the number one question I get on my stream, and a problem that plagues new players, is what upgrades to buy and in what order. The problem is you're thinking of upgrades on your character wrong. Sure, there might be something really core to the build that you need to purchase first, and that should be obvious enough if you're listening or reading to whatever the build guide is telling you. But past that, it's time to get some solid rare gear, invest into your flasks, and make your damn character stronger. Too many players are sitting with currency in their stash with the most Great Value Kroger Brand Aldi ass gear imaginable. Okay, you guys will link me PS with rings that have 20 Fire Res, 30 strength, and crafting life. Dude, you're playing trade League. Okay, just set a Max bio of five chaos, have 90 Max life at least, and then sort by total eles. It's so easy to find upgrades, and so many players are giving up on builds without investing anything into them. I'm seeing this all the time on the Path of Exile.

build subreddit. These people are wondering why their Ark Mage or lightning strike characters are so weak. It's because you don't need a new build; you need to put some real gear on that thing. Get some big rares so you don't feel like a dumbass for using Eldritch currency on them. Get high suppression, maybe some PDR on a big armor base on your body armor. Add some Eldritch implicits on top for some survival. We've got Fizz shift, we got max endurance charge generation, fortify on hit. These are too big to give up. Good rares, they'll save you points on the tree, they'll cap your suppression at 100%, save you from less armor maps, and stop your random one-shots and Deens to chaos damage when you click those Alters or you roll those map mods. The difference between body armor like this and this one is the same difference between crappy chicken tenders from your microwave and milk-soaked hand-breaded fresh-fried with a little bit of ranch.

tenders okay look at this. It doesn't look that bad. This is a decent slot. It's got life and it's got res. It's not dog right, but you have to upgrade from this, okay? You can't just have a bunch of slots on your character that are like, Well, it's not that bad, right? 'Cause when you have eight pieces of gear on that are like, It's not that bad, and then you got some drills that are like, Well, it could be, you know, like, you know, they were 2C. I think it was a pretty good deal, and you've got some clusters that are like, Well, it's got, you know, I have unnotable, and it's, you know, Maybe I got two notables, and it's not passives. Every one of those should just be thought of as like, us 5% minus 10% damage or survival, right? Every single time you do that. And so now your character is at like less than half of the defenses, half of the damage that it actually should be. I mean, look at this. It has a lot of life. It has

some resistances on there. They're not very high as a tier, and you could have an extra craft, right? But now we've got something that has seven physical damage reduction. We've got a big life regen roll, which is really nice for stuff like Zerker, just like everything in general, right? Everybody wants life regen, your life character, huge PDR. It's got T2 life, you know, just as much as the other one. It's got T1 % armor, and the only thing that kind of sucks where I got to recraft it is the flat armor, and it's got an open suffix that I could just craft or do whatever I want on, right? And it was good enough where I wanted to invest into Elder implicits, and so now I have 10 fiz shift, right? 10 physical damage taken as cold, and on this character specifically, I have recoup. Otherwise, it would have been two Max res. The difference between these two is phenomenal, and you need to start having more gear like this. It's not even that

hard to make something like this, especially when fractures are so cheap. We will cover that in a moment. Okay, you need another cute little analogy why you should be upgrading your gear. Too bad. Okay, now it's time to hurt you. There are some mfers out there playing these off-meta random crappy skill gems, winging it without a build guide, and they have no problem blasting maps. The only difference is they actually put gear on that damn build. So, what is your excuse out here playing lightning strike and Ark Mage, struggling to do maps with some Alters? Nut up. Stop swapping builds, bro. It's not the build, it's you. Okay, after a little pain, a little comfort. Okay, I've told you what to buy already if you haven't noticed, but I'll spell it out, and we'll go through some examples. Specifically, you have dog gear. Get some not dog gear, and then get some actually pretty good gear with Eldritch implicits and some great mods. You can buy pieces of gear off trade that other players have rged, gambled, or otherwise.

you could take advantage of the cheap fractures and essences and make your own gear jewelry. Roll it with stat essences, everything else greed or resistance. When you're playing a fun build, the upgrades come easy. You just got to get over that first hump and dive in. After all of that, once you have a decent set of gear, a comfortable character, and you're able to do whatever elen go or very low investment strategy that you want, and it's fun and it's comfy, then you get to start investing into some scarabs, thinking about some mapping strats, and eventually one of those cool streamer man belts. Now let's go over how you actually get some real legitimate gear. Like I said, set a max buyout of five chaos. Do max max life. Max life. We want at least 90 life, right? They added a ton of life to every single gear slot. We want to make sure we take advantage of all that. And then you just click select total res, search for a ring, boom, and then sort by res, and we have a ring like

this for five chaos. Now let's say you need a prefix open. Maybe you have to craft minus Mana. Maybe you need something else. We can set an empty prefix as well. Do the little tilde, the little squiggly to the left of your one. Then you do prefix, do empty, at least one. And then boom, again sort by res. And we've got this thing, 90 life, a little all reses, whatever, it's crappy, but it's got double T2, and it's got T2 life. That's pretty big. We've got another one, all res, boom, boom, boom, increased Le damage to attack skills. Not a big tier, but hey, if you're lightning strike, that's a pretty good pickup from whatever random crap you probably had on Ark Mage. You get some Mana regen. Look at that. Okay, just keep going. Make sure you don't take these mirror rings though. Okay, watch out for stuff like that. Some of them might be pretty good, some of them probably pretty stinky, but so easy now. This is how you get some non-dog gear.

let's go to the actual good slots. All right, I'll leave this down in the description. It's not perfect, but it'll at least get you started, and it'll at least get you looking at fractures like this, especially on some of the newer, higher base armor bases. Now, I've set this up specifically for a friend who is struggling with some gear and needed some point on getting some fractured stuff. And so, I have a count here, right? Any of these of this fracture. This is great for body armor, although on body armors, I would up the life a little bit more. But, you know, it's set up for, you know, a little bit of a hybrid for everything, right? So, you can mess with the life a little bit. Body armor, this life is a little bit low. Let's say we want some boots. All right, it has Max evasion of One, Max Energy Shield of one. It's only showing me pure armor bases and a level requirement of 78 means it's only showing me some of the newer bases, and so it's not going to

show me PDR, but I am going to be able to look for some of these resistances, and I think life does go up to 130 on boots, maybe a little bit more. I have to see, but you see here we have new armor bases for boots, and it's absolutely nothing, right? I can probably even up these numbers a little bit. You probably do want to spend a little bit more on your fractured base, right? This is going to be a base that you're going to throw some Essences at, some currency at. You're going to add Elder implicits. You might as well get something decent that you could be proud of, but getting a T2 res if you're struggling, you're poor, whatever people buy them up, whatever it is, right? We've got tons of resistances here. It's so easy to just get a fractured res. We take all these out. We have to go down on the life a little bit. I think we probably have to go to 120 for T1. Yeah, that's even like a pretty

high T1. These get a little bit expensive, right? You can go down a little bit more, but you can kind of see what you got going on here, right? Fractured life. You spam some resistance essences on there. If you're playing a build like Zerker, you're going to get your avoid shock on there. A lot of builds will get shock immunity on their boots. And so what that means is you're just going to spam a bunch of essences. So a pair of boots like this, I'm going to upgrade these soon because, you know, it's a little bit whatever at this point of the build. I've got to make sure I squeeze out every single slot. And that T4 life regen could be a T1, but I've got fractured T1 life. I spammed it. Even says there, suffix modifier of the essence. I spammed torment essences on this for the avoid shock until I got any two decent suffixes. So it hit a T1 res, and then I got a little life regen, and I just said

f it like that's fine. I have the Hybrid Armor and life on there to get even more life. And then I have the avoid being chilled move speed craft, so I get my shock immunity from these boots and the eldr implicits, which is huge. I'm so much tankier now 'cause I don't get randomly shocked and randomly take a ton of increased damage. And I got said move speed, life, and a little regen, and a Big Res. It's so nice. These could be better now a slot like this amulet. This amulet was a little bit specific. You could probably do something a little bit different, but for this build, I needed int. And like I said, you will use resistance, or in this case, it was the avoid shock on these. I spammed a res Essence. I believe I did an Envy to get my chaos res. You see, I got T1 fractured res, spammed a chaos resistance Essence until I hit T1 cold res, and then you just Spam for life. Now it's got crafted.

life. I did some Elder chaos. I did some whatever. It hit T1 flat T1 per armor. So I just said script. I'll deal with the crafted life. It's not beautiful. It's not perfect. But that's pretty damn good. You know, like an extra almost 1K armor. Sure. Okay. But on your jewelry, you're going to use stat Essences. 'Cause the resistance ones will just give you like increased cold damage instead of cold res. And so I used an intelligence Essence. I forget which one it is. But grabbed a fractured life. Bammed into Essence until I had all res and an open suffix. And this one hit Rarity too and Fizz. So I was like screw it. I'm keeping this. Okay. You know, it ain't T1 res. But it's got the suffix open. It was good enough. I could settle a little bit. You know, as we go on. I'm settling this one. I didn't do any of that. This was just using greed Essences and spamming until I hit some good suffixes. Just because I had to buy it as

a six link. I think this was like, this is literally a body armor I've had since like day two or day three or something, uh, it's something like that. And I just changed the implicits around. You see, with stuff like this, like man, when you make something really good, you can't carry these between characters, and it doesn't feel bad, okay? You know your other character is going to feel pretty good. Now, I just did a Respec on this build, so it wasn't the biggest thing. Eventually, I should, yeah, I should probably go back and hit some of these pieces, but they've been treating me well enough because I gave a singular about my gear one, and that's all I'm asking. That's all this video is about, is just using a trade search like this, right? Get some of your really bad pieces upgraded with something like this. This can be, it could even be boots, right? Let's say you want to buy a pair of boots. It's got the open prefix, so you can craft your move speed. We could do a search a little bit.

better than this, right? But look at this, look at this. This is insane, man. This is insane. 100 life T2, T2, T4. Open prefix to craft some move speed. He, some of you are walking around with like ins. Okay, don't buy the ward gear. Don't buy the W gear. I'll, I'll, I'll do. Don't you know you got to keep your eye off for what bases you need on for whatever for your character or like three or five chaos. Like man, dude, some of the, look at this already has move speed on it, you guys. You just have to like care, okay? You just have to care. Anyways, I'll set this fractured trade link. It's not perfect, but I'll go ahead and throw that down in the description just so you have an example of armor bases, fractures, or whatever. You can increase the number, decrease in numbers, do whatever you got to do with it depending on what you're searching. You know, you can add some stats on here too for jewelry if you need like a double stab roll or whatever it is, but

It's a great start. You need to care. Hopefully, this was valuable. I'll see you guys on the live stream. Bye.

How To Make Every Build Feel Good...

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