To keep in contact my gamer gal pal, 
As the subject says, I have completed the 10 Acts and now I'm in the Epilogue. People refer to this as the End Game Maps, but I don't get why Epilogue isn't just as good a name.
So, I've reached the Epilogue!!
I finally forced myself to ditch the Area of Affect spell (AoE), Contagion. Yes, I like to look at the purple smokey lights, but as part of my evolution to becoming a sensible gamer, I realized it wasn't suiting my game style. I took onboard that suggestion of another player to slow the mobs down and go with freezing spells. I use a combination of Freezing Pulse, Frost bomb supported by stun, spell echo and knockback. Who knows if it is the best combo, but I just threw at it anything that will keep the mobs away from me, and helped my hardworking minions! The image above is one of my new spectres, they are mean curtains with some serious firing power! lol I've been able to defeat the Syndicate every once in a while because they are tough range attackers. Previously, I had no chance. Love my curtain minions, even if they are a nuisance getting in my view when I try to do interior decorating in my hideout. They clear the path for me a lot when I run through an area.
The end result: my survivability has gone up! It helps that I am now actually paying attention to the stat, damage per sec (DPS), I wasn't really looking closely at that and just played by feel and what looked fun. And I also make a point to use my life flasks now. I wasn't making effective use of those previously. Since all the changes, I've been able to kill a few mid-level bosses without dying at all. But the big boss of Act 10, Kitava, was ridiculously hard for weakling witch me. I died about a dozen times before my minions finished her off.
With the acts done, I am resting and decorating my hideout some more. And that brings me to my latest happy find, the Skeleton Hideout. I love finding hideouts because they are just mega stashes of hideout décor for me to reuse in my preferred hideout. I thought the Skeleton hideout was quite lovely, but it was too rabbit warren-like for me to want to move to it. I find the undercity hideout the right size and space for me. I did learn that I need to have enough space to spawn portals and not have decorations in the way. So I have just enough space in my main work room for that now.
My hideout remains my happy game home. It was funny last night when I had an unexpected visitor while I was rearranging the furniture. Scared me to see a streak of red racing around on my screen. It turned out to be a player I met the other day on voice. So today I decided to be community-spirited and enter the Path of Exile Hideout competition. Here's the post if you're interested.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2295165/page/112#p16208385
I'll directly link and update of my hideout anyway, if you want a walkthrough. I've made some updates with lighting, fixed up my bedroom, and also worked on my boring tunnel. :)
You'll see a little monkey carrying a green light. He was my surprise from the Fairgrave mystery box I bought. You can get anything from character cosmetics, pet to hideout items. I was happy to get him because he is mobile hideout décor to me, and that was what I really wanted, hideout stuff. He's a cute creature roaming around my hideout looking at things. I could take him with me in-game, but I've got enough company with my 14 minions, I don't need another tag along.
Finally, the last thing I'll touch on is my guild experience. I only joined a guild to see what it was about. I discovered the one I joined is a big Diablo guild that plays PoE as well. They pretty much have finished all their PoE play 3 weeks into the league. So I have a guild stash now, not that I have any use for it. I see it as an extra hideout decoration. Woohoo! But I caused some trouble there yesterday which resulted in a mod stepping in and warning another guild member to back off or be banned. The gist of it was that I refused to accept that I should play by a build or copy others on what they consider to be optimal. I get so tired of people insisting I must follow a build guide to have the best experience. It's my first run through the game, why must I spoil all my surprises? They came up with a bunch of silly reasons and I could tell these people who were responding just wanted to be right and have the last word. It seemed like a waste of my time to keep debating with them. So I ignored them and went back to my hideout decorating. I did leave with them with this comment:
I was seriously doubting this was the kind of guild I wanted to be part of, if they were a majority of people who didn't appreciate there will be a breed of players who like to do for themselves, and not look to others for a solution to every game problem. For me, as long as I am still having fun and learning things, that's all that matters. This morning, I woke up to an alert on my guild server from the mod who responded after reading last evening's dialogue:
I totally agreed with him, it was a pointless argument, but I didn't want this other player to get into trouble just because he couldn't help himself and wanting the last word. He wasn't a bad sort, just opinionated like the majority of players. This guild is quite interesting though. It's both quiet but responsive when people chatter. So for the most part, it's a relaxed atmosphere where I occasionally like to post my random thoughts about PoE. Anyway, the mod's response had me a little more at ease that there are reasonable people in that guild. I'm posting this because this echoes the opinion that I really appreciate from some players I chat to privately, which is essentially:
You do you.
To close things off, now that I've reached 'Maps', I'm considering how I should approach this part of the game. Do I play with others? Do I start looking at some builds? Do I keep doing what I am doing and playing solo? Do I play some Hardcore (most likely). There is so much still I need to figure out. The next thing is my character's movement speed. She still runs at the pace of a turtle, because I have stubbornly decided to stick with only using Phase run and not Flame dash. Someone got me to join up with them so they could demonstrate how quick Flame dash was, and it was indeed super zippy. It's just a case of gem socket limitations. But it's quite embarrassing how slow my witch is, so I need to fix this soon!