Crafting tips to get unstuck at red maps in SSF

I’m playing SSF for the first time because my experience in the trade league felt completely joyless. Now I find myself wishing I could trade again. I’m stuck with almost no way to improve. I just reached T15 maps, trying to earn my last five Atlas points, but I’ve already failed the Corrupted Nexus twice. A juiced T14 or T15 is unplayable for me, and my defenses feel woefully insufficient.

I’m running an ES/EV build with only 25 percent evasion, 1.3 k life, and 1 k energy shield. My gear is very outdated, yet I feel unable to swap any pieces without completely breaking my build. I’ve always prioritized specific affixes over base stats, which is how I managed to cap my resistances. My build needs +90 Spirit, so I found a chest and an amulet with +45 Spirit each, and a ring with “mana on kill” to sustain my skills. It’s nearly impossible to find a chest with mid/high double res plus +45 Spirit, or boots with 25–30 percent movement speed and at least one good resistance roll. If I did swap anything now, I’d lose either my capped resistances or my extra spirit and I’m not sure I could fix that even by messing with my runes.

It feels like PoE 2 throws problem after problem at you with almost no way to solve them other than “RNG the right gear”. This league’s new stun and freeze buildup mechanics have also been killing me repeatedly and I can't add stun buildup in the mix or the luxury of a multiple charm belt. It goes without saying that I'm also playing without any rarity on gear. In a trade league, I could just buy decent ES/EV gear with a few resistances and extra Spirit for relatively little currency at my level. But in SSF, finding the right drop and then crafting on top of it seems impossible. I’m making less than one exalt per map, so I can’t just slam random bases I find. I have no currency for the Recombinator, and even if I did craft a solid 2 stats base, I’d need many more exalts to craft it into something wearable.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do. Should I farm lower-tier red maps until the perfect items drop? It’s so frustrating to feel like I have no control. If anyone has tips on how to itemize in SSF at this stage, I would really appreciate the advice. Thanks

I see 2 Options

1.) you could provide more insight into your build, so maybe there are adjustments you can do that make it less gear restrictive, not all builds work well in SSF though

2.) From the Character Selection Screen you can migrate your SSF Character to Trade League

I would back off map tiers until I was not dying very often. Which should get you some levels. Avoid certain map mod, especially ones that make the monsters do a lot more damage. Doing just double blue maps is fine.

I would also not worry about completely maxing resistances. It is nice and a goal to shot for but not at any cost.

You need to understand at least the basics of crafting. All your gear needs to have 6 mods, 20% quality, and max sockets.

I don't know your build but 1.3k life and 1k ES at T15 is very fragile. Until you get more experienced, following a build guide is good. League starter builds or something like that are normally designed to be less gear dependent. Many end game builds do not work well until you have very good gear, so be careful going with just the most popular meta build guide.

As a practical matter, you might want to wait until 0.2.1 is released. It's intended to improve drops a lot. More quantity and more variety, like new socketables.