Last night, for the first time ever, I killed Uber elder. After the initial shock, I wanted to go over some lessons I’ve learned in the past few leagues that have helped me and could possibly get advice from other players on how to improve.

Some history: I’ve always been more of a casual player. I started in 3.0, but being a father and a warhammer enthusiast I never really payed attention to leagues or anything until Betrayal. I never got past a5 until then. In betrayal I took things a little more interestingly. I looked at Enki’s arc witch and started following my first build guide. I did well ending in t11-t12 with still no idea what I was doing. When synthesis was announced I got hyped. Invested into my first currency tabs and bought a supporter bundle for my first quad tabs. After release I was sorely disappointed. Played for about a month on a bane build barely making any money and hating the mechanic, knowing absolutely nothing about crafting, I felt completely out of touch with everything. I got burnt out. Focused the little spare time I had on warhammer and HOI4/EU4. Legion came and I was late. After the burnout I didn’t come back til two weeks remaining in the league and only just made it back to yellow maps before it ended. I only started blight because well it was next and I was decently surprised.

Lessons I’ve learned: - Follow established guides. Arc was amazing. But Bane was a brand new skill and while I love chaos archetype in general, the fact that it wasn’t established made me question everything I was reading and couldn’t find a good solid way to build things. This only increased my frustration in synthesis with the lack of crafting knowledge and just made me feel completely overwhelmed. I did a 73 minion build in blight and I love it. Not only that but now with all the small things I’ve learned I’ve made small changes to make things even more personalized and feel like I’m getting more and more comfortable with it. New and shiny is great. And Bane definitely has a place in the meta. But when your as new as I was, it was too much for me to figure out how to find that spot.

Currency tabs - buy em all. Don’t regret a single purchase. I don’t buy MTX. Just stash tabs. But that’s just me. I don’t care bout looks. Just function. Buy quad tabs after the specialist tabs. Don’t buy regular premium tabs as they’re just not worth the time messing with.

Tab set up - I’ve learned to set up my stash easily in the most efficient order possible. This is the order mine tends to go in for new players. Dump - Currency - Maps - Uniques - Cards - Essence - Frag - Delve - Quality Flasks - Quality Gems - Vaal Gems - $$$ - Random (mostly 20/20 gems waiting on corrupt rooms, blight maps - Set price tabs. All tabs are listed as public even if there’s no prices. I end up getting offers on things that are obviously low ball and just ignore them. I remember I had a spare unending hunger in my $$ tab I was holding onto that I got for 50c. Planning on getting a double corrupt room to see what could happen and had no price set. Often I’d get offers of 3-20C. I just ignored them until one day a Korean offered me 60c. Figured what the hell, I couldn’t get that room to spawn anyway and sold it.

Trading. Time vs opportunity cost - starting the league I pretty much set my dump tab to be 1alch price. Once I hit a8 I increase those tabs to 1c. Once I hit yellow maps I increase those tabs to 5c. Could I trade and sell more if I payed more attention to the items I’m picking up and priced them accordingly like I did in previous leagues? Probably. But I only have 2 hours to play maybe a night. It’s not worth it to me to spend 20 minutes pricing everything for a few more trades at less than 5c. And if an item is worth more than that I’ll learn it quickly. I remember I picked up a 1 specter chest. Didn’t even look at the mods before I through it into the 5c tab. Almost immediately I got like 20 whispers. Ok pull it out. What did I find? Holy shit 1 specter with 90 hp chest. Put it into the $$ tab and started pricing accordingly. I could probably be making more currency if I was throwing more into a 10c tab. But I’d rather sell things fast and play then sit on it for a while.

Chaos recipe - it’s worth doing at the beginning. I pretty much dump tab everything then a week later whatever doesn’t sell vendors. When going through the dump tab for vendor I do try to do chaos recipe 3-5 times but I no longer stress about searching through another tab once the first runs out of a slot like gloves to vendor the rest. Just not worth my time.

Map sustain - this was my first time using poemaps.live and I loved it. My atlas progression skyrockets. Prior to that I was buying maps and it severely hampered my ability to buy gear. That tool freed up the cash to buy gear. I still buy maps. But now it’s just t15 and t16 to finish out the zana quest line as I found there were far far fewer trades happening of them.

Masters - do em at your highest possible tier as they’re far more efficient. Only ones I’ll do at lower teirs is einhar. Still need to perfect Alva and Jun.

Currency - don’t worry bout it too much. As you play it’ll happen. I’ve only had 2 ex drop all league. Maybe 4 trades worth 100C . Everything else has come from 5c trades and I’m not feeling poor at all.

I’m just so happy I hit my goal for the league. And so shocked it happened so early. I’m still debating on where to go with things next. I know I want to delve but how deep? I’m only 150. Never been further than 200 so I wanna see how low I can go.

I wanna learn more about temples and Jun as I do love betrayal. But just feels bad as I gain no intelligence. I hate imprisonments, and the other option is always execute when they’re already max rank or remove rivalries. Very rarely am I gaining intelligence or getting rivalries/friendships. Ontop of that, the mastermind while fun feels bad when I lose what little friendships/rivalries I’ve built.

I’m debating doing more to learn to craft. But I hate gambling. Which makes everything feel better to just sell and let everyone else take the risk.

Blighted maps are fun. But my performance is terrible. I usually play at 30-45 FPS so most of my deaths come from drops to as low as 5-7 FPS. It’s hard to learn from mistakes and one shots when you can’t even see them. It’s partially my own fault running 4spectors wit phantasm support, zombies, Vaal skelies, carrion golem, and cyclone CwC SRS. But I do love the build. And at this point idk if I want to start over again.

Where do I go from here? That’s the biggest question. HC is never an option due to performance and travel for work (HC Hotel WiFi = F You). SSF could be interesting but I fear I’d be overwhelmed trying to craft for myself.

So where do I go? What do I do to push further and learn more? Start over with a less laptop melting build? Just push with this one to learn Jun and Alva and Niko?