I beat Zarokh and I'm an "old man" gamer. Here's my lessons learned:

From one old man to another, did you go with the naggy wife and demanding kids modifier? About to finish actIII on cruel and haven’t gotten back to the trials yet. Found that avoiding the workload modifier made a big difference.

Overall nice summary thanks, will be using it when I get back to it.

My learnings that allowed me to beat the boss after 7 consecutive fails:

• 'Monsters/bosses take increased damage' on relics is broken.
• Honour resistance is great stat.
• Relics containing both mentioned mods are BIS.
• Never ever consider taking the pact "50% less honour lost in boss room, 100% more honour lost in non-boss rooms". You will bleed too much on your way to the boss.
• The rotating beam phase cannot hit you if you stay in arena's bottom left corner.
• Frost Wall blocks boss' bullet hell projectiles.
• Monsters like to offscreen you. When moving through tight corridors, move frequently from one side to the other.

I've beaten him many times for my friends. My biggest tip... JUST BRING A SHIELD. Everything is blockable.

Now I'm a minion build but should still work for anyone. When he is doing bad shit in swap to shield and block. If I wanted I could just stand there and hold block, do the minigame twice, and win the fight.

yeah but you take the +40% ms anticipating feeble or the slower ms affliction

Do NOT roll through the "pick up hourglass mechanic" except maybe at the very end, you will move slower over all

Yeah, the way roll works is it is entirely frontloaded but it is based on your movement speed, so imagine instead of traveling a distance at your normal speed, you travel the same distance but your movement speed is multiplied by something like 1.5x (just spitballing numbers here as example) that scales down over time until you've eventually reached about the same distance. The roll at the end actually saved my run, I collected the last hourglass on the same frame i ran out of time and it caused him to cancel the deathtouch and leave me frozen for a couple seconds, took a couple hits as a result but that was fine

Also, when the middle starts glowing and Zarokh disappears, WAIT FOR THE PORTALS AT THE SIDES TO GO AWAY BEFORE WALKING INTO THE CENTER. The timer does not start until you start the hourglass phase. The portals can obscure your view of an hourglass, and the fight is programmed to close the portals ASAP (according to the dev I reported this to, who made the fight) but it seems that all projectiles from them need to dissipate before they can do so right now which hopefully can be fixed

Also I want to note, be EXTREMELY careful of the 5% life/mana/es on hit Affliction while progressing. The pot enemy has an attack that will COMPLETELY delete you with some like crawling bugs on the floor which do RAPID multihit, and on Floor 4 they get another ranged overhead strike that you basically just have to keep moving to dodge (+ theres ball lightning there).

For me the difficulty was the hourglass mechanic, so on my second run I used 2 relics to reach 30ish % "less slow debuff" and I got the movement speed boon. This allowed me to cheese the mechanic whatever route I choose to pickup the stuff.

Note: I have 30ms boot and got 65 honour resistance with 4800 honour.

Great thread. Something I never saw mentioned in guides but I died my first time due to health pots running out, so I went full life/mana leech my 2nd run and got him. Did you do that as well?

The boss has ridiculous amount of HP. Reaching the boss is okay, not too hard. But the last boss is beyond buffed. I am playing the Spark build with lighting conduct especially for bosses and i still failed it today with 12k honer. I raged quit and i have no intention to go back. This Trail is a turning point for me.

Here is my tip: Wait for the nerfs like in any other PoE league

Thank you for this great guide. Zarokh is truly frightening.

I got this done a few days ago too, on a SSF warrior. It's all about econ early (i.e water, getting the more water boon), and chasing down merchants later. Mostly agree with the always take and always avoid. I think you can fade one or two of the monster HP/dmg afflictions if you have all the positive damage/hp boons, but it's definitely easiest to just avoid them. I like to combo the 40% ms boon with the 25% reduced move speed affliction if I can. That brings it down to a healthy 15% boost, which makes doing traps still pretty easy. Definitely lost a run to eating traps from moving too fast.

FWIW it's totally doable with 30% boots and no movespeed boon/affl, but you need to have a very clear route, and like you said, avoid rolling and most movement skills. The flat delay on leap slam, for example, gets multiplied by whatever slowdown, making it horribly slow in that phase.

Since GGG added the less honor damage taken at close range, the easiest strat for me was to mostly facetank everything. I still dodged a fair bit, but it's easy to get separation from the boss and start taking some gnarly chunks of honor damage that way. Was sadly better to just park in melee and whack away.

Nice, congrats. I just did the 3 floor Sekhemas and ended up enjoying it quite a bit. Got some nice drops too. 

For my 4th, I'll definitely be running Ultimatum.

What i find odd is that it's notoriously durable. I almost wonder if there is some sort of dynamic damage reduction at play here like in last epoch.

Oh yeah, and the most important tip - don't go in as a demon form build, it is a guarantee crash.

I've killed Zarokh the "hard" way with zero useful boons, 50k tempest flurry tooltip DPS, 3.5k honor and capped honor res. Face tanked all mechanics, run out of mana flask mid fight and killed him with basic autos and bells.

Couple hours later I saw my deadeye friend stomp him hitless with dedicated merchant run with quadrillion boons and realized I unga bungaed my way through sanctum :(

Trials hate me and honestly I wouldn't have been able to beat him if it wasn't for some higher power giving me a merchant with the boon that makes you take no damage right before the boss room

Enfeeble + more monster life made my first kill on him utterly painful and took like 25 minutes :/ wouldn't recommend.

"old man" swear to god if you say you're like 28 I'm gonna hit you with my walking stick

Get 75 honor ress Get maximum honor Get further room vision Never take room random affliction (never take them like seriously dont fucking take them)

You should get 3/4 asedencies easier

If u want to do ultimatum take Lightning Cri Slow projectile (if u r not melee)

Dont take ever****** Petrify Damagine circle that expand from center Orb that fly to u after mob dies

Try that, these are actually easy if u take the right mods!!!!!

I'm not there yet but saving this for future reference. Thanks!

50% more monster hp affects bosses?

Here is one more tricked I learned for before the boss fight, to be used when ever during the run.

There is a boon that restores 50% of your honor when you get to low life. If you ever need a boost in honor and you don't have it available on a shrine, you can just keep a Lifetap support gem in your local stash. Then on the side some where safe (or between rooms) just replace one of your support gems with Lifetap, manually lower you health to low life, get the instant restore of Honor and then take out the Lifetap.

You can repeat this as often as needed if you feel like you need an honor boost.

How old is old exile?

I'm a little bit at a loss. I see people speak about this boss like you need a million dps to win, but yesterday my first time doing 4th ascendency trial I went into the boss room with 138 honor and survived maybe 15 seconds but had him a quarter down already. I was 81 using a level 77 token, with no boons to increase my damage or lower the boss hp. Do the mechanics get crazier than the time freeze? Seems like if I went in with more honor I'd clear in about a minute. 

Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t monster damage+ afflictions not affect boss rooms?

"40% move speed boon is tempting but may make you so fast you "overshoot" a lot and make more mistakes"

You can balance it with good shoes without movement speed.

In case people didn't know, you can actually RESET the fight by logging out. The game will take you out of the trial, but you can go back in and start the fight at the beginning. It is huge for people who got disconnected during the fight or failed the stupid picking up hourglass mini-game. Just make sure you pay attention to your honors, since it doesn't restore. I had to reset the fight a couple times because of the stupid hourglass phase, but I had like 10k honors. So I was able to re-do the fight a couple times to learn the mechanic.

Stack honor res and boss/monster take more damage relic. And for his rotating lightning rod attack, roll through the attack than trying to running away. Stay close to him to take less honor damage.

Just to add to this

Frost wall and minions can eat projectiles. Ranged Minions in particular make the fight far easier as they tend to form a wall you can use to block projectiles. 

During his lighting phase just hug a corner until it's over. 

Id argue his hourglass phase is his hardest part. The 40 percent hare move buff is probably the more important part mod to use on him.  Also avoid stuff like flame wall during the phase anything that can obscure vision. 

Side not I've never really had issues with people scamming me in poe 1 over boss carries but in poe2 I have sadly had more people ghost me after boss completion then actually paid. Hopefully a fluke but be aware. 

I payed 20 exalted for some dude to get my ascendancys. Playing Titan was miserable to do those trials. I did 2, and the 3rd I payed. I will gladly pay again so much time wasted with just one life.

There's something to be said for that odd choice between a blind single exit, or a random affliction, and one of the "bad" afflictions. Because, black smoke is far worse than lead sandals if you still have lots of exits to take. And one is something you're very likely to be able to to undo (if you're still not on your final floor) while the other isn't.

So I'd take some of your "never take" afflictions rather than force myself onto a path with a single exit, or, rather than taking a random affliction.

Get a relic that offers +3 merchant options after you're honor resist capped. More or less guarantees you can get all the good boons before 4th floor unless extremely unlucky. You can also gets some boss damage taken or monster damage taken relics.

Just get a good pair of boots without MS in case you get the MS boon. Since noone wants boots without MS you can get insane ones for cheap

A big one not mentioned: Evasion characters can avoid basically all of his damage (only the spinning lightning can't be evaded I think) which allows you to just facetank and DPS. With my character that had low DPS and I ran out of mana flasks because the character used a lot of mana, I only lost 2/10k honour just facetanking him with like 15k evasion.

Honestly I wouldn't even recommend people try this boss. If you aren't playing with busted uniques or a busted build that destroys T15 bosses in literal seconds, the dps requirements on Zarokh are gonna be so obnoxiously high don't even expect to win.

I've been playing my Gemling crossbow build, feeling pretty strong, melting maps, hit 91, no bosses are issues. I can kill T18 bosses, takes a little but doable. I got to Zarokh and I was there for probably 3-4 minutes just to get him around 60% before I lost.

Came back in with Hands of Wisdom, no change to my build at all other than taking one lightning damage node, and ran shockburst rounds instead of explosive arrow, and I melted Zarokh over about 2 minutes. I still had the 50% damage and -30% mob health boons.

I don't know if the majority of build's just don't scale well enough or if boss health is tuned too high, but one or the other needs to change. I don't see Hands of Wisdom surviving the nerf hammer either. Any attack build not trying to tear their hair out at this game's dps requirements on the end-game bosses is running them.

Nice tips!

I just did this on my Pathfinder as an old man gamer myself.

One thing id like to add that helped me was not picking the gauntlet rooms on the last floor.

As someone who farms Zarokh for currency. If you take in 75% honor resistance and relics with max life, max honour or max defense (depending on your build), your run will be 10x easier.

You also can get 2-5% max honour resistance on 4 space relics.

The beat the 4th floor pre-nerf before most of the streamers when it was absolutely stupid. Do yourself a solid and buy some relics before hand and save yourself the headache!

“monsters deal 5% of life/ES” mods means that Zarokhs beam will wipe you.

Im farming zarokh, i always bring two 10% mov speed relics with me, full honor res. And bosses take 70% inc dmg just to make it faster. But the mov speed is the essential thing.

Any chance if you know if the stat "reduced potency of slowing debuffs on you by x%" apply to the hourglass phase? Also, during the hourglass phase, I know you can't pause but can you leave the game and wait out the instance in the case you want to bail? Asking because I play HC and need to know if I can bail if I mess up.

Don’t know you could doge roll delete the ground freeze orbs. Good to know for my second character!

Once you get Honour Resistance Relics, Sekhemas are way easier. Currently trying to buy a barya for my 4th ascendancy. Compared to Sanctum I feel it's a lot more doable, and the overall pool of must avoid afflictions just got a lot lower because the Smokes amd Deceptive Mirrors are a lot less debilitating.

All good and dandy but when he puts those fucking cubes in each corner it's impossible. I'm just going to have to wait until they patch this garbage.

I would say most of the afflictions/boons that deal directly with your damage or mob hp are dependent on how strong your build is. The only must avoid one imo is the -25% ms one(unless you have the +40% ms)

Agree on never roll the dice on random afflictions. There are some minors that can 100% brick a run (like no energy shield on an energy shield stacking char)

I carry people through alot. And usually do it with the full blinder relic (which should really say it also hides afflictions and rewards too)

My advice for people doing it themselves

Do a 2 and 3 floor first to get your relic sluts unlocked. And familiarize yourself with the trap rooms

15% movespeed is the bare minimum to consistently complete hourglass phase. You can still get screwed over by bad hourglass spawns here though, you ideally want to get to at least 25 where ive only seen 1 multi corner spawn that was uncompletable in 40+ runs and ive never seen one that bricks a 30+ms

At less than 30ms its easier to learn the timing of his spin cone move, stay close and i frame through than try to outrun while avoiding mines, especially if youve gotten trap damage afflictions even if you fuck up the timing for your i frame getting 1-3 hits is better than getting a mine and 5+

When doing hourglass do not roll until the very last second rolling slows you down overall.

Pick up every single relic. You can augment them and you can reforge most of them. Though size 4 relics are mostly trash outside of monsters take increased damage, size 3 are the most consistently good and size 2 have some good options

You want to hit 75% honor resistance from relics.

After that you want to get a merchants have additional options. +2 makes a huge difference for completing 4 floor runs. Since it will make it more likely for ypu to get movespeed or reduced action speed

If you are running energy shield increased defences is your next most valuable buff as it makes you harder to kill and increases your maximum honor.

When picking rooms prioritize getting as much water as possible the first 2 floors.

Avoid ever taking random minor afflictions if you use energy shield.

Enemies remove 5% on hit is the scariest minor affliction for most builds and should be avoided like the plague.

Most of the bosses are easier to dodge if you sit on their arms and strafe behind while they are attacking

On floor 4 jars are your priority kill target

You can leave the trials and return to them at any time from the room select map in the bottom left. If you start getting bad latency or get tired just leave and come back later. (You can also use this to respec into MoM if you are playing e shield and get no shield. It wont be great but can give you enough breathing room to finish)

Ritual and chalice rooms are always easy,

gauntlet sucks on floors 1-2 is meh on 3 and easy on 4

Hourglass is good for drops and east with a decent build i still avoid them on floor 3 since its got an arena that only spawns jumpy sand shits and after death explosion enemies.

Escape trial is easy in the first 3 floors and can get dicey on floor 4 since jar enemies have homing fireballs you have to stop and kill them or else your gonna get hit.

Plan your route through the hourglasses to start at the furthest from the cluster when your move speed is still high

this is the trick to it, going for the furthest last is a death sentence

You can do it without boots if you equip a second hand blink aura. Just equip any weapon in the second weapon slot and equip blink aura and set it to only proc when weapon set is switched then also set one of your fast casted skills to second slot and press the following combo: second wepon set skill -> dash(space) main skill to switch back to main hand(should set main skill to only work with first hand, not both. And it becomes infinitely better you can do it in half of the clock spin. With zero speed on boots

At least sth usefull, thanks.