If I wanted to look through every single squad, every team, and every league on FIFA, it would take me hours. Sure, it can be tempting to do this when you’re trying to pick your next career mode save. But what if I told you there was an easy way to always get the best team with just four simple steps?

Here, I’ll be showing you my step-by-step guide to help you choose the ideal Career Mode save every single time. Of course, if you want to dominate FC 24’s Career Mode, you still need to prepare a large amount of FUT 24 Coins to upgrade your players.

Just like everyone else, I used to start dozens of saves. I would play one preseason game, then get bored with playing Career Mode. Since I started thinking a little more about what I actually wanted to do in my save rather than just picking the first one, I thought of my saves are now averaging closer to a full season.

Step 1: Choose Your Playing Location

The first thing you need to find out is the general area of the world you want to play in.

If you’re totally unsure, this could be a continent. But if you’re a bit more confident, then it could be a specific nation. Each continent on FIFA has different strengths and weaknesses.

Europe offers a fully licensed Cup Competitions with the Champions League, the Europa League, and the Conference League as well as having the biggest selection of leagues to choose from. The sheer amount of teams and leagues here means there’s always going to be multiple options that meet the criteria you’re setting.

North America only features one league, but the MLS is a totally unique experience. Annoyingly, they don’t actually have any Cup Competitions here and this can make the journey a little less fun.

South America also only has one licensed league, but you can play in Brazil if you don’t mind the fake players. You do get to play in a license continental Cup Competitions with teams from leagues that aren’t actually playable in Career Mode and it does provide a chance to explore football in a totally different culture.

Finally, we have Asia, which is probably the most underrated Career Mode continent. Asia includes an unlicensed continental competition and features a surprising amount of leagues, including the Saudi, Indian, and Korean leagues, which I barely ever see anyone doing saves in.

Hopefully, at least one of these regions sounds like exactly what you want in your next save. When you’ve decided on a continent, drill down and have a look at some of the nations inside it. Each nation has a different feel. They’ll play in different ways and they have different atmospheres. This can make neighboring countries feel unique on the pitch. 

Belgium, Holland, and Germany are totally different in Career Mode, despite having very similar cultures as nations. Throughout this guide, I’ll give you some examples of the system working. 

So, let’s say that I wanted a fairly long save. I think Europe has the deepest league structures on the game, so that’s the ideal location for this first step of our example.

Also Read: EA FC 24: 3 Most Promising And Exciting New Dribbling Techniques!

Step 2: Define Your Desired Save

The second and probably most crucial step in selecting the perfect Career Mode save is to decide on the type of save your most interested in doing.

You can generally categorize teams into one of these four main groups. 

On FIFA, I’d say every single league has at least two teams who are capable of winning the championship who call these the Championship Contenders. These teams are instantly competing for league titles in cups in Season 1. They typically feature the best players and are considered the top teams in that nation. Bayern München, Ulsan Hyandai, and Inter Miami are examples of this kind of team.

The majority of leagues also have a selection of Historic Teams. These are the teams that might have experienced success in the past, but are not currently at their peak. They often have large fan bases, maybe even impressive stadiums. But they also usually have a squad of very average and very overpaid players. I would say that D.C. United, Everton, and Rosario Central are all Historic Fallen Giants.

The majority of the rest of the teams that aren’t Championship Contenders or Historic, I would call Middle Of the Road Teams. These teams are maybe a few strategic signings here and there from becoming title contenders. While they may have a couple of top players in their team, usually up front to be honest, they usually lack the overall quality usually in defense to compete for the title. Think of Crystal Palace, Al shabab, and Orlando City. That’s three good examples of teams that are fairly average, but are very close to being very good.

Finally, the most common type of team to use on FIFA is the Road To Glory Teams. This option usually is a longer term challenge where you have to rebuild an entire squad. Typically, Road to Glory saves involve a newly promoted team or someone who’s looking to establish themselves in a higher division. This generally includes the two or three worst teams in every single league.  

If you like the sound of one of these four categories, then that’s great because now you’ve got a location and you’ve got a career path.

Let’s go back to our Europe save example. I said I want it to be long, so surely a Road To Glory Team would be ideal for us here. We’ll be taking over one of the worst teams in the nation that we pick.

Step 3: Determine Your Team’s Level

For step three of our system, we also need to determine what kind of team rank we want to be using.

If you’re someone that doesn’t enjoy using 50 rated players in the lowest leagues of island, you might be looking for a 3-star team here. If you want to be trophy hunting, you also want to be in a really bad league. You might be interested in trying to find a 1-star title contender. 

Have a think about how good you’d like your starting point to be because this will easily narrow down the amount of teams and the amount of leagues you can use from the continent you’ve picked.

You’ll never ever get a 5-star Polish team in Career Mode or a 0.5-star French team, so this is the step that will filter out most of the teams in this system.

I could easily pick a 4-star team for my European Road to Glory save. There are loads of teams around that rating in Germany, Spain, England, and Italy. If I wanted a long Road To Glory though, I’m going to pick a one and a half star team, which means we’re going to have a team from League 2.

Step 4: Utilize SoFIFA for Team Search

Now, let’s round off our system. If you’re struggling to find the team with the in-game tools, you can have a quick search on SoFIFA. 

You can easily search for teams with certain overall ratings and you can also check things out like the squad’s average age or the amount of potential that every single team has if that’s important to the kind of career mode you’re looking to do.

Back to our example. It looks like AFC Wimbledon could be the ideal save for me. It’s in Europe. They’re at the lowest level in the country and they’re the right star rating to match with everything that I’m looking for. They definitely seem like the perfect save for me to start. 

So, let’s quickly run through two other examples of using this system just so that you understand exactly how it works.

I said Asia is fun, so let’s try and find a cool team from there. I fancy playing with a Historic Fallen Giant save, so that’s a team that’s around two and a half stars in Asia. Last year, we could have picked Guangzhou Evergrande who actually spent £1.7 billion on a new 100,000 seated stadium that they never finished. But they’ve actually been relegated on FIFA 24.

Suwon Bluewings is the team we probably go for then: four Korean titles, two Asian Champions Leagues between 1997 and 2008, but nothing since. They have a decent squad. Some of our players are in the 70s, but the majority are in the 60s, so they are actually going to be able to be fun inside Career Mode.

Let’s do one last example. How about a 3-star Middle Of The Road Team in South America? I want to use licensed clubs with real players, so we only have Argentina to choose from. This makes it super easy to see that we actually have several options here. I guess I’d have to just pick on the history kits and stadium I like the most. 

We actually have some pretty big teams for a save in this kind of area. We have Newell’s Old Boys, Rosario Central, Banfield, Unión de Santa Fe...... There’s so many choices. So again, one of these is likely to be the perfect Career Mode save for me on my next go. 

Hopefully, you can now understand how the system works that I use for every single save I do.

Do you want to get that Level 40 mount by the time you actually hit level 40 or get that Epic Mount at level 60? If you do, you must have enough WOW Classic Hardcore Gold. Here is a guide to help you obtain raw gold, specifically while leveling.

Intro

I’m doing this mostly from a Solo Self Found perspective. Because I believe that even if trading is allowed, some players will play on a Solo Self Found basis. And for raw gold, most of it comes from vendoring items anyway, so you can do it completely without having to rely on other people to buy whatever you are selling. 

Having access to raw gold early will also be incredibly valuable as the purchasing power of each individual gold is at its absolute peak early in a server’s lifespan. And the purchasing power will go down every single day as more and more people get access to raw gold. 

What I mean by purchasing power is that 100 gold will get you more stuff in Week 1 than 100 gold will in Week 2, due to how inflation works. This is important because of, for example, investments or if you just want to stack up on some materials, you might want later and get them while they’re cheap. 

Get Skinning

Advice number one is to grab Skinning. 

Skinning is an insane profession to have while leveling. Because it simply benefits everyone in terms of increasing the amount of gold you get while leveling up. 

Skinning also allows you to skin beasts for additional materials. And although they do not give the most amount of additional to begin with, this scales incredibly well with your level. 

By level 10, you might have gained a couple extra silvers. But, by level 40, you will most likely have obtained anywhere between 10 and 40 extra gold, depending on how you level. 

Some of the locations where you can farm for the most raw gold per hour, you actually end up killing beasts. In that case, having Skinning will further increase your gold per hour from those locations, pushing you closer to that 40 gold extra by level 40, which is basically half of your level 40 mount. 

And especially on Hardcore Servers, many people will choose professions that benefit their profession in terms of survival. Two big professions here are Alchemy & Engineering. 

Alchemy is mainly supported by Herbalism, and Engineering is mainly supported by Mining. This means the most popular professions on these servers will be Alchemy, Engineering, Herbalism and Mining. 

This is important. Because that means while everyone is leveling up, there will be a lot of skinnable mobs just laying on the ground giving you free skill-ups & free Hardcore Gold. And there are many locations you will find during your Hardcore Journey where you can just sit in one location and skin other people’s mobs, like, for example, the Yeti Cave in Dun’Morogh. 

So seriously, if raw gold is something you’re looking for, I always recommend Skinning. Even if you want to have Herbalism & Mining eventually, I would use Skinning while leveling up to 60, then swap professions & farm herbs and mining veins with that level 60 mount. This is also because Herbalism & Mining nodes will be incredibly competitive at launch and will slow down your leveling process, while Skinning you can pretty much always keep up with your level. 

Now, when farming raw gold, there are mainly 2 different farms you want to think about: Humanoid Farms & Beast Farms. 

Humanoid Farms will give you raw gold by itself through looted silver values, and it will give you Cloth, which you can either sell for vendor loot, or turn into Bandages for even more gold before selling it. 

The bonus of Humanoid Farms is that they also have a bigger drop rate on Grey, White & Green items, specifically grey items like Weapons, which can vendor for about a gold per piece (plus / minus). This means in some cases, Humanoid Farms can be better in terms of gold per hour, but they also rely more on RNG because a lot of gold comes from those Grey weapon drops. 

From Beast Farms, you will get a very steady amount of gold per hour due to your gold value being derived from what the mob actually drops on a regular basis. Whiskers from Cats, Mane’s from Wolves, Crocodile Pelt and so on, even Gorillas drop a lot of good vendor value items. 

For Beast Farms, you can also obviously increase that gold amount by having Skinning, like we just talked about earlier. 

Also Read: WOW Classic Hardcore: How To Make Gold From Level 30-40?

Raw Gold Farming Locations

So with this being said, let me show you some of my favourite locations for where to farm for raw gold in Classic WoW.

First off, let’s cover 4 different farming locations I personally use in order to farm enough gold for my level 40 mount, all of which are beast farms and you want to have Skinning.

You have the Tigers in Swamp of Sorrows. Now, I say Tigers here because they will usually give you the most valuable items, but the tigers are also found throughout the entire zone, where you will also find crocodiles & spiders, which are definitely worth killing. 

You also have the Gorillas in Stranglethorn Vale. And here, I will show you 2 different farms that are pretty close to each other, giving you 2 different places to farm. 

These Gorillas have a pretty lucrative loot-table and will give you the best raw gold you can get at this level, especially if combined with Skinning. 

And the farm I personally do the most: Tigers in Badlands. 

This one is incredibly slept on and I don’t see many people farming here, which is why I personally really like it here. Because there’s almost never any competition, and they can drop really good vendor-value items, like Long Soft Tails, Bristly Whiskers, and Wicked Claw. 

You also have some farms past level 40. For example, my personal favourite is this one killing Steeljaw Snappers in Tanaris.

This one is very known from farming Turtle Meat and as a pretty decent experience farm. But these turtles also drop pretty good vendor loot, even better if combined with Skinning. 

How To Maximize Your Raw Gold?

With farming covered, there are a couple more steps you can take to maximize how much raw gold you make and how to make sure you can afford your level 40 mount and get closer to that level 60 mount.

First off, you can save a lot of gold by not training all of your class abilities. Let’s be real, in Classic WoW you get way more abilities than you actually need, at least while leveling. And many of your abilities are only useful in very niché situations, in which case I rather not learn them until I have to and save my gold instead. 

Exactly what you should and should not train depends on each individual class. But personally, I only train spells I use on a regular basis, plus any class-buffs I get access to and any defensive abilities I get. 

As a Warlock, for example, I can opt not to train Soulstone, I can also choose one or two demons and therefore only train abilities for the demons I actually use. I can also save gold by not training every single curse I get access to. Because personally, I don’t use all of them until very high levels, anyway. 

Plus, some classes get a free level 40 mount, like Warlocks & Paladins. But, pick and choose which spells to actually train and upgrade, and you can save a lot of gold while leveling. 

When questing, if the quest doesn’t offer an upgrade, pick the item with the highest vendor value. This sounds obvious. But some leveling addons have auto-complete enabled where they automatically pick items in slot 1 or slot 2 or anything your class can use, or maybe you personally also always choose whatever Cloth Item you get from the quest if you play a Cloth Class. Then, check if it’s an upgrade atferwards. 

So my advice here is, check if the quest offers an upgrade before accepting a quest reward. And if there are no upgrades, choose whatever has the highest vendor value. 

Of course, if you want to involve trading and using the Auction House, you can also make a lot more gold. 

New World is a MMORPG that’s had an interesting lifespan so far. During the beta phase, the red flags were obvious. The game released on September 2021 and was insanely fun until level 30 or so. Then, it fell off a cliff with many people discovering game breaking bugs turning the game into a meme goldmine overnight. 

The devs didn’t give up. They went away and started addressing issues one by one, leading to the game having a major resurgence in player numbers for its first major update: Brimstone Sands in October 2022.

Since then, New World has been rather quiet. Over the course of the past year, it’s been losing players again month on month, which is mainly due to no new big content, other MMO releases, and players just running out of stuff to do. 

Recently, New World has announced its first real expansion “Rise Of The Angry Earth”, which will bring massive fundamental changes to the game, increase the level and gearscore cap as well as finally add mounts to the game. 

Here, I’m going to discuss everything you need to know about the new New World expansion as well as jump into the game now in its current state to prepare my character for the new content. Also, I will also show you what other cool changes have been added to the game over the past year. 

Some Surprises About Returning To New World

The last time I played New World was during the PTR of the Brimstone Sands expansion. I didn’t actually play the game when the expansion fully launched because my main server was dead due to everyone playing fresh start and I really didn’t want to start again. I log into the game and I immediately see people spamming X EGG in chat, so I did the same thing and got invited to a 20 player raid group.

If you played more than a year ago, you’d know that you couldn’t make raid groups in New World previously. The max group size was 5 players, so straight away I was surprised and happy with this change. We basically went around the map in this group and did some seasonal daily event called the Siege of Sulfur where you protect eggs from waves of mobs and get good rewards. 

Pretty cool and I’m a fan of any kinda content that brings players together in an MMO. Basically, within minutes of logging in, I was in a massive group of players doing massively multiplayer things. 

Next, I wanted to finish getting all weapon masteries to level 20 to prepare for the new expansion. I only needed to level the Greatsword and Blunderbuss, so I looked online for the best strat. And the current best method is to go do a repeatable Thorpe event at the area in Great Cleave. 

It was here where I stumbled upon another new addition to New World, Augments, which are basically boosters that you can buy off the cash shop. The most significant ones in my opinion are the Weapon XP and Gathering XP boosters, which basically double your XP. You’ve also got Season XP and Territory standing boosters, which do a similar thing and a proficiency booster, which increases your gathering yield by 10%.

If these boosters were in the game at launch, everyone would be complaining that they are pay to win and rightly so, I guess the games been out long enough at this point that most people have capped gathering and weapon masteries, anyway. So it’s not a big deal. Either way, I popped the weapon XP booster and got both weapons to 20 mastery super fast at the Thorpe spot. 

Another nice change, if you hold control + C and left click, you can spam click to very quickly salvage all your crap. You’ll be doing this a lot during your time playing New World. 

The next amazing change made to the game since the last time I played is the addition of multiple gear set loadouts. This was one of the most requested features to be added since launch and I’m happy to say it actually works very well except for one caveat. 

The thing I love about New World’s gear set system is storing gear in these templates actually removes it from your inventory, which is nice because if you’ve got 3-4 different gear sets your bags would be an absolute mess otherwise. The caveat here is that if you want more than 2 gear set storage, you need to buy it off the cash shop for roughly $5. 

I started working my way through the Brimstone Sands MSQ and realized I was earning Season XP, basically a Battle Pass you can work through, which gives various rewards such as furniture, skins, gypsum, currency and so on. Your typical battle pass, love it or hate it, it is what it is, at least it gives players at end game something to work through when they’ve completed everything else. 

As I was questing through Brimstone Sands, there was a few things going through my mind:

1. The Greatsword feels way more fun and better designed than every other weapon in the game. 
2. Visually, this game is still one of the best looking MMOs out and the sound effects are best in genre. 
3. The general movement in New World feels so fucking scuffed at times that the game feels like it’s in alpha in some places. 

Like you still can’t swim in New World, your attacks will very frequently just not register when hitting mobs. Relentless Rush with the Greatsword is a great example of this. It’s a double hit ability where 50% of the time only one hit will register. 

Any form of slightly elevated terrain in a combat area will make your character desync and the actual running animation in this game feels so scuffed to me. The run animation looks faster than the speed you actually run, idk what it is, but it just looks off. Also, when you log into the game after playing other third person RPGs, you just feel like New World should have a sprint but it doesn’t. I kinda wish it did have a sprint, to be honest.

Right now, my biggest issue with the game is definitely movement, inconsistent combat, desync and certain animations. I continued questing through the Brimstone Sands, eventually fully completing every quest in the zone, including the side quests. 

And I have to say that when it comes to questing, New World has come a very long way. This was notoriously dogshit for questing back at the game’s launch. Every quest was “Go to this POI, Loot Crates, Get Item, Run Half Way Across The Map and Repeat”. 

But now, it’s much more varied. There’s some actual story and narrative interwoven into it. There are puzzles, climbing quests and more varied enemies. Quest rewards are actually decent now. The difference is night and day from launch and I actually consider New World’s questing to be pretty good nowadays. 

Next, I did the Ennead dungeon and was quickly reminded that I do actually enjoy Dungeons in New World and think that in terms of visuals they’re some of the most epic looking dungeons in the MMO genre. I spent some time sorting through my storage and selling some stuff to free up space for the new expansion. If you haven’t played since launch storage in New World is all connected now rather than local to each town and city, which means storage management is much less of a pain in the ass nowadays. 

Bags and tools now go up to legendary 600 GS and will probably go higher for the new expansion. So, I replaced my old blues with legendries, got a full set of instruments, made a gear set for healer, strength, dex and mage, then checked out another highly requested feature that’s finally been added to New World…... 

A full transmog system comparable to games like Guild Wars 2 and World Of Warcraft, where you unlock the appearance of all dropped gear. Basically, to actually transmog gear, you need transmog tokens, which can be bought off the cash shop, 5 Tokens costs like $10. So, if you’re constantly changing your outfit, it’s not cheap. Just to clarify once you’ve unlocked something. Once you don’t need to spend more to reapply it again, it is permanently unlocked for you to use as a skin at any time. But for additional skins, you’ll need more tokens.

Something that instantly pissed me off with this system is that the preview window to actually view your appearance is dogshit and depending on the time of day like night time, for example. You can’t actually see the colors properly, which is annoying because you definitely want to get a good look at how your character will look before committing to spending New World Coins. AGS please improve the transmog character preview window. 

After that, I solo queued some 3v3 PVP arena and despite never doing it before it was surprisingly less try hard and more fun than I expected. I’m glad I was able to solo queue this rather than manually find other players. Otherwise, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. It was enjoyable and rewarding enough that I’d definitely play it again. I spend a bit of time levelling up my music skill, which seems to have had the experience required per level reduced heavily since the last time I played the game. 

And finally, I took on a seasonal 10 player boss, which wasn’t overly difficult. But it was fun because the rewards were good. The boss had a few mechanics, and it was easy to join a group for by Xing up in recruitment chat. It seems like New World is actually making a bit of a push to more traditional MMO style raid content. 

As aside from the 10 player seasonal raid boss, there’s also a 20 player instanced Sand Worm raid boss that is the hardest boss in the game. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the chance to do it yet as I can’t find a group. But it looks super cool, regardless. 

New Upcoming Expansion - Rise Of The Angry Earth 

Next, let’s discuss all the info you need to know about New World’s new upcoming expansion “Rise Of The Angry Earth”.

First of all, this expansion will release on October 3rd alongside Season 3 and will be a paid expansion costing $29.99. New players will be able to buy the base game + the expansion in a bundle for $69.99 

This new expansion comes with a new zone. Remember “First Light?”, the zone south of windsward? Yeah, that zone no longer exists. It’s fallen to the angry earth and will be transformed to the Elysian Wilds, completely unrecognizable from the place it was before.

Mounts are finally being added to New World and come with a new trade skill called riding, which you’ll be able to level up for upgrades to speed, buffs and higher tier mount consumables. Mounts will come in the form of horses, dire wolves and lions initially, with more likely to be added over time. You’ll be able to name your mount and also deck it out in with customizable equipment, which will probably be sold on the cash shop. 

A new weapon will be added to the game in the form of the Flail, which can be used either one had or with a shield. The flail will scale with strength and focus and had abilities that debuff and absorb ally damage, making it a solid choice as a secondary for both tanks and healers, from the sounds of it. 

Progression in New World will also be changed quite a bit. You’ll be able to level up your character to 65. Gear score will now go up to item level 700, trade skills up to 250 and the devs are completely removing the expertise system, which means that there’s no tedious barrier to entry grind that new players will need to go through to get decent loot. The new zone will straight up drop gear that’s 625 or higher and the hardest content will drop the best gear, as it should. 

There’s also going to be a new tier of faction gear, new faction questline and a new rarity of gear called “Artifacts”, which will need to be awakened via a questline up unlock up to 6 perks with one of them apparently being playstyle defining, which is quite interesting. 

There’s also going to be a few revamps to the game. The most impactful one long-lasting one will be the removal of Ward, Bane and resilience stats on gear, which just wasn’t fun and I think this is an amazing change. And the main storylines of both Edengrove and Great Cleave will also be revamped.

Aside from that, the expansion brings with it a new level 62+ expedition, a new heart rune ability, a new season with events, such as nightveil hallow and the turkey terror and a bunch of other stuff. 

Overall, after revisiting New World for a bit to prepare for the new expansion as well as looking into all the positive changes that will come with the expansion, I really think New World is heading firmly in the right direction and I’ve actually had a decent time so far returning to the game.

My main issue with New World is still that the movement and animation feels off sometimes as well as the inconsistency with attacks registering and the game still not having swimming. 

But almost every other issue I’ve had with the game over the years has been resolved. And now, with the addition of mounts, improvements to progression, large-scale groups and transmog, the game seems better than ever. So, I do think it’s worth jumping back in for the New Expansion because even if you don’t stick around long term, you’ll likely get a few weeks of fun out of it at the very least. 

Recently, I have made guides for Path of Exile 3.22’s Ruthless mode. And here, I want to teach you how to create a different version of the Hinekora Righteous Fire build.

When I was mapping on my Hinakora Righteous Fire building, I came to realize that I had invested so much POE Currency into making Righteous Firework that it was unnecessary.

The build felt like it was an actual caster build and that Righteous Fire was just a meme that I’d added on top of it. So, instead, I designed and created this Hinakora Shaman.

Hinekora Shaman

This build is so solid that you can even play it as either cold or lightning. I wanted to push it as far as I could, so I experimented by leveling it up using Wintertide Brand. And even then, the leveling experience was a breeze.

However, due to the resistance ignoring power of the Ramako Ascendancy in the end, it’s far better to keep the build this fire, so that’s what I’m showing you today.

It will work if you want to do something else. But your ability to progress deep in maps will be limited unless you can find relevant support gems that will penetrate for whatever your Elemental Damage type is.

You also can play the build with just Fireball and Flame Wall. But you’ll likely find that your AOE clear speed will be lacking. I would recommend using your first Uncarved Gemstone to pick up either Firestorm, Incinerate, or Flame Blast as a complement to both Fireball and Flame Wall to make your AOE clear speed as fast as possible.

How to Acquire Skill Gems?

If you want to create a Hinekora Shaman, your first task is to make a farm Witch and take her as far as finishing the ‘Breaking Some Eggs’ quest in the mud flats.

This will give you Fireball, Flame Wall, and your choice of either Raise Zombie or Freezing Pulse is temporary filler spells. You also get the extra POE flasks I see a lot of players forgetting.

Please remember that you can sell three small life flasks for one medium life flask and start using it as soon as level 3.

Once you’ve transferred everything to your stash, go ahead and create your Hinekora Shaman Marauder.

Intelligence

You may remember that there was some real nasty pathing that you had to do in order to get your Marauder enough intelligence to use his skill gems.

While it is still slightly beneficial to transfer a Lapis Amulet, in this build, it’s unnecessary. You’ll eventually need to find about 40 intelligence from your gear, but that’s not until the endgame.

And if you want, you can instead spend three passive points to, take the notable skills: Deep Wisdom and Deep Thoughts. This will help your Mana, but it will more importantly solve your intelligence problem entirely for just the cost of three additional passive points and that can all be done after you complete the campaign.

In this build, your intelligence problem completely goes away.

Related: My Ruthless Starter Build for Path of Exile 3.22 - Slam Duelist

Passive Tree

Leveling with the Hinekora Shaman, you take a different approach to solving the intelligence problem as you level.

Early on, you’re simply gonna head straight to Templar college and then keep going to which grad school. With this method, you’ll have far more than enough intelligence to use and level up your skills.

The only annoyance is that you can’t equip Flame Wall until about level 10. That’s it.

This build is a full league starter build that works great as your first character if you want to try out Ruthless mode in POE 3.22.

Eventually, around level 60 or so, you will need to fix your early pathing. When you first level up and you path up to the Templar area, you’re going to use the path on the left. But in the final build, you want to be using the path on the right instead.

All this means is that starting around level 55 or so, you’ll want to double up your pathing on the left, connecting the Devotion cluster to the Barbarism cluster.

Once you are connected on both the left and the right, you’re going to use the passive refund points earned through the campaign to refund the leveling pathing that you used and then you’re done with your pathing.

Ascendancies

For your ascendancies, you’re going to be using Hinekora, Tesalio, and Ramaco.

I tried taking Hinekora first and while it did help, I ran into resistance problems in Acts 6 and 7. I would recommend taking to Tesalio first, then Hinekora with your second ascendancy and then Ramaco before you hit the endgame.

If and when you can finish the Eternal Labyrinth, you would take Valako, Storm’s Embrace.

Endgame Progression

As you progress into the endgame on your Hinekora Shaman, you have three choices.

Choice number 1 is to use this cluster jewel socket that would be best, but of course requires that you have a cluster jewel.

Choice number 2 would be to focus on your offense, developing upward into the Templar area so that you can take Holy Fire and Purity of Flesh.

And choice number 3 instead is to focus on your defense and your life where instead of developing up you’re going to develop downward into the Marauder area so that you can take Bloodless and Soul of Steel.

Conclusion

If you wish to unleash the power of Hinekora, you can play this Hinekora Shaman and become the erupting volcano. You will engulf rayclast in flames and purify everything in the names of your ancestors. And when you hit the endgame, you won’t just work on the atlas, you’ll burn through it.

With the launch of Official Hardcore Servers on Classic Era, I think it’s time to cover what’s different on these Official Hardcore Servers, compared to the version of Hardcore we have been playing in the past with the addon.

So, here, I will cover the major differences between the addon and the official hardcore servers, as they do not follow the same rules and are actually very different from one another.

Grouping

Let’s start with Solo / Duo / Leveling in a Group.

With the Hardcore addon, if you wanted to be in a duo or a trio, you had to be online at the same time, and level together from start to finish. There were several rules in place such as you’re not allowed to be in different zones, basically meaning you had to duo with the same person from level 1 to level 60 and always play together.

On the Official Hardcore Servers, you are free to Solo, Duo, or Trio whenever you want. You can invite whoever you want to your group whenever you want. You could, for example, group up in a 5-man group from level 1-10 and just focus on kill-quests, then split up at level 10 and then solo the rest of the way until level 60. And if you suddenly meet someone you want to duo with for a couple of hours, you can do that as well.

Basically, you are no longer locked into being a Solo, Duo or Trio Character upon starting. Because with the Addon, if you chose to be in a Duo, you were stuck in that Duo. On the upcoming Hardcore Servers, you’re more free to pick and choose throughout your journey.

So basically, Grouping was very restricted before, but now you’re free to group up when you want to.

Dungeons

Now, let’s talk about Dungeons.

With the Hardcore Addon and the Solo Self Found Ruleset, we were only allowed to do one singular run of every dungeon until we hit level 60. This could be very annoying, as a singular mistake, and losing one person could mean you miss out on the entire dungeon. Because if you lose 1 person in, for example, Zul’Farrak or Maraudon, finishing such a high level dungeon with only 4 people can be incredibly difficult and is often a risk not even worth taking on Hardcore.

This could mean you miss out on an entire dungeon because of a mistake someone else makes. And not only that but some dungeon quests were borderline impossible to do with only one run: Like for example the Stormwind Stockades Bandanas Quest, or the Zul’Farrak Mojo Quest, basically quests where you loot mobs for an item with less than 100% drop chance, and even Wailing Caverns with the Deviate Hides, though those could be farmed on the outside.

In these cases, players would literally /roll for who got to complete their quests. And if you lost the roll, you would not be able to complete your quest, which feels kinda weird.

On top of that, you also have dungeons, like Uldaman, which heavily encourages you to do multiple runs of the dungeon in order to complete every quest, although it is technically doable in one instance-run if you time it to perfection.

On the Official Hardcore Servers, all of this annoyance is removed, as we can now do several dungeon runs while leveling, although there has been one modification in order for people not to just spam Dungeon Cleaves like they did in 2019 when Classic WoW came out.

Dungeons now have a 24 hour reset timer from level 1 to 59, meaning this timer is lifted once you hit level 60, so you can freely farm dungeons. But this means while leveling, dungeons will have a daily lockout and you can run every dungeon once per day.

One more change they have made to dungeons is that mobs inside dungeons give 50% less experience, but bosses give a lot more experience than usual.

Basically, they have taken 50% of the mob experience throughout the dungeon and put it into bosses, which is done for two main reasons: Mobs inside the dungeons do reset over time, but bosses have a 24 hour reset timer. And it also encourages people to focus on killing bosses and doing the higher dungeon rather than just AoE farming mobs inside dungeons for experience.

Trading

Next up then, the use of Mailboxes, Auction House and Trading. I’ve chosen to throw all of this into one place, as it all pretty much boils down to one thing: Trading.

Sending a mail between players is essentially trading something, you’re just doing it via mails. Same thing with the Auction House, so it’s all Trading.

On Classic Era with the Hardcore Addon, Trading was not allowed, even for things, such as Mage Food or Mage Water, or Warlock Healthstones. Basically, no trading whatsoever.

On the Official Hardcore Servers, this rule will be lifted and you are free to Trade, use the Auction House, and use the mailbox. I think this is a good thing, because you have another way to make WoW Classic Hardcore Gold.

But what I will say is, all the rules we had in place with the Hardcore Addon, made it so you were pretty much forced to play in one very specific and restrictive way.

And without being allowed to Group, Trade, send mails or use the Auction House, it is a very “Solo” experience. It is definitely more challenging, but is also a lot less social, and Blizzard have verbally stated they want to focus more on the Social Element than the Challenging Element, which I think is great.

The essence of these servers being Hardcore already is quite challenging in itself, and too challenging for most people, considering if they lose a level 60 character, a lot of people simply won’t bother going again.

Also Read: WoW Classic Hardcore: An Elwynn Forest Survival Guide

Class Abilities

There are also a couple of small changes, such as Class-Abilities, which were previously prohibited or the use of certain items.

Number one here would be the Paladin Bubble-Hearth, which was technically not allowed with the Hardcore Addon, but there were a couple of work-arounds. But on the Official Hardcore Server, there will simply be a restriction in place to where Paladins physically cannot use their Hearthstone while under the Protection Effect.

However, nothing has been stated about the Light of Elune plus Hearthstone, so there might be a big favor for the Alliance here.

With the Hardcore Addon, we were also not allowed to use the Auto-Unstuck Features in order to Teleport to Major Cities, and this restriction will not be there on Official Hardcore Servers.

For most people, this won’t really matter much. But for example, as a Night Elf, this means you can use the Auto Unstuck Feature to teleport to Ironforge instead of having to walk through Wetlands, or swim to Westfall, so it definitely has some practical uses.

Minor Changes

Now, let’s talk about some minor things that might not directly impact your gameplay, but are pretty huge changes overall.

- With the Hardcore Addon, we had an Appeal System. On the Official Hardcore Server, we will not have an Appeal System. This means if you die because of a disconnect, your run is over. But, Blizzard have done a lot of work in the back-end to atleast make it so you disconnect as little as possible from the game itself. But if you have terrible internet connection, there’s really not a lot Blizzard can do.

A lot of people have speculated that they could have added a disconnect-protection-mechanic where if you disconnect, you get a protective bubble around your character until you come back in. But believe me, that could be abused and would be just as terrible as anything else.

Imagine if we had such a system, I could just install a flip switch for my internet router next to my PC on a foot-pedal and if I’m ever close to die or in an oh-shit situation, I could just hit that switch and disconnect and get a protective bubble around my character.

- There will be a lot less griefing on the Official Hardcore Server than we had on Classic Era with the Addon. With the Addon on Classic Era, we had people stand on flightmasters with PVP enabled players naming themselves after mobs and forcing you to target them. Basically, people just forcing you into PVP combat then griefing you.

On the Official Hardcore Servers, you have to physically opt in to PVP by typing /pvp in order to get PVP flagged, so that the entire category of griefing is now disabled.

We also saw people drag elite mobs such as Teremus all the way to Stormwind and Elwynn Forest, and mobs will now have a kite-leash-cap, meaning if you try to kite a mob more than 500 yards away, it will reset. So, in this example, kiting Teremus out of Blasted Lands would end up resetting Teremus.

On the other hand, there is a new category of griefs, which Blizzard really can’t to anything about, and that is “Social Griefing” by players pretending to be your friend, joining your dungeon group or raid, then wiping the entire group.

Today I'm going to give you an updated version on how to target farm specific unique items in Diablo 4, but also double your unique drop chance and sometimes even triple it. So there are four components to this article with the last one speed farming being the most important, ideally you should be doing two of these at the same time.

Concept Of Monster Families

I'm going to start off with Monster Families. I know a lot of you are already familiar with the concept, but I'll briefly go over it. Different monsters in the game have a higher chance of dropping certain Diablo 4 Items. For example, if you are a Druid and you're trying to find Tempest Roar, you should be targeting Cultists and Cannibals, because they have a higher chance of dropping Helms.

Let's say you were going to chase Greatstaff of the Crone, well then you would be farming Goatman. Now I know a lot of you in the previous season would rerun the same dungeon, even though it was not a Nightmare Dungeon in Diablo 4. So like Cultist Refuge without opening up a Sigil, you do not want to do that this season.

The reason is that massively increase the chance of a unique item dropping from the rewards at the end of your dungeon, so previously it was one legendary and I think two rare items, now there's a very high chance you can drop two legendaries, but those legendaries can actually convert to unique items as well.

How To Reset Nightmare Dungeons?

This is not only important for Target farming certain uniques in Diablo 4, but you should be doing this anyway just for the experience game, because of how good some dungeons are compared to the others. So to reset the dungeon, obviously open up the dungeon that you want to do first.

Now accept the dungeon like usual when you are in a group, now you want to promote your teammate to party leader, or it might be the other way around, they might promote you. It doesn't matter either way, but you have to exchange party leadership. So in my case, I from loading my friend wolf to party leader. Now he has to decline the party leader invitation or this will not work.

Once this is done, we're going to teleport to the dungeon you can also do this at the start of the dungeon too by the way. Now in Diablo 4, we're going to finish the dungeon you can get your Cliff Awards everything, leave back into town, now whoever was the party leader has to leave the group. Once they've left that group, whoever was party leader, they have to invite you to a brand new group. So you're jumping into their world now, now the dungeon has been reset, so we're going to teleport to the entrance using the open world map and rinse and repeat.

In Diablo 4, there are two more factors that you need to add into this as well, the chances are between 1 to 100 you are going to find at least one of every single unique in the game for your class. I know that's not the case for everyone, it's RNG, some people cannot get say a Tempest Roar and be level 100 and still trying to find this item. So what you want to do is try and farm dungeons that have a way higher drop chance for items in general, and you can get more Diablo 4 Gold too.

Farming Uldurs Is A Good Choice

A really great example that my clan and I have been using, we've been farming Uldurs, the quantity of items that drop is almost double even triple than some of the other dungeons. In fact it's around about two full inventories of just items that can drop on the ground, there is a chance that each item can roll into a unique. So this is just as effective as Target farming certain dungeons, just the sheer quantity makes up the difference.

Speed Farming Is The Most Important

The last which is the most important in my opinion, you should be speed farming. You have to fight the temptation to be pushing dungeons way higher than yourself, so you want to make sure that the monster level is the exact same level as your character in Diablo 4. Because you're farming enemies at the same level as you, they're going to be super super easy, so you don't have to worry about things like damage reduction, too heavily investing in defensive stats, you just want to go completely Glass Cannon.

One of the stats that I've been playing around with that I think is absolutely fantastic that was not good in the previous season, but is now really important for Speed farming and that is the bonus effects after killing an Elite, so it might be x amount of movement speed for 4 seconds after killing an Elite or x amount of damage after killing an Elite.

They can only roll on three specific item slots. So the amulet can roll movement speed after killing an Elite and damage, now your boots can only roll movement speed after killing an Elite and then your pants can run the extra damage after killing an Elite.

Only those three spots make sure that you keep in mind that the movement speed in the game is capped at 100% I believe. Technically you could get 230% movement speed with all of your gear, it's going to hard cap at 100%, so you want to be kind of keeping that in mind.

Outro

This is even more effective now because of the monster density bonus, so just to recap, find a dungeon in Diablo 4 with the specific item type that you're trying to look for, dude dungeon resets with your friend. If you do not have a friend to play with, then go for a higher drop quantity dungeon, which has a higher chance. Because of the sheer number of items and lastly make sure you're speed farming monsters at the same level as you. This is not just for uniques, this is for your experience gain as well.

Dendro completely changed the way we look at Kokomi’s teams and builds. So, today we’ll cover everything you need to know from her best artifacts and weapons to general playstyle and team compositions.

The Jellyfish That Does It All

Kokomi’s biggest strength revolves around her elemental skill.

Her skill simply summons a jellyfish to heal surrounding allies and deal hydro damage to surrounding enemies. The hydro damage is very weak, but more importantly, the jellyfish will apply hydro onto enemies with every tick of damage it deals.

Since the jellyfish lasts for 12 seconds and hits with 2 second intervals, that means you get a total of 6 hydro applications and 6 heals, not including the initial cast, which is extremely strong.

Even though Kokomi’s elemental skill has an 18 second cooldown, you can actually have 100% uptime on her jellyfish thanks to her first ascension talent.

After using her elemental burst, the 12 second timer on her jellyfish will immediately refresh and allow its uptime to extend all the way past the 18 second skill cooldown.

Other things that Kokomi’s burst does is give her attacks and elemental skill max HP scaling, as well as extra healing for the party every time you normal or charge attack an enemy, similar to the way that Barbara functions.

With all that information in mind, I’m sure you can envision two different playstyles for Kokomi. The first playstyle is an off-field support where Kokomi only swaps in to place her jellyfish and refreshes its timer with her elemental burst to support your main DPS. The second playstyle is an on-field driver where Kokomi spends time on-field with the effects from her elemental burst to apply extra hydro to enemies to support reactions for characters off-field, and even deal some of her own damage with an invested build.

These two different ways of playing Kokomi have clear differences in build options, so let’s walk you through how to build your Kokomi for the situation that fits your team.

Off-Field Kokomi Build

Kokomi’s supportive build is very cheap and accessible to all players.

For artifacts, you’re almost always going to want the 4-set Tenacity of Millelith because her elemental skill can keep 100% uptime on the 20% attack buff for the team.

In the cases where you’re running a bloom team that’s not dependent on ATK%, such as using Thoma for burgeon or Kuki Shinobu for hyperbloom. You can also choose the 4-set Deepwood Memories for dendro resistance shred, which increases the damage from bloom-related reactions.

Artifact stats are always energy recharge or HP% in the sands, HP% in the goblet, and healing bonus in the circlet to maximize her burst uptime and her healing potential.

Since this Kokomi playstyle, I usually have her off-field most of the time. Her energy recharge requirements are high. Getting as close to 200% energy recharge is recommended, so usually the sands slot will run an energy recharge sands without extremely efficient artifact substats.

Aside from as much energy recharge as possible, other substats to focus for Kokomi are just HP%, flat HP, and elemental mastery if you run her with Nilou Bloom teams. So, she ends up being an extremely cheap character to build for off-field support.

To hammer that nail even further, Kokomi’s best weapon for off-field support happens to be a 3 star catalyst that all players can easily get to R5.

That catalyst is, of course, the Thrilling Tales of Dragon Slayers. Not only does it provide a good HP% stat for Kokomi’s healing, but the passive provides a 48% attack buff to the character switching in after Kokomi, which is an absolutely insane damage buff for ATK scaling characters.

There’s really no other reason to run any other catalyst with an off-field Kokomi. The only exceptions are if your team cannot utilize attack buffs, or if you really prefer to rely on having 100% uptime with Kokomi’s burst, then an R5 craftable Prototype Amber is also a viable option for the extra energy it gives to Kokomi.

Regardless, both options are completely F2P friendly and players should have no issues with building Kokomi for off-field support.

On-Field Kokomi Build

Kokomi’s damage build is a bit more expensive in terms of investment, but still simple to understand.

Unlike the off-field build, Kokomi’s best artifact set is now the 4-set Ocean Hued Clam. This set will convert all of Kokomi’s healing into a bubble that deals physical damage every 3 seconds, where an invested on-field Kokomi can easily hit the 30,000 damage cap per bubble before resistances.

Artifact stats to focus for an on-field Kokomi also have slight changes, where now you always want to run an HP% sands, a hydro damage bonus goblet, and a healing bonus circlet. Because Kokomi is on-field with this playstyle, she’ll directly absorb energy particles and naturally have a lower energy requirement.

Instead of the 200% that I described for the off-field build, 160% energy recharge is the sweet spot for any on-field Kokomi, which is a lot more attainable with an HP% sands.

Hydro damage and healing bonus are mandatory for Kokomi’s damage. Hydro damage in the goblet is pretty self explanatory. But the healing bonus also increases Kokomi’s damage while she’s empowered by her burst thanks to her other ascension talent, which grants extra scaling on her enhanced attacks based off her healing bonus.

This extra bonus scales much better than HP%, meaning you’ll always lose both damage and healing power by running an HP% circlet over a healing bonus circlet.

The usual energy recharge, HP%, flat HP, and EM for electro-charged or Nilou Bloom teams is the standard substat focus.

While the Thrilling Tales of Dragons Slayers catalyst can be good for an on-field Kokomi as well, it’s usually outclassed by two weapons. The best weapon for an on-field Kokomi is, of course, her signature weapon Everlasting Moonglow. But generally, this catalyst is not worth your primogems unless you’re a whale or a diehard Kokomi fan like I am who has R5 Moonglow just to flex on the haters.

Moonglow is usually not worth your primogems because Prototype Amber is more than enough for Kokomi, and usually only gets 5-10% less personal damage compared to Moonglow depending on the refinement situation. Not only is this craftable your best F2P option for on-field Kokomi, but its energy passive allows you to ease your energy recharge substat requirements if you have some pretty garbage artifacts.

To summarize, the weapon order for an on-field Kokomi is Moonglow if you have it, and if not just run Prototype Amber. If you’re also out of catalyst billets, then Thrilling Tales is also a viable option for those looking to stay stingy and build the cheapest on-field Kokomi possible.

Freeze Support

Kokomi is such a flexible and universal healer with the utility that she brings to the table that she can practically be used in any team.

However, just to get you started, if you don’t know where to begin, I’ll outline a few teams where she shines in. Of course, it's even better if you have five-star weapons suitable for Kokomi. The way to get it is actually very simple. You just need to buy a Genshin Impact Account.

The first of a few teams that we’re going to talk about today is a freeze team. Off-field Kokomi support is a backbone of many freeze teams. Because she provides outstanding hydro application and her build with both Tenacity of the Millelith and Thrilling Tales can buff your cryo DPS.

Running Kokomi allows you to run two offensive cryo characters as opposed to running a defensive cryo character, like Layla or Diona. So, a team usually has double cryo damage dealers, Kokomi, and an anemo support.

For the cryo slots, you can pick any of the two between Rosaria, Kaeya, Shenhe, Ganyu, and Ayaka as these characters either deal a ton of cryo damage, buff the cryo damage of your team, or do both at the same time.

The anemo support can technically be most anemo characters as long as they have the 4-set Viridescent Venerer equipped. The best option by far is Kazuha, for his elemental damage buffs. But other options, like Venti and Sucrose for grouping, or Jean and Sayu for even more healing, also exist.

Hyperbloom & Burgeon

While freeze teams are strictly for an off-field Kokomi, both an off-field and on-field Kokomi can function in a hyperbloom or burgeon team.

For the on-field Kokomi variants, the team consists of Kokomi, a dendro applicator, and either Kuki Shinobu or Raiden Shogun for hyperbloom or Thoma for burgeon.

The dendro applicator needs to be a consistent off-field option to allow Kokomi the freedom to stay on-field. So, your best options are Nahida for players who have her, or Dendro MC, for the best F2P option.

Collei and Yaoyao also work in this slot. But their abilities don’t last nearly as long as the Dendro MC’s burst. So, they are like tier 2 options if Nahida and Dendro MC are considered tier 1 options.

The final slot can be either Xingqiu or Yelan for powerful single target hydro damage, or a second dendro character from the ones listed before.

Options like C4 Kirara and Baizhu are also viable in the last slot for a second dendro option. But keep in mind that they lack AoE dendro application and cannot be used as solo dendro characters to create dendro cores.

For the off-field Kokomi variants of hyperbloom and burgeon teams, a dendro character, like Nahida or Alhaitham are fantastic for operating as solo dendro characters and easily allow you to run the usual Xingqiu or Yelan in the final slot for a team maximized for damage.

Also Read: Genshin Impact: How To Create The Best Yelan Build? - Artifacts, Weapons & Teams

Taser

The one team that is usually limited to the on-field Kokomi build is a taser team.

This is Kokomi’s classic team composition before dendro took the teambuilding scene by storm, and got significantly better with the introduction of the Ocean Hued Clam set. The team consists of Kokomi with two off-field electro damage dealers, and then either Sucrose to buff the EM of the team, or Kazuha to buff the elemental damage of the team.

For the two electro damage dealers, you can pick any off-field character between Fischl, Beidou, Raiden Shogun, or Yae Miko. The premise of the team is extremely simple, so nothing much really needs to be said about the team.

Kokomi, in particular, not only provides the ability to run two off-field electro characters, but she also consolidates the role of healing and hydro application.

Prior to Kokomi’s release, your only options to use were Barbara for healing, who does significantly less damage compared to Kokomi, or to use Xingqiu and live with the fact that sometimes his rainswords aren’t enough to sustain the entire team’s health bars.

Nilou Bloom & An Entirely New Build

Last but not least, the final team that Kokomi really shines into is a Nilou bloom team.

The introduction of dendro survivability options, like Yaoyao, Baizhu, and Kirara, definitely brought more flexibility to Nilou bloom teams. But Kokomi still remains a staple partner for Nilou.

As an off-field healer, Kokomi can keep her cheap build and sustain the team while Nahida, Alhaitham, or Kirara bear the burden of providing on-field dendro.

For the last slot, usually with Nahida and Alhaitham you want to run triple hydro characters, meaning Xingqiu or Yelan are again the options for the final slot.

In the case of on-fielding Kirara, you cannot use Xingqiu or Yelan while she runs around as a package. So, a second dendro character that applies dendro off-field like Dendro MC, Nahida, Yaoyao, or Collei can go in the final slot.

While the off-field playstyle is a little unassuming, Nilou really changed the way we can build Kokomi as a driver for bloom teams. If you want to play Kokomi on-field within a Nilou team, then an entirely new build path opens up.

Building Kokomi with the 4-set Gilded Dreams or the 4-set Flowers of Paradise Lost and triple EM in the sands, goblet, and circlet actually becomes viable, since Kokomi can become the “owner” of bloom reactions.

In hyperbloom and burgeon teams, Kokomi never focuses on elemental mastery because the reaction damage always depends on the EM of your electro or pyro characters that turn the dendro cores into hyperbloom or burgeon reactions.

However, Nilou’s Bountiful Cores do scale off Kokomi’s EM if she creates them with her attacks or elemental skill. So, that’s why building full elemental mastery is viable on Kokomi.

Not only does Nilou allow you to switch your artifact set, but new catalysts like A Thousand Floating Dreams, Sacrificial Fragments, and Fruit of Fulfillment can be used if you don’t need a catalyst focused on healing.

Of course, if players want to keep their Kokomi build flexible for other teams, you can still on-field Kokomi with Ocean Hued Clam and elemental mastery substats in a Nilou team, or off-field Kokomi with the 4-set Deepwood Memories.

Although you won’t be seeing a flurry of huge green numbers with just elemental mastery substats compared to the triple EM build, Kokomi will still retain solid personal damage with her Ocean Hued Clam numbers.

If you’re on-fielding Kokomi with Nilou, then you’re going to need to pick two dendro characters between Nahida, Dendro MC, Yaoyao, and Collei for the final two slots since all these characters have some sort of AoE dendro application.

Since Kokomi is so flexible, there are definitely other teams, such as a general on-field Kokomi, to drive vaporize, or even specialized teams, like the “Sukokomon” team.

As we all know, Diablo 4's Season 1 was successfully released last week and has received good player feedback. The new season is called Season of the Malignant, and I think Necromancer is the most powerful class in this season.

Malignant Hearts are completely broken and more powerful than you ever thought possible. Let me give you an example of Decrepit Aura, when you have at least five enemies nearby you get an aura that automatically curses enemies with Decrepit Aura for 5 - 15 seconds.

This is Caged Heart of Decrepit Aura item power 608, so not Ancestral, not 800 item power, even there's only a level three Heart, When at least two enemies are near you, gain an aura that automatically curses nearby enemies with enfeeble for 15 seconds, up to a maximum of 21 seconds, helps you get some Diablo 4 Items faster. This is not the strongest version of the Heart can this potentially go down to one single enemy and then it just works perfect on bosses.

Necromancer In Season 1

This is not the only thing, in Diablo 4 Caged heart of the Sacrilegious, we know that walking near Corpse automatically activates an equipped, equipped it needs to be in your skill bar, warp skill every second dealing 36% reduced damage. This works bonus to what you actually do, but the question was does this use your cooldowns. For those wondering Diablo 4, this Heart for Necromancer will trigger Corpse Explosion, if on your bar every second and Corpse Tendril every three seconds roughly, without triggering the cooldown of it.

There's one important key part that a lot of people seem to have missed in the patch notes, the stats you see reflect what a level 20 character would receive as a drop. So each of these is essentially one of the weakest versions, for example the 20 damage reduction right now, I mean that was five enemies close by, this 20 damage reduction could even be more.

We see the absolute basic weakest version, Tempting Fate with 60% Critical Strike damage, how high can this actually go. Now seeing how absolutely overpowered these Hearts can be, maybe the nerfs were warranted to a degree. Obviously Eternal realm players in Diablo 4, but then again that's the way how arpgs go, I'm sorry you bought a live service game.

Blood Summoner Stronger Than Ever!

Knowing now how broken the Hearts actually are, may I present you a potential Blood Summoner build, that will get super duper charged. Because Sacrilegious is now triggering Corpse Explosion every second and every third second Corpse Tendrils. Absolutely super charges our Blood Surge Summoner, why Blood Surge Summoner? Because you truly will never run out of essence again, we are using cool Mages to generate Essence in Diablo 4.

This build usually doesn't run Corpse Explosion, but if we actually now put Corpse Explosion into our skill bar, that's an equipped skill, and we can move Decrepify out. Why can you move to Decrepify out, well that's simple we play Decrepit Aura and Decrepit Aura works on two or less enemies, I mean we might get the one enemy Decrepit Aura so it's a free Decrepify cast without asking everything to do anything, we can move Corpse Explosion in the bar and then in the skill tree as we see here, you have Grim Harvest for consuming Corpses Grand 6 Essence plus Fueled by Death will constantly actually work.

Not only that in Paragon Board, we can go for the flesh eater Note 2 consuming 5 Corpses around 40% increased damage for six seconds, because we constantly automatically consume Corpses, without having to do anything. If you don't know how to build it, Diablo 4 Boosting Service can help you.

Which grants us, bonus Essence the whole time with a Skeleton Mage, followed up with bonus Essence constantly for consuming Corpses, and if we're running out of Corpses we can make bonus ones with Ghastly Blood Mist in Diablo 4, and then at the same time just Blood Surge everything around as the whole time, our Skeletons will mitigate a little bit damage that way we be taken, will fortify with ourselves with our Blood skills and Skeletons.

Eternal Realm Got Shafted

A lot of you were not so excited about Season of the Malignant, but I always expected these Hearts to be absolutely overpowered broken bonkers. It stinks for the Eternal Realm players, but this is how life service goes this is how Seasons go? Maybe just just make this season is for free, give it a try, have some fun, experiment with the hearts, play some new things and even if you only level up to 50. Maybe it brings you some joys and smiles in your face to experiment with all these crazy things.

Today’s topic will be Diablo 4 mechanics. We will be talking about damage buckets, damage, how to calculate damage increases and defenses.

Additive VS Multi

Starting off, we’re just going to quickly go over additive and multiplicative stats. You’ll see stat lines aspects things in your skill tree and your Paragon Board that either have a ‘+’ or an ‘X’ by them.

‘X’ will be better at 99% of the time. There are some instances where it’s not. But it’s safe to think that stats with an ‘X’ will be better than with a ‘+’.

Damage Buckets

This is where people seem to get confused, Damage Buckets.

We have four main damage buckets in Diablo 4:

• Main Stat
• Crit Damage
• Vulnerable Damage
• Additive Damage

Each of these buckets multiplies with each other to get your final damage output. The most confusing bucket is the Additive Damage bucket. If it’s not Crit, Vul, or Main Stat 99 of the time, it goes into this bucket. So, things like core, close, healthy, injured, damage, and so on all go into this bucket.

This is because you have 0% close damage and you get 100% close damage somewhere does not mean you’re now going to double your damage against close targets. It gets put into the added a bucket with the other Additive Stats.

Keep in mind there are hidden stats that go into these buckets that will not show up on your stat screen. For example, Critical Damage against Crowd Control targets gets put into the Critical Damage bucket, but it does not show up as Critical Damage in my character screen.

It’s important that you balance out your damage buckets. If you have 600% Critical Damage but only 200% in your additive bucket, a 25% additive roll would be better than getting a 50% critical damage roll.

Also Read: Diablo 4 Shadowmancer Necromancer Build: Season 1 Endgame Guide

How To Calculate Damage?

How do we calculate our damage increases? I’ll be using my character stats in these examples.

So, we have 285% Critical Damage, 275% Vulnerable Damage, 800% in the Additive Damage, and 900 Dex in this current setup. You can calculate each of these buckets the same. When we’re representing these stats, we start from one for Critical Damage. The 285% would be represented as 3.85 when we’re doing our calculations.

Let’s say we get another 50% Critical Damage somewhere. We would now have the 335% Critical Damage versus the 285% we had before. We then take 4.35 divide that by 3.85. That would give us 1.129. That would mean that we get roughly a 13% damage increase. For our main stat, calculations 100 Main Stat equals 10% damage increase. So, when you’re calculating your Main Stat, make sure to convert it into the damage increase percentage and not the total amount of dexterity, strength, willpower, or whatever stat it may be.

So, say we have a crossbow with Crit Damage, Bone Damage, and Dex. And we’re trying to decide on what roll to get next. We can either go for a 70 all-stat damage roll or a 40% core damage roll. So, our Dex before is 900 and after it’ll be 970. So, we would take the after being a 1.97 and divide it by 1.9 to get a 1.036 or roughly a three and a half percent damage increase. For the additive, we would take the 800% before and the 840% after.

So, 9.4 divided by 9 gives us 1.044 or roughly a 4.4% damage increase. So, we have 3.5% versus 4.4%. If you are needing to get the all-stat roll to hit some Paragon node bonuses, it’s not going to be a huge damage loss.

To sum it up, you take what your stat will be after and divided it by what it was before. So, ‘X’ divided by ‘Y’ equals your damage increase.

Item Power

On to Diablo 4 Item power, how do we calculate our item power damage increases? Suppose you have an 818 sword and an 810 sword. Assuming both stat rolls are the same, you take the average of the damage per hit of both those weapons and divide the larger number by the smaller number, like we did with the damage buckets.

So, our 818 damage range is 989 to 1483. Add those numbers together. Divide them by two to get your average. Do the same with the other weapon. And then, we’ll take the average of both being 1236 for the 818 and 1198 for the 810. Divide 1236 by 1198 to get 1.0317 or roughly at three percent damage increase.

Armor

And lastly, are defenses. For our defenses, we have armor and resistances as well as damage reduction rolls.

Starting off with armor, this reduces physical damage taken from monsters on your level. What this means is that as a level gap between you and monsters increases, the amount of damage reduction you get from your armor is reduced.

In this chart, you can see how much armor you need in order to get the maximum damage reduction against X level of mobs.

The maximum damage reduction you can receive from armor is 85%. So, if you are fighting mobs that are level 154, don’t go over 1300 armor as you’ll be overcapping.

Resistances

Resistances are non-physical resistances damage reduction. So, for every two percent of a resistance stat, you get one percent damage reduction for that element.

If you get hit by a fire attack and you have 20% fire resistance, you have another 10% damage reduction against that attack. This additional 10% is then multiplied with all your other damage reduction rolls that apply to that attack if they were close distant poison, etc.

However, resistances don’t seem to be near is important in Diablo 4 as they are to a game like Path of Exile. I have pretty much completely ignored resistances, and it hasn’t seemed to affect me at all. Maybe down the road with seasons, resistances will become far more important. But for now, don’t stress and worry about how much resistance you have.

Damage Reduction

Finally, we’ll talk about damage reduction.

It’s important to note that damage reduction in Diablo 4 is multiplicative and not additive. So, you can never have a hundred percent damage reduction and be invincible.

If you have two sources of damage reduction, giving 50% damage reduction each your final damage reduction would be 75%. Suppose you get hit by an attack doing a hundred damage you would reduce that 100 to 50 and then you would further reduce the leftover 50 by another 50%, meaning you only take 25 damages. And if you had another 50% damage reduction roll somewhere, it would take the leftover 25 damage and put it to 12.5 and so on.

Genshin Impact has been out for a few years now. There’s a ton of characters to choose from and some are more popular than others. But here, I want to talk about characters that are underrated, although in my opinion still relevant and strong in 2023.

1. Noelle

The first one I wanna talk about is Noelle.

She definitely has gotten the short end of the stick over the years. Because just to start with, Geo doesn’t have that many characters or team comps and no new Geo support units have been released during Sumeru’s cycle. And what’s even worse, when Itto showed up, she basically got overshadowed by him due to how similar both are.

And if that’s not enough, one of her biggest problems is that she doesn’t generate energy from her skill. But it’s 2023 right now and we’ve honestly seen worse energy problems. The thing is Noelle is like a puzzle you need to solve. But once it’s done, you can sit there and admire the result. In her case, you will need to use Favonius weapons on at least 2 team mates if not all 3 of them. By the way, some 5-star weapons are very difficult to obtain. At this time, directly buying a Genshin Impact Account is a good choice!

Gorou is also amazing for her, not just because he boosts Geo damage, but also he can generate a good amount of Geo and Favonius particles for her, which you can catch by swapping to her.

But the saving grace here is that her burst costs 60, which is not the worst thing in the world to have. And also, if you didn’t know, by doing normal attacks, there’s an increasing probability that will let that character generate 1 energy and it just so happens claymore and catalyst users have the best probability chance. So, doing some slashing with Noelle gets that energy restored.

But honestly, the thing I love most about her is that when there are multiple enemies, especially if they hit hard, her team wide healing by using the skill is kinda amazing and gives you a nice amount of team options you can go for when she’s taking care of the survivability.

And truthfully, it’s not the energy problems that’s holding her back, but her final constellation. If you don’t have it, a good chunk of damage will be missing.

However, this is also a bit of an outdated statement because it’s been around since Genshin’s launch. And these days we have her dedicated artifact set. We know how valuable Benny boy is, and Gorou is also there to help her out.

All in all, Noelle’s mono geo teams still hold up really well these days. Sure, she has her some problems. But as time went on, in my opinion, she is still relevant even till this day.

2. Heizou

It’s no secret that Heizou has been often compared to Sucrose or even Kazuha. And things like his underwhelming crowd control or short range normal attacks make him inferior.

But honestly, if you can get behind his playstyle, he is an extremely fun to use character. One punching enemies with his skill that scales extremely well or kicking enemies with a burst that has a low 40 energy cost is one of few things that makes him a great unit.

And the thing is because of how fast and fluid his animations are, he is a superb quickswap unit for teams like Freeze or Vape. At the same time, he is also a great driver for comps like Electro-charged due to the low charged attack stamina cost. And as you know it, charged attacks have no ICD, so you can always create reactions with his sweeping kick.

And after making guides on complex characters for a few years now, you gotta appreciate his simple yet strong passive. punch an enemy with his skill and everyone besides him gets 80 Elemental Mastery boost.

Also, if you are invested into Wanderer or Xiao and have obtained a C6 Faruzan, she is honestly amazing with him and only turns him into an even stronger damage dealer. And don’t forget, he is an Anemo catalyst, which means you can just slap on him Viridescent and Thrilling Tales and he can still land some quick punches before swapping out and buffing the main damage dealer, which works out super well in quick swap teams.

Now, I do have to be honest with you here because my Heizou is C6. However, when he first got released, I had him at C0 for a pretty long time. But I will admit, his constellations, especially C4 and C6, are amazing. But without them, he still works as a great unit for many team comps.

Also Read: Genshin Impact: How To Create The Best Yelan Build? - Artifacts, Weapons & Teams

3. Yae Miko

In the past, I really didn’t know how good Yae Miko was. That was me before Sumeru update. And now that we have Dendro reactions, she’s actually really good.

I think Hoyoverse should honestly stop with releasing characters whose potential is not yet unlocked. Because Yae Miko and Kuki Shinobu are the perfect examples here. Not sure about Thoma, though, they probably didn’t plan him to be a pretty good Burgeon enabler.

Still, the reason why I mention this is that a lot of people think Yae Miko is not that great. She looks amazing and has some of the best voicelines. But when it came to her damage, it just didn’t feel satisfying, especially when Hoyo went back and forth trying to quote unquote fix her and afterwards rolling back the changes.

However, the change that she did need the most was the Dendro element. Here is a funny fact: Aggravate and Spread reaction damage works better when characters can do many little hits which can cause reactions. And because of this, Yae Miko’s totem damage has completely changed after putting her into Dendro teams.

And what’s also great is that her burst isn’t that super mandatory. You could skip the burst in one of the rotations if she didn’t have enough energy for it. What’s most important here is to maintain the totems on the field at all times, so that they can relentlessly attack enemies.

Overall, I think Yae Miko has been underrated for a while now, even after the Dendro element, and I gotta confess. I also didn’t think much of it before I tried her out in Dendro teams. She’s kinda like Keqing to me. Because of Dendro reactions, both of them are now my go-to characters I like to use everywhere.

4. Kaeya

Going back to the classics again, I feel like Kaeya doesn’t get enough attention when it comes to the new Dendro team comps.

First of all, he is a great option when you’re playing a Freeze team. I especially love the fact that even after game’s launch: his damage numbers are pretty respectable, especially when you build him with a Blizzard Strayer set and slap on him one of the premium 5-star swords.

And of course, who could forget the Reverse Melt teams that you can run with him? But what really has set him apart after the Dendro changes were the Fridge team variations. The most prominent one is Hyperfridge. And it’s pretty simple. You build him as a damage dealer. You use either Kuki or Raiden to trigger Hyperblooms and then someone like Alhaitham or Nahida can act as the driver so that there’s enough Dendro application.

You will then choose between several Hydro options so that there are Freeze reactions happening because hitting enemies with Hyperblooms while they are frozen is really a one-of-a-kind satisfaction you’ll get.

Honestly, I am just happy to see Kaeya doing so well after all this time. I know some content creators love to showcase him and that makes me happy. But at the same time, I can see a lot of times people forget he exists and always focusing on the next shiny character. When in reality, you’ve got a cool starter character that you can build and use in many teams, including the new Fridge comp.

5. Collei

I probably haven’t seen this much injustice when it comes to a character getting overshadowed. And it was Dendro Traveler out of all people who did this to our Collei, who we must protect from the world’s harm.

No, but seriously, she obviously has some problems like her skill collision with enemies acting weird or the fact Hoyo decided to put a special limiter on her Burst’s ICD.

But with these problems out of the way, I actually love using her in various Dendro teams, especially when she is equipped with the Sacrificial Bow. This allows her to do her skill twice and if you have at least a few of her constellations unlocked, there’s some good synergy you’ll get out of those.

But even then, she is massively underrated when it comes to Nilou bloom teams. I am honestly still trying to wrap my head around her playstyle in this team. But I am having a blast using her with Nilou. Because after playing this game for so long, getting to experience a pretty unique playstyle is something else.

She’s one of the best choices to go for if you want to have a strong Nilou bloom team. Otherwise, you can still use Collei in Quicken teams or even Burgeon. She’s obviously going to require more focus than when you play DMC, who just drops his flower and switches out.

There’s a couple of important things that need to be addressed when it comes to summon in 1.2 update. These are the 5 considerations you don’t want to miss out on.

Consideration 1: Blade’s Damage

It’s probably safe to say that Blade is definitely one of the more interesting damage dealers, although the fact that he sacrifices his own health to deal better damage is not that ground-breaking. Because Arlan can do it as well. Still, there are a couple of things about Blade that really stand out and we need to talk about.

First of all, we know that the skill consumes Blade’s HP and increases his damage output. It’s not an attack, but more like taking a turn to buff him up. However, he does gain a new turn, although I am not sure how that will work out with supports like Yukong or Bronya. Hopefully, this skill won’t waste their buffs.

Also, unlike Arlan, who doesn’t consume a skill point, Blade unfortunately does use it up. So, if you’re using him in your team, you will need to be aware about the skill point economy, which was one of the best-selling points about Arlan when you didn’t have to care about it so much.

But the biggest thing about him has to be the ultimate. No matter how much HP Blade has, he will set his own health to 50% and deal massive damage. We still don’t know officially how good his damage multipliers are.

Still, what’s exciting here is a strong synergy with Luocha. It just so happens that Luocha triggers his skill’s auto-heal when an ally drops below or to 50%, which is just perfect for Blade’s ultimate.

What’s even better, since Blade also consumes his health with the skill and then attacks afterwards, Luocha’s healing from the field will be amazing for this. Basically, the coffin courier is best buddies with this immortal Stellaron hunter.

Honestly, I could go on and keep delving deeper into Blade’s kit. But it’s pretty much clear that he will excel best when his health is constantly getting reduced. And Hoyo made sure to include a new relic set with the 1.2 update, which is basically tailor made for him. I am not sure how big the Critical Boost is going to be from the 4-set bonus. But hopefully, it’s enough that you can put on Crit DMG body on him and fish for the Critical Rate substats instead.

But what I care about the most right now is how useful Health stat is going to be to Blade. There were some hints that he might scale with it in some way. I am a bit worried when it comes to split scaling characters. It doesn’t always work out for the best, although I am basing this on my Genshin experience. But it will be interesting to see how important HP is going to be when it comes to building Blade.

Otherwise, he seems like a unique damage dealer you could go for, if you’re still in the process of building teams for Memory of Chaos.

Consideration 2: Kafka’s Team

With Kafka, a new team is going to be rising to the top if everything goes well.

Her entire kit is based around Shock damage over time. And there’s quite a few synergies you could pull off with a team like Sampo, Kafka, a healer and another flexible character, who could be Serval as well.

Now, Sampo is probably going to be one of the key team mates for Kafka because this guy’s ultimate boosts DoT damage by up to 30% if it’s raised as a level 10 ultimate.

This is pretty huge. Because both Sampo and Kafka specialize in unloading lots of DoT damage and this debuff on enemies is going to be amazing. I mean, it’s no secret that Sampo has been talked about a lot in the community as one of the best team mates for Kafka. Although even if things sound good in theory, it’s always the damage numbers that bring the clearest results.

And the thing is, from what I understand, Kafka applies Shock DoTs in an interesting way. I am specifically talking about her talent, which will trigger a follow-up attack from her when any other ally in the team attacks an enemy. That same enemy will then get attacked by Kafka and, at the same time, Kafka will also apply Shock DoT.

First of all, in order for Kafka to utilize her kit efficiently, you will need to adjust her speed so that somebody else can attack an enemy before her. And once that is done, when you use her skill, if the enemy is already afflicted by DoTs, they will receive additional damage.

For example, Sampo would need to go before Kafka, apply his Wind Shear on the enemy. Then, if you also have Serval, she would need to go next and then afterwards Kafka could benefit from all those DoTs placed on the enemy.

Obviously, there’s also Ultimates we need to keep in mind. Honestly, I really like a team that’s focused on dishing out tons of damage over time and Sampo is already a beast by himself in Simulated Universe. So, imagine how easy the runs are going to be with Kafka and Sampo together. I mean, I know Simulated Universe isn’t that challenging compared to Memory of Chaos. But even then, this new team is going to be definitely interesting when Kafka comes out.

And the funny thing is, all the DoT characters are going to be available on Kafka’s banner. So, it’s going to be extremely easy to assemble this new team if you’re going for Kafka. And what’s even better, snagging a couple of Eidolons for someone like Sampo is going to be amazing if you can get his 1st, 4th and last Eidolons.

Consideration 3: Luka’s Bleed

Speaking of Kafka’s banner and damage over time, Luka is the new 4-star Physical Nihility character who specializes in Bleeding his enemies.

His whole schtick is playing around the Fighting Will stacks. He will gain after using attacks or when entering the battle by using his technique. And just like Fire Trailblazer, he will consume his stacks and deliver an enhanced Basic Attack, which will deal increased damage against an enemy who has Bleed DoT.

But unlike the Fire Trailblazer, we can see Luka only consumes 2 stacks to deliver the Enhanced Basic Attack, which is great. Because that means he can use this attack more often and unload a lot more damage.

Still, the biggest thing about him has to be the ultimate. First of all, he will gain Fighting Will stacks. But more importantly, the enemy will receive a debuff that increases their damage taken, similar to Welt’s ultimate. And then, of course, he will do some damage.

I am not sure how good he is going to be with Kafka compared to Sampo. We still don’t know officially what his Traces or Eidolons will do. But if his damage multipliers are solid, he could be a great replacement for Serval. Because he does increase the damage the enemy takes, which hopefully also means that he helps increase the DoT damage.

Luka, Sampo, Kafka and a healer could be an interesting team to try out when the banner drops and it’s going to be exciting to see how that works out.

Consideration 4: Banner Value

Now, when trying to evaluate the banners, Blade’s featured banner is pretty decent. Although if you’re thinking of building a team with him, then it’s mostly Natasha that matters here.

However, if you do have Luocha, then you will want to pair him with Blade. So, Natasha would be used in another Memory of Chaos team.

But as for Arlan and Sushang, they don’t really have any synergy with Blade. Arlan has been notoriously nerfed before the launch. So, even if he has a similar kit to Blade, he would be better off in a team that’s built around him. Sushang is a pretty strong physical hunt unit. But all in all, this banner isn’t really that great if you’re pulling just for Blade specifically, unless you still need one of these 4-stars for your 2nd Memory of Chaos team.

Still, Natasha’s Eidolons are pretty good, especially the 2nd and 4th Eidolons. Providing some decent healing for badly damaged allies and gaining energy on hit allows her to maintain everyone’s health easily, especially since her Ultimate only costs 90. It’s the cheapest ultimate in the entire game.

And as for Kafka’s banner, as I already said it, it’s an extremely valuable banner for anyone who wants to build a DoT focused team with Kafka. Sampo’s 4th, 5th and 6th Eidolons are all really good. The 5th one allows him to raise his ultimate beyond level 10, which means more DoT damage boosting on enemies. While Serval’s 2nd and 6th Eidolons are incredibly good for improving her energy and damage output, especially the 6th one. If you’re going to be using her with Kafka, this means it’s going to be extremely easy to maintain Shocked debuff on enemies and enable extra 30% damage for her.

Also Read: Honkai Star Rail 1.2: Why Kafka Is The Next Character Worth Pulling?

Consideration 5: Future Warps

When it comes to picking which banner to wish on, honestly it really depends on you, although Kafka’s banner definitely has more synergetic 4-star units that she can utilize.

But we still don’t know much about Luka’s performance and, more importantly, we don’t know how good Blade or Kafka is going to be, despite the rumors about them.

Also, let’s not forget that 1.3 characters have been teased as well. Dan Heng’s new powerful form is going to be a 5-star Destruction Imaginary unit, so I can imagine this guy is going to be a damage dealer. If you don’t have this character in your Honkai Star Rail Account, you have to find a way to get him as soon as possible. And that’s pretty interesting since we’re finally going to be getting a dedicated damage dealer from the Imaginary element.

Fu Xuan is another unique unit we’ll be getting in version 1.3. She’s a 5-star Quantum Preservation unit, which means a new tank is joining the ranks of Gepard, Fire Trailblazer, and March 7th. To me, this is very exciting if you have Silver Wolf, because we can get one step closer to a true Mono Quantum team.

In fact, we will be able to build a Mono Quantum team thanks to Lynx, who is a 4-star Quantum Abundance unit. So, Lynx, Silver Wolf, Seele and Fu Xuan is probably going to be the ultimate Mono Quantum team, you can play in places like Memory of Chaos.

All in all, I would say that Blade’s banner is for those who want to use a cool damage dealer but are fine with 4-stars that have very little to do with him on his banner, while Kafka’s banner is for those who want to build a DoT team.

Finally, 1.3 characters I just talked about will probably have their own 2 separate banners. Hopefully, Fu Xuan and Lynx are going to be on the same banner, so those who already have Seele or QQ and Silver Wolf can build their dream team of Mono Quantum.

The core of Path of Exile is character customization. Most expansions introduce new ways to play the game, sometimes including brand new skill gems. Path of Exile 2 will be no different.

What’s Definitely Coming In POE 2?

In fact, it will be the single largest drop of new skills into Path of Exile in the game’s history. Between introduced skill gems, the concept of skills attached to ascendancy classes, and weapon implicits granting skills as well, once POE 2 hits will be inspired to craft a plethora of brand new builds with a batch of visually pleasing new skills.

We are less than a month out from ExileCon 2023 and the total reveal of everything related to Path of Exile 2. Let’s hop on the hype boat and explore what we do know about all the new skills arriving in this big content drop.

Defined New POE 2 Skills

The long-awaited shapeshifter archetype finally enters Path of Exile with Path of Exile 2. Presently, we’re aware of at least three different shapeshifting forms: the Werewolf, the Werebear, and the Werecat.

The Werewolf will be accessible via a skill gem and function much like an aura. This is probably the case for the other two forms, too. Werewolf users focus on speed, attacking fast and moving fast. The form can be transitioned to and from seamlessly. Inside the form, you will be able to use any skill that makes sense.

The two examples GGG used were Leap Slam and Cleave, although I’m sure many other melee skills will be usable, too. And spell skills are probably not usable in the Werewolf form, although we could be surprised. Similar to the Werewolf gem, the Werebear is also stored within a skill gem, although we never saw it in action. While a Werebear will probably focus on tankiness, its functionality should be the same as the Werewolf.

Personally, I think this will be a form we can briefly swap to and gain major defenses inside. Think of an emergency Vaal Molten Shell or something similar. A huge boss strike is incoming. So, we quickly swap to Werebear form before dancing back to Werewolf or Werecat form.

Unlike the other two former shapeshifting forms, the Werecat form can only be accessed through the Beastmaster ascendancy class, one of three new ascendancies. Due to this, there will probably be more power packed inside this form than the latter two. Plus, it’ll have a specialization in Critical Strikes.

Don’t worry about scaling, either. In POE 2, skills granted by ascendancy classes will scale with the character’s level and not remain static. I’m hoping for a variety of new play styles enabled due to shapeshifting. In addition to adding this entirely new archetype, I really hope it’ll introduce a shift dancing playstyle, incentivizing players to swap between multiple forms and prolonged fights.

The new crossbow weapon class will add a variety of new skills to the game in the form of weapon, implicits, and actual skill gems. Power Shot is a high damage single target attack skill granted by a crossbow implicit, which can be modified by bolt skill gems. In order to have a better gaming experience, I recommend that you prepare enough POE Currency. In this way, you can buy the skill gems you need at any time.

We know of three bolt types: Permafrost Bolt, Armor Piercing Bolt, and Incendiary Bolt. Permafrost deals cold damage and conjures a big field of ice and can freeze enemies. Armor Piercing deals extreme damage, breaking through the armor of enemies. Incendiary sparks a field of fire and can leave corpses burning.

Again, these bolt skills are like auras and can be swapped between to change how your crossbow attack skill of choice functions. They don’t seem to reserve mana, and swapping between them doesn’t have any associated cost.

The Siege Cascade Skill is granted by the Siege Crossbow and essentially acts like the current day's Rain of Arrows skill. You shoot a bolt into the air and it slams down on enemies. Again, your various bolt skills modify how Siege Cascade works.

The second new weapon class coming with POE 2 is spear. Spears boast a host of brand new skills found both on skill gems and on the weapons themselves as implicit modifiers. Every single spear in the game will grant Exiles at least one mobility skill with some granting, too.

One of the spears we’ve seen came with both an engage and disengage skill. The former skill grants increase damage for a short time once used, while the latter unleashes a flurry of projectiles upon use.

Another new skill is Whirling Slash, which creates a sandstorm, which grows each time you use it then explodes when you leave it, dealing huge damage to monsters.

Yet another spear skill gem is Rapid Assault, which does three rapid stabs, then a fourth that does more damage and can possibly stun, rewarding those who position themselves well.

Spearfield creates an area of spears on the ground, which deals bleeding damage to monsters who walk through it. It’s basically a damaging area control skill gem.

Storm Spear fires a lightning projectile, which splits on contact. It is kind of like Lightning Strike.

Related: Will There Be Three New Weapon Types In Path Of Exile 2?

Finally, we have Blazing Lance. Blazing Lance creates a trail of fire on the ground, which can be hit again to Fan the Flames for a burst of damage. All in all, these seven new skills introduced from Spears are absolutely wild.

Path of Exile 2 shall bring a new gem type into the game - Meta Gems. These gems accomplish a niche purpose or enact an odd design pillar, functioning differently from other gems.

Renowned examples are the proficiency, cast on crit, and spell totem support gems. The former can hold all your auras inside it, allowing them to be activated with the click of a button. The latter completely revamps the current spell totem support gem, allowing you to socket multiple intelligent gems into the meta gem itself. For example, you can socket an elemental curse and an elemental skill into the gem and it will know to use the curse first and the spell skill second.

Even though the developers have been steadily revamping and sometimes merely updating the visual effects of existing skills, it’s evident more drastic changes shall arrive at the momentous release of Path of Exile 2.

Some of the speculation we’re about to undergo might be revamped to existing scales or these might be new skills entirely. We’ll have to wait for the end product to see. But there’s sure to be an absolute ton of other visual and animation updates on release, especially with the updated Exile models and bar advanced rigging technology GGG has developed.

Speculated New PoE 2 Skills

Both the Ngamakanui and Aggorat teasers showcased a rapid fire barrage of potentially new Elemental Skills. The Exile in the jungle ruin seems to use a revamped spark skill, curving her hand toward the floor and conjuring a small lightning projectile that randomly zips along the ground.

Afterwards, she either uses a new cold damage skill or gets another revamp skill gem Ice Nova. Finally, the Exile finishes off a group of the infected creatures with a brand new cold damage skill - a meteor of ice. If I were to guess, its name is probably an ice meteor.

Then in the Aggorat teaser, we see the monk Exile use his staff to twirl around another new skill, create a ground targeted arc of lightning and a cone of ice. Both look like completely new scales. Unlike anything else we’ve seen in the melee right now, the monk is also using lots of skills, which could mean a few things.

GGG might have just wanted to show off all these skills and animations. Because they look cool or they could be hinting toward a combo system of sorts with this class.

What if there are new abilities or support gems that incentivize using a variety of skills or damage types to build up for a huge payoff? A combo system of sorts. It’s definitely a possibility, especially for the monk, an archetype known for their wild combo potential.

We’ve seen a dodge roll in the two most recent snapshots of Path of Exile 2. So, how will a tumble like ability enter POE? I’d gander it’s a new skill gem or a basic movement skill, like our basic attack skill. If it’s a new skill gem, we would likely get it very early as a way to introduce new players to Path of Exile’s method of dodging big boss attacks. Roll would be a precursor to Flame Dash and Frostblink, maybe.

Option 2 roll is our new basic movement skill and one of our only movement skills. There is a small possibility we’re about to see a major shift in the way movement skills function in Path of Exile.

Imagine this: we get Roll as a basic movement skill or one of a few movement skill jumps. Instead of having individual hyper focus skill gems, GGG adds the ability for a variety of support gems to modify these new basic movement skills.

Thusly, we could form our own movement skills and save a fair wealth of Flame Dash. But with Flame Trail support and Insta Phase support mixed with the Dash skill gem, you’d have your own with three more supports to use and modify it with. I could see four based move skills possible: Roll, Dash, Charge, and Blink.

As the lots of players were curious about the KR server status, so I thought it’ll be great to share some of those updates & notices for your Lost Ark journey.

Please note: This news is only containing about the improvements and updates on KR server. It does not contain the roadmap of the whole global server.

Raid Updates

Just like the before gold adjustment on Valtan and Vykas, some of the gold reward got adjusted in this update.

Some of the raid was way too easy, but gives too much Lost Ark Gold as a reward. And those higher-tier raids, which need more efforts and times, like Akkan and Ivory Tower, were given too low rewards than the low-tier raid.

Of course, the high-tier raid is also consuming such quantity of gold to beat the raid due to a need of expensive potions and other battle item stuff.

So, now Kakul-Saydon, and Brelshaza Normal drops less gold than the previous version. Also, the high-tier raid and dungeon, like Akkan and Ivory Tower, will give you better rewards than the previous raid rewards.

Also Read: Lost Ark: When & How To Use Esther In Valtan Legion Raid?

The Vykas raid has a really hard mechanic called Medusa mechanic in the Gate 3. And this mechanic will also got patched and removed. So, now you longer need to solve the intricate mechanic during the Vykas raid.

For Brelshaza Normal mode, it’ll drop the ancient material for making or crafting the ancient gear. So, you are no longer to go Brelshaza Normal and hard again to simply upgrade your gear to an ancient level. At the same time, chest opening efficiency was boosted, too. You could make and set your character more fast than the previous version of the Lost Ark.

Besides, the Integrated Dungeon UI can be changed after this update. You can keep use the previous version, but also you can use the newer version, too. It looks simpler and cleaner than the previous version UI.

Additionally, in the token exchange, you can additionally exchange the tripod amulet. Lv.4 and Lv.5 tripod amulet can be exchanged per character. Previous version was a per roster. And this tripod will snap 100 %.

Summer Season Patches

As the summer is here, the new Summer Season event will also begin.

Maharaka Festival Island is opened to start a new event. It’s called Mokoko Pirate Festival. Do you still remember the past event, which looks like Fall Guys?

Not much thing was changed in this update. Mokoko got changes its costume and add one more course during the race. Actually, it’s not bad to play, so try it out if you are playing the game in KR.

Mokoko Pirate Festival opens at every even hour like 2, 4, 6. If you played the Lost ark in this season, in every single content you play, it’ll drop the Event Token, which can be exchanged on the separate event window.

And of course, it contains lots of useful stuff for your Lost Ark journey, like material for honing and legendary card pack and some footstep skins.

At the same time, new Express Season has begun and it’ll give you 1540 support and an engraving setting, which is based on the players’ gameplay data.

But unfortunately, in my personal experience, it won’t provide you enough material for your gear honing. So right now, my Express character got stuck in the dead end and waiting for the next week reset.

But what is really good right now is that it won’t cost any gold for honing to 1490. And as you expect, achieving each section of the item level will give you a lot of useful stuff for honing and other setting. Even the legendary selection card pack is obtainable when you reach 1540.

Ark Pass is also has begun on the KR, too. Just like the other region, Ark Pass is containing lots of useful stuff for honing, cards and some new mounts and pets for your Lost ark journey. And within the pass package, it contains a cool-looking summer background wallpaper on the lobby.

Other Updates

Some of the user convenience patch was also done on this update.

From now on, you can hand over the item to your alt without costing Pheon. It’ll decrease the trading counts, but as I mentioned, it won’t cost the pheons.

Sailing coins and keys were integrated into two types. It is more like shrinking the variation of the sailing item. So, you and I no longer to carry a such many types of coins for exchange in the trading ship.

Also, the ship skin can be changed once more, which is more like a separation of the ship’s function and the appearance. So, you can manage the function and the skin in the separate window.

Engraving function got updated, too. From now on, you don’t have to open the certain engraving by reading an uncommon Engraving Books. All the engraving will be started at level 1. In other words, it’ll opened the whole engraving in level 1 if you already opened the engraving function on your characters.

Warrior class or Shushire character’s body type was adjusted in this update. And one more customizable appearance was also added to the Shushire class - beard. So, now you could customize your Warrior class character with more variation to choose from.

Floors of the tower or spire were also adjusted to 20. Previous version of the tower was consisted to 50, right? But from now on, you don’t have to climb that many floors.

Gear Adjustments

Gear section or tier was updated on this update.

Lot of things happened in the tier 2 and 1, but let us just skip these 2 and move on to the tier 3 right away. The tier 3 section got adjusted. And the change content is more like the compression of the honing session. From now on, you don’t have to make 20 for your gear to reach the 1490 level.

In this update, you only need to hone your gear to 15 to reach 1490 right away. Also, the cap of the max honing level was decreased to 20. And as I mentioned in the raid chapter, you don’t have to go Brelshaza hard mode to make an ancient level gear.

Ancient material also dropped on the Brelshaza Normal, too. So, if you reach the 1490, go to Brelshaza Normal and then you can make an ancient level gear and hone again with more eased honing session.

Besides, the gear effect change conditions are gone. Once you craft your relic gear, you can change your gear set effect right away.

If you used an Express Pass on your characters, you could start right away with your relic gear.

Also, a lot of support for the new player is ongoing right now on KR server in the raid or in many other stuffs. So, if you are playing the Lost Ark in the KR region, it is a nice time to raise another alt or new character.

Emoji Penal

Emojis UI also updated in this update. Emoji panel was added.

More Other Updates

Delain Armen and Balthorr are now can obtainable from the wandering merchant like Wei.

Also, you need to react to the quest sometimes. This express or emotion can be directly accessed through the quest penal on your right.

Brackenhide Hollow makes its Mythic Plus debut in Dragonflight Season 2! So, in this guide, I’ll walk you through the dungeon to help prepare you to take on the Gnolls and stave off the Decay!

By the way, some bosses have lots of high damage in this dungeon. You’d better use WoW Dragonflight Gold in advance to buy some good weapons and armors to equip yourself.

Dungeon Start

You’ll start by freeing captive Tuskarr. You’ll need to release 5 from their cages before you can progress to the dungeon. But there are more than 5. So, you can pick and choose how you want to path through the start of the dungeon.

Watch out for Bracken Warscourges, as these have an AoE fear that needs to be kicked, and they passively increase the damage and reduce the cooldowns of other nearby Gnolls!

This dungeon is full of nasty diseases, such as the Witherbolt cast by Trickclaw Mystics. Luckily, they only cast this ability if there is a Rotchanting Totem nearby, and the bolt can be kicked.

If all else fails, you can dispel the disease. And if you have an Alchemist in your group, they can add an extra safety net by purifying any of the Decaying Cauldrons found around the dungeon.

After the cauldron is purified, everyone can click on it to get a 5 minute extra action button that can be used to cleanse themselves once.

Hackclaw’s War-Band

After you’ve freed five Tuskarr, you’ll get to fight the first boss.

During which, everyone should try to stay as high health as possible since the bosses gain haste based on the group’s missing health. Gash Frenzy is also removed by being healed above 90% health, so you’ll want to do this, anyway!

The nasty combo on this fight is when your tank gets hit by a disorient at the same time your healer gets CC’d by hextrick totem. Break this totem quickly so that your tank can get dispelled since they need to get in front of Rira Hackclaw before Savage Charge goes off and kills someone else in the group!

The other bosses all have other abilities you’ll need to look out for, but most are pretty straightforward. Kick the Greater Healing Rapids to avoid the bosses healing, for instance.

After the boss goes down, you’ll get to head left or right! The left path is a little less kick intensive and is my recommendation for most groups. Though it does feature a lot of group damage from Bone Bolts from the Rotbow Stalkers, which also have a few other nasty abilities, such as the same buff aura as the Warscourges had at the start of the dungeon.

They’ll also throw meat at players in your group, causing nearby animals to fixate them!

Gutshot

Gutshot is the next boss you’ll fight. She’s basically a Beast Mastery hunter, and frequently summons Hyenas and throws traps.

The Hyenas should be picked up by the tank. But they also will fixate on the players that Gutshot throws meat at. You can kite these Hyenas over the traps to root them. You’ll also want to kick Master’s Call to stop the boss from freeing her pets!

After Gutshot goes down, head back across the bridge. Watch out for Stinkbreath’s Stink Breath, which will disorient and damage whoever gets hit. This is a pretty quick cast and will track whoever it’s targeting.

So, if you can react fast enough, you can make sure it only hits one person.

Treemouth

Treemouth is up next, and this boss’s bark is definitely just as nasty as its bite!

The big mechanic to understand on this encounter is the Grasping Vines phase, which works a little differently than it does on Normal and Heroic!

The boss will cast Grasping Vines and pull all players towards it. When the cast finishes, all players within 10 yards get Consumed, which deals some nature damage and locks you inside the boss. If nobody is within 10 yards, the boss gets a massive enrage. So, make sure someone stays in!

Any players who get eaten get the Partially Digested debuff for the next minute, which makes the Consume much more lethal if it happens to them again. So, you’ll want to alternate who gets Consumed each time.

Trash Gauntlet

A final gauntlet of trash stands between you and the Decatriarch after Treemouth falls.

Waves of small adds will spawn routinely until you get to the top. But take your time and make sure to kick the Filth Callers to bring them into the fray.

During this gauntlet, you need to make sure to swap to the summoned totems, as they empower the Fetid Rotsingers to cast Burst of Decay and put a disease on your whole group.

There are some of the Alchemy cauldrons in this gauntlet, too. So, make sure to use these if you can, especially if you don’t have a Disease Dispeller in your group like a Paladin, Monk, or Priest.

The Vile Rothexer is another important mob towards the end of this gauntlet. Stay spread because Withering Contagion will spread if you’re too close to one another, and use your Cauldron or other Disease dispels on this if you can!

Also Read: WoW Dragonflight: How To Unlock The Ability Of Mining And Herbing On Your Dragonriding Mounts?

Decatriarch Wratheye

Decatriarch Wratheye is the last boss, and you’ll need to make sure that you avoid the Choking Rotcloud or else you’ll get a nasty DoT.

If that’s not enough to convince some of you DPS players to dodge it, it also silences you while you’re inside and reduces your damage dealt afterwards!

Make sure to quickly swap to the Rotburst Totem, especially if it shows up in the middle of a Rotcloud. Because if it finishes its cast, you’ll take a bunch of damage and also get a stack of that nasty DoT / Damage Reduction effect.

Brackenhide Hollow is a fearsome dungeon. But I hope this guide will help you tackle its challenges!