[1.3] No Cash Lowlife - LL ST with 10 ex budget - 5 auras & 3 heralds, 22k LMP dps in a 5L

Intro

I proudly present to you the No Cash Lowlife - ultimate LL ST version created with the best budget technologies, with NONE of the uniques typically used in LL builds. Truly achievable by anyone!

In summary, this build uses:
NO Mirrored Items
NO Acuity
NO Shavs
NO CoE
NO Auxium
Not even Solaris (shit item really, loosing 500-700 base ES from chest? no thx)
5L EV/ES Chest (~2-4ex)
~5ex cost dagger
total build cost should amount to around ~10ex on average
If you want to go REALLY budget, you can use elemental dagger or just any <10 c cheap one (as long as its fast and has decent crit chance), this will bring down the build cost to 4-5 ex.

This is more of a gearing guide, as the tree is mostly a generic mana-based LL, with some minor adjustments.

Many people, myself included until recently, believe that it is impossible to do LL builds without spending hundreds of exalts. Pretty much all LL build threads reinforce this opinion, as in 9 out of 10 cases you see Acuity, Shaves, Loath Banana and other mirrored gear in the gear section, with most of these listed as "required" items. Truth is that none of them are actually required to make a functional LL build, and that is precisely why I am posting this thread.

The main difference from the popular RMT LL builds is that rather than using Shavs, or Solaris (and having no ES), it is possible to stack a lot of chaos res (ideally cap it) to counteract BR degen and heavily reduce incoming chaos damage, with the ability to run Vitality instead of Anger in chaos-heavy areas, and optionally Binos which provides life regen in thousands per seconds.

Pros & Cons



Dealing with Chaos damage

First of all, know what enemies actually do chaos damage. This helps greatly.
In any map with those, or other sources of chaos damage (Desecrated), replace Anger Aura with Vitality and change to Binos dagger if you have one.

Main enemies that present the biggest threat to you are:
- Jungle Valley boss. I'll test if it is actually possible to survive it or not, haven't tried yet.
- Poison Alchemists when they have some sort of damage increase. Normal ones should be just counterable with Vitality + flasks, but the ones with powerful crits for example can become deadly.
- Some Beyond spawns that deal chaos damage
- Zombies that leave powerful chaos degen clouds after death, spawned by Hillock-like bosses.
Thankfully those are mostly limited to lower maps and you don't encounter them in 75+

One thing to note is that being shocked acts for you the same as standing in chaos degen cloud. This is very important and took me a few deaths to realise this. Standing in the actual chaos degen cloud and getting shocked is even more dangerous and should be avoided at all costs!!!
The reason - while shocked you have +50% self damage from BR degen. So effectively you must treat +lightning damage and "shocking ground" map mods as chaos-dangerous, and perform precautions mentioned above. Also carrying at least one Grounding flask at all times is a good idea.

Auras

I use the following auras (& Heralds):
Herald of Ash
Herald of Thunder
Herald of Fire
Anger (or Vitality)
Wrath
Hatred (or Haste)
Discipline
Clarity (lvl depends on manapool)

If you need to take out any damage auras or can't run them all yet, the ones that are least important (in terms of damage at least) are Hatred and Herald of Ash.

Stats



Tree

Final form
Alt path - more life, life regen & mana regen, but less ES

Generally it is better to level as a life/ES hybrid.
Get Heart & Soul as well as Written in Blood, also you can get Melding if you feel like not having enough life. After that get Nightstalker & Assassination.
When you reach 50+ pick life regen nodes near Scion in preparation to switching to LL.
For leveling use Rat's nest.

Only switch to LL when you can equip enough chaos res gear to have 60+% resist. By that timw you should have all aura nodes that reduce aura mana reservation.

Gear selection

Chaos res should be present on almost all items. Don't bother with chaos rolls less than 25%, not worth it. If you can't cap chaos res or get at least 60%, you can use Purity of Elements at the expense of one damage aura, then capping chaos becomes very easy.

Nearly all damage-related mods increase our damage, but WED is one of the most efficient ones and highest on priority list. If you can't find affordable items with one, craft yourself on the belt.
Next comes flat elemental / phys damage. Don't bother with phys roll from Elreon mod, it is garbage.

Accuracy is also important, and should be present on 2 items minimum, 3-4 ideally.

Budget for each rare is from 1c to 1ex.
Buying anything more expensive is generally not worth it,
as at some point there will probably pop up something similar for only a fraction of the cost.

Useful prefixes:
max life
max mana
flat ES
% ES (a combination of flat + % ES with high rolls can give 500 ES from 1 piece of jewelry)
WED
flat phys dmg
flat light / fire / ice / chaos dmg
Prefixes is where you have make survivability vs damage tradeoff.
% mana leech <<<< get this on at least one piece of jewelry to solve all mana problems!
% life leech

Useful suffixes:
accuracy
chaos res
any elemental res
% mana regen

Shield - Prism Guardian. Allows to run 3*60% auras on life, or 2*60% + 1*40%, without wasting slots on BM gems.

Uniques
This is a list of uniques that can be useful for the build. Note that none of them are optimal, and ideally should be replaced by better rares, but they are good enough to start out.
Death Rush - up to 33% chaos res, accuracy, additional life leech and Onslaught on kill. Disadvantages - no other resists, no ES / damage prefixes. This is one of the better options, and the one which can potentially be considered for permanent use. Unfortunately, doing so puts really high demand for good ele resist rolls on other pieces of gear.
Broken Crown - very high chaos res, double the normal roll. Disadvantages - no accuracy, really low ES value, no other resists.
Lori's Lantern - up to 25% chaos res and 20% to all ele resists, plus it can substantially reduce damage from hits with high degree of damage randomness (lightning mostly). Disadvantages - no accuracy / ES / damage /leech prefixes, rare rings can roll higher chaos res value.

Weapon
Ideally highest possible pdps Ambusher with 2+ APS and high crit chance.
Aim for 250-300 pdps, the more you have the better is your leech.
APS and crit chance are way more important than the actual dagger damage though, due to all the aura stacking. So, if you are broke, just buy the cheapest one with highest APS and crit chance you can get.
You might have to run LL gem in that case. If that dagger wilkl have flat ele damage that would be a nice bonus.

Mandatory stats:
crit chance
attack speed
% increased phys
flat phys

Useful stats:
accuracy
crit multiplier
flat ele damage
life / mana leech
resists


Bandits

Norm: skill (or life)
Cruel: skill
Merc: power charge

Notes

Avoid Vaal Oversoul boss!!!
Main problem with it is the laser - dodging it with running is a piece of cake, however we can't run fast enough, and WB proved unreliable at this task - laser often still hits you when you try to dodge with WB, and if you are shocked after the first hit the next one kills you.

Videos

Academy boss
Precinct (+lightning damage)
Shrine

Your build seems really promising to me and well-rounded, so I don't really see any weakpoints in this new LL strategy hear.
However, what is your DPS ? Clear speed seems quite slow, even though I may be just not used to Spectral Throw builds, which do not clear that fast unless on a very high budget imo.

"

Vadler wrote:

Your build seems really promising to me and well-rounded, so I don't really see any weakpoints in this new LL strategy hear.
However, what is your DPS ? Clear speed seems quite slow, even though I may be just not used to Spectral Throw builds, which do not clear that fast unless on a very high budget imo.

DPS / defense statistics already posted, in "stats" section.
Current dps with full charges is around 24k, also switched some things around which allowed me to run lvl 20 Clarity and mid-lvl AA.

Found a Shrine map so going to test it against piety next.

Added a Shrine video.
Shrine is a garbage map due to its horrendous layout and I will probably never run it on this char ever again unless it happens to pop up in Zana rotation.

Piety - basically either try to kill her in her original form, which is often not possible because she constantly runs around or teleports, or wait for Fire form and simply facetank it.

Currently running lvl 19 Clarity and lvl 14 AA linked to CwDT, for automatic activation.
It completely nullifies phys reflect and slightly helps against ele reflect.

Also added Vaal Disc, which is probably the only thing that can save you against ele reflect if you happen to hit lots of enemies, aside from logout.

Probably not worth it to make budget LL ST, you can reach better stats with a hp base ST build.

Example hp base st gear, L86 shdow:
5l belly - 5c worthy dagger - alphas howl


21k lmp spectral in the hideout

-Self cast assasin mark for the first mob pack - easy to gain 4-5 power charge and easy to keep up with a curse on hit assasin mark.

4644 hp - 163/144/156 resist

26k lmp spectral with 5 power charge
L20 anger; L20 wrath; L20/15 H.Thunder; L20 H.Ice; L20 WED; L20/20 spectral-LMP-FA

Edit: (with my linked gear i used L21 and 21/20 gems, and reached L87; have another power charge (6pc total). 26k -> 30k dps with this setup

36k lmp spectral with 5 pc + vaal haste + atziris flask

Edit: 41k with 6pc, and 21-21/20gems


-no problem with reflect
- 979 instant hp in trouble
-(

In the end, its all good but you can reach much faster clearspeed with a flameblast build or "stronger" deeps with a phy tornado shot build.

The thing is, if you does not use shav/lorica, you have to have life regen for chaos damage, so you can't get vaal pact which is necessary for anti-reflect, that's why budget LL ST impossible.

Also, 22k LMP / 5k ES is just pathetic. Though, with 6l and what not it can be much better.

fbzzs

You used 20-21 lvl gems, my gems are 18-20 lvl, some without quality.
If all my gems were lvl 20 dps would jump from 24k to 30+k, with 21 gems - to 35k+
This is with just charges, without flask and vaal haste.

Also, don't forget, that since my damage is partially physical, I will always have better real damage compared to pure ele build with the same dps due to resists.

Plus, as I mentioned before, LL build provides far better party utility due to its auras.

I agree though that life-based will generally have better defense.

TS at the moment is an overpowered skill and will probably get adjusted in the future, and I don't like how Flameblast builds play at all.

"

qquno wrote:

The thing is, if you does not use shav/lorica, you have to have life regen for chaos damage, so you can't get vaal pact which is necessary for anti-reflect, that's why budget LL ST impossible.

Also, 22k LMP / 5k ES is just pathetic. Though, with 6l and what not it can be much better.

Yeah right, so the build I am playing right now is impossible, makes sense.

If you can point any build that can achieve better ST dps and ES values with same budget I would greatly appreciate it. To my knowledge there aren't any, but I may have missed some.

Also about ES - tell that to Solaris builds running with less than 4k ES.
Plus, all my jewelry is damage focused. You can have 6500-7000 ES if you wanted, but at the expense of damage, plus it will go over budget due to having to use expensive % ES master mod.

Also while more ES will increase survivability, the only cases where it actually does matter is vs bosses or ele reflect. In all other cases most enemies are frozen and can't deal damage to you.

I know it screws with your res setup at the moment but might I suggest using a broken crown unique. lower on es but 20ed plus 50 chaos res. easy to pick up 4 1c. Good work to wish I had found this while I constantly killed myself to 89 with a solaris. good work.

btw ll over life always. if only because of the massive attack speed bonus from br.

The point isn't that it is impossible, but that it's not worth it. You can reach the same dps tooltip with the same dagger playing a Crit Phys ST build using Abyssus. And even with the Abyssus, you still gonna have a lot more survivability thanks to Acro+Phase Acro+Ondars+Ev gear and about 4-5k life - which is an equivalent to about 6-7.5k ES because of life pots. Also a lot higher movement speed and no reflect worries whatsoever. Also the gem slots to use 100k+ dps Double Strike. On a similar budget as well. And it's gonna be easier to put together because you won't have to look out for pieces that have chaos resist on them - which means you will be able to get the exact resists you need and not end up needlessly overcapped on some element, for example.

That said, it's always good to see build diversity and if someone, for whatever reason, fancies to do a LL ST, it's nice to have a budget version for him.

"

TheChandrian wrote:

I know it screws with your res setup at the moment but might I suggest using a broken crown unique. lower on es but 20ed plus 50 chaos res. easy to pick up 4 1c.

It is not the best in slot item for this build (or any chaos res build for that matter)
It has really low ES value, and does not have accuracy. The helmet must have accuracy, it is vital.
Essentially the Broken Crown can be viewed as an item with 2 suffixes (double chaos res).

However, when starting out, it can be used as a temporary chaos res "patch".
I'll add the info about uniques such as this.

"

Cabesi wrote:

The point isn't that it is impossible, but that it's not worth it. You can reach the same dps tooltip with the same dagger playing a Crit Phys ST build using Abyssus.

Oh really now? Have YOU played an ST build with Abyssus? My guess is not in the last half a year, because Abyssus does not work with ST, ST in not a melee attack, it worked before but it was a bug and was patched long ago. Before that change yes, utilising that bug made ST life-based builds a lot better than they are now.

Without Abyssus you won't get nearly as much damage as LL version can.