[0.4.0] My way to 100lvl

Hello fellow Exiles. I finally made it – for the first time (most likely for the last time too) I reached level 100. After this long journey, I’d like to share what I’ve learned with you.

Let’s start by answering some obvious questions:

Was it worth it?
Yes. I’d already done almost everything else in the game, so this was aspirational content for me.

Why without Vaal Temple – wouldn’t that be way faster?
I’m not a fan of that mechanic. I tried it, but it was too boring for me.

Will I do it again?
Maybe after the full release.

You can check my character on POE Ninja: https://poe.ninja/poe2/profile/PaOmi-3123/character/DeadEnd_Witchhunter (Permafrost Witchhunter). It’s not the strongest build, but I had a ton of fun with it. The most expensive item is Rite of Passage Golden Charm for 3300d – I bought it when I was about 40% of the way from 99 to 100.
From 98 to 99 it took 36 hours, and I died quite a few times. From 99 to 100 it was 89 hours, with "only" 6 deaths. The last one happened around 45%, after which I tweaked my character to boost survivability.

How was I farming XP?
I jumped between towers using The Grand Project tablets, looking for Corrupted maps with the Increased Experience mod. When I found one, I used Vision of Paradise + Unforeseen Consequences + Abyss (for Exp, Effectiveness, and more monsters). For the second run, I swapped Vision of Paradise for an additional Abyss Tablet. I took T16 waystones with Pack Size (I tested more Rare Monsters and more Magic Monsters, but Pack Size gave the best results). I avoided mods that slowed me down (like Chilled Ground or Temporal Chains) or were deadly to my build (extra projectiles, reduced player resistances, Ignited Ground). This was my final setup – I’m guessing if I’d used it from the beginning, I’d have saved a few hours. A “double run” took about 20 minutes and netted around 17M exp per hour, so you can see that a lot of time went into traveling and shopping.

Now I’m resting and waiting for 0.5.0, hoping these lessons help me reach level 95 way faster next time.

17M/hr is really good for level 99 in maps.

Those 6 deaths must have really stung - hoping you had the omen that would have brought the XP penalty down to 2.5% instead of 10%!

Otherwise I imagine that 89 hours would been closer to 55-60.

Without trying to sweat my face off or anything I can comfortably maintain ~8-10M/hr at level 98 but I always end up goofing around picking up interesting bases and yolo-crafting. I can see it really hindering progress from 99-->100 if I were to play the same way.

Did you mostly play in a head-down, no selling, no chatting, super-grind manner for a significant portion of the 36+89 hours?

And did you do any testing on the different combos of tablet mods? Would be interested to know how you felt about the best tablet mod combos.

I usually end up with some kind of haphazard mix of increased xp%, increased effectiveness, increased pack size (this one feels rare), increased magic monsters, and increased rare monsters, and the suffixes that add more monsters as well depending on the tablet type but I don't really "optimize" here, just more or less try to make sure the tablets have some mix of the above mods.

Unique tablets are few and far between but I do save them for the xp boost tiles when I find them.

Feels like it's lucky if I end up with a triple set of great tablet mods, a great cluster of corrupted/cleansed waystone tiles, and also success in turning my juicy t15s into t16s. Most of the time I'm just doing some semi-optimal grind lol

I sometimes consider migrating my bear to a trade league so I can buy all of the optimal xp-juicing ingredients and hit the milestone more easily but then I feel like I would just buy a HH and do it in temple and get it over with even faster and it doesn't seem like as much of a milestone anymore.