[1.2] Quad Curse Trapper

The impetus for this build is my fascination with the curse skills. There’s a multitude of benefits you receive from one curse so stacking four on each other seemed like a cool idea. Plus it gives you flexibility to swap out curses to fit the situation. When the passives tree was modified to improve the effect of the curses, I wanted to try and make a build that leveraged the 24% increase of effect for these spells. My first build was a summoner using three curses. By and large that was a success but I wanted a build that did not have to rely on minions to do the damage, can solo, and squeezed in that 4th curse. The quad trapper was thus born.

Here's a video of me slowing Kole so much it's a joke running around and not getting hit... although i do get hit even though I seem to be behind him.

Kole Katch Me if you Kan!

The next video is me solo'ing a level 70 map, the Underground Sea. This gives you a feel for how quickly/slowly I kill monsters.

Under Da Sea!

The video below shows party support for a level 66 map. I usually just end up cursing and letting everyone else blow things up. With higher level party mates, trapping becomes rare because I'm constantly trying to catch up.

Cursin' Like a Boss!... I mean cursing a boss

Pros:
== Survivability is good. You freeze, slow, weaken monsters into irrelevance.
== Awesome party support.
== Can solo.
Cons:
== Curse Immune monsters.
== Slow clear speeds. You’re waiting for mobs to step into your traps.
== Mobs with shields or high evasion if using a bow.

There are several synergies I wanted to take advantage of. Arctic Armor (AA) is a great little skill. It protects you from fire and physical hits, but it has an added effect of chilling the monsters chasing you. Trappers have to kite monsters by default so AA is a good defensive choice. You can further slow down monsters with temporal chains. In fact, with 20/20 temp chains, 20/20 curse on hit, and the 24% increase from the nodes on the passives tree, you can slow monsters up to 55%. Add on the chill effect, it becomes a comical sight to see. Maybe in future patches I’ll be able to slow them down by 88% and see them go back in time.

The other synergy was using three other curses and elemental equilibrium (EE) to increase damage output. I picked fire trap as the primary damage dealing skill because the area of effect burning damage but there is plenty of potential to try out other trapped skills. Vulnerability gives s 33% damage over time increase in damage. This affects only the AOE burning damage and not the initial fire trap damage. Flammability, EE, and elemental weakness smash the resistances of the unsuspecting monster by 172%. This is with a 20/20 curse on hit, 20/20 elemental weakness, and 24% nodes from the tree. If you get all the increase damage trapper nodes, that’s another increase of 215%. Throw in a 20/20 concentrated effect and 20/20 fire penetration, you get an average of 5.6k per fire trap! Wow!… wait, that’s not as impressive as the two million DPS of the shatter chuck build, but this allows you to trash white mobs fairly easily.

For defenses, I combine AA with Acrobatics / Phase Acrobatics, and a shield to block.

My current setup:



Ball lightning. Ball lightning pierces all the monsters and is guaranteed to hit. Also, I proc EE on monsters to have lower fire and cold resists. The downside is that the AOE is limited and the ball flies slowly. A wand with increased projectile speed will definitely help. Overall, I find this to be the best spell to use for getting four curses on monsters in the time it takes to fire off this spell (roughly half a second). You can pick and choose which curses you need at the moment. If you're running a party heavy in fire users, then I go with Flammability, Elemental Weakness, Vulnerability, and Temp Chains. If the focus is more crit melee, then I use Assassins Mark, Vulnerability, Temp Chains, and Warlords Mark.

Cold Snap. With Cold Snap combined with elemental proliferation, and cursing the mob with frostbite and elemental weakness, it becomes very easy to freeze the crowd. You follow this up with a Fire Trap or a trapped Desecrate, and sit back to watch the mobs health dwindle as they perform a mannequin act. Quite fun to mess with monsters.

Fire Trap. I currently have this linked with increased AOE, and concentrated effect.

Vaal Flameblast Trap. Link this with trap, concentrated effect, and fire penetration and you have yourself a nice little damage dealer.

Auras. I run Clarity, Discipline, and Haste. Although you can run Herald of Ice in lue of Discipline if you have enough ES on gear.

Doedre's Damning x2. It is possible to get a corrupted rare amulet with a +1 to curses. However, Doedre’s rings are cheap.


Tabula Rasa. This is great for swapping out curses on the fly. A corrupted 6L armor that gives you one or two white sockets, added ES and elemental/chaos resists, would be great. Or, perhaps a corrupted 6L’ed Lightning Coil/Cloak of Defiance with 3 white sockets would be most ideal? Richer folks than me can test that out. I got lucky with the Tabula, so that’s what I use.

Dying Breath. This unique gives you 18% increase in effectiveness to your curses. The downside is that you need to be about half a screen away for this to take effect. I would use it but my resists are too low and a shield provides a higher block percentage.


Deerstalker boots. This gives you a 5 link and 30% movement speed. The downside is no resists.


Rime Gaze. This helm effectively gives you a 5L. I throw in Cold Snap, Trap, Increased AOE, and Elemental Proliferation.


Sunblast. This belt is good to increase your trap damage, but I need the resists more.

Passive skill tree build at 30 points

The first 30 points are you trying to get arctic armor up and running. No small feat because of the mana regen that is required.

Passive skill tree build at 60 points

At this point, you should have EB and enough mana nodes to run arctic armor. The next series of points goes towards getting Acrobatics and Phase Acrobatics, the curse nodes, and trap nodes.

Passive skill tree build at 90 points

The rest of the points should go towards block and trap nodes:

Passive skill tree build at damn-near-impossible to get 120 points

Normal == Help Kraitlin. He provides the +8% to resists. The 2 unique rings, tabula, and helm make it a bit tough to achieve maxed resists. Helping Krait here alleviates that problem.

Cruel == If you choose to go with a bow, pick Krait for the attack speed. If you're going with ball lightning like me, help Alira for the cast speed.

Merciless == Kill all bandits.