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Gear Progression

Last Updated: December 8th 2022

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Learn how to progress your gear, important Milestones, Budget Items, Earlygame, Endgame & Crafting for the Poisonous Concoction Pathfinder Build.

Learn about recommended farming content, resources, farming strategy, Path of Building (PoB), Video Guide & Summary for the Explosive Arrow Ballista Elementalist Build.

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.

If you want full context to everything, watch my fully detailed Video Guide on Youtube as well. It is linked at the end of the article! You can also check out my stream on twitch.tv/palsteron and ask me questions or simply hang out!

To make itemization less confusing, there are no Resistances on Rare Items anywhere. You can get them wherever you want and they do not have to be on specific items. Resistances are incredibly important though, DO NOT forget about them when choosing which items to craft or buy! Make sure to check your Reistances in your Character Sheet (C, Defense Tab) whenever you switch your gear around.

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 - Get decent Rare Gear

After the campaign, you encounter a steep difficulty increase. This 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 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 Essence of Greeds on items that are already appropriately linked and coloured.

Look out for Accuracy on Gloves, Rings or on your Quiver and make sure you have 100% chance to hit at all times in the character sheet. Note: Your Accuracy decreases with levels since enemies get stronger, so going for more than less pays off later.

Milestone 2 - 100% Chance to Poison

Now is the time to have 100% Chance to Poison. Go to your Character Tab by pressing "c" and look at your Poisonous Concoction sheet. Under "Offense" it shows the "Chance to Poison". If it isn't at 100%, reevaluate your build.

To make this easier, here are all the sources of Increased Poison Chance you should have by now:

  • 40% innately on Poisonous Concoction
  • 10% from Poison Damage and Chance
  • 15% from Toxic Strikes
  • 15% from Poison Chance
  • 10% from Claw Attack Speed and Poison Chance
  • 10% from Claw Ailment Damage and Poison Chance

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 - 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. It does not have any defensive mods however, so until you replace it you'll be vulnerable.

In order to get the Currency to buy a Tabula Rasa, use the Chaos Orb Recipe or farm some Heists.

Milestone 5 - Mark of Submission

Mark of Submission is simply incredible. It's cheap, easy to use and applies one of your Curses automatically, giving you more time to place Ballistas or dodge enemy attacks. The Curse of choice is Despair, which you socket into the Ring! Other sources of automatic cursing significantly reduce the power of your Curse, because they only triggers a Level 1 version of it. Mark of Submission makes it possible for you to apply a FULLY LEVELED Despair with Quality, making it a must-have to beat highly resistant enemies, even in lategame scenarios!

Milestone 6 - Flasks

Next inspect your flasks and see if they are adequate for the content you are farming:

  • 2x Divine Life Flask
  • Quicksilver 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 check the gear sets if you want to craft perfect flasks.

For Life Flasks we want our Life Flask to have extra Amount Recovered, similar to this one: Saturated Divine Life Flask of the Cure.

Milestone 7 - Check your Accuracy Rating

Damage doesn't mean anything if you can't hit enemies with it. Open the Character Menu by pressing c, then go to Poisonous Concoction and check your "Chance to hit" there. It should be between 98 and 100% at all times.
Other than Acuity, you also need Accuracy on Gear (Jewelry and Gloves).

If you have Mana Reservation for it, you can use Precision. Be careful though, it reserves more and more mana the more you level it up!

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