overall. Yeah, love your channel. Happy you're in the community making content even so late in the league. Thank you for being here and was appreciate that. Yeah, thanks for having me on, been man. See you around. Cheers. [Music]

Being Tanky at Leaguestart & Forgotten Uniques ft @dreamcore_gg | Paltalk Episode #2

Being Tanky at Leaguestart & Forgotten Uniques ft @dreamcore_gg | Paltalk Episode #2