GhazzyTV's Iron Mass Skeletons Gear Progression page (PoE Settlers of Kalguur)

Introduction

While the PoB shows you what gear we believe belongs in which budget, it might still be a bit unclear in what order we think you should prioritize what.
On this page, we will do our best to explain what we prioritize when, and why. With that out of the way, let’s dig into the gear progression.

Campaign

During the campaign with this build, you will for the most part pick up items that have the links and colours you desire and hit them with an Orb of Alchemy or an Essence with an appropriate function to make them rare. You will be hoping for a resistance when doing this, and should you end up having an open suffix on the item the crafting bench will let you add on a second resistance roll or an attribute roll, depending on your current needs.
Keeping your resistances as high as possible, ensuring you have the attribute rolls and getting some life modifiers is all you need to worry about at this stage. Do keep in mind that resistances are not very important in the first couple of acts but becomes extremely crucial for your survival around Act 5 and forward and reaching the cap (75%) is preferable for all 3 elements at this point. If you’re struggling with gear to reach this you can always replace any of your offensive aura(s) for a Purity of Elements to help solve this potential problem.

Low Budget

We are going to make the assumption that you have kept your resistances capped going into this budget, and will be working with that assumption. If you do not have capped resistances when hitting maps, you need to get that sorted as soon as possible. Any attributes you might need to keep leveling your gems and/or equip gear will also need to be sorted either via gear or by deviating slightly from the skill-tree by picking up any needed “+30 attribute” nodes on the tree. Gear wise, pieces such as a Heavy Belt and/or Jade Amulet are great pieces to solve attribute issues.

Early gear

The first item we are going to need, is The Iron Mass itself. We need this item to play our build and we want to have it as soon as we possibly can.
This should be prioritised over a sixlink as it’s integral to the build.

The second order of priority is either a sixlink, or March of the Legion. As a +5 march is likely expensive, get a +4 with a decent resistance roll instead.
Whichever one you didn’t go for initially, you do next.

With that sorted we want to grab our helmet, Ancient Skull, This item is dirt cheap and extremely effective, consider picking this up before the sign and simply run a smite yourself.

After that you grab some rare pieces for resistances, attributes and a sprinkle of spell suppression here and there.
Exactly what you get on each item does not matter terribly much. This early we just want stats, honestly.

Sort your flasks! This is the number one thing underestimated by newer players!
If you keep forgetting to press your flasks, investing in automation orbs is going to be an extremely worthwhile investment.

This would conclude low budget.

Medium Budget

I would recommend investing in a The Devouring Diadem as the first big purchase in medium budget. This will make your resource management a lot easier and it provides reservations.
It also enables a pretty large respec of points as we are no longer married to Eldritch Battery.

We’re going to want to move into Fourth Vow as soon as possible, but before we can drop the suppression on our chest there’s a few things that needs to be sorted.
The first is acquiring a The Green Nightmare jewel
The second is 2x tattoo of the Arohongi Moonwarden
The third is 1x Tattoo of the Ramako Shaman.
With those three things sorted, we move into The Fourth Vow

At this point you need to reshuffle your rares a bit and get proper attributes spread across them to enable Perquil's Toe.
A solid option is an Amethyst Ring with a high dexterity roll.

It’s time to consider upgrading our March of the Legion boots to a +5. If this is still really expensive, put it off until later.

It’s also high time we consider recrafting our Stabilising Sceptre.
Like before we want to hit this with a Fear essence, specifically a Deafening Essence of Fear.
We then anull it down until we are left with essence mod and no suffixes. If you lose the minion damage mod at any point here, start over.
Once you have a “clean” sceptre with minion damage mod and no suffixes, you multi-mod it, craft minion attack/cast speed and finally trigger.

If you haven’t already, it’s high time you get a decently rolled Darkness Enthroned and some decent Ghastly Eye Jewel.

At this point you should be up to date with the medium progression of the guide, and we will be moving on to high budget.

As always, remember to fix your flasks. I cannot stress this enough.

High Budget

There’s not too many changes in high budget, but a few of them are going to be expensive.

We want to make sure we have super high chaos resistance across the board, both to boost The Fourth Vow and enable Glorious Vanity – Xibaqua.
These are extremely strong defensive layers.
You should absolutely make use of tattoos to reach these numbers, as they will make your life a lot easier.

If you did not make the multi-mod sceptre in medium budget, it’s way overdue to happen now.

Your rings are going to have to carry pretty hard in certain areas and one them will have to be an unset ring.
Exactly what stats you get here is a bit dependent on what you have elsewhere.

As we will be picking up a 100% Darkness Enthroned this means we can, and should, put a Ghastly eye jewel in our belt with 50% chance to avoid shock. Or as close to this value as we can get.
I would advice that you compromise on other stats here and make this a 50%, as being immune to every ailment is massive Quality of Life.
Once we have this, we acquire a Stormshroud and we will be ailment immune.

A large 12 point minion cluster rolled with 35% increased effect and 3% increased attack and cast speed is going to hard-carry your offensive stats.
The most relevant modifiers here are those two, but ideally you would want to have elemental resistances and life on this cluster as well.

A Watcher's Eye with extra armour and extra physical damage while affected by Determination

Finally once you are able to, you pick up a Progenesis to really help smooth out incoming damage.

At any point you can, and should, upgrade your Ghastly Eye Jewel‘s to have better modifiers. This is something you’ll have to play by ear as you go along however.
If you have not already, it’s high time to get better flasks with a higher tier flask gain and higher tier values of suffix modifiers.

This concludes our journey through Iron Mass and I hope you’ve had a blast with it!
Should you run into any issues, have questions or need help with progression head over to the ARPG-Vault discord and the moderators there will assist you as soon as they are able to.