all right, so today we're here with Fess Dumbo. How's it going, man? Going well, going well. Thank you for being here. If you guys don't know him, definitely check him out on the YouTubes. So from what I've gathered researching a little bit about you, you're a little bit of an explosive trap player, a little bit of a connoisseur if I may say so myself. Is that correct? That's a pretty good description. I really enjoy the Trap play style a lot, and Explosive Trap checks a lot of boxes for me. So yeah, I've enjoyed it and played it for a long time now. Yeah, but I definitely notice in your builds is you don't just care about boss damage, you care about the overall feel of the build, which is where I first kind of like came up on your videos. Definitely. I tend to League start a bosser. I like the challenge. You know, Path of Exile is interesting in that some of the only skill checks are early League bossing.

you know, the goal is often to put a build together that can one-shot delete everything. Um, but all of the opening weekend stuff, till you get to the point where you can one-shot delete everything, is really interesting to me. And so, I tend to make all my currency early League doing this, like doing carry service or racing to bosses. Interesting. So for you, basically, it's just about getting through the first maps and then get to bosses and just rush them for monies. How do you make it so explosive trap actually feels good while progressing? 'Cause Trappers are not exactly known for feeling good, right, or being like comfy. Yeah, it's definitely not a lightning Arrow build. You, yeah, yeah. I think over time I've just gotten really used to the playstyle. And so, you know, the way that you move as a Trapper is different than you'd want to move for a lot of other skills. You tend to throw things behind you or jump across packs of mobs. And so, I feel like after playing a Trapper for a while, you sort of get

used to the movement style and it and it becomes a little more comfortable. It's definitely not going to be as good as you know Ellie hit of this Spectrum or you know anything like ice. Doesn't have to be yeah ice shadow penetration or any any of those skills that just do full screen clears. It's never going to be that um so I've just sort of accepted that with the trade-off being I get a lot of damage later y. I mean sounds good but in general like I'm really surprised by how good your endgame builds look as well. And that's mostly because you also go into self chill right which is something I have not seen all that much before. You actually go into uh into some action here with Call of the Void winter reave. Can you kind of explain what your your thoughts are behind this. Yeah I actually once Ben dropped this unique uh call of the Void into the game. I think it was 319. I think a week or two weeks into that League. I had already I started

trying to put this together trap throwing speed is really strong as a multiplier for traps but it's very rare. I guess just chiming in for people who don't know action speed also affects mind throwing speed trap throwing speed everything right like yeah exactly affects everything you know how fast you're able to move how fast you're able to cast how fast you're able to do things like throwing traps and so it being available as you know 30% multiplier on the Trap throwing speed that I have in my character is huge for damage and so it just felt like a no-brainer to try and work that in not just for damage right like what fascinates me is damage wise you could probably do a little bit better but you realize that you have so much damage like your only cap at this point with this build is for the feel right the game feel and how fast you are right that's your cap at this point exactly and and part of it for me is I sort of

ruthlessly optimize for farming early, because the goal for me personally in Path of Exile is, I want to farm enough currency that I can go then build something wacky later in League. That I don't have to worry about currency as an issue, and so being able to optimize how fast I'm able to turn laps for bosses like in the farming phase is really important for that. If I'm able to do an Uber boss 20% faster, that nets out to be 20% more currency for me. And so, self-chill checks a lot of boxes both for damage, but also for being able to execute laps of uber bosses really quickly. That's interesting that you talked about that, because a lot of people I hear talk about bosses and stuff like that, they mostly talk about just like going in and one-shotting. They think Exar is like all that bossing is kind of, whereas a lot of bosses, especially stuff like shaper and whatnot, everything you have to move being fast is actually incredibly

important fear draws or anything like that right even more important that you're fast than anything else yeah absolutely this is this build is one of the faster at doing fear rotations back when those were actually profitable I did a lot of fear rotations I roped in lightning warp which also ties in really nice to self chill to make this you know even faster my my PR for Uber shaper is 1 minute 51 seconds which I think is that's crazy kind of comically fast when I think the generally accepted how fast you can do it is was three and a half or four minutes and then a few leagues ago I made a video saying no you can actually do this reliably in two and a half minutes if you really wanted to um which I think has shifted some of the perception about how you can Farm things like uber shaper but yeah speed is really important you're right not in XR Shore eer but for basically all the other things like if you're doing uh conqueror rotations if

you're doing Guardians all those things move speed is actually quite important what do you think is like the biggest misconception that people have about trapping play style or like traps in general is there anything that comes to mind I'm not sure I feel like it's pretty polarizing you either love it or you don't love it uh there are know from to yeah yeah there are very few people that are just kind of so so on it I feel like you know in every one of the videos I've ever made I sort of lead with this isn't for everybody you know try it before you buy it you know if you if you don't like it now you're not going to like it on leak store for sure yeah I got to say when it comes to mines versus traps I was always more of a mind guy because of the auto targeting it's just so comfy and what I always hated about traps is like this throw not the throw time itself but like this curve that it makes before it goes

to the ground, and sometimes mobs run towards you, and you don't hit them with the Trap like you have to aim in front of it. Do you kind of know what I mean? Yeah, a lot of people who have never played traps before or coming into it for the first time play it as though it were a skill that just is a projectile skill where it will hit anything in the way, and you're right. If you go into it with that preconception about how it's supposed to work, then it's gonna feel bad because you're just like, I can't hit anything, and then you have to adjust. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. After you play for a little while, even if you're not using Sunblast, which is sort of another layer of very polarizing equipment, you still have to adjust the way that you're playing, for sure. Yeah, okay. So, Explosive Trap, um, how long have you been playing Explosive Trap for? Can we kind of go a little bit back 'cause, uh, I saw you have some pretty damn old videos, right?

guess I want to talk about first kind of like the Heyday of Trappers was like the big times of Trappers was probably when seismic trap was big um how was your perception of that time did you start with seismic trap and eased into explosive trap or where you like the guy who's like now screw seismic trap it's explosive trap all the way or how do you start out yeah I started with seismic first um I think in ritual League after a couple leagues I shifted over to explosive trap I actually there was a guy named SK cloudy who doesn't do as much as he used to who made a cold conversion seismic build which I loved and I remember I remember and so he's like a Dela right yeah yeah he sort of pushed me into seismic was it like uh that seismic trap got nerfed that kind of got you into explosive trap or did you just like uh did you like the speed like it had more potential basically for what you wanted to do once I started

tinkering with explosive trap, and I realized that the ceiling was much, much higher than it was for seismic. It was a no-brainer for me to switch. Seismic trap is really comfortable on league start and up to, you know, I don't know, 100 or a couple hundred million DPS, but you can push explosive trap way, way farther. It's got an extra multiplier in the way that damage is applied. So, explosive trap doesn't apply instant damage like ice trap might. It actually meters its damage over one second. So, I think to offset that, GGG was like, Oh, we're going to give you all these extra explosions that happen. So, you have this multiplier of the number of small explosions that you get, which are one-to-one the damage that the primary blast does. And so, it has this extra scaling thing that just makes it quite a bit higher than seismic. Yep, it's like every skill. This goes for every skill in general, right? Like, if you have two scaling vectors on your skill gam, it also means levels get a lot

crazier, which is also the case on Explosive Trap. Where's the cut off for nine, actually nine is level 26. Yeah, and then 10, level 32. 32, yeah, 32 is the magic number. It was actually quite hard to get until Locks became a thing, um, and you could corrupt an eight-link helmet for it. I guess after level 30, it's not that big of a deal, right, because you, I mean, sure, you get that extra explosion, but you have diminishing returns on your flat damage, right, so it's not as good. But I guess the real magic number for a normal build is probably 26, right? I agree with that, yeah. Okay, that's cool. So over time, what happened with Explosive Trap was you basically played normal Explosive Trap, and I'm assuming that at the time, one thing you didn't love was like maybe the clear, right? It's like you were like, you want it to be better, but the problem is also if you scale AOE, you can also decrease the damage if you

don't know what you're doing, right? Um, but then at some point, we had to transfigure gems, and now we get into explosive trap of shrapnel. Right, yeah, shrapnel was a phenomenal ad. I tried for days to make magnitude work, and it's just, it's just bad. Maybe I, maybe I'm not looking at it the right way, but I just couldn't. No, no, no, I, I just couldn't get anything good out, and I spent, you know, at least three days trying to put together something with magnitude, but I didn't give shrapnel a really strong look until we were a few weeks into the league. And when I started doing testing with it, I was just blown away. Felt so good. I think the real issue with explosive trap of magnitude is just that as a Trapper, you get so much like really efficient crit and so they like the only reason to go magnitude would be poison, which you don't get any incentive to do, right? So yeah, cap for poison so low.

relative to what you get if you go hit based exactly, and like the mine nodes are so efficient as well, and then like mine clusters are efficient, and they all want you to be crit based kind of so it it's just awkward, and then obviously the less trap ring speed makes it like feel even worse and whatnot. Um but yeah, explosive trap or trap mode is basically, I mean I remember when it first came out, I basically thought, Oh, this is going to be the clear right, like people are going to gem Swap this. But actually, the think after aerf round as asive trap, right 324 Nerf, made it so it changed a number of things in the way that it worked. The biggest, the biggest Nerf in my opinion, is actually not very obvious, it's it's because you lose some of the explosion overlapping, but what it means, because the Baseline is already low for shrapnel, it means that you get more variance in your hits, and so sometimes you'll get a number of hits and

sometimes you'll get almost none, and it just feels worse for. Clear interesting damage-wise on bosses is actually pretty similar, as long as you're not already capping your ailment. So, all the way up to modestly High investment, it's going to be about the same amount of damage. But what I ended up doing after more testing is I would use the shrapnel gem on certain bosses, and I would use the normal gem on others. So, like Uber Uber Elder, I would use a shrap gem. It would be way better than the normal gem, but on because of like, you know, Uber sh walls and stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. And that why and and there were two Targets too, right? Okay, pretty sick, yeah. Explosive tra of shrapnel. I mean, for me. So, I remember when sass trap was meta, and I always remember explosive trap was kind of like pretty, like not far behind even for leak start. It was pretty decent. It's just that seismic trap was so all-encompassing and so easy to get going.

that there was kind of no reason to play explosive trap, but I always felt like people slept on even normal explosive trap. And uh, I think like you said, it's because of the trapping play style, but I'm really happy that it got its resurgence now with explosive trap of shrapnel. The only problem I really have with this skill is that it needs an MTX finally. Please, it's yeah. Oh my God, you can't see anything. Yes, yes, yes, please GGG, please. Yeah, I'm 100% with you. I actually posted to the forums, I don't know, six or 12 months ago begging for an MTX for explosive trap. I'll have to find the post and send it to you. We need one. We can file in like it has. It's definitely not a visual clarity type of skill. So you make content basically. Uh, you don't do this full-time, right? Uh, but you basically just make content whenever needed for your community, as I understand it. Yeah, for me making content

is about helping people out, and I sort of accidentally got into it. I wrote a Reddit post saying, Hey, you know, I put together self-chill explosive trap setup that works really well, and you can get off the ground for really cheap. And um, a number of people asked me to, like, Hey, this is great. If I could consume this in a video, it would be even better. And so I, I tried making a video. I don't really know what I'm doing, um, so I've just been learning as I've, as I've gone. But largely it's been, yeah, you know, around helping people get the build off the ground, you know, start from the beach and then get to a place where they can delete Uber bosses, hopefully fairly easily, and then show them sort of what a min-maxed or more endgame version might look like. Awesome, yeah, like, I always love talking to people. I don't want to say one-trick ponies 'cause people associate that with bad things, but like, I just love people who play the same builds over and over and just kind of master it.

like I'm way more of like a jumpy kind of guy. I want to try as many things as possible, and I try to go as deep as I can. But obviously, like people who just play the same build over and over and over are always going to come out on top in that particular area, right? So it's like, it's just fascinating watching people's um perspectives. We actually played the build a lot. Yeah, I could see that. I just really like the skill. The skill is fun to me. I don't mind playing it again, and there's always a new wrinkle or something that's changed, you know, this league. I did slave driver's hand. There's always a twist. There's always something that's different about it every league. Sounds good. Um, so when it comes to necropolis, right, like we heard a lot of opinions from people and whatnot. What was your um experience in necropolis? Did you play as long as usual? Did you not mind the league? Did you like it? You know, necropolis changed so many

things. Uh, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Uh, mostly wasn't that great for me personally. So, as, as somebody who does opening weekend bossing, getting to the place where you could actually run an Uber boss was awful on League start. You know, even acquiring the fragments was almost impossible. Um, I remember I got to, normally I get to, you know, somewhere between 90 and 95, and then I just park myself on a boss for a while. And I remember I got to 90, I think this league, with 20 or 23 deaths. And the only way to get Uber fragments was to just YOLO those t17 Maps. You couldn't roll them with chaos yet, and so they were just whatever garbage mods you had on them. And it was just how you buy, like, did you even get to buy fragments in bulk at all or how? No, no, they did not exist in bulk. They didn't exist. You had to farm them. You could buy them one at a time. Um, I, I tried farming them. Normally, I would just

go buy a huge pile of them. And then that's what I could do. I could just focus on bossing. But that wasn't really. That wasn't the reality of Necropolis. It was very difficult to source the Uber fragments. So you'd say you kind of went in expecting you can boss. And it kind of um cocked you in a bit. Like in a in a sense. Yeah, yeah. You could do you know like normal Shaper, which I did opening weekend a bunch. But that feels less good than being able to go do the Uber content. Yeah, interesting. I I definitely had some some issues with that. I completely in my video forgot about bossing and general. Yeah, that's definitely a big deal. I mean I already talked about like I think what they did to Syndicate and whatnot was obviously a travesty. But uh when it comes to bossing, I don't know like they definitely have to revamp it somehow. I would love if they make it a little bit more. I don't know. Niche year 17 should

be more niche, but you should also like acquire the fragments easier. But maybe, yeah, maybe that's what they want to do. Maybe they want Ubers to not be like farmable, and they want it to be like a special thing, quote unquote, which would kind of suck for bossers, right? Because that's where the money is at. Yeah, and that's also the content I enjoy. So, you know, I don't love like, I remember the old Nemesis 3 days. I just couldn't. I didn't want to click a million times when stuff was on the ground. So, I would be sad for me if I couldn't just live and die, you know, live, breathe, and die as a bosser. Yeah, we need some love for the bosses. This ball, that's actually, that's a good point. I know, thought about that. So, for Po1, I mean, obviously we need a win. What is a, what about like PoE2 in gaming in general? Are you interested in other games? Are you just kind of like, um

part-time gamer. You just play PoE, and then you kind of chill IRL. Or are you hyped about PoE 2? Yeah, I'm pretty hyped about PoE 2. I like a lot of the things that I like specifically about early League bossing, like I need to care about mechanics and where I place myself and recognize attacks. And it feels like PoE 2 is going to be more of that. Like the combat's going to be a little more drawn out and less one-shot and sprint through the map. So I think that part of it is attractive to me because that's the way I like to play RPGs. I'm sort of reserving an opinion on how it feels to play until I get to play it personally, but I'm looking forward to it. I think it looks pretty good from where I'm sitting. Yeah, for me personally, I just, even if I didn't like how it looked, I still have trust in GGG to make a good game. Maybe just a shield like that, but I

cannot them making a bad game and letting it stay bad. I just cannot imagine. I'm with you. I think that they've done a lot to show that they're willing to course correct if things go sideways. So even if it's not great on start, you know, I feel like Mark and John, they're all going to, you know, recognize that the community either doesn't like it or, however they do their internal analysis, and then pivot. Yeah, for sure. Like I 100% agree. Yeah, in general, I mean, yeah, I love your content, man. I really think you're doing some awesome stuff. I absolutely love watching your stuff. See what happens to explosive trap next. So thank you for chiming in today. Thank you for being here. Yeah, thanks, man. I really appreciate you having me. Oh, yeah, dude. Let's talk a little bit more. Maybe I'm going to play explosive trap at some point. Then I need some guidance. Okay, I'm going to hit you up. Sure. Yeah, I would love to help. All right, man. See you. Take care.

Rushing Bosses on Leaguestart, Traps & Self-Chill ft @fearlessdumb0 | Paltalk Episode #1

Rushing Bosses on Leaguestart, Traps & Self-Chill ft @fearlessdumb0 | Paltalk Episode #1