So I’ve always had the problem that once I hit a baseline of endgame gear, I mostly stop getting upgrades, I don’t manage to push corruption past like 200, and then I move on to another character.
In discussions about CoF, people have talked about how this gear stalling is at least partially due to a lack of knowledge and clearly since people were often able to take the same builds I’m playing to 300, 400, 500 corruption even before item factions, I guess this must be at least somewhat true. (Now how much time they spend on that I’m curious, but setting that aside for now.)
So my question is: What do you do that lets you go from just starting/clearing base empowered monoliths to your eventual BiS? Breaking down areas of uncertaint.
To be more precise, lets say that we’re starting at a point where you’ve got your basic gear setup, you’ve got resists capped, you’ve got crit avoid capped, you have endurance cap if you’re a life build, etc. If the build has any required uniques, you have those, although perhaps without LP yet. From there, break down what you typically do, with particular areas of interest/confusion:
Loot Filters: How do you go about setting up your filter? How many affixes do you put into the show rules? Just your really important ones? Those plus generic defenses? How many do you need to be on the gear? If you use the advanced settings, what do you set?
What are you willing to hold that is for your build? If you find some gear that looks good, but maybe doesn’t fit into your cap stats yet, what does that look like?
What are you willing to take a chance crafting on? How many of your desired affixes? How many undesirable or useless affixes? Which affixes do you need to be exalted? What about situations where you don’t have a lot of affix shards for the rarer or class specific ones? Then how picky are you if you need to use those shards to make use of the item?
In cases where you can target farm some pieces, either through CoF or timeline rewards, how do you prioritize which you go after first or if possible, how do you set up opportunities to find multiple things you’re interested in?
Personally, I don’t chase BiS items. I just play something until it’s geared decently, can do endgame properly and the build is working as it should. After that, I usually move on to the next. I don’t have any character at level 100 and I haven’t even finished any T4 dungeon.
To me, the grind for BiS gear has increasingly diminishing returns to my fun. It’s been that way for many years now. All I want is to try out builds, have fun with them and feel they reached endgame. After that, it’s time to start over.
Some builds I might be having more fun than others and I might push more. But ultimately, there’s no shame in being an altoholic and not waste too much time into getting them perfect. Good enough is enough.
Sorry if this doesn’t directly answers your question, but I thought you might like to hear another perspective
People set up their loot filters for very specific items and affixes so they spend less and less time looking at stuff. This leaves more time for zooming through echoes. You have to know exactly what items and affixes you want and filter everything else out. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, perhaps try to follow a build guide until you understand the game a little more.
From watching some of the expert players, the general strategy seems to be kill stuff as fast as possible and clear echoes as fast as possible. The faster you kill stuff and clear echoes the more drops you get.
I don’t think there’s any special knowledge. Eventually you get to a point where nothing better will drop unless it has a T7 affix on it, so even crafting is mostly irrelevant. You look for your desired item with one of its 4 desired affixes at T7 (or T6). Then if you can craft the rest of it into something better than what you have, you try it and hope for the best.
I think you’re over-thinking problem. Drops are mostly rng except for a few “targetable” uniques. You just play until you find what you’re looking for or get bored and start a new character.
How long is “You just play until your find what you’re looking for” I have spent 50hrs in corruption 200 and got 0 upgrades. I am CoF player and we are quite restrictive to our own drops vs the MG side of things. Please understand as CoF player we are way behind the odd of getting anything good on our end. 1000 MG players are better than 1 CoF player for MG players each echo in that example is ran 1000x vs as CoF is 1x.
