This is the notification content and activity announcement. We provide 7x24 service. Contact us
This is the notification content and activity announcement. We provide 7x24 service. Contact us
Country / Region:
Language:
Currency:
Send60s
I accept Terms and conditions and Privacy Policy
I want to get information about activities, sales and personal offers
or continue with social networks
Not a member? Sign in
In this guide, we’ll talk about a forgotten unique item, Apep’s Supremacy. We’ll discuss the mechanics of this item and look at any synergies or interesting use cases they might have, especially given the many trend-changing or new unique items that have been added to the game recently.
Apep’s Supremacy is a unique shield introduced in Incursion League, located within Temple of Atzoatl, and is a combination of the predecessor unique Apep’s Slumber on Altar of Sacrifice, as well as Vial of Awakening.
This shield has unique modifiers that allow you to take physical damage from chaos damage instead of bleeding, while requiring you to be poisoned to benefit from its maximum resistance. This set of modifiers, along with Tainted Pact and other POE items, has some interesting potential.
This unique shield is exclusively dropped from a chest in Toxic Grove, a level 3 room in Temple of Atzoatl. Apep’s Slumber is a prerequisite to unlock it, and the other component, Vial of Awakening, can be dropped from the last boss of Temple.
Let’s first look at the modifiers on Apep’s Supremacy. We have a flat added damage modifier that adds (50-55) to (72-80) Chaos Damage. This is equivalent to a level 9 or 10 Added Chaos Damage Support.
Then there’s a very large flat energy shield modifier that adds 130 to 150 maximum energy shield. With a good base energy shield roll and 30% quality, you can actually get up to 280 energy shield from Apep’s Supremacy, which is pretty good. In addition, you also get 30% to 50% Energy Shield Recharge.
Now let's look at the special modifier on this shield that makes you take chaos damage instead of physical damage from bleeding.
Bleeding is a Damaging Ailment that deals physical damage over time, and is generally considered the most dangerous Damaging Ailment in the game. Bleeding deals 70% of the base damage of the blow that inflicted the ailment every second for five seconds, at least from the perspective of the monster that inflicted it on the player. But when the target is moving, the damage dealt is tripled to 210% per second.
Many characters will choose to use Soul of Ralakesh Pantheon Power to make Bleeding less dangerous. It essentially subverts the bleed mechanics so that it deals less damage to you when you move.
But now, Apep’s Supremacy will make you take Chaos damage instead of physical damage whenever you have Bleeding. The immediate synergy here is Chaos Inoculation Keystone, which sets your maximum health to 1 and makes you immune to Chaos damage.
By combining this Keystone with Apep’s Supremacy, you’ll be able to effectively ignore Bleeding. Sure, you may still be affected by Bleeding, but it won’t do any damage to you.
The modifiers on Apep’s Supremacy don’t just apply to Chaos Inoculation. In fact, it’s so strong that it can also be used on standard setups with capped Chaos Resistance. Because the vast majority of builds won’t have a lot of extra physical damage reduction to help mitigate damage from bleeding.
Next, let’s compare the modifiers for a character using Apep’s Supremacy to a character using Soul of Ralakesh Pantheon Power.
A character using Apep’s Supremacy takes extra damage from bleeding while moving. So they take 210% of the damage from hitting per second while moving. While stationary, they take 70% of the damage from hitting per second with Chaos Resistance at 75%. So they actually take 52.5% of the damage from hitting per second while moving, and only 17.5% of the damage from hitting per second while stationary.
Meanwhile, a character with Soul of Ralakesh doesn’t take the extra damage from bleeding while moving, and they take 25% less damage from bleeding while moving. So in this comparison, they’re actually taking 52.5% of the damage dealt per second while moving, and 70% of the damage dealt per second while stationary.
You can see that a character using Apep’s Supremacy with Chaos Resistance capped takes the same amount of bleeding damage as a character using Soul of Ralakesh while moving. But they take much less damage while stationary.
But one thing to note here is that Soul of Ralakesh reduces all physical damage you take by 25% while moving, not just bleeding. So it can be used to protect against physical damage from other sources as well.
Something else that might be useful is that the modifier on Apep’s Supremacy lets you take Chaos damage. But physical damage from bleeding is not actually a damage modifier taken. This interaction happens before damage modifiers taken are calculated. This means that technically, you can still shift that portion of damage to another damage type.
Now, there’s another potential use case for this modifier, and it takes advantage of another unique item, Tainted Pact Amulet.
Before discussing this synergy, however, we should first look at the other modifiers on Apep’s Supremacy plus the 25% Poison Chance. This modifier will give all incoming physical or chaos damage a chance to poison you.
The added Max Resistance modifier will increase all resistances, including Chaos Resistance, as long as you are poisoned. Meanwhile, Poison Expiry Rate modifier will effectively double the duration of poisons on you by slowing down the expiry time by 50%.
This differs from Poison or Ailment Duration modifiers, which are technically a multiplier of the poison duration, but do not actually increase the duration of the poison. This modifier stacks with other sources of slow expiry rate effects, up to a maximum of 75% slower expiry rate.
Now it’s time to discuss the aforementioned Tainted Pact. This unique amulet will make chaos damage heal you over time while leeching life.
Poison itself deals chaos damage over time and bleeds will also make you take chaos damage over time instead of physical damage. This is thanks to Apep’s Supremacy, and this combination of mechanics will allow you to potentially self-inflict ailment, which actually heals you instead of hurting you.
Now the interesting thing about Tainted Pact is that the healing benefit gained from Chaos Damage over time is actually based on the damage mitigated, i.e. the damage you take from the source of Chaos Damage over time.
This creates an interesting balance after it’s been mitigated by things like Chaos Resistance. You want your Chaos Resistance to be high enough so that you don’t die immediately from Chaos Strike Damage, but low enough so that you benefit from the healing over time from Chaos Damage.
However, using Tainted Pact does have one very important prerequisite. For the healing to work, you must keep leeching life until unreserved life fills up. You will need a way to maintain life leech.
You can get this effect from some non-Ascendancy mechanics. For example, the Immortal Ambition Keystone can grant this modifier. To keep you from ever reaching full health, you can also use Petrified Blood and make sure you don’t have 50% or more of your life remaining so that the life leech effect isn’t removed at 50% of the maximum recoverable amount of life.
Finally, I’ll mention Divine Flesh because you might want to use this Keystone with Apep’s Supremacy.
But if you plan on playing a build with a capped Chaos Resistance, I recommend only using Tainted Pact and Divine Flesh in this setup. Because this Keystone turns 50% of elemental damage into chaos damage.
If you choose lower chaos resistance to ensure you get a lot of healing over time from chaos damage, you will inevitably die from the upcoming elemental blows. But without Tainted Pact, using this Keystone with Apep’s Supremacy and focusing on scaling your chaos resistance and other means of chaos damage mitigation is a powerful combination.
So why isn’t Apep’s Supremacy used more often? Honestly, I think this shield is seriously underrated right now.
But that being said, it has competitors like Saffell’s Frame, which provides an extra 1% max resistance compared to Apep’s Supremacy and doesn’t require prerequisites like Poison.
In fact, the need for Poison prerequisite is the biggest downside to this shield. Because it requires an investment elsewhere to really be effective and also makes it less reliable as a defensive mechanic.
So if you’re using a shield and taking advantage of other synergistic mechanics at the same time, it makes sense to really lean into this mechanic.
That’s it for our in-depth discussion of all the mechanics of Apep’s Supremacy. Hopefully, this guide will shed some new light on this for you!
Recommended Article
View More
According to the information released by the developers, Path of Exile 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas is expected to be officially released on June 13th. It adds a lot of new content, such as the current exclusive Mercenaries of Trarthus challenge league and new endgame content. In addition to the new mechanisms and items that will affect the gameplay, players are very surprised by the addition of the pause system.
In POE 2, which is highly sought after by developers, the pause mechanism has allowed some players to enjoy an unprecedented and enjoyable exploration experience. Given the previous developers’ attitudes towards the previous game and the sequel, players did not have high hopes for this Secrets of the Atlas league, but the appearance of the pause system overturned everyone’s views.
Since the current developers’ description of the pause mechanism that players are looking forward to is only a small part in the patch notes, most of it appears in some public interviews with its game director Mark Roberts. Therefore, this guide will explore the operation mechanism of the pause mechanism and the dual attitudes of developers and players towards it.
For a long time, it is not uncommon for players to die because of problems with the game instance or network architecture in Path of Exile as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game .
In fact, in this type of game world, as long as you do not choose the Hardcore mode, it is very normal to die 1-2 times during an exploration. However, the super-strict death penalty in POE will greatly increase the exploration cost of players, whether you die due to skill rotation or network disconnection.
First, all POE currency and loot that you have not collected in the exploration of this map will be confiscated. Secondly, you cannot explore it again by using the same Waystones (even those with the same modifiers).
This will make the player’s small mistakes in a certain battle infinitely magnified, and even cause some newly joined exiles to not dare to try the final boss in the first act, because they are afraid that they will not be able to beat it and make all the costs invested before go down the drain.
Not only that, those players with medium game skills will also use the build that conforms to the current game version for a long time, because they are afraid that the new build will cause them to die in battle, which is completely detrimental to the build diversity advocated by the entire game.
In view of this, the developers added the pause mechanism in POE 2 to change the status quo. In the subsequent exploration process, you only need to press Esc to pause, whether you are in some regular combat or running exploration.
But it is worth reminding you here that if you are playing a multiplayer game, only if each player chooses to pause can the entire exploration time be frozen here. According to Roberts, this is to prevent a player’s pause from affecting other players’ sessions to ensure fair exploration for all players in POE.
If the network environment you are in does not allow you to explore freely in the game, or even cause high latency, the system will help you automatically pause the instance exploration to prevent you from being hurt during the disconnection period. So with the help of this mechanism, those players who often experience lag will have a much lower chance of death than Hardcore players.
Of course, the developers are not partial, and Path of Exile also has a failsafe mechanism for hardcore players: if the game detects that the player’s client is no longer communicating, it will automatically pause the instance immediately. Although the detection element it has only looked at packet loss and frame rate issues, it is fast enough to prevent some abnormal deaths.
After Roberts introduced the pause mechanism in POE 3.26 for players, he said that not all game content in Wraeclast can be paused. In order to fully maintain fairness, all pinnacle boss encounters in the game will not be able to use pause.
Their consideration is to prevent some players from abusing the pause right to cheat, such as pressing Esc to observe what the boss’s next attack is or where the attack range will be.
In this case, the developers believe that it not only retains the highest challenge difficulty in POE, but also allows players to get super high flexibility in other aspects besides this content. They are even very confident that the addition of this system can attract more new players.
In fact, since the developer announced that the pause mechanism will be added to the game, the attitude of players towards it has been mixed.
Especially after the announcement that Mercenaries of Trarthus challenge league would allow players to hire a mercenary to be your 0.5 teammate, players became even less optimistic about the pause mechanism. Because while you are exploring with your mercenaries, you can only mark yourself as paused, and the battle continues.
Not only that, but disabling the ability to pause during pinnacle boss encounters, which are extremely prone to death, is another point that players are very unhappy about.
Originally, the number of deaths and penalties for players in this high-difficulty challenge were already very high. After the pause mechanism was banned, the difficulty of the challenge can be said to have been taken to a higher level.
In summary, the developers added a pause mechanism to balance the exploration fairness in the game and disabled it in some difficult content, but players said that this would make some challenges that were originally difficult to win more difficult, thus further undermining the players’ confidence in exploration. So what is your judgment about it?
With PoE 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas League approaching, are you ready?
As we all know, the beginning stage is always the most critical moment in the game, just like building a house, the foundation is always the most important. A good starter build will always determine whether you can have a far superior advantage when you start the league and enter the endgame earlier, which is a vast difference between having to stagnate for a while because of using an inappropriate build.
Therefore, here we have sorted out the starter builds for various different play styles to ensure that everyone can find the most suitable one for you! Whether you have already chosen your initial equipment or you like to leave it until the last minute, it is always beneficial to get more information and know which builds are more popular. Let’s get started.
Let’s start with a build that is likely to become mainstream in the early stages of the league, which is Volcanic Fissure of Snaking Berserker.
While this isn’t a brand new build that just appeared in POE 3.26, it’s perfectly positioned in the meta as a strong successor to the severely nerfed Lightning Strike.
Volcanic Fissure of Snaking is a melee slam attack with great scaling and huge single target damage. When you slam the ground, you create a winding rift that deals area damage as it moves outward. Once it reaches the target location, the rift bursts, dealing damage to the target area, and the rift keeps moving towards enemies, dealing further damage.
Not only that, this build has great synergy with Warcries, and since it’s auto-cast, you don’t even need to press an extra button.
In addition, its spawning power is pretty strong thanks to Ascendancy rework and the use of Endurance Charges and other defensive layers. The explosive visual effects brought by this build will also bring you a feast for the eyes and ears!
Moving on to Penance Brand of Dissipation Inquisitor, which really shocked me by surviving 3.26 patch.
Despite being one of the most powerful skills in Path Of Exile in the past, it has not been nerfed at all in the latest update because of its mechanics and scaling to billions of DPS. And now, with updates to skills like Righteous Fire of Arcane Devotion, it could be even more powerful.
This build is excellent at farming content like Ultimatum and Simulacrums, and can even handle endgame bosses if you’re willing to spend some POE currency to equip it with the right unique items.
While it’s not a fast clearer, it can be very efficient when you commit to the right farming strategy. Not only does it give you the thrill of a rain of Divine Orbs dropping, but the entry cost is fairly low and more importantly it scales impressively into the late game, which is why this build has always been at the top of the popular build charts over the past year.
Next up is Explosive Concoction, a pure League starter that can be used as a temporary build while you prepare for a real endgame setup.
For this build’s Ascendancy, Slayer class is the first choice for most players, but in fact, any class on the right side of the passive tree is applicable, and its flexibility determines that it can be your excellent League starter. Even if you don’t choose Ascendancy class, it can still help you get to the endgame, which is exciting!
Then there is Poisonous Concoction of Bouncing Pathfinder, which is also a strong starter build.
Poisonous Concoction causes projectiles to bounce randomly in a non-linear manner, and the damage of the explosion scales according to the area of effect.
Note that choosing this build as a starter does not mean you have to use it for the entire League. It is perfect for fans who are eager to build a small army of soldiers, starting with the low-cost and reliable Archer Skeletons, and transitioning to Skeletal Mage on a small budget.
If you like to summon an army to help you, then this build is definitely for you, it is arguably the best minion build for early leagues. It has always been strong, and the latest patch has given it some indirect buffs.
Also, there is a very interesting build, Flameblast of Celerity Totem, which is probably the most buffed skill in POE 3.26 update.
It now does 660% more damage at the maximum stage, and the new gem quality increases its damage by 40%. Since you can get a gem quality of up to 104 by using Ashes of the Stars and buffing it to level 4, it means that the quality alone can cause 208% additional damage.
Therefore, the damage effect brought by this spell totem is absolutely ridiculous, you don’t even need to worry about aiming or charging, the patch gave it a better cast speed and lower mana cost.
Finally, my personal favorite Lightning Arrow Deadeye build is a lot of fun, traversing the map at the speed of light, leaping over enemies and firing thousands of projectiles. Although Arrow has been nerfed in POE 3.26 and doesn’t perform well on a budget, this is also the right starter build for you if you want to have fun.
In short, no matter what your play style is, you can find the best starter build for you here. Maybe you can try something new, they may bring you unprecedented experience!
Last week, after the developers of Path of Exile held a live broadcast about 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas League, they released a full description of the entire update, and the introduction of some new and improved features made many players look forward to this new league.
However, the changes to Shaper of Winter passive skill of Elementalist, Ascendancy class that players have always loved, have caused opposition from some players who are keen to use elemental damage such as freezing and frost to complete all campaign content, because its effectiveness has been greatly weakened compared to the previous patch.
But in fact, it is not. This guide will compare the current description of Shaper of Winter in the game with its update notes, and analyze for you from multiple attributes and statistics presented to you whether this change is a sign of the developers giving up this style of play or an early attempt to find a different way.
This 3.26 patch notes originally released by the developers state that the changes to Shaper of Winter include increasing the maximum Cold Ailments Effect by 50%, increasing Chills inflicted by each hit, and removing the previous effect of reducing enemy movement speed by 15% - 40%.
Instead, this Notable will only cause enemies that are Chilled by you to deal 50% of your Chill Effect. For example, if you can deal 30% Chill, the damage dealt by Chilled enemies will be reduced by 15%. Not only that, these already Chilled enemies will be more vulnerable to this longer duration damage, and the damage they receive will be increased by the Chills effect.
With this change, builds with Shaper of Winter Notable activated can still rely on strong offensive gear with high POE Currency investment to have strong Chills damage even when taking any type of hit damage, which is very suitable for encounters with monsters with strong offensive capabilities or elite monsters.
However, the developers made another change to Shaper of Winter Ascendancy Passive Skill in the patch notes of June 9 update: the previous slow down debuff of up to 40% was returned to players, which means that your powerful Chills damage and action speed debuff can help you complete encounters with more flexible bosses more easily and smoothly.
Judging from the comments in the player community and social media, the biggest complaint from players about the changes to Shaper of Winter is that the developers removed a lot of direct damage buffs that players saw and added new effects that did not directly make their builds more powerful.
But if those players calm down and analyze rationally, they are likely to modify their negative comments. First, before determining how much actual damage you can get from the modifiers that Shaper of Winter provides to Chills. If you only have this one damage type in your build, then a 30% modifier means you can cast 30% more damage.
It has to be said that in the more than ten years of POE development, there is no optimal build that focuses on only one source of damage. So if you add gear that can cast Unnerve debuff to your build and buy POE currency to increase your spell damage by 10%, then the actual damage gain from the modifier provided by this passive skill may only be 27%.
Of course, when making a build, you must add some crowd control modifiers, such as Shock debuff that make enemies stand still and vulnerable to damage, which can generally be up to 50%. With these modifiers working together, the additional damage provided by the modifier of Chill damage buff may only be 18%-19%.
In addition to this, like chaos damage, vulnerability, and physical damage modifiers that can be added to a build will reduce Chill damage bonus that the original Shaper of Winter had, preventing it from being able to reach its maximum effect.
So it was a very correct decision for the developers to remove this passive skill effect that is not conducive to players’ exploration in the game and balance the offensive and defensive effects brought by Shaper of Winter.
First of all, the up to 40% enemy speed debuff that players had before is still there, so your build defense ability has been greatly improved. And reducing the enemy’s damage ability by half will put you in an advantageous position in the battle from the beginning.
Secondly, on the offensive side, you can combine Chill effect of this passive skill with Bonechill Support, so that you have higher cold damage and can more easily deal with enemies and bosses that have no resistance to this element type.
Not only that, in POE 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas League, the developers will bring some new Uniques to players, among which Ahuana’s Bite, a Unique Quiver, makes up for Chill Effect buff removed by Shaper of Winter in the build. And most importantly, it will not stack with other elemental damage affixes.
So in summary, Shaper of Winter changes are actually good news for builds that focus on cold damage, but builds with a variety of elemental damage may see some nerfs when using this passive skill, but it’s not a big deal.
Which builds are likely to be most affected by this change? Those builds with limited access to increased damage taken on the enemy are probably some of them.
Of course, in the regular exploration process after the new Secrets of the Atlas League is released, we highly recommend heading over to the major communities and social platforms to find the build that works best for you. And here will continue to pay attention and introduce it to you. I wish you a happy game!
After the live hosted by the developers to introduce the new content contained in Path of Exile 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas, players are getting more and more excited about the arrival of this long-awaited new league, because some changes it has will greatly improve the game experience that players can get.
For example, the crafting mechanism. In all previous leagues, the crafting system can be said to be one of the most important game mechanisms in POE, because it allows all players to make a piece of gear that can be used to increase their own combat or defensive capabilities through some efforts, so as to explore more freely.
In Secrets of the Atlas, the developers have made comprehensive improvements to the crafting system, including the introduction of some new crafting mechanisms and improvements to some existing mechanisms, which will help you find Zana in Atlas more easily and complete all the campaigns in the game.
In order to let all exiles master it faster, here will be an in-depth discussion of the new crafting system in POE 3.26. However, it should be noted that since there is still some time before its official release, some properties or statistics introduced in it may change. Everything is subject to the official release.
In this League update, the developers have added two new crafting mechanics for players - Memory Strands and a new pinnacle crafting currency. Here are their specific effects.
This new crafting mechanic is currently the highlight of PoE 3.26. You can find Memory Strands on the item description of high-tier loot picked up in Memory-influenced maps, and the value it has will affect the quality of the item after Scroll of Wisdom, up to 100.
Although the value of Memory Strands on the item is completely random, you can replace or add modifiers to it by applying POE Chaos Orb or Exalted Orb to make it more likely to generate a higher quality random affix for the item.
However, it should be noted here that Memory Strands cannot be used in other non-currency crafting methods, such as fossils or crafting benches.
Thanks to Zana, PoE 3.26 adds three new Pinnacle Bosses - The Incarnation of Dread, Neglect and Fear - who drop new loot with unique effects, such as Starcaller Axe, as well as some new exclusive crafting currencies:
In addition to the new crafting mechanics above, the developers have also improved existing systems in the game, such as Betrayal, Recombinator, and Syndicate crafting bench. Next, here will introduce them one by one.
In POE 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas, Betrayal league mechanic, which has existed for more than 10 years, has undergone a major change: Veiled modifiers that were previously unique to it will no longer be obtained through uncovering items.
Now, they have become the core of the current game. When you find some Veiled Items in a boss encounter or some endgame maps, you can right-click at any time to open Unveil screen, which greatly facilitates the player’s exploration process.
Betrayal changes bring back Veiled Chaos Orb to the game, which can allow you to reforge rare items with random modifiers and add Veiled Modifier to them.
However, in the current game content, it has been renamed Veiled Exalted Orb, and its effectiveness has changed a bit: it can remove a random modifier from an item and add a Veiled modifier to it.
Introduced in 3.25 Settlers of Kalguur league, Recombinator was very popular with players when it was first launched because it allowed you to combine two non-unique items with the same base into an item with a random combination of modifiers.
However, due to the randomness of the modifiers that are included in the final items, many players have received completely useless or extremely bad modifiers after handing in some items, which has caused a lot of complaints.
So in this update, the developers have added an option for players to choose their desired modifiers to make this random event a fixed event that players can create.
In previous game content, completing the raid of Syndicate safehouses and spending POE currency awarded to you to craft high-quality gear was a favorite among players. Previously, players only received crafting materials and currency, but now, the crafting bench will also have pre-generated craftable items and other rewards.
Above are some of the new additions and production changes that the developers have brought to players with Path of Exile 3.26 Secrets of the Atlas. In fact, judging from the live and update notes held by the developers, this new league must be a carnival for new and old exiles, and everyone can feel the sincerity and repentance of the developers in it. I wish you a happy game!
