Patch 0.2.0 News - The Deepest Tower, A New Unique

Edited 04-Apr-2025 to reflect changes to Presence in patch 0.2.0 - nerfed from 6 meters to 4 meters.

Coming in patch 0.2.0, The Deepest Tower has adequate but not amazing 'basic stats' - life, chaos resistance and the like.

But it's one key line on the item that is the reason you'll use it.

"Enemies In Your Presence Count As Being On Low Life". "In Your Presence" defaults to a radius of four meters. (This is a good chunk of a screen).

Not useful on its own, this has very strong synergy with several passive tree nodes in the south of the tree as well as with the support gem Execute.

Reminder: This item applies only to hit damage. Sorry, damage over time enjoyers. Find another helmet to use.

Finishing Blows and Stars Aligned are found in the same cluster on the passive tree, between 5 and 6 if you consider the passive tree to be a clockface, and about halfway from the center to the edge.

This cluster also contains excellent small nodes, 6 nodes that each provide an extra 30% increased damage with hits against Enemies that are on Low Life.

While wearing the new helmet, taking all eight points in this cluster awards a massive 240% increased damage with hits against Enemies that are in your Presence.

This only stacks additively with other sources of increased damage (if you have 500% increased damage on the rest of your character this improves that to 740%, so you go from 600% base damage to 840% base damage, a 40% more multiplier), but it is still an extremely efficient use of eight points.

Stars Aligned interacts with the Luck mechanic.

'Lucky' in Path of Exile 2 simply means 'roll twice and take the more favorable roll'. 'Unlucky' is the reverse, and if you are simultaneously 'Lucky' and 'Unlucky', neither applies.

On a non-critical, average damage without 'Luck' effects is the average of your highest and lowest possible non-critical damage rolls. (The same applies for crits)

When you are 'Lucky', the computations are more complex. I'll save you the calculus here. It works out as within a very small rounding error of the average of the lowest, highest and highest rolls (this includes the best roll twice and the worst roll once).

Examples:

Unlucky:

Average the lowest, lowest and highest rolls

Example (7-13 damage): Average of 7, 7 and 13 is 9.

Neither Lucky nor Unlucky:

Average the lowest and highest rolls

Example (7-13 damage): Average of 7 and 13 is 10.

Lucky:

Average the lowest, highest and highest rolls

Example (7-13 damage): Average of 7, 13 and 13 is 11.

As you can see, having a wide damage range will help you get maximum value from your Hits having Lucky damage.

Isn't it great that excluding Act 1 Crossbow base items, all Crossbows have a wide damage range, generally dealing 40-160% of their base damage? If you are using such a crossbow, Lucky damage represents 20% more damage.