News Tag: POE League Start

The Guardian of the Chimera is one of the four Shaper Guardians. Next to Guardian of the Hydra, Guardian of the Phoenix and Guardian of the Minotaur, he is one of the "Guardians of the Void". Each of these Guardians drops one of the Fragments required to access the Shaper encounter, one of the pinnacle bosses. In order to fight Chimera, you have to open a Pit of the Chimera Map where he acts as the Map Boss.

These Shaper Guardian Maps are Tier 16 and can be rolled with many Modifiers to increase their loot and difficulty. Shaper Guardians are a lot harder than typical Map Bosses, but also have specific loot tables.

Guardians of the Void - Boss Guides:
*Pit of the Chimera Map - Guardian of the Chimera
*Lair of the Hydra Map - Guardian of the Hydra
*Forge of the Phoenix Map - Guardian of the Phoenix
*Maze of the Minotaur Map - Guardian of the Minotaur

The Shaper - Boss Guide:
*The Shaper's Realm - The Shaper

Loot Table
In addition to regular loot, the Guardian of the Chimera has the following boss-specific drops:
*Fragment of the Chimera (100%)
*Perfection
*A Familiar Call

Skills Breakdown
Default Attack
The Guardian of the Chimera strikes with his Claws at close range, dealing Physical Damage.

Flicker Strike
The Guardian of the Chimera attacks with the Flicker Strike ability, dealing Physical Damage.

Charged Attack
The Guardian of the Chimera charges up and performs a triple strike attack. The first two Attacks are single Claw Strikes, while the third is a double Claw Strike dealing Physical Damage. Make sure to side-step this ability.

Combo Attack
A red Circle appears and everything within takes heavy Physical Damage from Chimera's stab and slash attacks. Make sure to move out of the Circle immediately.

Tip: The total damage of this ability is spread between all targets in the area. If you have many minions or totems, you can use those to soak the damage and stay in the circle.

Hide Attack
After each Minion Phase, Chimera starts hiding, performing Hide Attack. It is highly recommended to use a Quicksilver Flask to run over the Smoke Clouds faster, until you find Chimera. This ability can take out most builds if you are too slow with uncovering him.

Flicker Lance
The Guardian of the Chimera charges forward and slashes everything in front of him, dealing Physical Damage as well as inflicting a Bleed debuff.

Boss Mechanics
Once you enter the Boss Arena, you find the Guardian of the Chimera in the center. Engage him, but beware of his abilities. If you out-range his Melee Strike Range, he either chases you or uses his Flicker Strike ability.

The fight itself is split into 2 major Phases: The Boss Phase and the Minion Phase, each repeating multiple times.

Boss Phase
When you enter the Boss Arena, you start off by facing the Guardian of the Chimera in a 1v1 situation. He uses his common Abilities like default Attack, Charge Attack, Combo Attack, Flicker Lance as well as Flicker Strike. Make sure to check out the Skills Breakdown above to learn more about each of the abilities.

After each Minion Phase, Chimera launches his Hide Attack. Get through the Smoke Clouds to uncover the Chimera quickly to end this lethal Phase, especially if you don't have a decent amount of Armour or Evasion on your Character.

Minion Phase
Once the Guardian of the Chimera reaches 75%, 50% and 25% of his health, he teleports out of the Arena and the Minion Phase begins. There are 3 gates in the Arena, one on the West, one to the North and East respectively. In each of the Minion Phases, 3 monsters per gate, per turn enter the Arena to defeat you.

Each wave has to be fully defeated to spawn the next. The fourth wave also features a unique mini-boss spawning from the Eastern gate. Only after you defeated all 4 sets of adds the Guardian of the Chimera teleports back into the Arena and the Boss Phase repeats.

There are 3 different Sets of Monsters that spawn in a randomized order:
*Goatmen with Avatar of the Goat as the mini-boss (Physical Abilities)
*Snakes with Avatar of the Snake as the mini-boss (Chaos Abilities)
*Hellions with Avatar of the Hellion as the mini-boss (Fire Abilities)

Summary
In conclusion, here are the four important tips you may need.
*Avoid getting hit by Chimera's avoidable abilities such as Combo Attack and Charged Attack.
*Bring a Quicksilver Flask to help with the Hide Attack.
*Chimera can apply Bleed, consider a form of Bleed Immunity such as Flasks.
*Defeat add waves to force Chimera back into the Arena.

Infinite Heist Farming is a strategy that should be used exclusively on your first character of a league to get your initial gear and Currency to make end game progression far easier. The strategy can be done on any character with 0 investment, the only requirement being that you are level 61 - 67. The primary goal of Infinite Heist Farming is to accumulate a good amount of Raw Currency while completing the Chaos Orb vendor Recipe as fast and as often as possible. In this Infinite Heist Farming guide you learn how to maximize your loot, set up the strategy and optimize your play with essential tips and tricks.

Profitability
This strategy is one of the strongest ways to obtain early Currency, netting a greater accumulation of net worth than entering maps immediately, which is crucial for purchasing important upgrades for your build quickly.

The Currency you earn from the Infinite Heist comes in the following forms:
*Chaos Orb Vendor Recipe

*Raw Currency

*Rogue's Markers

*Uniques
Because you're able to focus solely on acquiring Currency, while netting yourself some useful Uniques along the way, this strategy easily outperforms jumping straight into maps. Most people who do so are forced to make due with whatever scraps they find, while you can cherry-pick the gear you need from the Market.

Requirements
Infinite Heisting has a low gear requirement compared to white maps, with most builds being viable with ~3000 Life and capped Elemental Resistance. Builds that can move fast excel in the Heist, but even slower builds can succeed easily. It’s important to prioritize additional Defence on your build, because you drop your loot upon death after the alarm trigger mechanic is activated.

You need at least one Rogue's Marker to enter the location that we need to actually start farming Infinite Heist, markers drop in stacks off any monster so you should have some from the campaign.

Gameplay
The infinite in "Infinite Heist" is achieved by purchasing Heist contracts from the Rogue Harbour Contract Vendor Whakano and running them using the methods in this guide until levelling up. Every time you level up, the contract vendor refreshes and you can purchase any desired contracts once again.

After levelling, create a Book of Regression by vendoring an Orb of Scouring and a Scroll of Wisdom to any vendor. Use the Book of Regression to de-level yourself, at which point you can level up once again and refresh the contract vendor giving you yet more contracts. This method is repeatable infinitely and allows you to Heist permanently.

This strategy is viable between the levels of 61-67 with lower levels (61-64) requiring less XP to trigger level ups and higher levels (65- 67) allowing access to higher level Gems, gear and more passive points. Levelling past level 67 is strongly discouraged since Whakano only sells level 67 contracts. As your level increases the time between levels does too, meaning you will no longer be able to sustain purchasing and de-leveling with contracts as you out-level them.

Tips And Tricks
*Dealing With Doors
When unlocking doors with your rogues, enemies routinely amass on the other side and wait for you to attempt to enter the room before attacking you all at once. Strafe across the doorway entrance once the door opens to create an opening for you to move through safely. This avoids triggering their attacks immediately.

*Securing Your Loot
If you drop a valuable Unique, Divination Card or Currency item like a Divine Orb, it is safer to leave the contract area and deposit them into your stash rather than finishing the contract in one go. Doing this ensures that if you were to die after triggering the alarm, you won't lose these valuable items as you have already deposited them into your stash

*Hidden Loot
The final room contains safes that can be opened for additional loot in some contracts. Keep an eye out for these as they are often hard to see if you are not actively trying to find them.

Set-Up
Unlocking Your Rogues

Upon reaching the start of Act 10 head to the Rogue Harbour by right clicking on a Rogue's Marker. DO NOT finish the campaign and defeat Kitava! Doing so reduces your resistances, making it more difficult to engage in Infinite Heisting. Head  to Whakano on the left-hand side of the Harbour, select ‘Purchase Items’ and buy any contracts listed below as “profitable”. In order to unlock and meet rogue level requirements, complete these steps:

*Unlock Huck - Run a Lockpicking, Perception or Agility Contract with Karst. If they aren't available, return to the campaign to farm Blood Aqueducts in Act 9 until you level up again and reset the vendor contracts.

*Unlock Tullina - Run a Demolition or Brute Force Contract using Tibbs.

*Unlock Nenet - Run a Trap Disarmament, Agility or Lockpicking Contract using Tullina.

*Fully Unlocked - Using Karst, Nenet, Tibbs & Huck you can and should be able to run all recommended contracts available at the vendor.

Contracts have level requirements attached to them and Rogues gain experience when you bring them along on a heist that is completed successfully. The level requirements of Vendor Contracts are trivial and after a few runs of their required skill, they should reach the requisite level for you to run everything.

Caustic Arrow Ballista Trickster is a great all around League starter. It kills bosses with tons of Poison Stacks and clears entire screens of monsters with its huge amount of overlapping projectiles. This build abuses a clever combination of Unique Items to get huge damage bonuses.

Caustic Arrow Ballista
Caustic Arrow is a ranged Bow attack that has an initial hit which triggers area damage, followed by spreading Caustic Ground. In this build, you are focusing on the hit portion, which allows you to Poison enemies.
What makes this skill special is that it can overlap several times when stacking "additional projectiles", giving it great bossing and clear potential. You do not scale the secondary Caustic Ground effect, since it cannot stack or poison enemies and has therefore mediocre damage potential.

Ascendancy

*The Trickster is an easy choice for Caustic Arrow as it offers incredible boosts to damage, Life Recovery and Defensive Capabilities.

*One Step Ahead increases your Movement and Attack Speed, while making enemies around you slower. It also protects you from certain slowing effects!

*Polymath is one of the strongest Ascendancies currently available in PoE. It provides damage on top of Life, Mana and Energy Shield Recovery. Can't ask for more!

*Heartstopper is a versatile defensive boost. It's a little random but also extremely powerful whenever it works in your favor!

*Swift Killer gives you extra Frenzy scaling and increases the Duration of your Charges, making it easier to keep them up at all times!

Mistakes to Avoid
1) Scaling Caustic Ground and not Poison
Caustic Arrow has 2 separate damage portions:
*Initial hit, which applies Poisons (which you are interested in)
*Caustic Ground, which gets applied afterwards and is a Damage over Time effect, however it is NOT A POISON. (which means you are NOT interested)

This is so important to distinguish, because Poisons scale off your Weapon Physical and Chaos Damage, while the Caustic Ground scales more like a spell. This can be confusing for people when it comes to choosing your weapon, so here's the gist:
*Get as much Physical or Chaos weapon damage and attack speed on your Bow as possible, just like any other Bow Build.
*"+ to level of socketed Gems" is worthless, since it does not increase your Poison Damage at all.

2) NOT having 100% Chance to Poison
100% chance to poison is not something to just aspire to, it is mandatory and every % missing costs you a ton of damage. Your biggest source of chance to poison is Snakebite, which means keeping your Frenzy Charges up with Frenzy is a must at all times. Thankfully, having Swift Killer means that you have 200% increased Frenzy Charge Duration, making this incredibly comfortable.

Since your Build changes several times, you have to revisit your chance to poison whenever changing gear and make sure it is at 100%. You can check this by pressing "c" ingame and going to your Caustic Arrow setup.

3) Ignoring your Accuracy Rating
Caustic Arrow is an attack skill, therefore it adheres to Accuracy Rating. The amount of Accuracy you need to get 100% chance to hit depends on your Level and the enemies level. The only way to find out how much chance to hit you currently have, is on your character sheet by pressing "c" and select your Caustic Arrow setup.

You want to focus on Accuracy on Gear (Rings, Quiver and Helmet). If necessary Acuity and Precision can temporarily help out, but you want to remove them at endgame, since everything over 100% chance to hit is wasted!

4) Not using extra Life Flasks on Bosses
Before big boss fights, don't hesitate to put on extra Life Flasks. This, coupled with the Ryslatha Pantheon, ensures that you never run out of Life Recovery during prolonged fights!

Always keep a Quicksilver Flask though, since it allows you to get out of the way of boss mechanics quickly.

Skill Gems:
Gems are a fundamental part of your build. Getting the correct link setups before entering Maps and leveling those Gems as you progress through the Atlas is one of your main goals. This is how your Gem setup should look like before entering Maps:

Caustic Arrow - Ballista Totem Support - Greater Volley Support - Awakened Deadly Ailments Support - Awakened Unbound Ailments Support - Lifetap Support

Caustic Arrow - Mirage Archer Support - Lifetap Support - Greater Volley Support - Unbound Ailments Support - Awakened Deadly

Ailments Support - Frenzy - Greater Multiple Projectiles Support
Culling Strike Support, Steelskin

Grace - Purity of Elements, Blink Arrow - Faster Attacks Support

Enduring Cry - Summon Stone Golem - Withering Step - Lifetap Support

Mark of Submission: Despair

Skill Tree

Playstyle in Maps
Focus on placing your Ballistas down while moving, and having your Quartz Flask up at all times to phase through enemies.

Since you are a Damage over Time build enemies don't die instantly, so being able to rush through them while they die behind you saves you a ton of time. With a good loot filter, you won't miss any items or Currency.

Make sure that you keep up your Frenzy Charges, since you otherwise lose the buff from Snakebite. Always be full on charges!

Periodically activate your Mirage Archer, Vaal Haste and Enduring Cry!

Playstyle against Bosses
Focus on having your Ballistas up at all times. A lot of Bosses move, so make sure your Ballistas are not out of range or dead.

Always keep your Frenzy Charges at full stacks.

Always keep your Curses up. Temporal Chains and Despair together nearly double your damage!

Cast your Mirage Archer Support setup every 4 seconds, for maximum DPS.

You don't need to stand still, just let your Ballistas do the work while you dodge enemy attacks. This is one of the huge advantages these builds have, so use it!