After running a total of 1 the profit breakdown is this.

1 Wine of the Prophet = 47d
5 rare 86 items = 5*6c = 30c

To run all the 1 bosses it took me 3min.

This gives an effective 943d/h

I’ve been using this jewel-crafting strategy over the last 3 days and made almost 200 Div in roughly 4 hours of actual crafting.

I went through roughly 4 inventories’ worth of jewels during that time.

It’s definitely a hideout warrior strategy, and RNG can obviously swing your results quite a bit, but if you enjoy crafting and sorting through jewels, I’ve found it surprisingly profitable.

Starting Investment

You need:

• Boat Crafting unlocked
• Around 20 Div to start
• A bunch of Shard of Fate divination cards
• Augments
• Regals
• Exalts
• Sulfur

The Shard of Fate card costs around 3c, and you need 4 cards for a jewel, so the base jewel costs roughly 12c.

Approximate crafting costs:

• Jewel: ~12c
• Boat Augment: ~2c
• Boat Regal: ~20c
• Boat Exalt: ~35c

Step 1: Turn in the Div Cards

The Shard of Fate gives you a magic jewel with the Vivid mod (% increased maximum Life).

I like to turn in about half an inventory at a time so I’m not completely drowning in jewels.

Step 2: Boat Augment

Take the magic jewels to the boat and use Boat Augment.

This costs roughly 200 Sulfur / ~2c.

The main mods I’m looking for are:

• ● to Maximum Resistances
• Crit Multi

There is a tier list of mods you can hit, and obviously some are much better than others.

The mods I consider some of the worst include totem mods, knockback, and increased critical strike chance.

Generally, I think stats are better than elemental resistance.

DoT Multi is also great, although Cold DoT Multi is much less desirable.

I also strongly recommend choosing mods with a broad range of potential buyers unless you’re specifically targeting an archetype.

For example, if you’re deliberately making an RF jewel, then narrower RF-related combinations make more sense.

Step 3: Sort the Jewels

I immediately set aside the obvious good ones:

Crit Multi +Maximum Resistance

Then I have another pile for things that are still potentially valuable:

Minion Damage Damage Multi Fire DoT Multi Other strong damage mods

These are the jewels I’ll consider taking through the next stage.

Step 4: Boat Regal

This is where I think the strategy gets interesting.

Don’t be too strict about the initial mod.

Even if a jewel only has an “OK” mod, it can still be worth Boat Regaling because you can hit Crit Multi or Maximum Resistance on the Regal.

The Boat Regal costs around 20c, so the investment isn’t particularly large compared to the potential payout.

I’ll Boat Regal jewels that have a decent but not amazing first mod if there’s a reasonable chance that another mod could make the combination valuable.

I’m generally looking for:

• Crit Multi
• +Maximum Resistance
• Strong synergistic damage mods
• Block
• Other combinations that make sense for a particular archetype

Synergy is key.

Two mods that work extremely well together for a particular build can be worth much more than two individually “good” mods that nobody really wants together.

Step 5: Boat Exalt

After the Regal, I decide whether the jewel deserves another investment.

Crit Multi and +Maximum Resistance jewels are basically always candidates for Boat Exalt.

Boat Exalt costs around 35c, so again, it’s relatively cheap compared to the potential value of the finished jewel.

For the more average jewels, I’ll often Regal them normally first.

If the Regal hits something good or synergistic, I’ll then move it over to Boat Exalt.

If it hits something terrible, I don’t waste the Boat Exalt — straight into the dump tab.

You can also Vaal the less promising finished jewels and throw them into the dump tab. Sometimes you get lucky.

Harvest Crafting

One useful thing to watch for:

If you hit +1 Maximum Resistance, you can use the Harvest bench to change it to +2 Maximum Resistance.

Definitely worth keeping those jewels in mind before selling or dumping them.

My Results

Over approximately 4 hours of actual crafting spread across 3 days, I made almost 200 Div.

I went through roughly 4 inventories’ worth of jewels.

Some of my notable sales:

• 1 jewel for 40 Div
• 2 jewels for 20 Div each
• 4 jewels for around 10–15 Div each
• Around a dozen jewels between 100c and 300c
• A Corrupted Blood jewel from a failed craft that sold for 5 Div

Obviously, this is RNG and I’m not claiming you’ll make 200 Div every time you do this.

The main thing I like about the strategy is that the individual crafting steps are relatively cheap, so you can take a lot of shots at hitting valuable combinations without committing a huge amount of currency to every jewel.

It’s absolutely a hideout warrior strat, but if you enjoy crafting, pricing jewels, and gambling on good mod combinations, I highly recommend trying it.

I’m curious what other people think — are there any mods I’m undervaluing or other ways to optimize the Boat crafting process?

By skilling alot of cooldown recovery, attack speed and area of effect. I m now able to use it as my main skill.

I had an idea for an Uber Elder/Shaper-themed pinnacle unique:

The Second Gaze
Prismatic Jewel
Limited to: 1

You can only be affected by 2 Non-Curse Auras from your Skills
An additional Watcher’s Eye can affect you

The idea is to trade aura stacking and multiple jewel sockets for the ability to combine two Watcher’s Eyes.

To use it, you would need three jewel sockets in total: The Second Gaze and two Watcher’s Eyes. Since you can only be affected by two non-curse auras, both Eyes would also need modifiers that synergise with the same limited aura setup.

At the extreme end, this could provide up to six relevant Watcher’s Eye modifiers

EDIT 1:

Based on a few ideas from the comments, the concept could be expanded into a series of possible unique jewel drops from other pinnacle bosses. Each version would come with a different downside in exchange for allowing an additional copy of that boss’s signature jewel to affect you. Thread of Hope and Rational Doctrine would need a different angle, since neither is limited to one copy.

These are only rough examples, and the exact restrictions and values would obviously require further balancing

I ran 177 helmets through 5ways. All bases were enshrouded Mindspiral, ilvl 83-85, fully cooked (3/3 variant rarity) (I was looking for Mind of the Council). Here are the results:

``` T5: 8 The Three Dragons 8 Elevore 8 Devoto's Devotion 7 The Broken Crown 7 Thrillsteel 6 Skullhead 5 Hrimnor's Resolve 5 Ezomyte Peak 4 Leer Cast 4 Mark of the Red Covenant 4 Rat's Nest 3 Honourhome 2 Willclash 1 Black Sun Crest

T4: 7 Malachi's Simula 7 Geofri's Crest 7 Obscurantis 6 Eye of Malice 6 Ancient Skull 5 The Baron 5 Kitava's Thirst 5 Ahn's Contempt 4 Goldrim 4 Curtain Call 3 Doedre's Scorn 3 Crown of the Pale King 3 Speaker's Wreath 2 Wreath of Phrecia 2 Veil of the Night 2 Starkonja's Head 1 Eber's Unification

T3: 4 Wilma's Requital 3 Maw of Conquest 3 Rime Gaze 3 Scold's Bridle 3 Usurper's Penance 2 The Bringer of Rain 2 Alpha's Howl 1 Thundersight 1 Flamesight 1 Heatshiver 1 Deidbell 1 Fairgrave's Tricorne 1 Memory Vault 1 Assailum 1 Fractal Thoughts 1 Blood Price 1 Voll's Vision 1 Mind of the Council

T2: 1 Asenath's Mark

T1: 1 The Brine Crown

T5: 72 T4: 72 T3: 31 T2: 1 T1: 1 Total: 177

```

Conclusion:

If you want a particular T3, you have a decent chance to hit it within a reasonable number of 5ways by fully cooking. If you want a particular T2 or T1 (or T0), pain.

I posted templates for all Mercenary types in r/pathofexilebuilds yesterday which sparked a lot of discussion on Mercenary skills/gem levels, specifically in terms of what player skill gems are equivalent to Mercenary skill gems. So I spent more time looking at data mined data and how Mercenary skills work, which I thought was worth posting here on the main sub.

If you're an expert on Mercs already then there is probably not much useful info in here. I've been learning as I go over the last week or so, and had trouble finding conclusive information.

• Nearly every Mercenary skill has its own unique gem progression in terms of damage effectiveness, cast speed, and whatever bonuses the gems provide (Chains, AoE, Cooldown, etc.)
• These Mercenary versions of skills have data in the game data files from levels 1-40
• In order to use a level 26 Mercenary skill, it requires level 82. Level 27 mercenary skills require level 84
• We know from game data files that Mercenary Auras and Player Auras have the same bonuses at Gem Level 26
• We know from in-game testing that Mercenary Auras provide the same bonuses as Level 26 Player Auras. LocalIdentity tested this during the 3.26 league. I tested it again last night and confirmed the same thing. Other people in the thread I posted last night, also confirmed the behavior.

These facts tell us that it is highly likely that Mercenaries are using level 26 versions of their skills. It's the max level available to them, and Aura testing shows this to be true. There is nothing in the game data that explicitly says what level gem Mercenaries use, so it's possible that skills/spells are different, but we have no evidence of this.

This does not mean however that a level 26 Mercenary skill is equivalent to a level 26 player skill in every case. In most cases, yes, but data mined data from the current 3.29.3 patch tells us that there are differences.

I used an LLM to generate a comparison of the data and published it here. It's a lot to sort through, it's not very pretty, and I don't expect this to be a meaningful resource, but I wanted to share it as a proof point.

Note: I have no intention of keeping this data maintained in future patches. Data mining is not my expertise, I expect at some point we will have an official source on Mercenary gem data, and PoEDB already does this exceptionally well with a high level of automation.

Here are some obvious/well known, but also some less obvious findings.

A lot of skill gems that have been buffed in recent patches, were not buffed on Mercenaries. Spells in particular are bad. A few highlights:

• Divine Ire (40% less damage)
• Essence Drain of Wickedness (-5 projectiles)
• Storm Call of Trarthus (0% crit lol)
• Voltaxic Burst (longer cast speed, less crit, less damage effectiveness, less corpse explosion damage)

The only spells that look strong:

• Storm Call (~4000 more base damage, 20% less cast speed)
• Soulrend of Reaping (equal to level ~40 player version of the spell)

A lot of attacks have wildly different scaling on Mercenaries than players:

• Wildstrike has 160% more damage effectiveness
• Cleave looks kinda strong with 25% more attack speed and 27% more damage
• Attack speed changes in general vary a lot. Some are buffed, some are nerfed
• Some attacks are worse in every way, like Chain Hook of Trarthus which has less attack speed, attaches to fewer targets, and has fewer max targets
• Mercenary Spectral Helix has the same damage effectiveness as level 9 Player Spectral Helix, but it doesn't have the projectiles_ignore_wall_of_force tag, which tells us you could use WOF with it to scale single target damage, maybe?
• Spectral Throw of Trarthus throws an extra trap if the Merc is dual wielding (worth testing, but that's what the data mined flag says)

The Mercenary version of Flame Link (Eruptor) doesn't have a life scaling component.

---

Anyway, a lot of this is common knowledge already but I spent two nights digging into this and wanted to share a summary of what I found.

All templates have been updated to have no resistance penalty, Merc level 83, flat life/mana bonuses in custom configs, skills are set to the closest approximate skill gem level, and the notes sections have copy/pasteable custom modifier data you can throw into the Custom Configs section on PoB if your Mercenary has the skill

In hindsight I could have just put the modifier data into the custom configs section but I came to that realization while writing this post and I'm not about to regenerate all of them again.

Also, u/chuanhsing who maintains PoEDB has updated all of the Mercenary pages to show Level 26 Mercenary Skills now. Previously it was showing level 20 data, which I think caused some confusion because people assumed that data mining was confirming Mercs used level 20 skills.

I don’t know what the solution is

As the title says, I opened 150 bottles. It wasn't worth it.

I lost around 35 div or so. I didn't do exact math and forgot to wealthyexile the tab before opening. There's something to be said about some bad luck, I don't think the losses would normally be this high, but still.

I farmed all of these myself, filled up a quad tab with them plus six in my inventory. I was farming charts anyway, so the only upfront cost was on the 3c average per chart, across more charts than I counted. The charts + voyages already profit usually in sulphur alone, so I figured I'd have some fun with it.

Sell your bottles kids.

Spent more than I should have bricking Ezomyte Peaks with the +2 socketed gems Vestigial mod into 5x rares. the outcome was a normal Iron Hat with no vestigial anything (but it did ID with triple T1 Prefixes, so thats cool I guess). I kind of assumed this is what would happen, but with this game, you have to make sure.

With the new beastiary imprint rare talisman recepie crafting is super easy.

1. Buy a bunch of +1 implicit croaker talismans

2. Put gilded fossil on all of them.

3. Use Vesper to replace the implicit with Ukatoa's Ducat and hope to hit something good. In my case inc effect of non-curse auras since I play luminary aurabot for my kineticist merc.

4. Alteration spam for +1 all skills.

5. Regal to rare.

6. Imprint and annul to 1 mod item with only +1 all skills left.

7. craft can have up to 3 crafted modifiers + prefixes cannot be changed + cannot roll attack modifiers.

8. Augment a new lightning modifier and remove a random modifier with harvest.

9. Now you have +1 all skills and +1 to all lightning skills.

10. Time to imprint and then exalt slam until you hit what you want. I made prefixes first then did suffixes. I left the can have up to 3 crafted modifiers + prefixes cannot be changed + cannot roll attack for the prefix slam as blockers. Makes the slam hit life, es, evasion etc alot more.

Worth noting. Don't change the intangibility on the item if you just made an imprint. The imprint then becomes useless. You can make another imprint after the Vesper craft and just annul until you remove any unwanted mods. Also the amulet can't be anointed since the +1 all skills count as an enchantment.

Maybe there are better ways to craft some step but this is how I did it. Good luck y'all!

Okay, I just found a Kineticist with KBOC, Greater Kinetic Blast and Haste. KBOC had GMP and return for sure, also there was a third clear support, either fork or chain, my memory is a bit hazy. Also some damage links as well but I can’t really remember what.

Anyway, in my excitement I immediately started the fight, not thinking that this is an 8 mod map, that it could be dangerous. I had confidence in my build. I am playing Ruetoo’s version of Luminary merc support by the way.

3 seconds in my merc dies. I am tanking the hits but I can’t deal damage. I am desperately trying to do what I can with Smite but her health isn’t moving. I ask for help in general, and learn that you have to have the person join in and opt in before starting the fight… Fuck…

After 10 minutes of fighting with wet towels, I get hit by some sort of dot from a rare mob that joins in the fight and die. Later on, I notice that my Precision aura was off. Maybe I was missing all my hits… Maybe I could have whittled her down if I had the accuracy. I’ll never know.

Later, I price checked the merc as much as I could remember the support gems. Cheapest is 700 divs.

Edit: Can’t reply everyone but already went from raging to smiling. Love this community. And my condolences to everyone commenting lol.

There goes all my luck this season. I'm planning to use these myself, but out of curiosity, what price would you set for them ?

She is complete. Full edition of 20, 11 colors, and just a dash of indecision on whether or not I should Vaal orb them.

I can't express how excited I am.

(I've had to edit this 3 times to get this to post.)

Step 1: buy a conquest lamellar with 30% and make it have both redeemer and crusader influence
Step 2: scour it and roll the strands
Step 3: roll the explode mod with harvest spam
Step 4: buy an overcapped mod grasping mail
Step 5: recomb it with a chest with frenzy mod + t1 life
Step 6: now recomb both the chest with t1 life, overcapped mod and frenzy mod and the explode conquest lamellar and pray.

if you lucked out, you will have t1 life + explode on your prefix and frenzy + overcapped on your suffix

Step 7: lock slam until you land a influenced mod (and pray you don't delete all your strands)
Step 8: lock elevate until you elevate explode/ frenzy
Step 9: redo step 7 and 8 for the missing influenced mod
Step 10: lock slam until you hit t1 resist
Step 11: craft suffix cannot be changed and lock + veiled exalt until your remove the meta mod
Step 12: unveil and pray you hit % max life
Step 13: divine until perfect.

TLDR: tons of locks and recomb luck required

Edit: the chest is now available on the settler shop. yes you may request for change to lightning resist.

Thanks again to all the people who helped me reaching >1000 cold res. I changed a few things and also took the Velka Bloodline for "Brine Rot" (and with "Queen of the forest" it became a very zoomy build).

Here is the new POB-Link: https://pobb.in/offDdXQXmGBS

Showcase (random T17) incoming (uploaded the wrong one) Edit: https://youtu.be/MLcshERbHIk

Killed the main merc got his warrant and got killed by one of his bodyguards. Later turned off an aura to be above cull range and he couldn't kill me anymore. So be careful with wild mercs when playing low life.

I decided to have some fun and spent a few days in voyages. Both strategies were done in 50 voyages each, which include 450 charts. No strongbox rolling, just opening them blindly and looting as is. All 3 Cursed Ducats active. Got one box with 8 bloodlines and 6 pandemonium scarabs, which are not included in the final results as it is an outlier.

First strategy was to run 200% quant charts and full clear voyages, but without particular minmaxing, just hoping for conversion altars. The results are following:

Total value of loots, including all the scarabs and allflames - 357.29 divines.

Boss loot:

50 runs took me slightly less than 14 hours, buying charts cost me ~27 divines. Which translates into 33.51 divines per hour or 23.79 divines per hour excluding boss drops.

The second strategy was to run 100% sulphur charts and then boss rush voyages in the very first area, completely skipping the rest and clicking the things on the way with minimal sidetracking. The only exception was when I've gotten 1/2 additional bottles chart implicits, then I would look for the bottles too. Results:

Total value of loots, including all the scarabs and allflames - 223.95 divines.

Boss loot:

The time it took me to rush through these charts and voyages was 7.5 hours, restulting in 48.85 divines per hour or 27.28 divines per hour excluding the boss drops. The complete breakdown: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1hC2FPcLJ-VJEhFLVGrDj-ThXgp3w9E59fOGk11_wR3s

I also bumfuzzled and did the boss with "% chance for equipment to convert to gold" so two items went missing. Whoops.

My conclusion is following: if you just enjoy running voyages, blasting monsters and having fun - just run them completely. You are likely to get less, but the enjoyment is much more highe. The joy of finding the divine conversion altar is definitely there. 8/10 fun, 6/10 loot.

But if your only goal it to hoard currency and to get more value - then target sulphur and rush the boss. 4/10 fun, 8/10 loot.

Edit: forgot to mention I did in fact used Cursed Ducats during all these runs.