Herald of Thorns – CwDT + Punishment + Shackles (a SC viable alternative to Scold’s or CoC)

The following are the main design goals I wanted to achieve for this build:

1) Damaging enemies based on the amount of damage received.
2) Somehow dealing damage to yourself to increase effectiveness of #1
3) Viable in late-game maps.

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1) Damaging enemies based on the amount of damage received.

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2) Somehow dealing damage to yourself to increase effectiveness of #1

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3) Viable in late-game maps.

In case you didn't read the intro, here's the TL;DR of how the build should work:

• Cast Punishment socketed in Shackles of the Wretched to curse myself.

• Cast Glacial Cascade, reflecting the portion of physical damage back onto myself.

• Trigger multiple Cast when Damage Taken spells to fire off, targeting the monsters that reflected the damage.

Now, the hard part is trying to sustain this damage you deal to yourself. We discussed that both Cloak of Defiance + Eldritch Battery and Life Leech + Vaal Pact are important to spread damage taken between life and mana and leech it back instantly. In order to make sure that works properly I'm going to walk through an example interaction with Glacial Cascade reflect.

EXAMPLE:

Lvl 17 Glacial Cascade + Lvl 17 Herald of Thunder + Lvl 19 Herald of Ice + Apep’s Rage
= 64–98 Physical Damage + 118–178 Cold Damage + (.8 * [9-129 Lightning Damage + 48-64 Cold Damage + 65-105 Chaos Damage])
=~79 Physical Damage + ~193 Cold Damage + ~55 Lightning Damage + ~68 Chaos Damage

Now we multiply by:
• 28% increased cold damage
• 20% increased elemental damage
• 12% increased area damage
• 92% increased spell damage
= ~161 Physical Damage + ~486 Cold Damage + ~139 Lightning Damage + ~139 Chaos Damage
= ~925 Total Damage per hit

Now if we are using a level 1 Punishment, then we are reflecting 28% of all physical damage. Meaning we take ~45 damage per hit, but 30% of that goes to our mana pool, so we really only take ~31 damage per hit to our life pool. We are also using a level 17 Life Leech linked to Glacial Cascade, so we leech 7.9% of all damage. This comes out to ~73 life leeched – but we are using Vaal Pact, so we only actually get 40% of that, meaning ~30 life leeched per hit.

Now although that seems too close for comfort, there are a lot of things that improve my leech that I find too hard to calculate:

• Critical hits (50%+ crit chance)
• Arctic Armour
• Warlord's Mark (5.4% life leech is HUGE)
• WM leech from CwDT spells
• Most casts of GC hit the same enemy at least twice, which helps build up the CwDT threshold

Basically, AA makes it so that non-crit reflect barely damages me, but crit reflect does. But because I am critting, there is a much higher gap between the amount of elemental/chaos damage I’m dealing and the physical damage, so I’m able to leech more than I reflect. Also, Once Warlord’s Mark goes off I leech MUCH more health from mobs afflicted by it. It’s important to level up Punishment if you go this route to about the same level as your AA, as my own little rule of thumb. This way you don’t deal too little or too much damage to yourself.

I hope that all makes sense, but if not you can check out the videos I will have added that show in detail the effects of leech versus reflect.

Required Uniques:
Mods on Gear (in order of importance):
• Wand: Apep’s Rage (required)
• Body Armour: Cloak of Defiance (required)
• Shield: Spell crit, mana regen, life, energy shield, resistances, and spell damage.
• Helmet: Life, energy shield, and resistances.
• Boots: Life, movespeed, resistances, and energy shield
• Gloves: Shackles of the Wretched (required)
• Belt: Life, strength, resistances
• Amulet & Rings: Life, resistances, mana regen, dexterity, crit chance/multi, +1 curses (optional)
• Flasks: Instant life flasks, Quicksilver flask, Atziri's Promise (optional), remove bleed, remove freeze, etc.

Bandits:
• Normal: Help Oak (+40 Life)
• Cruel: Kill All (+1 Passive Point)
• Merciless: Help Alira (+1 Maximum Power Charge)

From there you can continue to pick up more % mana regen, crit multi, spell damage, or life on the passive tree.

I leveled as a Glacial Cascade build. I just used GC + Added Lightning + Added Chaos as soon as I could to ease my way into Merciless. Pretty much as soon as you hit level 62 and can equip Apep's Rage you can switch over to the Shackles + CwDT playstyle.

You could just as easily level as Freezing Pulse, Arc, Flameblast, or any other spell. Not much need for respeccing points either.

I would just like start out saying that I am a very casual player that forgets to use quicksilvers, picks up mostly everything valuable, and takes the time to kill stragglers. Because of this I have pretty slow clearspeed. The build itself doesn't have amazing DPS, but I know it could perform a lot better in the hands of someone else. Maybe sometime I will try to race through a Gorge, since I'm fairly certain I could get a sub 6-minute run.

Here's a video showing some gameplay in a white Gorge map, and also a %rare monster + totems Bazaar map: https://youtu.be/EkrgL3_SZ3U

Here's a video of me AFK-ing in Merciless Docks to show the CwDT damage: https://youtu.be/jXV0FyR0GWs

• Rime Gaze - This is a great addition and you can use it on your GC setup for an extra link. Unfortunately I could not spare the resists or life or else it would be part of the main build.
• Doryani's Invitation (cold) - This belt would help with leech, but we don't really want armour and life is too important on a belt.
• Void Battery - This could quite possibly outrank Apep's, but it's much too expensive.
• Other Classes - Scion is quite doable with the 1.3 skill tree. You basically trade off ~20% spell damage for the opportunity to grab more % inc. AoE nodes. Not worth it to me, though.

Other questions will be added.