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Gear Progression

Last Updated: August 16th 2023

Trial of the Ancestors 3.22

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Impending Doom Occultist League Starter Gear Progression, Important Milestones, Budget Items, Jewels & Crafting.

Milestones

The Item Progression in Path of Exile is not as rigid as in most other games. Unique Items can provide easy upgrades early, but overall your gear mostly consist of Rare Items. This means that flexibility is key. The game won't always give you exactly the item you are looking for, so you need to adapt. Even if small upgrades seem insignificant, the sum of them decides whether your character fails or succeeds.

IMPORTANT: Most gear in this section is easier to craft if you obtain a Fractured base. This base 'locks' the mod in, so you can use Essences and other crafting methods to obtain a good item. You can search for fractured modifiers on trade by inputting "~fractured (name of modifier)" in the modifier search box. If you want to try out how to craft your final items, Craft of Exile is an amazing tool to plan them without wasting in-game currency.

Early Game

Early Game Goal
Our goals in the early game are to establish our skill setups by socketing, linking and colouring our gear appropriately and to start leveling our Gems.

Since we are wearing "Act Gear" at this point, we need to focus on upgrades to get our necessary Attribute Requirements and cap our Resistances.

Early Game Gear Overview
Milestone 1 - Off-Hand Gems

Purchase two Wands that have 3 Blue Sockets from a Vendor. Buy 6 Impending Doom Supports and put them in your Weapon Swap. Then swap back to your main hand. When these gems reach level 20, sell them to the vendor with 1 Gemcutter's Prism each to get a level 1 gem back with 20 quality. Level these back up to 20 and finally use a Vaal Orb on them or alternatively double corrupt them with a level 3 Alva gem room called: Doryani's Institute. You might want to Vaal Orb your first set without quality first as a level 21 gem is a massive DPS boost!

Milestone 2 - Get decent Rare Gear

After the campaign, you will encounter a steep difficulty increase, which becomes a problem unless you upgrade your suboptimal gear into something more appropriate. This is where random currency you dropped during the campaign comes in. Spend all the Chaos Orbs you have on gear upgrades so you can progress through the game.

You are looking for Life on every single gear piece, as well as enough Resistances to cap them at 75%.
A good trick to get some Life on your items is using: Screaming Essences of Greed on items that are already appropriately linked and coloured.

After you have some starter gear, make sure you can use all your Gems. You need to use your Jeweller's Orbs, Orb of Fusings and Chromatic Orbs to adjust your items appropriately. Use the Skill Gem Section to check if you have the right colours on your items!

Milestone 4 - Flasks

Next up, inspect your flasks and see if they are adequate for the content you are farming. The base flasks you want at this point are:

  • Divine Life Flask
  • Quicksilver Flask
  • Silver Flask
  • Granite Flask
  • Jade Flask

Use Orb of Transmutations, Orb of Alterations and Orb of Augmentations to craft some important Suffix mods onto your 3 utility flasks:

  • Increased Armour during Flask effect
  • Increased Evasion during Flask effect
  • Increased Movement Speed during Flask effect

Prefixes are not super important right now, but do check the gear-sets if you want to craft perfect flasks. For Life Flasks we want one Life Flask to be semi-instant for quick recovery, with protection from Bleeds, similar to this one: Divine Life Flask of Allaying.

Milestone 5 - Hex on hit Ring

Purchase a Mark of Submission early on. This ring will allow you to apply the Despair or Temporal Chains Curse socketed on hit granting you a massive boost in damage.

Milestone 6 - Tabula Rasa

Getting an early six-link can be expensive, but Tabula Rasa provides a cheaper solution. Going from a 4-link to a 6-link almost doubles your damage, and is therefore a complete gamechanger. Once you do pick one up make sure to allocate the Life Mastery granting: 15% increased maximum Life if there are no Life Modifiers on Equipped Body Armour. In order to get the Currency to buy a Tabula Rasa, use the Chaos Orb Recipe.

Milestone 7 - Syndicate Unveils

While doing Syndicate Missions find Elreon and Gravicius, or remove other members from the Syndicate until they show up. Unveil the following gear slots for these crafts specifically and all other unveils afterwards:

  • Unveil Boots for 20% increased Movement Speed & #% chance to gain Onslaught for 4 seconds on Kill
  • Unveil Belts for Regenerate # Energy Shield per second while a Rare or Unique Enemy is Nearby
  • Unveil Elreon's Veiled Rings for Non-Channeling Skills have -(x-x) to Total Mana Cost
  • Unveil It That Fled Veiled Gear for x% of Physical Damage as Extra Chaos Damage

There are a variety of other useful veiled crafts you will gain in the process, obtaining them should be much easier as the veiled item required to unlock the crafts is not specific to a syndicate member.

Milestone 8 - Amulet
  • Purchase an Amulet with +x% to Damage over Time Multiplier and some Elemental Resistances/Strength depending on which you need.
  • When you get an Amulet that has one of these mods, craft Life and anoint Toxic Strikes:
    • Amber Oil
    • Clear Oil
    • Crimson Oil
Milestone 9 - Leper's Alms

Leper's Alms is a unique shield which grants a ton of Evasion and Energy Shield. The Energy Shield is very helpful early to ensure that you are able to cast your Divine Blessing Support aura setup without issues. Evasion rating granted by the item bolsters your avoidance, making it less likely for you to die as you progress the atlas and work towards improving the rest of your gear. The Ailment Duration gives you a substantial damage boost in encounters where you need it the most, it allows you to stack up more poisons on bosses.

Shared Suffering is a mechanic unique toLeper's Alms, it causes all damage from hits, including hits from your Profane Bloom to cause Elemental Ailments you are suffering. For example: if your character is shocked, a hit will inflict that shock to the enemy and remove it from you, which is a great way to mitigate ailments early on where you might not necessarily have the gear to deal with them yet.

Milestone 9 - Doedre's Scorn

The Doedre's Scorn unique is a great way to get access to a lot of added chaos damage early. It is a great upgrade to get early as it is generally very cheap and can make progressing through maps easier thanks to the DPS it provides. Stay mindful however of your elemental resistances as with every unique you add to the build, it adds stress on the rest of your gear to provide all of the defensive stats needed to stay alive.

Milestone 10 - Apep's Rage

The Apep's Rage Unique wand is a massive DPS boost as it provides the equivilent to a level 14 to 18 Added Chaos Damage Support gem. It also has a ton of Cast speed, and makes your Poisons deal damage faster. Faster poisons means the damage feels more instant, but it effectively does the same total damage per poison. The downside to this unique is the fact that you lose 40 mana when you use a skill, this effect is completely offset by Eldritch Battery. Note that the rolls on this wand have a high variance, when purchasing make sure to get a decent roll that is within your budget.

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