POE 2: Rambling about Chaos Monks and levelling

[@ANDELE3025]

% as extra does work off chaos damage and you can see it in the tooltip. The "% base as extra" works off everything except other "as extra", type specific modifiers of another type that arent applied to base damage and conditional specific damage increases it doesnt fulfill. Its best on builds that do unarmed, bows or scale raw attack (or spell). So if you have a build that entirely relies on "% increased maximum lighting damage" or "elemental damage to ignited foes" the extra chaos doesn't double, yet if you build and deal only chaos, it appropriately doubles it (or if you build raw base, including the elemental damage runes, so a cold runed burning breeze cultist bow setup with 2 iron rings, since they are added damage to base damage, not extra damage). Or a Fervent Voltaic Staff (so 10% damage as extra fire and the staff itself is the lighting bolt lighting damage one) it will fully scale with elemental damage, spell damage, etc, the fire extra (so at low level volt staff from the 1 to 20 lighting the "0" to 2 fire) will scale with all fire things as well, but not the lighting ones and vice versa. TLDR: Treat "as extra n damage" increases as its own extra hit that uses every benefit from the base attack, just doesnt trigger "on hit" things. 10:03 - Defences (aka Global Defences) is all 3 of the armor stats, so Armor, Evasion and Energy Shield (note, in the vast majority of cases its increased not more, like the quarterstaff one, so its additive to existing +n% armor/evasion/es nodes, not 30% to current total, still a very good node). 11:32 - A thing the game REALLY should explain (simply for new players that dont go through the menus like fellow schizos) is that if you open the skill panel and click the little > arrow next to the DPS, you can in the new window that opens at the bottom select which weapon the skill uses. Really good if you want to go glass cannon with active block or mix skills. Also Ferocity Support (uses frenzy charges to use skill faster) works really well on a mixed monk build that isnt flicker strike nor stat stacker, be it with reso if you use power gen/lighting staff skills or without and going combat frenzy on ice (or both). 17:06 - Other commenter went over evasion and Acrobatics is great because it + Wind Dance with quality even from base level 19:10 - Basic attack is only relevant if you want it as your main attack or you want a good early combo builder, it doesnt improve your other hits (but does scale with level and +skill level mods on stuff like gloves and amulets, so does a good job all the way to T6~8 maps despite just being a regular attack). 21:33 - Herbalism (and most non-damage/non-herald supports) work while grim feast is just toggled on (not while you have energy shield), but all of the spirit gems except for the banners which just need a bit more base area and blasphemy which is bugged to not work with half the curse effects are universally good/without need for their effect supports (arguably GF and WD are easily argued to be strong even), including heralds (tho at end game ofc you wouldnt want to waste free damage).

[@ProbablePrimeGaming]

@@ANDELE3025 this is great information thank you! I have some changes to make.

[@Calekoflight]

I was under the impression that Consuming Questions, the mana leech=ES leech wasn't actually working right now.

[@ProbablePrimeGaming]

@@Calekoflight it's been so difficult to validate things. I'll have to test this in isolation. I'll do some googling thanks!

[@aw2031zap]

It is ABSOLUTELY working. I can confirm as I have a Lv94 chaos monk that tried to do an es leech build. I got 10% mana leech, about 60% increased mana leeched from passives, and I used *only* pillar of the caged god auto attacks on Cruel Doryani fight. I was able to instant leech about 500 ES/sec through basic attacks. There isn't a single good phys staff skill in the game right now for leeching, since all leech must be phys leech (or spell leech if blood mage), which is terrible lol. If you want to try a leech build, use a mace. There is some weird leech resistance thing going on related to level, I think the calculation is just wrong, because if you leech in maps, it's way weaker than cruel Doryani. As far as the ascendency goes, "it's fine" if you just take the +chaos res perk, the random chaos damage perk, and flames of chayula. The rest of the ascendency doesn't really function without more stuff being added to the game. You can use darkness if you're a ranged build, but you would be better off using your spirit on things other than darkness, honestly. Herald of Thunder + Ghost Dance or Wind Dancer alone is better than Darkness for damage+defense.

[@ProbablePrime]

I'm also able to see this doing something, it's possible the numbers are incorrect or incorrectly scaled. But just by attacking I can survive. I've made a bunch of changes so I'll upload a new video soon

[@levitastic]

Mana leech only from runes and item rolls? ​@@aw2031zap

[@AlestorNewbern]

Heads up about evasion, unlike block its actually not random. Evasion uses an entropy system to guarantee that out of every so many hits, only x amount will go through, resetting after 3.33 seconds (100 server ticks) of no hits taken/evaded to become random again. Assuming you have 80% chance to evade (though the tooltip can lie, as monster accuracy plays a part) only 1 of 5 hits should actually hit you. While you need a lot of it to feel good, if you fully invest its actually a very powerful defensive mechanic. A key difference because you mention slams, is that evasion only works against strikes and projectiles, area attacks will always hit and have to be dodged unless you take the Acrobatics keystone which gives 70% less evasion and makes all hits evadable. About quarterstaff strike linking, most people forgo it because it falls outside their usual combo. They'd rather use Tempest Flurry or something and it competes for pretty limited support gems in EA. It's a lot stronger than most give credit for in PoE2 though and requires no mana, so its possible its worth focussing on more than PoE1 vets are assuming since in PoE1 default attack was a joke. Chayula monk focuses on chaos damage, so rather than convert physical to lightning/ice with other quarterstaff skills, juicing your default strike and focusing on chaos could be an avenue for a build to go down If you want a tip about staff upgrades, theres a corner of the market I've been exploiting where people forget that they can put 2 runes in for 40% increased physical damage. If you search for staffs >x pdps with rune increased physical damage in a 'not' field, you'll only get things that are unsocketed but still above your pdps threshhold. These are usually criminally underpriced compared to what they'd be with a couple runes in them. I've flipped a few 400-450 pdps staffs from 1-2d to 7d by just socketing them, making them 500-550 pdps.

[@CocoHunter-f5t]

I've tried playing with the default strike, it doesn't feel really good because ice strike and tempest flurry are so much better. You can just dash with ice strike or move forward with tempest flurry. But default strike, you're stationary. Not to mention ice strike freezes mobs in nanoseconds and tempest flurry is a machine gun for charged staff and the bell. Even then, the physical leech wasn't really satisfying imo. I tried it for ES leech, and Ghost dance was miles better than this if you stack evasion. The leech is only great if you attack the bell that covers a lot of mobs. Also the fact about evasion is interesting. Does reality rending also use entropy system?

[@AlestorNewbern]

@CocoHunter-f5t Yeah my assumption is default strike will need some very specific building to get to work satisfyingly, we'll likely see something when PoB2 finally comes. The "issue" with ice strike and tempest flurry is that they convert phys to cold/lightning, and when you're Chonk you'd likely rather focus into chaos and physical since you can't leech off anything but physical dmg now, and the conversion means another avenue to scale since conversion happens at step 1 unlike PoE1 where you can double dip (ie in PoE2 increased phys nodes will not affect your converted cold damage). Ice Strike and Tempest Flurry also just feel so much better to use and leech is in a bad state lol No Reality Rending is entirely random, but the more attack speed you get the more it evens out in the long run. Ultimately you can just average it out since over an entire boss fight you likely hit them for the same amount of procs each time unless you're killing them in only a handful of hits. AFAIK evasion is the only mechanic that uses the entropy system because it's one of the core 3 defenses, and being truly random would have been awful.

[@kit_horror]

Any other potential builds that don't use default strike?

[@ProbablePrimeGaming]

There is this Wind + Crit based build, There's a video here: kzbin.info/www/bejne/d5itXpp-mZKFrZY but I haven't checked this creator in a few days so there may be updates.

[@levitastic]

About chaos damage, i wonder about poison, poison is based on phys attack damage and chaos damage. Based on the end result of the hit. So lets say you do a critical hit, with double damage proc, and u proc poison from it, whats the poison calc? After the 7% double damage added and critical hit, and then poison is calculated, or is poison calculated before the 7% extra dmg hit... I hope the former

[@BoGGoljubGaming]

Hey, thanks for the shoutout and great video, you have probably explained Reality Rending better than me, still need to work on my English skills I guess! Keep in my that the leech only happens from physical damage part that you are doing, elemental and chaos are not included in it. If you press shift when you hover on a skill node, it will show you how does it change your stats if taking that node! Tempest Flurry and Reality Reding work best with high attack speed on your weapon, I would not recommend getting one with less than 1.7 AS, the + to melee skills provide diminishing returns, I have used to run it but switched later and my damage went up massively. I think you would have much easier time if you have capped your resistances and also bump that evasion to a higher level. I recommend taking a look at one of my build guides as I'm running it at 88% evasion while having resistances over-capped and immunity to chaos damage (includes bleeding and poison because of CI). On the last note, work on your SEO and thumbnails, Chat GPT has helped me a lot with setting up the channel!

[@ProbablePrimeGaming]

Thanks for the info! Staff upgrade is next on the "stare at the trade site" for 2 hours. My budget is a lot higher for this next one. I'm already making a bunch of changes, its like a slow rolling snowball. As for channel help, I appreciate it! Oh and I swapped to flicker strike and immediately died in the middle of some scary mobs :D.

[@BoGGoljubGaming]

@@ProbablePrimeGamingI would only go for flicker if you can survive going with Tempest Flurry alone

[@ProbablePrimeGaming]

Swapped electrocute over to tempest flurry and it's working a lot better. I'll do another video soon.

[@Woodi_FPS]

what trade overlay are you using?

[@ProbablePrimeGaming]

sidekick-poe.github.io/