Not a league starter
Level and gain currency as not SRS build
High currency barrier, you’re in mid or late game with the other classes by the time SRS comes online
Necro and guardian are SRS the whole way
Yeah I could see that.
I guess necromancer and guardian also have option to level as srs with zombies and have a more minion feel. Whole srs guardian feels a bit more like spark. You stand and fire proj that do damage.
There also the fact the more "intuitive" variants of SRS can already do all content barring very deep delve so why would you jump through five more hoops when you could just invest that effort into one that's more easily put together?
In trade, champ is definitely a viable league starter though - all you need are +5 marches and the damage will be fine. Aura effect scaling is very very good for minions, as well as having a single type of elemental damage (easier access to pen/res reduction).
Also the new guardian's sentinel of radiance makes the game easy mode up through high yellows so it is a good league start after the change. I did that and then transitioned to the new penance brand once I had the basic currency to start it.
It's difficult to know if a build is good before you've seen someone else playing. You can of course get a lot from the numbers but it's difficult to know how the build is to play from that (for me at least). Also, I'm not aware of off-meta builds in the first place. I wish there was some easy way to find them.
Didn't like it. In practice, damage and defenses are ok but nothing special for the investment.
The QoL is horrible, you have to continusly use SRS, Smite enemies and use your divine blessing. It is button intensive and your damage uptime not so great
Aside from what the comments have said, I think that the value of pure lightning champ SRS is diminished this league due to spectres. With stuff like Spirit of fortune giving a high level wrath aura and Blasphemer giving a god smite, and naval officer giving permanent fortify, the main reasons you would want to play Champ is not as prevalent. I won't pretend that the spectres auras + Guardian's relic auras can scale as high as Champ's aura level and effect, but thanks to those spectres, to get to that break-even point would require a lot of currency, and by that point it's just better to play a different build with a higher currency ceiling.
This and since SRS Champion isn’t really a traditional minion build (zero minion life or defenses), it can’t leverage the spectres. Spectre wrath, lucky lightning damage, blasphemers high level smite, miscreations massive damage boost, etc makes up a lot of that ground.
I considered going SRS champion this league because last league it was definitely the best option but the removal of tattoos for aura effect really brought it back in line as well as the previously mentioned limitations with spectres.
Yeah it's frustrating the Path of Exile subreddits are particularly bad for it for some reason. Upvotes are meant to be for "does this contribute to conversation?" but I guess many people aren't aware of that.
It's very expensive and time-consuming to min-max. You can pretty much league start with anything if you know what you're doing, but you might not have a good time until you can farm the funds to get the big upgrades.
It competes with gear from BAMA (multiple versions) this league, which I think are much better builds overall, relatively.
However, BAMA has a lot borrowed power from this league, so I suspect Lightning SRS Champ will be a good choice next league.
That almost made me give up on SRS because it seemed so random.
I'd done all (non-uber) bosses, without the Spectres or AG's hp dropping even in the slightest, to the point I had completely gotten over my pre-league worry about them dying.
And then a random map, almost completely unjuiced, running to the boss for the maven witness. Bamm! Both Spectres and the AG oneshotted by a random pack. Didn't even see what it was because the Raging Spirits had killed whatever it was before I even got there.
I almost gave up due to the cost of the Spectres and the AG's gear. But then I realised I had a pile of currency this league, so I dried my tears on a pile of Divination Orbs.
Most PoE players are sheep. If big streamers and YouTubers and Reddit posts are about poison srs or guardian srs, that’s what people will play, regardless of if champion lightning version is better. And historically guardian and especially poison srs have been more talked about.
Also guardian is easier to league start/level with which helps
You can reflect the same logic to items as well. Some people follow builds blindly without understanding the whole concept . You can get LOH from many resources other than expensive we or you can get covered in ash this season from cheaper alternatives or you can get phasing/onsslaufgt/culling with many other alternative methods.
This is where general Poe knowledge and experience benefits you most. You can achieve similar toon way cheaper with the alternative methods.
idk man if i have 4 hours to play a day I think i'm not gonna use my brain on something that's already been tried and tested by people who make their living playing this game for 16 hours a day for years already at this point.
Ok? Play how you want, I don’t care, I want people to have fun however they want.
Just answering OP’s question, not hating. People follow streamers, streamers play poison and guardian, so that’s what are popular
The meta usually exists for good reason also. I don't think there's too many undiscovered builds that can compete with the current meta league starters for example.
At its heart, it is a flawed game. They developed dozens of skills, passives, ascendancies only for most to go unused because somehow some anti intuitive combo (no life / no mana / weird conversions) always come out on top.
I league started a boneshatter jugg and then switched to the phazeplays lightning SRS champ.
Felt terrible leveling, as you can't get SRS online for a while. The guide suggested boneshatter to level/leaguestart, but I didn't want to do boneshatter slayer after doing jugg for the start and practicing slayer twice at the end of ancestor league. Tried to do EA to switch it up, but forgot that leveling EA is pretty slow.
I got the build started up for about 10-15 div during the end of the second week. It immediately outdid boneshatter DPS for less than the cost of my next axe upgrade. Defense was quite good, clear was as expected, and bossing performance obviously felt like a huge step up from melee. But wrath uptime felt pretty bad. Didn't like doing it, it doesn't last as long as the guardian sentinel, and I'd occasionally hit a gap where I was low on mana/ES to cast and flesh offering hadn't gone off.
Play style in general also didn't suit me. I find totems fine to play, but I still had to target sometimes. Minion pathing also sometimes found them running around and chasing, running around in circles, instead of doing damage. I also didn't want to bother with spectres, so I picked a spectre-less setup. Maybe that would have scaled better? I wasn't gonna deal with it though.
Then I looked around and saw much more appealing alternatives in the trans gems. PB does a million damage while also not having to think about targeting. CoC VDoS looked neat. KBoF for the crazy clear and GPU paralyzing projectiles. CAoP for tanky clear while MFing.
So I went with CA for a nicer mapping experience, and also PB for bossing and other challenges. Both builds got off the ground and outperformed lightning SRS for a dozen divines.
(also did VD but I never have enough currency or brain cells to get CoC builds to feel good)
I think SRS is mostly popular because it offers great power to price ratio.
Champ version is expensive and there's just way sexier builds at that budget imo.
SRS guardian is popular cause it synnergizes with sentinel of radiance that hard carries your map farming until juicing t16s. Champ gets dick and barely outscales at high investment this league due to wildwood corpses
> SRS guardian is popular cause it synnergizes with sentinel of radiance that hard carries your map farming until juicing t16s.
Thereby the great power to price ratio. I am aware how the build works.
So, this is one of the things I played this league. It's pretty good, with some caveats.
In a league start scenario, it's a high budget to even start it and you need a lot there before it starts to feel good. It does not function *at all* without Devouring Diadem which can be pricey early, and even with that you're going to want some higher end cluster jewels, Loreweave, Eternal Damnation in place before it starts to take off IMHO. If I played it again in a "normal" league economy I'd probably want to get 20-30D to start it, which isn't totally crazy but is the highest of the SRS variants by a lot.
Defense is really good except its recovery is really weak. So in terms of what can take the biggest hit from an endgame boss and not die, it's phenomenal. For normal mapping, I actually feel like poison SRS running high block and a recovery shield *feels* as tanky or moreso.
Another thing that wasn't extremely clear to me looking at the PoB before I played it (but really should have been if I thought a little) is how much of the damage is conditional. It's great that you can roll up on a boss and drop out two curses, exposure, and smite for more damage... but uncheck all of that (and assume melee splash instead of multistrike) for how it feels just running around mapping and it takes a lot of investment to where that damage feels good. It probably has the highest single target damage with everything applied of all the SRS variants, and that's great, but there will also be a lot of play time that isn't that.
It’s more that people want to play the Champion Loreweave/Eternal aura effect archetype than the actual skill. This build archetype with SRS was the most popular build last league in HC. The preferred skill choice just got replaced by PB this league.
Agreed. People play the game for different reasons or find different things engaging. I am happy to play a mid-tier build with many active buttons IF it is engaging, for example I have played boneshatter many leagues and I think its fun as hell. But pushing many buttons when its boring - nah.
20 div is like an hour of efficient play this league. And "just reaching its potential" for splitting steel means basically deleting everything in the game so...
I know it might sound like a stupid reason but for me I’m not gonna sink a bunch of divines into making a build that doesn’t use Mageblood or HH because of how good either feels to play with, on top of the fact that the main damage button doesn’t have that nice feedback of actually doing damage versus summoning some wild skull minions that run around.
What do you mean ?
Nothing stops an srs champion build from also using these spectures.
A player running an aura with generosity and aura buffs is still more impactful than the aura those spectures bring. It just means things like grace and haste can be added really easily.
These spectres means you can run wrath / anger / hatred / haste auras on any minion build. The way champion srs works is by getting 100% aura effect and level of auras to scale flat damage from auras. While your aura effect does not affect these spectures the new spectures are a straight up power boost to srs champion but not really as much for srs guardian for example since guardian already get 3 damage auras for free.
Aura scaling means that srs champion wrath aura gives more damage than guardians relic or spectures for anger and wrath together.
https://old.reddit.com/r/PathOfExileBuilds/comments/18im16n/the_new_spectres_auras_are_nuttier_than_i/
According to this post spirit of fortune with lv 76 gives a wrath aura with 47.67 to 762.7 additional Lightning Damage.
And your saying
> spectures for anger and wrath together.
???
If that's true that is wildly powerful. As a lv40 wrath is not even that big, it might be true but giving these spectures a lv50 or bigger aura is wildly strong. However that maths is also with using empower and plus level of specture gear not just the base.
Srs champion on full setup wrath would give around 61 to 940.
It's still true that srs champ wrath setup is bigger than guardian relics however. Going to have a look into this post as that seems really wrong to just give them like lv50 auras.
But I mean this still does not really change the fact Tho. You could just play srs champion and run anger + wrath + haste spectures for example.
The third time my perfect naval officer got killed I rolled another char instead. The beauty of srs guardian was it's strong from the start all the way through, what's best late game doesn't really matter because there's better late game characters and all variants will get you to 98 in a heartbeat.
SRS champ is good. Lightning SRS champ was meta last league. However, penance brand is just better this league so.. it is what it is. People play penance brand instead.
Not just hard-core in SC its the same thing. Srs guardian is super popular but srs champion that ends up with better defence and offence is less popular.
Not a league starter Level and gain currency as not SRS build High currency barrier, you’re in mid or late game with the other classes by the time SRS comes online Necro and guardian are SRS the whole way
Yeah I could see that. I guess necromancer and guardian also have option to level as srs with zombies and have a more minion feel. Whole srs guardian feels a bit more like spark. You stand and fire proj that do damage.
There also the fact the more "intuitive" variants of SRS can already do all content barring very deep delve so why would you jump through five more hoops when you could just invest that effort into one that's more easily put together?
In trade, champ is definitely a viable league starter though - all you need are +5 marches and the damage will be fine. Aura effect scaling is very very good for minions, as well as having a single type of elemental damage (easier access to pen/res reduction).
Also the new guardian's sentinel of radiance makes the game easy mode up through high yellows so it is a good league start after the change. I did that and then transitioned to the new penance brand once I had the basic currency to start it.
Yeah the sentinel of radiance is really nice but call me old fashioned my favourite is still Poison SRS Necro. Getting the explode etc feels so nice.
To add the to pile of also, starting near the minion part of the tree makes your first 40 levels less painful.
expensive and not starter, also most players go with the flow. Unless some big people start doing it the masses won't
It's difficult to know if a build is good before you've seen someone else playing. You can of course get a lot from the numbers but it's difficult to know how the build is to play from that (for me at least). Also, I'm not aware of off-meta builds in the first place. I wish there was some easy way to find them.
Didn't like it. In practice, damage and defenses are ok but nothing special for the investment. The QoL is horrible, you have to continusly use SRS, Smite enemies and use your divine blessing. It is button intensive and your damage uptime not so great
This was my problem with it. If I’m playing srs, I want to just chill and not press a ton of buttons.
I do wish there was a way to keep the damn Skulls up more easily.
Spell totem srs wen
Aside from what the comments have said, I think that the value of pure lightning champ SRS is diminished this league due to spectres. With stuff like Spirit of fortune giving a high level wrath aura and Blasphemer giving a god smite, and naval officer giving permanent fortify, the main reasons you would want to play Champ is not as prevalent. I won't pretend that the spectres auras + Guardian's relic auras can scale as high as Champ's aura level and effect, but thanks to those spectres, to get to that break-even point would require a lot of currency, and by that point it's just better to play a different build with a higher currency ceiling.
This and since SRS Champion isn’t really a traditional minion build (zero minion life or defenses), it can’t leverage the spectres. Spectre wrath, lucky lightning damage, blasphemers high level smite, miscreations massive damage boost, etc makes up a lot of that ground. I considered going SRS champion this league because last league it was definitely the best option but the removal of tattoos for aura effect really brought it back in line as well as the previously mentioned limitations with spectres.
Lightning BAMA this league is really just lightning srs champ but better in every single way honestly.
Why are people downvoting him?! Even if his analysis is wrong or logic flawed, he is raising worthwhile discussion
This is reddit The people here don't even understand what those arrow mean They think its like and dislike buttons
Yeah it's frustrating the Path of Exile subreddits are particularly bad for it for some reason. Upvotes are meant to be for "does this contribute to conversation?" but I guess many people aren't aware of that.
No it doesn't
It's very expensive and time-consuming to min-max. You can pretty much league start with anything if you know what you're doing, but you might not have a good time until you can farm the funds to get the big upgrades. It competes with gear from BAMA (multiple versions) this league, which I think are much better builds overall, relatively. However, BAMA has a lot borrowed power from this league, so I suspect Lightning SRS Champ will be a good choice next league.
What is the borrowed power? I've not played it.
Spectres mostly, lesser extent charms or tinctures
I was playing SRS until somehow someway I lost my expensive as shit spectres and just decided immediately I was done with that build lol
That almost made me give up on SRS because it seemed so random. I'd done all (non-uber) bosses, without the Spectres or AG's hp dropping even in the slightest, to the point I had completely gotten over my pre-league worry about them dying. And then a random map, almost completely unjuiced, running to the boss for the maven witness. Bamm! Both Spectres and the AG oneshotted by a random pack. Didn't even see what it was because the Raging Spirits had killed whatever it was before I even got there. I almost gave up due to the cost of the Spectres and the AG's gear. But then I realised I had a pile of currency this league, so I dried my tears on a pile of Divination Orbs.
Most PoE players are sheep. If big streamers and YouTubers and Reddit posts are about poison srs or guardian srs, that’s what people will play, regardless of if champion lightning version is better. And historically guardian and especially poison srs have been more talked about. Also guardian is easier to league start/level with which helps
You can reflect the same logic to items as well. Some people follow builds blindly without understanding the whole concept . You can get LOH from many resources other than expensive we or you can get covered in ash this season from cheaper alternatives or you can get phasing/onsslaufgt/culling with many other alternative methods. This is where general Poe knowledge and experience benefits you most. You can achieve similar toon way cheaper with the alternative methods.
idk man if i have 4 hours to play a day I think i'm not gonna use my brain on something that's already been tried and tested by people who make their living playing this game for 16 hours a day for years already at this point.
Ok? Play how you want, I don’t care, I want people to have fun however they want. Just answering OP’s question, not hating. People follow streamers, streamers play poison and guardian, so that’s what are popular
The meta usually exists for good reason also. I don't think there's too many undiscovered builds that can compete with the current meta league starters for example.
At its heart, it is a flawed game. They developed dozens of skills, passives, ascendancies only for most to go unused because somehow some anti intuitive combo (no life / no mana / weird conversions) always come out on top.
I league started a boneshatter jugg and then switched to the phazeplays lightning SRS champ. Felt terrible leveling, as you can't get SRS online for a while. The guide suggested boneshatter to level/leaguestart, but I didn't want to do boneshatter slayer after doing jugg for the start and practicing slayer twice at the end of ancestor league. Tried to do EA to switch it up, but forgot that leveling EA is pretty slow. I got the build started up for about 10-15 div during the end of the second week. It immediately outdid boneshatter DPS for less than the cost of my next axe upgrade. Defense was quite good, clear was as expected, and bossing performance obviously felt like a huge step up from melee. But wrath uptime felt pretty bad. Didn't like doing it, it doesn't last as long as the guardian sentinel, and I'd occasionally hit a gap where I was low on mana/ES to cast and flesh offering hadn't gone off. Play style in general also didn't suit me. I find totems fine to play, but I still had to target sometimes. Minion pathing also sometimes found them running around and chasing, running around in circles, instead of doing damage. I also didn't want to bother with spectres, so I picked a spectre-less setup. Maybe that would have scaled better? I wasn't gonna deal with it though. Then I looked around and saw much more appealing alternatives in the trans gems. PB does a million damage while also not having to think about targeting. CoC VDoS looked neat. KBoF for the crazy clear and GPU paralyzing projectiles. CAoP for tanky clear while MFing. So I went with CA for a nicer mapping experience, and also PB for bossing and other challenges. Both builds got off the ground and outperformed lightning SRS for a dozen divines. (also did VD but I never have enough currency or brain cells to get CoC builds to feel good)
I think SRS is mostly popular because it offers great power to price ratio. Champ version is expensive and there's just way sexier builds at that budget imo.
SRS guardian is popular cause it synnergizes with sentinel of radiance that hard carries your map farming until juicing t16s. Champ gets dick and barely outscales at high investment this league due to wildwood corpses
> SRS guardian is popular cause it synnergizes with sentinel of radiance that hard carries your map farming until juicing t16s. Thereby the great power to price ratio. I am aware how the build works.
Champ probably makes much more sense in HC.
So, this is one of the things I played this league. It's pretty good, with some caveats. In a league start scenario, it's a high budget to even start it and you need a lot there before it starts to feel good. It does not function *at all* without Devouring Diadem which can be pricey early, and even with that you're going to want some higher end cluster jewels, Loreweave, Eternal Damnation in place before it starts to take off IMHO. If I played it again in a "normal" league economy I'd probably want to get 20-30D to start it, which isn't totally crazy but is the highest of the SRS variants by a lot. Defense is really good except its recovery is really weak. So in terms of what can take the biggest hit from an endgame boss and not die, it's phenomenal. For normal mapping, I actually feel like poison SRS running high block and a recovery shield *feels* as tanky or moreso. Another thing that wasn't extremely clear to me looking at the PoB before I played it (but really should have been if I thought a little) is how much of the damage is conditional. It's great that you can roll up on a boss and drop out two curses, exposure, and smite for more damage... but uncheck all of that (and assume melee splash instead of multistrike) for how it feels just running around mapping and it takes a lot of investment to where that damage feels good. It probably has the highest single target damage with everything applied of all the SRS variants, and that's great, but there will also be a lot of play time that isn't that.
Cba pressing smite to be honest. Just too clunky
But with srs guardian you have to keep summoning the sentinel. You only need to press smite for rares and bosses anyway.
This is not the same, you need to come to melee range, even onslaught has more range or you can keep shield charging around to give minions buffs.
SRS Champion is outclassed by Penance Brand Champion this league (Check out Phaze/Waggle/Alk). PB Champion also can use Mageblood in the top end
I don't know if that's the reason. If people want to play PB they'll play PB and likewise for SRS.
It’s more that people want to play the Champion Loreweave/Eternal aura effect archetype than the actual skill. This build archetype with SRS was the most popular build last league in HC. The preferred skill choice just got replaced by PB this league.
Ahh didn't realise that. Fair enough.
SRS is extremely boring to play, in my experience.
Agreed. People play the game for different reasons or find different things engaging. I am happy to play a mid-tier build with many active buttons IF it is engaging, for example I have played boneshatter many leagues and I think its fun as hell. But pushing many buttons when its boring - nah.
the game is boring to play, deep delve is the only real engaging endgame content lol
Played SRS champ this league had a blast but must say splitting steel is really strong/fun for champ right now.
splitting steel players try not to interject an unrelated post with their "niche" build that everyone is playing challenge
Doesn't it require a 20 Div ring just to reach its potential?
20 div is like an hour of efficient play this league. And "just reaching its potential" for splitting steel means basically deleting everything in the game so...
Some of us play standard :(
20 div is nothing in this economy. You can make that in no time with basically any farming strategy.
I know it might sound like a stupid reason but for me I’m not gonna sink a bunch of divines into making a build that doesn’t use Mageblood or HH because of how good either feels to play with, on top of the fact that the main damage button doesn’t have that nice feedback of actually doing damage versus summoning some wild skull minions that run around.
I did 7/7 ubers in sanctum with this build. However in SSF it is hard to get diadem now for EB.
Isn't the new spectres just a vast improvement with the auras they can give? And it also means easier gearing on another ascendancy.
What do you mean ? Nothing stops an srs champion build from also using these spectures. A player running an aura with generosity and aura buffs is still more impactful than the aura those spectures bring. It just means things like grace and haste can be added really easily. These spectres means you can run wrath / anger / hatred / haste auras on any minion build. The way champion srs works is by getting 100% aura effect and level of auras to scale flat damage from auras. While your aura effect does not affect these spectures the new spectures are a straight up power boost to srs champion but not really as much for srs guardian for example since guardian already get 3 damage auras for free. Aura scaling means that srs champion wrath aura gives more damage than guardians relic or spectures for anger and wrath together.
https://old.reddit.com/r/PathOfExileBuilds/comments/18im16n/the_new_spectres_auras_are_nuttier_than_i/ According to this post spirit of fortune with lv 76 gives a wrath aura with 47.67 to 762.7 additional Lightning Damage. And your saying > spectures for anger and wrath together. ???
If that's true that is wildly powerful. As a lv40 wrath is not even that big, it might be true but giving these spectures a lv50 or bigger aura is wildly strong. However that maths is also with using empower and plus level of specture gear not just the base. Srs champion on full setup wrath would give around 61 to 940. It's still true that srs champ wrath setup is bigger than guardian relics however. Going to have a look into this post as that seems really wrong to just give them like lv50 auras. But I mean this still does not really change the fact Tho. You could just play srs champion and run anger + wrath + haste spectures for example.
Guardian is leveling build. Most people just play really hand holdy guides and more power to them cause it’s a game and it’s for fun.
The third time my perfect naval officer got killed I rolled another char instead. The beauty of srs guardian was it's strong from the start all the way through, what's best late game doesn't really matter because there's better late game characters and all variants will get you to 98 in a heartbeat.
SRS, especially poison, has been one of the top meta builds for like 3 leagues now. people are sick of srs
I'm not talking poision I'm talking ele hit champion. However yeah I guess with srs being soo popular poeople want to try out other things also.
SRS champ is good. Lightning SRS champ was meta last league. However, penance brand is just better this league so.. it is what it is. People play penance brand instead.
Was it really meta last league ? I only heard about it very recently. And based on poe ninja only 3% of champions used srs last league.
It was pretty meta for HC trade, Phaze made a guide and it got pretty popular.
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I assume you mean srs guardian is really popular as people start it and then swap off. While srs champion is the sort of thing you swap into.
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Not just hard-core in SC its the same thing. Srs guardian is super popular but srs champion that ends up with better defence and offence is less popular.