[Torment] Splode's Bridle - Scold's Vaal Molten Shell Incinerator (now with videos)

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PepprmintButler wrote:

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squurellkiller wrote:

I just bought a Scolds and divined it once.

Got the 100% lol.
I want to make a build using RF, Incinerate, VMS, as well as the uniques Rotp, Cloak of flame, 2 Mokous Embrace rings, and obviously Scold's. Can anyone tell me if this is possible?

That's definitely possible (and likely to be very very strong), but I would advise against the Mokous. To ignite yourself through CoF, you need to not be using AA at all, and besides the loss of its defensive power, that means you will hurt yourself a lot with Scold's. I'm not saying it cannot work (there's actually interesting stuff to do with CwdT if you do that), but it's going to be harder to pull off imo. Incinerate/VMS is already ridiculously powerful ; RF on top puts it over the top. You really don't need any more deeps after that I think, especially not at the expense of tankiness.

Thanks for the advice, I think i'm going to do just a Incinerate VMS and maybe add in RF.
Also, what do you think about making a cwdt build with the Scold's and Incinerate that's kind of like a Cast on Crit build. I was thinking about linking about 5 or 6 cwdt 2 links with a single, but different spell for each cwdt gem. I just don't know if the damage is going to be enough considering that cwdt lowers the damage of the spells, plus the fact that the spells can't be maxed level or the cwdt won't proc enough.
Edit: I looked at the cwdt wiki and I am 99% sure that it wouldn't do enough damage.

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squurellkiller wrote:

Edit: I looked at the cwdt wiki and I am 99% sure that it wouldn't do enough damage.

Pretty much.
You could conceivably do something interesting with utility spells on a low level CwDT and something like Discharge on lvl20 CwDT or self-cast, but having all your damage dealers on CwDT is unlikely to work out very well.
For reference, here's a fun CwDT-centric build I did a couple leagues ago : http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/997583

(quick edit : here's another very short video of lvl77 Shock and Horror with 42 lightning resist - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q53x-3TQhNs)

Have you tried Atziri with it?

I thought I'd give you guys an update on my VMS/Scold's RF Incinerator. So basically, I built this guy first and foremost as Dooncinerator, using Doon Cuebiyari to scale increased damage with my strength and RF to scale all my spell damage to high amounts. Early in the league I killed Atziri a few times with my Incinerate in a 3L on Doon (which for budget incinerator is essentially a 5L (Level 30 IW = Faster Casting + Iron Will, essentially) and saved up enough to get a cheap Doryani's. Once I got that I wavered between the two and decided that Doon is slightly better than Doryani's (even with only 450+ strength) IF you're running added chaos. If you're running added cold, Doriyani's is generally better. BUT, and big but here, once I switched to Scold's and a 6L Incinerate, I actually find that the elemental leech is an absolute necessity.

My current gear:


This is not budget in the least, but I'll run through what I paid for some of this and so you can get an idea... Doryani's I paid an Ex and some change for with a bit of haggling. You'd be surprised how affordable some Atziri gear can be when nobody has straight exa early in the league. Anyway, the armor I got for 2 ex-- it was probably corrupted in a box and the stats aren't important. At the time I bought it I initially regretted buying it instead of a Tabula, but it gives me some mana and life and resists, so meh. Basically it's the one piece I'm looking to replace in the near future. Probably with a Carcass Jack or Cloak of Defiance. RoTP cost me a lot because I bought in the first week, now it is cheap I think. Gloves, boots, belt, and amulet are self found and enchanted. The unset ring is baller, one of the best possible rolls for this build and I got it today for 40c. Scold's, well, I logged in today wondering what the easiest way to farm up enough currency to buy a scold's would be and it dropped in the first map. Probably the priciest piece.

My links are:

RF - Increased Burning Damage - Conc - Increased AoE in Scold's. so at level 20 RF is like 59% more spell damage with 1,595 tooltip. Consider scold's itself is 97% increased spell damage. holy moly.

Incinerate - Spell Echo - Faster Casting - GMP - (Added Chaos) - (Fire Pen) GMP tooltip is 5,140 dps, 0.10 cast time; I mostly play in parties but this melts mobs. Solo you don't even need RF up to really do damage and I do enough DPS without it that I can turn of RF on hard maps to be that much tankier.

Arctic Armour - Purity of Fire - Reduced Mana - Herald of Ice (no brainer, happened to put AA here due to having no chromes and getting rolls to work out this way. Basically I'm always out of chromes, so I'd probably switch AA to the unset ring if I could and put LW in with the auras.)

Clarity - Herald of Thunder - Reduced Mana More auras. It was hard to run them all before I got scolds and better energy shield gear, now I have 400 unreserved and am running L16 arctic armour (can go higher)

Cast when damage taken 7 - enduring cry 9 - immortal call 8 - increased duration (typical cwdt setup, this gives me a decently long immortal call when surrounded by mobs; scold's only triggers this if AA is off, otherwise the scold's damage is prevented completely)

Vaal Molten Shell - Inc Aoe - Inc Duration - [level 20 ele prolif in scepter] Here's where the magic happens. So while VMS is up, scold's triggers it on every "cast" of incinerate (many times per second); my VMS tooltip right now with RF on is 9207 at level 15; 6 players, extra health, whatever. VMS + incinerate + scold's will delete it. I'm not sure what my DPS is if all 5 projectiles + scold's VMS + something standing in my RF, but I can easily solo 76+ map bosses in parties. quickly. The prolif helps a ton, because VMS deals big chunky hits that if they freeze or shock due to the added herald damage, those statuses are immediately proliferated to everything nearby

Here's my tree:

Basically go for all the regen nodes, which gives you a lot of health and strength, and then get inner force and devotion when your PoF hits level 20. I started Templar, went witch way first, then went south templar and duelist area last I think. I'm currently considering specing out of Retribution, the life node in front of it and the life node after Devotion and putting those 3 into the increased duration nodes. Downside of this is that Lightning Warp is slow, but I only really use it to cross gaps anyway. The singular dex node can be ignored as it was required when I was using Alpha's Howl. So with that one (4 total points to be moved out of retribution) I could get unwavering stance (helpful to keep from being stunned during vms cast and to avoid desync). So yeah, at 90 you're basically playing around with 3-4 points between Potency of Will, the Templar or Witch AoE clusters, and/or just more life or cast speed (alternatively, mana-- Dynamo cluster maybe, Righteous decree, etc. but the others are probably more important).

Stats I look for on my rare bits are: Resists > Life > Spell Damage | Strength > Chaos Res | Movespeed; the elemental leech is required because in my garbage chest I can be squishy at times; leveling and throughout the early 80s I used a 5L Daresso's Defiance, but alas, once you get a Scold's you have to retire that piece as they fundamentally don't work together right. If you don't have a Doryani's scepter go with Doon Cuebiyari and probably a fire doryani's invitation.

One nice thing about this is you can run it as regular RF incinerate until you get scold's or even just as a high life regen incineration without RF. The RoTP + arctic armour takes care of reflect issues, though without the global 1% elemental leech it's possible to take huge non-fire elemental reflection damage if you're using added cold or have quality heralds. If you have another source of elemental leech or are running a fire invitation (I don't run this because belt slot is a high life slot and I'd rather have +400 life from the 120 max life on my belt than the armor + inc fire damage on invitation), you could replace Catalyst with Doon and with enough strength pieces have higher damage and a lot more chaos damage scaling. But with the 97% inc damage on scolds + Rf More spell damage + quality gems, etc. you'll be way more worried about survivability than anything else. I'll try and upload a vid or two at some point, but this build is totally faceroll.

Flasks:

Topaz should be changed, probably, since I have a lot less armor than I did when I was using daresso. With that said, some of the biggest late game damage spikes tend to be lightning damage, which is the reason I keep a topaz in the second slot. You want perpetual + either armor or evasion mod; alternatively shock immunity, but I like the hybrid def + max lit res combo. Scariest things for this build are curse (higher RF degen, etc.) followed by corrupted blood. regular bleeding/pierce can be dealt with by ruby flask alone, but corrupting blood will destroy you so keep a bleed flask-- (before the patch it was possible to meet corrupted blood mobs you couldn't kill, but now with bleed immunity during duration of the flask these mobs are much easier to deal with).

I used to curse with HoT but due to socket requirements and insane clear speed (clear faster than it can curse) as well as auto-curse being a no-go during atziri fight, I opted to make that 3link into just another aura link so I could give VMS a proper 4L.

Future goals are:

Better chest piece, probably Carcass Jack or Cloak of Defiance, alternatively atziri garb could be very nice. You'll want BBBBG for 5link and BBBBGR for 6 link which makes it super hard to get the right colors on stuff like Belly. At some point I'd like to 5/6L my Cloak of Flame, as that might be BiS.

Gloves can be replaced with gloves with fewer unused stats.

That's about it, really.

I've refreshed my tree:

Yesterday I hit 90, so I'll be going with that tree (I basically just streamlined my witch-area nodes to get 4 points extra (at the expense of some ele damage and fire res) which will go into either the Exceptional Performance cluster above Duelist for longer VMS uptime/CWDT-Immortal Call OR to get Celestial punishment. Another alternative would be unwavering stance OR straight life (about 20% increased maximum life from the Scion circle) or Armour Mastery (regen, inc armour, 3% movespeed) + life in the Marauder area for increased regen/life.

So I ask you all, which would offer me more utility in your opinion?

Basically as it stands, just my RF-incinerate damage is more than enough to run pretty much any map I want by itself and my immortal call already hits 3-6 seconds regularly.

With a L20 increased duration VMS will last:

10s * (64% inc + 45% cluster) = 21.9s duration (current tree without the extra inc duration cluster)
10s * (64% inc + 45% + 45% clusters) = 26.4s duration (w/ all inc duration clusters)

For Immortal Call the difference works out to be:

(0.55s base + (L8 Immortal call additional 0.59s base per charge * 3 charges)) * 64% inc + 45% inc = 4.84s duration (1 inc duration cluster)
(0.55s base + (0.59s per charge * 3)) * (64+45+45%) = 5.89s duration (all inc duration clusters)

I can generally keep VMS up about 80-90% of the time in a map (would be a lot easier to do so with higher movespeed) and no boss lives longer than it takes the shell to expire apart from Atziri or Uber Atziri which have invulnerability phases anyway.

So the full 4 point return skillwise would be:

+5s to VMS duration and +1s to immortal call duration
OR
5% chance to shock, freeze, ignite and 25% increased damage against targets with ailiments
OR
50% increased armour, 3% movespeed, 0.5% life regen, and 5% inc max life
OR
+30 Strength and Unwavering stance (cannot be stunned/cannot evade attacks)

I'm not going to go with the defensive option with my current gear as I have almost no armor, so the benefit would be negligible, but I'm currently thinking that while my damage bonus with VMS up is way way higher than 25% increased, I might get more mileage in outlier cases (boss fights, etc.) with Celestial punishments nodes in addition to 50% more damage (shocked) and higher freeze potential as well as just lots more damage during VMS downtime. The alternative choice would be to just bite the bullet and spec into unwavering stance, which ultimately would provide me with stun immunity at the cost of about 10% chance to evade attacks. While this arguably doesn't benefit me very much offensively or defensively, due to the loss of evasion, it does provide the very tangible cannot be stunned benefit. I don't get stunned MUCH, but I do ocassionally get stunned while casting VMS which cancels the effect but spends the souls and of course hits large enough to chunk and stun me are typically the main source of my deaths to bosses due to the potential to stunlock/desync me.

Another thing to consider is that Celestial punishment is flat out worse than all other options when it comes to Atziri, because she is immune to status ailments. However, I'm too lazy to farm sac frags anyway, so I'm not running her regularly.

My gut feeling is that I should go with either Celestial Punishment or Unwavering Stance, but I'll need to farm more regrets before I can test out the practicality of either. I checked a lot of other incinerate builds to kind of get a sense if anyone was taking Unwavering Stance and I saw very few people taking this node. My guess is that since incinerate is melee, most builds advise a high life pool anyway, which lessens the chance of getting stunned in the first place, as well as the inability to grab both IR and US and still hit the other nodes you need. Additionally I don't see RF characters taking it either, probably because of similar reasoning (stacking life) and the added benefit that you tend to burn down enemies in melee range anyway so the worst offenders (charging enemies, rhoas, etc.) tend to die as soon as they stun you anyway. However, it seems to me that most of my deaths (rare as they are) are typically caused by either stunlock or degen.

I'm leaning towards Celestial Punishment, but I'd like to hear any opinions.

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squurellkiller wrote:

Have you tried Atziri with it?

Yes I have, it's pretty smooth sailing. No problem at all with the trash, and the Vaals and the trio go down in seconds. Atziri herself, you need to pre-charge a couple extra VMS gems if you want to go fast, but it works with just 1 charge and incinerate only for the rest of the fight.
I'll maybe upload a run if i can be bothered to.

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FutureBlues wrote:

[wall of text]

Whoa, thanks for that. Will respond when I get a chance to go through it all. :P

@FutureBlues : Thanks again for the detailed report on the RF side of things. Sounds pretty good, I don't have many sugestions for improvement there. Regarding your choice for last points, if you're still wondering about that (unlikely I guess) : I'd definitely go with the duration nodes. The 5 seconds of VMS are just a huge difference for general clear speed. Second choice would be straight life, because as you say damage is not really an issue, at this point you want survivability above all.

On my own front, this build is still in use for me to farm dailies when I can be bothered to, but it's on the backburner. It just works really well, I don't see any significant axis for improvement as it stands. Actually I do, speccing out of US for something more point efficient is likely to be one, but meh. There's just very little stuff that's still even remotely challenging with the build as it stands so yeah.
I'm currently off to making other builds. I did a RT Static Striker with dual Catalysts to see how far I could push the deeps on a RT build (80k+ unbuffed tooltip), but I'm not a big fan of the playstyle. Now that the latest patch has made arrow minion MI lowlife builds workable, I'll probably be working on that next.

Thank you for this nice build. I love the new helmet and mechanics.

I'm happy playing my own Flameblast and Burning prolif version. I could say a No-brainer version but so fun!







Currently Level 77: Flameblast DPS 2.382 and VMS 17.280.

Cheers.

More news from the lab!

After a lot of game time with that 6L in the gear section of my last post, I finally hit 90. About 3 bars in, I got killed in a 76 map when I got lazy with my flasks. Just one bar of experience. I began to notice, hey, these levels go a lot slower now. Then I died again in a -max minus corrupted map, sure it was a hard affix, but the map was low 70s! I started to grind for a few hours at a time, only to lose all the progress I'd made by the sessions end. Throughout the 80s I'd been nearly invulnerable and died maybe twice total, but as soon as I hit 90 I was getting careless and dying a lot. Some of it was sloppy playing, well a lot of it was, actually.

I found a new flask:

Still, I was dying. As much as I liked that 5500 tooltip on my incinerate, I was a little too squishy and my assumption was that a little physical and a lot of elemental damage and chaos degens were killing me.

My first thought was to try out Cloak of Flame (which had been my initial motivation for this build). Since with flask nodes I have 102% fire res during flasks, Cloak of Flame is basically 20% flat physical damage reduction. I bought a cheap 6S Cloak and decided to spend all 300 of my fuses trying to surreptitiously 6L it.

Result of those efforts:

With that said, I did do a few runs with it in a BBBG 4L and I can say that it performed the job of physical mitigation admirably. In fact it worked SO WELL that I realized that my main defensive weakness was lightning damage. Bosses like Piety could stun me to death through my healthpool and added lightning damage in maps resulted in shocking (more degen) + frequent microstuns which interrupt incinerate. I would have stopped there and stuck with the Cloak anyway had my waste of fusings panned out any better. But they didn't, so I was forced to really wrack my brain and try new, scary things. Things that cost a lot of currency!

I put the 6L back on and in an attempt to try out some various defensive gem options, I moved VMS out of my armor and created a Cast When Stunned setup. I figured if I was getting stunned as much as I thought I might be, a CWS setup could chill mobs/create chilled ground while actually doing decent damage due to all the RF scaling.

This led me to realize that I wasn't getting stunned nearly enough to devote a full 3L to CWS and also gave me confidence that Unwavering Stance was unnecessary.

Other things I tested: Dual CwDT setups, one higher for immortal call and one lower for constant casts of Enduring Cry. Results were only marginally effective, stick with the tried and true before it gets removed at the end of the league.

Eventually I settled on a secondary CWDT 3L of Enfeeble (7) - CWDT (4) - Arctic Breath (4).

To fit VMS back into my build I changed my RF setup. My theory was that since I was primarily using RF for the spell damage multiplier rather than for the DPS, I could just remove Conc Effect / Burning Damage and I'd be able to recolor my Scold's to accommodate these changes easily as it's an Int helm.

Here are my current RF/VMS links: Righteous Fire - Increased AoE - Increased Duration - VMS

This allows me to make room for the above 3L secondary CWDT. With that said, all the new CWDT does is just add in some extra defensive after that first hit and allow me to better scale my existing defenses if I really want to. To refresh: Enfeeble is less mob damage, less accuracy, and less crit chance/multi-- which fulfills a lot of my defensive needs since it affects both physical and elemental damage AND makes existing evasion much more useful. But in the armour I was using, there's very little evasion, so I started thinking about easy ways to scale my evasion...

Having clawed my way back up to 3 or so bars towards 91, I decided to see how much easier Atziri would be now that I had improved my gear so much. I died 4 times to, what else, storm calls. Lightning damage. UGH.

I poured over unique amulets and chest armours, trying to find some way to mitigate lightning damage. Nothing really fills this niche. I was stuck. I decided that the only real trump card I had was that I could probably run Purity of Lightning if I really had to.

Anyway, when I finally killed her, all the way back at 90 with zero xp again she dropped:

15% spell dodge. I'd used these before on a nado ranger and my impression was that it was a little underwhelming, but I remembered how much fun (and how few deaths I'd had) with Daresso's 6% dodge that I decided to equip the boots and make some gear/passive changes to accommodate them. They also provided decent life and more importantly, high evasion. So yeah, spell dodge, general stats I needed, and they scaled my new Enfeeble setup at the same time, because higher evasion means lower enemy crit.

At the same time I decided to retire Herald of Thunder and put the lightning damage issue to bed by running Purity of Lightning. I had to make some passive changes to accommodate running the higher % reserved Purity so I took Righteous Decree and moved a few passives around to facilitate this.

Current Tree (level 90):

I ran a few maps, still feeling like I was missing something. Enemies could still chunk me before the Enfeeble kicked in and my movement speed sucked, so mapping was slow. It wasn't... smooth? It just didn't feel as solid, defensively, as I thought it should be. I could easily see myself dying again to the same situations as before. I wasn't ready to continue playing with that danger as I wanted to continue leveling.

At this point, I felt lost. I needed a 5 or 6L cloak of defiance, I needed the fusings back that I'd lost trying to stupidly link my Cloak of Flame. My only other option were expensive 6L rares that could take months to farm the currency to buy. I spent a long time with my stash open looking at the 4 or 5 options for 5L armour I'd picked up on my way to 90. None of them had high armor or evasion so they were strictly worse than the 6L I already had on. Did I mention I was broke? Like completely broke? A handful of chromes, zero (yes, none) fusings, 4-5 chaos to my name.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, it is known. Remember last post when I mentioned, but dismissed running Daresso's Defiance + Scold's. What actually would happen? I wondered. My assumption was that you'd prevent immortal call from triggering as scold's hits would immediately consume any endurance charges generated. I said why not, tossed out Fire Pen and subbed in Added Cold for Added Chaos because I'll never touch my BBBGG Defiance with another chrome if I can help it-- super expensive colors to try and get BBBBG. Anyway, put the thing on, tossed in the gems. Ran a map to see how bad it was. Holy Moly.

The meaning of life:

Here's my current gear:

Current Flasks:

Current Defensive stats:

The Daresso's Defiance bit is really interesting, great find ! Perma Onslaught is definitely something we want, especially with 26% buff effect. CwDT EC IC still working fine is just icing on the cake, and unexpected icing at that.

On my setup, coloring the chest (RRRRB-G) should not be much of a problem, so that's nice. Exciting ! I'm currently working on another build which needs my focus and currency right now, but I'll definitely get to this at some point.