Path of Building · Stage 03 · Configuration · PoE 1 and PoE 2
Enemy level, resistances and boss presets move the result further than most gear swaps do. There are dozens of settings in that tab and roughly six of them decide almost everything. Knowing which six is the difference between a number that describes your gameplay and a number that describes nothing at all.
Configuration is where you describe the fight. Six settings carry most of the weight: the target you are attacking, whether your buffs and charges are running, whether flasks are up, and whether the enemy is shocked, cursed or exposed. Everything else is rounding by comparison.
They multiply together rather than adding, which is why the same character can honestly show figures three or four times apart depending on the tab. Nothing is being faked. Two different questions are being answered.
A freshly imported build arrives at defaults, and defaults are deliberately neutral: a generic target, no conditional buffs, no ailments, nothing assumed. That is the correct starting point and it is also a fight that does not exist anywhere in the game.
So the number on screen at that moment is not wrong, and it is not right either. It is unfinished. Every figure worth quoting comes after you have described a situation. This is also the single biggest reason two people quote wildly different numbers for the same build and both are telling the truth, a problem that starts as soon as you import a build.
Toggle the settings below on one example character. Notice how quickly the total moves, and how the effects multiply rather than stacking politely side by side.
What are you fighting?
What is running?
Result
1,000,000
Default import: 1,000,000 Change: ×1.00
For scale: a substantial weapon upgrade on this example character is worth roughly ×1.15. Several config toggles individually beat that, and together they dwarf it.
Magnitudes chosen to show how settings compound, not to predict any real build. Your own numbers depend on your damage type, scaling and ailment setup.
Ranked by how far each one moves a typical result. If you only ever touch the first group, you will already be reading better than most people.
This is the heaviest single control in the tab. Boss presets bundle several changes at once: higher resistances, damage reduction, reduced effect of your curses, and tougher ailment thresholds. Moving from a generic target to a pinnacle boss can cut a damage figure close to in half before you have touched anything else.
It is also the setting people compare across most carelessly. A figure quoted against no boss and a figure quoted against an uber pinnacle boss are not the same measurement.
Honest setting: pick the hardest content you actually intend to run, then read that number as your real ceiling.Enemy level feeds accuracy, evasion, ailment thresholds and several resistance calculations. It usually travels with the boss preset, but it can be set independently, and a mismatch between the two produces a figure describing a creature that does not exist.
Honest setting: leave it tied to your chosen preset unless you have a specific reason not to.For elemental builds this is enormous. Whether the target sits at base resistance, is exposed, is cursed, or has been reduced by a specific mechanic can swing damage by a third or more on its own.
It is also the setting most likely to be quietly optimistic in a build guide, because assuming full exposure and a curse makes a build look considerably better than it plays.
Honest setting: only enable what your build applies reliably by itself, not what it could apply in a perfect moment.Power, frenzy and endurance charges are often assumed to be permanently full. For some builds that is genuinely true. For many it is true after a few seconds of a fight and false during the part that kills you.
Honest setting: full charges for a sustained boss fight, and consider reading a second figure without them for the opening moments.Flask uptime is the assumption most likely to flatter a build. A configuration with every flask running describes a moment, not a fight, and the difference is large enough to change which of two builds looks stronger.
Honest setting: enable what you can genuinely keep up. If you are comparing two builds, enable the same assumption on both.Onslaught, fortify, rage, elusive and their equivalents each add a modest amount, and modest amounts multiply into a large one. They arrive switched off precisely because nothing can know your uptime.
Honest setting: turn on what the build maintains by design, leave off what depends on a lucky window.Shock in particular is one of the largest single multipliers available, and chill, wither and similar effects follow behind it. If your build applies them itself, they belong in the configuration. If they depend on a party member, they do not.
Honest setting: match the magnitude to what your own character can actually apply, not the theoretical maximum.Several modifiers key off conditions like these. They are easy to leave enabled from an earlier session and easy to forget about, which makes them a common source of a number that quietly refuses to reproduce in game.
Honest setting: review the whole tab after importing rather than only the settings you came to change.Anything typed in by hand persists and applies silently. In an imported build these came from someone else's assumptions about their own character, and they are worth reading before you trust anything.
Honest setting: clear anything you did not add yourself and do not understand.The remainder exists for specific interactions and niche builds. If a setting does not appear in your build's actual mechanics, changing it does nothing, and hunting through all of them wastes time better spent on the six above.
The exception is when your build is unusual. If you are stacking a specific mechanic, the setting that governs it moves from tier four to tier one for you personally.
The uptime problem has no perfect answer, because the honest answer to "are your flasks up" is "sometimes". The practical fix is to stop trying to produce one number and produce two, each describing a situation you actually spend time in.
Profile one
The state you are in for most of your playtime: no boss preset, ordinary enemies, and only the buffs you hold without thinking about it.
Profile two
The hardest single target you intend to attempt, with everything you would genuinely have running by the time the fight is underway.
Read both. A build that looks excellent in one and poor in the other is telling you something specific and useful about where it works. A single number cannot say that, which is part of why the highest DPS build may not be the best one.
The most common error, and the most expensive. Two figures produced under different assumptions cannot be subtracted from each other. Match the configuration first, then compare. See comparing builds.
An imported build can carry custom modifiers and enabled conditions that reflected another player's character. They apply silently to yours until you look.
Optimising against the hardest content in the game is only useful if you intend to go there. Otherwise you are tuning for a fight that will never happen and ignoring the one you are actually in.
Configuration applies to whichever setup is selected, and imported builds frequently arrive pointed at the wrong one. Fix the skill first, as covered in how the main skill is selected.
The same tab governs what is being done to you: hit sizes, damage types, whether you are taking a physical or elemental hit. A build that dies in one hit does not get to use its damage. See comparing build defences.
The boss preset. It bundles resistances, damage reduction, curse effectiveness and ailment thresholds into one control, and moving it can change a damage figure by close to half on its own.
Only if you want a number describing your single best moment. That figure is real but rare, and it is the wrong basis for deciding whether a build can handle content. Set what you sustain, then read a second figure with everything on if you are curious.
Because the number describes a static moment with fixed assumptions, and a fight is neither static nor obliging. Enemy movement, uptime, positioning and defensive mechanics all sit outside what a configuration can express.
Some of it can travel with the build, including custom modifiers. Treat anything you did not set yourself as an assumption to be reviewed rather than a fact about the build.
The principle is identical: you are describing a fight rather than the character. The specific options differ because the games handle ailments, charges and boss mechanics differently, so read the tab rather than assuming your habits carry over.
Import both, select the correct skill on each, then set both to identical configurations before looking at any figure. If you only do one thing from this page, do that.
The whole tool, from import through to reading what comes out.
Next stepPutting two builds side by side under assumptions that actually match.
If it brokeWhen the build will not load, or loads and reads wrong.
Also useful: importing a build, reading build data, how ladder filters change results, common mistakes, the glossary, and the tools.
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Path of Exile and Path of Exile 2 are trademarks of Grinding Gear Games. The model on this page uses invented magnitudes to demonstrate how settings compound; it is not a calculator and should not be used as one. Get Path of Building from its own repository. Something here wrong or out of date? Tell us and it gets fixed and logged under our corrections policy.