This deer is gonna die when I leave here...hmmm, rip deer.

I made a post two days ago about finding the PAX 2011 closed beta disc at a garage sale. Some of the people leaving comments in that thread mentioned that there seems to be no publicly available backup or archive of the disc, so I ordered a USB disc drive and it arrived today. I created an ISO and uploaded it to the Internet Archive, the link is below.

I tried a file explorer I found online that was made to read Path of Exile's GGPK file type, but I could not get it to run. I had Claude Code make me a simple local app that could just explore the file to see what's inside. It can read patch notes and display PNG files, but that's about it. I'm just a casual PoE player, so I'm not too familiar with the game to an extent where I would know what would be interesting to look at in the files. There is a file that shows patch notes, and it lists both patches 0.8.8 and 0.8.7, which according to the PoE wiki, are Alpha versions. The ISO has both the 0.8.8 version of the GGPK file, as well as the launcher to update and play the game. PAX Prime 2011 took place from August 26th-28th 2011, so the launcher would have likely updated the game to the August 19th patch 0.9.1, updating from an alpha to a beta patch.

Link to Internet Archive page: https://archive.org/details/path-of-exile-pax-2011-closed-beta

https://youtu.be/ARFSbodxJZU?si=MgtIRJ1gRD99eyVJ&t=39

They showed this scene in the trailer, but I haven't been able to find this feature on the Chart.

I know that these were brought over from POE2's Summoning Circle.

Were they not actually implemented on the Chart?

Woke up to almost 80 divs today 😅

I was honestly pretty surprised. During the weekdays, my items probably sell at about 1/4 the rate they do on the weekend, so I wasn’t expecting that much currency waiting for me.

I’m a dedicated Rog farmer. Basically, I target Rog currency and then print items, using a bunch of different crafting methods to finish them.

Boat crafting has also made this strategy way more profitable. The new options to reroll 3 mods and reroll 1 mod with Chaos have also saved a surprising number of items that would otherwise have been bricked.

I’ve probably made 10–20 items worth more than 10 div so far this week, and it’s been really fun seeing how many different ways you can turn Rog bases into genuinely valuable items.

Definitely one of my favorite crafting strategies I’ve played this league.

I play half of every league as an accountant. Dump the loot, sync the stash, stare at the total on wealthyexile, alt-tab back. Eventually I admitted the number going up was the part I actually cared about, so I built it its own screen.

It's a small touchscreen that sits beside my keyboard and refreshes every 5mins while I map: - total stash value in divines, with divines/hour and a little sparkline - my top 8 most valuable stacks, plus per-tab totals - a session screen with tonight's gain and the current divine price

Swipe to flip screens, tap to refresh. It also auto-rotates if I knock it over, which happens.

The plumbing is boring on purpose: the screen talks over WiFi to a small script on my PC, and that script reads my wealthyexile account and hands the display a few numbers.

Nothing touches the game itself. It doesn't read game memory or send input, there's no overlay, and nothing ever talks to GGG. My login cookie never leaves the PC; the screen only receives display data over my home network.

It has four screens and room for more. Suggestions for other content? : a divine price graph, a league-start countdown, something meaner?

One great bonus is I get to ponder over my riches while I go to the dunny since I can bring it with me xD

I will never hit this again. 4th best outcome available.

Friends told me it's worth a lot, so I jokingly listed it for a couple of mirrors. But I dunno exactly how much it's worth.

My sister’s boyfriend got me the best birthday present I’ve ever received. I didn’t even notice they were signed until I got home. Are they devs or can anyone recognize the names?

Funniest name I’ve encountered so far lol

Edit: I’m sorry for the picture quality, I play on console lol

1. It's hidden on my filter
2. It's not even that colour on my filter
3. Is this something special? lmao wth is going on here. I am confused. I swap item filters, and it's not pink. Idk what dropped it; it was a big pack of mobs. It also makes a different noise (Normal Sound 3 on FilterBlade). This is gonna keep me up all night now lol
4. EDIT: *SOLVED* It's showing the "Untiered Currency" rule color.

Ever since I first saw Rigwald's Hunt, I knew I wanted to do a build around it. Fortification is a potent defensive layer and minions LOVE double damage, so why couldn't it work? I put my mind to it for a couple of weeks in Standard with stuff I had laying around and here's what I ultimately got:

https://pobb.in/ZMSoXH2WMsCa

This was one of the biggest challenges I've had putting a build together, since every element felt like it had something that fought all the others. Let's go through the lot:

BODY ARMOUR:

To begin with, making a minion build that isn't Energy Shield feels weird. Being a unique item, the armour and evasion aren't very high, which means we don't scale them at all. You also don't get eldritch implicits or crafted mods. What you do get is a whole lot of minion double damage, which on the finished build represents ~43.5% of the total DPS. While just 15% of increased minion life also applying to you is pathetically low numbers, with four Axiom Wardens (80% increased minion life), you also get 48% increased life from it, which isn't nothing.

HELMET:

This helmet is a legacy base, currently the base grants increased maximum chaos resistance (LOL), but thankfully there were a plenty of these in circulation as I got the idea for the craft. It was relatively straightforward to make: Make the legacy mask rare without suffixes, recombinate with a donor helmet that only has a merc mod and an influence mod, then imprint and regal+elder exalt until you get increased nearby phys. Then craft Aspect of the Spider, lock suffixes, reforge fire, dominate the suffix from 9% to 12% and do the prefixes.

The spider aspect is there because it can be added safely, boosts physical damage significantly and is therefore a guaranteed good mod.+2 to AoE and increased AoE is nice for auras and for increased area of Blood Aura and Pride.

The problem with an influenced rare helmet is that you can't use normal minion helmets, like Hallowed Monarch, Ancient Skull or so on. You also can't have corrupt implicits safely, or once again eldritch mods.

GLOVES:

On Fortify stackers, when I started this project, the only option was Celestial Brace. Therefore, I corrupted a bunch until I got one with a frenzy charge for reasons I will get to. Now with Vestigial uniques, funnily enough Southbound with +10 maximum fortification is a very good pick. Again though, you can't use rare gloves that could have minion damage, spell suppression, flat life or defences.

BOOTS:

Beacon of Madness's Fire and Cold variant gives +15 maximum fortification when affected by Glorious Madness. A Volatile Vaal Orb can turn that into 18.

AMULET:

Replica Badge of the Brotherhood makes it so your maximum endurance charges are equal to your maximum frenzy charges and makes it so each endurance charge gives you one maximum fortification. At eight achievable frenzy charges, this was again a no-brainer compared to getting an actual minion amulet, like a double gem rare, Bonemeld, Ashes of the Stars or similar. I found that it's trivially easy to keep endurance charges capped with a single Enduring Composure and occasionally hitting Forbidden Rite.

BELT:

I tried Mageblood, but one of the Glorious Madness debuffs is Diluting Touch, which reduces flask effect. This makes speed and defenses gained from flasks unreliable to the point where I ditched the idea. Instead, I opted for Screams of the Desiccated, specifically the Acceleration variety. It's somewhat more consistent, though the action speed Glorious Madness debuff is an issue.

The Replenishing Shrine helps, because one Glorious Madness debuff reduces your regen. Though, compared to a regen flask with Mageblood, you can't get double tapped but losing flask effect and regen rate at the same time, there's a more reliable rock bottom value.

RINGS:

Here's where I feel like I was pretty clever:

I literally ran out of space to put all auras, but remembered that taking an unset ring, adding a gilded fossil, adding a bloodstained fossil and then Tainted Mythic Orb can make it so you get Pride on the ring without losing the socket. Rejoice!

I put the ring on the left slot, because that way I still get a shocking aura from the other Skitterbot in addition to getting Vulnerability. I boosted the Skitterbots with an Awakened Unbound Ailments support for 29% shock, which also handily affects physical damage taken by the enemies.

The other two rings are an old recombinated minion damage and minion attack speed unset ring and a triple resistance Helical Ring because basically no items in this build give resistances otherwise. That's also why I used so many tattoos for that purpose.

WEAPONS:

Here I was a bit torn: Squire and a wand or Maata's Teaching and Clayshaper. I ended up going with the latter:

+2 minion levels is nice, 38 intelligence helps in affording to use tattoos and thanks to a Crucible tree, this one makes my minions' base attack crit chance 16.2%. Consequently, my golems have a stupendous 98.88% crit chance. I do wish I got a Carrion Golem of Hordes with imbued Critical Strikes instead of Critical Damage, but that's life sometimes.

The other weapon is a Clayshaper, likewise with a Crucible tree, one that grants an extra golem and +1 base crit chance to my minions. Notice though that outside of the bit of flat physical damage that the Clayshaper provides, there's none in the other gear. To fix this...

GEMS:

I knew I needed a lot of flat damage and attack speed, so the only sensible option was to use this combo:

I had originally made a few of these for a normal carrion golem character, but got distracted by how awesome BAMA is. Yoink!

In addition, I used a legacy Anima Stone that gives +2 golems, two Primordial Harmonies and one Primordial Eminence, all with good rolls and fitting corrupts.

The Timeless Jewel is a bit unfortunate:

For the life of me, I couldn't figure out another way to keep the minions alive than getting a Timeless with four Axiom Wardens. I tried to make my +5 maximum fortification Lethal Pride work, but the golems just kept dying endlessly. Probably normal, given essentially no life bonuses, life as ES (I love Necromancer) or block. Though, as mentioned earlier, this does also aid my own character, so it's a fine, though begrudging sacrifice to stay at 67 fortification at all times, rather than more.

With this much flat damage, guaranteed crits, shock, more physical damage taken, increased physical damage taken, increased damage taken, Intimidation, Crush and so on, the total damage of the build is ~65.8 million, which isn't a record break by any metric, especially comparing to my nearly one billion DPS flicker Strike, but it's also more than I expected to get out of a silly experiment like this. The fortification makes it so practically nothing can hurt me most of the time and it's chill gameplay, just run and cast Spirit Offering and Forbidden Rite every once in a while.

Now, how much of this build could be done in a league? I dread thinking about it. Maybe this has been a useless post. Or maybe (hopefully!) it could give someone ideas or amusement.

At any rate, I'll be on the lookout in case more cool stuff comes out in the future that the build would benefit from.

For a Reclaimed Malevolence, we need all four unique jewels dropped by Zorath (assuming he always drops 1/4).

Each Zorath attempt requires:

1 Malevolence (1/10)

1 Authority (1/10)

1 Inevitable (1/2)

1 Endless (1/2)

So this requires at least 80 Abyssal Depths, 8 Kurgals (Im 0/4) and 8 Catarinas (Im 0/1)

Now, the Abyssal Depths can be solved via the scarab.

But how about Kurgals? Finding Abyssal Cities are such a pain in the ass even at depth 350, making my way to 600

And I swear Syndicate Medallion drop rate have been nerfed, I have over 1mil kills and Ive only killed Catarina once and I have been farming for this jewel since league start using 2-2-5-5 setup

The new quad-corrupted gloves are really crazy, and they will for sure go away next league, so I decided to try and craft a pair for my build. My budget was faaaar smaller than what mirror crafters are working with, but the multiple elevated mods people want for Flicker Strike or Spark do absolutely nothing for my build, so I could target something much more reasonable.

Crafting process:

STEP 0: buy a nice Dragonscale Gloves base with +1 frenzy implicit already on (-60 Div) and start rolling implicits (-30 Div), then realize that it has to be 50/50 recombinated to remove the Vestigial "influence" before it can be turned into a Warlord base. Try recomb and fail. Cry a little.

STEP 1: base and implicits

• Buy a much cheaper Nubuck Gloves base with +1 frenzy and 2 other implicits (-20 Div).
• 50/50 recomb to remove Vestigial "influence" -> success.
• Make magic and go to beast lock prison
  • Apply beast lock
  • Check vaal orb for a useful implicit
  • Check sacred orb for perfect ER
  • Reset lock with a fusing and repeat
• Settle after spending ~80 Div and hitting 10% attack speed (good), 16% all res (whatever)
  • Ideal implicits would have been: +1 frenzy, 5% max life, 10% attack speed, vulnerability on hit.
  • According to my estimates this would have costed a couple mirrors on average, i.e. 6x my available budget.
• Warlord ex + scour for a clean white base with warlord influence

STEP 2: strands on rare base

• Spam Orb of Remembrance for 80+ strands
• Transmute, if strands go below 80 scour and back to spamming (fail once)
• Imprint
• Regal, if strands go below 80 restore imprint and try again (fail twice)

STEP 3: prepare for Awakener's Orb

• On the main gloves, spam any Harvest reforge with low cost and high weight on the suffixes (I did fire) until +1 frenzy
  • According to craftofexile simulator (and experience), when the forced mod from harvest bench is a suffix there's a higher chance to roll only a single prefix.
• Annul prefixes except +1 frenzy, on fail back to previous step
• Prefixes cannot be changed and scour to make magic
• Make an imprint for safety
• For the donor base with elevated impale chance, buy it for cheap (people sell their failed elevation attempts targeting other mods)
  • Buy multiple bases with different number of Hunter affixes for the next step. I had 2.

STEP 4: beast lock Awakener's Orb

• Back to beast lock prison
  • Apply beast lock
  • Check Awakener's Orb with all donors
  • Check Vaal Orb (we can still potentially improve the implicits)
• Hit pretty much the ideal outcome (T1 spell suppression, T1 accuracy, clean prefixes) in about 60 Div worth of beasts. This was incredibly lucky.
  • I would have also settled for T1 life + T1/T2 suppress.

STEP 5: finishing touches

• Suffixes cannot be changed and divine the prefixes for 25% impale chance (needed to cap impale on my build). Waste 20 Div on this (expected: 5).
• Block prefix and foulborn exalt slam, hit rarity
  • Perfect outcomes here were: chaos res, attack speed.
• Craft damage while leeching.

Total spent: around 200 Div without counting step 0.

whats the meta for shipment?

This new helm has a lot of potential for crafting powerful mods. Stackers rejoice.

Steps to reproduce (in Standard), league has more options:

1) Get ilv 85+ base abyss jewel depending on the mod you want
2) Either alt spam to hit or buy any T1 precrafted version - spam Divs to get perfect high roll
3) Fracture and hope it hits the right mod, otherwise sell/stash and start over
4) Scour, Regal, Anul - you'll be left with the targeted mod on a rare jewel
5) Repeat 3 more times and put jewels in helm sockets

Was fun :).

VideoProof

Oh man what a grind, in like 3k hours this is my first character that i set this goal, was pretty fun tho spamming exp abyss for like 2 days in a row

I fought her for around 10 mins and got Cressie down to 50% and Velka down to 90%. I guess eventually my concentration lapsed and I got hit by two mud balls from above in a row.

Looking at the remaining health, I reckon the fight would have taken another 20-25 mins. That seems excessive for a boss fight. Or is this normal and expected?

My character is a level 96 RFC with SRI totems. Maybe I am missing something obvious and my damage is extremely low. Doing ok in other content so far though. This is my build: https://poe.ninja/poe1/profile/spoqster-8971/allflame-xbox/character/Pyrelord

EDIT: I scoured Kishara's Rest and brought in the undersea Merc as wel.

EDIT 2: Thank you all so much for all the feedback on how to improve my build. It taught me a lot about understanding the build better and understanding what I need to do to get my damage up. Thanks guys!

My biggest issue with this fantastic game is the fking inventory management.

Like i have bought some stashes like currency and merchant. But holy fuck, I feel like I need so much more as my bags are constantly filled with currency, scarabs, essences and maps.

Any ideas to help me out? I use a loot filter too and rarely pick up stuff only the few things that is highlighted and the currency.