If you are lining up a new league start and you are not paying attention to the 0.4 patch on 12 December, you are kind of asking for a slow start, especially once you realise how hard limit stacking can carry and how easily you can fund it with
u4gm poe currency if you do not want to grind every scrap. In older patches, stacking persistent skills felt like wrestling the client: half the limits were hidden, tooltips were vague, and you were never quite sure what was blocking another cast. With Fate of the Vaal and the new Overabundance setup, you can flood the screen with overlapping zones in a way that feels closer to an RTS nuke strike than a regular ARPG build.
Limit Stacking And Overabundance
The big switch is how Overabundance works now. Before, it was the sort of support you grabbed when nothing else fit. Now, 20% quality giving a flat +1 to the skill limit is wild scaling, and you feel it straight away. You slap it on stuff like Frozen Locus or Volcano, then stack it with the new Stormweaver bonuses, and suddenly those +2 elemental limits are not just a tooltip line, they are the whole build. You walk into a map and it is five layers of Frozen Locus or a carpet of Earthquake aftershocks that keeps rumbling long after you have moved to the next pack. Throw Refracted Infusion into the mix, and you are blending elements so you do not get bricked by some weird resistance roll or map mod that would usually shut you down.
Druid, Vines And Gross Damage Fields
The new Druid class slots into this perfectly. Vine Arrow and Toxic Growth look innocent when you first read them, then you see the numbers at higher gem levels and it clicks. Vine Arrow scaling plant cap with gem level means that by mid to late game you have a literal thicket on screen, pinning mobs in place. Swap over to Toxic Growth once everything is rooted and suddenly you are watching 20 or more pustules explode poison all over the arena. It looks disgusting, but the DPS ramps so fast that you just stop caring. If you take the Oracle route on top, the extra collection range turns the whole thing from “micro-manage every remnant” into “run through the mess and everything sorts itself out”, which feels way better than the fiddly playstyles a lot of us suffered through in previous patches.
Cost, Gear And League Start Reality
There is a catch, and you notice it early: this is not a cheap first character if you want the full version. Overabundance eats quality, so you are either spamming currency trying to roll perfect gems or spending league time chasing corrupted upgrades that only drop in this Vaal content. You will probably want a half-decent Stormweaver, a few uniques that push limits even higher, and enough defensive layers that you can stand still long enough to set up your fields. Some players are going to roll this as a second or third character: start on something cheap, print a bit of value, then swap into the limit stacker once they have a stash big enough to play with.
Why You Might Want To Abuse It Now
Once the build comes online, the payoff is obvious: walk into a boss room, drop a wall of Volcanoes or chain out shockwaves with Gathering Storm, and watch the health bar just melt while the boss animation is still winding up. The stun immunity baked into a lot of these fields means they stay active even when things get sketchy, so your damage does not fall over the second you get clipped. It is messy, the screen turns into chaos, and it is almost certainly on a balance team watchlist, which is exactly why a lot of people are planning to juice their maps early and grab
poe2 cheap currency while this style of limit stacking is still allowed to be this ridiculous.