[2.0] Wild Strike + EE Claw Scion

There have been a lot of people who postulate that EE is bad for Wild Strike because it doesn't allow you to run Hatred - when in fact against resistant enemies (who slow you down more), EE is a bigger boon than hatred - and even against moderately resistant enemies, it's comparable, and doesn't take 50% of your mana that you could be using for MoM defensively.

There is a lot of misininformation out there, so let's talk about the facts. First thing's first - you only hit your melee target with melee damage - it's like Lightning Strike, where you don't hit the target you click on with your secondary attacks and my mana sustain can prove it:

You'll see in the videos that I often have troubles getting mana back on bosses. If I would have hit them twice, this'd be hard to explain, as I should get around 26 mana * 2 hits * 3 multistrikes = 156 mana per hit. In reality, the most I'll get is more like 78, with just more than what I've spent coming back if one of my multistrikes misses.

But don't you use Hatred and static damage on gear?

No, I don't. All of my damage scaling affects scale base physical damage, so I deal only one element at a time, and my clear speed in up to 77 maps is fine.

But isn't it terrible to be a physical damage char and not use Hatred?

Look at it this way. If you had an aura you could use that reserved just enough mana so that you couldn't use Hatred, but it had just 1% more damage than Hatred, you'd use it and never look back at Hatred, wouldn't you? EE is situationally better than Hatred (as we'll see below) and it frees up half your mana pool. I used that half for survivability, but there's no reason you can't just use it for a different kind of damage aura. Look at the numbers below - add the haste attack and move speed bonus to it. I think you'll find you're hard up for a situation where EE + Haste isn't better clear speed than Hatred.

Now, let's talk about the amount of damage added from EE.

The damage added from Elemental Equilibrium is dependent on monster resistances, and follows the form below:

DPS = 2/3 * DMG with debuff + 1/3 * DMG with buff, which means that at the following level of resistances, EE offers this benefit:

0%: EE adds 25% more damage
25%: EE adds 33% more damage
50%; EE adds 50% more damage
75%: EE adds 133% more damage

This is a large part of the reason EE helps clear speed so much. It does the most damage against the enemies who normally would slow us down the most.

The most remarkable thing about EE is that it's kind of necessary for Wild Strike to be competitive - simply because other skills like static strike can achieve similar dps values and are much easier to scale (since every part of the attack is melee). If you're not using EE, and you're playing Wild Strike, my experience has been that it might be more fun to look at, but you're probably doing less damage to fewer targets, and much less single target.

This build uses a ton of the new content in patch 2.0. It would be much harder to run this build without a solid Gemini Claw, but also the positioning of MoM, the addition of increased damage available on Jewels, and of course the introduction of Wild Strike as a skill also give this build a lot to play with.

The addition of the Ice Golem and Rallying cry also make this build a lot higher dps than it would have otherwise been. This is definitely a build to showcase some of the more underappreciated bits 2.0 has to offer.

In general, our defensive plan involves having high evasion and dodge to make it uncommon for us to be hit. Then, when we do get hit, we mitigate the damage through Mind Over Matter with a full mana pool, as well as keeping fortify up with whirling blades. And of course, we have a reasonably high life pool to make the character difficult to burst down.

Specifically, we use daressos defiance, the acrobatics wheel, and atziris step to get ourselves 46% dodge and 42% spell dodge which both become capped during vaal grace. In addition, we use a high evasion shield and with shield defense nodes and evasion nodes to give ourselves about 11,000 evasion, which is about 49% evade chance. And of course, we cap our elemental resists. I also currently use a 10% mind spiral to lengthen the period of time where damage can be mitigated by mana.

If this doesn't seem like enough defense, I'd suggest going deeper into ranger for additional block nodes, and dropping acrobatics so that you can bump up your armour too. A hybrid armour evasion shield seems optimal for this. You'd probably also want to drop daressos for something with a bit more defensive properties.

This build uses wild strike to proc elemental equilibrium and deal damage by scaling both the primary and secondary hits of wild strike. First, let's look at how wild strike works so that we can understand how to scale it.

Wild strike only scales the melee portion of the damage with melee damage modifiers (e.g. Abyssus, melee physical damage support gem, etc). It does not seem as though the melee target can be affected by the secondary attack, similar to lightning strike. Area damage, projectile damage and elemental damage types also only scale a portion of the damage. What does scale all of the damage are stats like increased physical damage (without the word "melee" in there), attack speed, damage with attacks, crit stats, damage with claws, damage with one handed weapons, and of course generic increased damage.

Our plan, then, is to scale up crit and damage increases that scale all of our damage as much as we can. In addition, we use rallying cry and an ice golem to supplement our damage. Rallying cry is linked to increased duration and increased area, while ice golem is linked to a high level cast when damage taken. We also get frenzy charges and an effective accuracy bump from using the poachers mark curse.

Our links for wild strike are WED + PCoC + Faster attacks + Multistrike.

Elemental Equilibrium

There have been a lot of people who postulate that EE is bad for Wild Strike because it doesn't allow you to run Hatred - when in fact against resistant enemies (who slow you down more), EE is a bigger boon than hatred - and even against moderately resistant enemies, it's comparable, and doesn't take 50% of your mana that you could be using for MoM defensively.

The damage added from Elemental Equilibrium is dependent on monster resistances.

0%: EE adds 25% more damage
25%: EE adds 33% more damage
50%; EE adds 50% more damage
75%: EE adds 133% more damage

This is a large part of the reason EE helps clear speed so much. It does the most damage against the enemies who normally would slow us down the most.

The most remarkable thing about EE is that it's necessary for Wild Strike to be competitive - simply because other skills like static strike can achieve similar dps values and are much easier to scale (since every part of the attack is melee). If you're not using EE, and you're playing Wild Strike, my experience has been that it might be more fun to look at, but you're probably doing less damage to fewer targets.

Tooltip

Bear in mind that tooltip damage is going to be very different from actual damage. My character has a highest tooltip of about 16k, but he easily clears maps at a similar pace to another melee character I have with 40k dps. This is because the tooltip doesn't include any debuffs and it doesn't include the converted elemental damage scaling. It treats all the damage we deal as physical damage.

This is the stealth reason a lot of players don't like Wild Strike. Your tooltip is quite small, and goes up when you switch it to any other skill. Many players won't get past this fact.

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwAAA5YEsQW1CGcPqxX9Fr8YPBhWHNwi6iP2JIsk_SaVKPoqCyo4MHEwfDIBNZI31DpCOq064TsoPeJBh0WdRfRLHEtXS3hMYE2SUUdRTFNSVUtd8l-wYENh4mHrYqxkr2yMbj1vV2-Eb55wUnDVdwd4GXpTgseDCYTFhTKHE4nTijiMNo19jYGNv48aj8GTOpVmmK2a4Jsmm7WcpJ2qo4qmV6Z_rEexs7IZtMW1SLc-uJO9J76AwOPBoMLswzrKSs961CPWB9fL2L3dqOdU6Nbr7u0_7UHxs_JF8-r56P4K_xz_3g==?accountName=TreeheadWoodfist&characterName=Ulendria

77 Plateau
https://youtu.be/v7sCt34C6-c

Dangerous mods in 77 Shrine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2PDwJXMpro

Video Guide
https://youtu.be/YMtMy0ZIx-g

While most builds have mandatory auras they end up taking such as hatred, grace, determination or other auras, this character is able to keep a ton of mana around and not have any particularly necessary mana reservations. Instead, he uses both EE (since without auras he's dealing only one random element at a time. And with the mana that he ends up having a ton of, he uses all of it for survival through MoM.

For this reason, I feel that using no auras is the best plan for this character, both offensively and defensively.

You really don't need any special gear to make this build go. An eva chest will work fine. I use Daresso's, and that seems to do the job too. I only have a 5L atm (fishing for a 6, though). And while this is good for a Gemini claw, my 250 dps claw could be much, much better. I'll link my current gear, but you'll see I'm not running GG gear to hit this level of clear speed.

The mind spiral is a bit weird, and it might be just worse than using Rat's Nest, Devoto's, CoE or some other defensively oriented piece. At the end of the day, though, I just wanted to milk my mana pool for as much mitigation as I could - and you can't get 2k mana like you used to be able to...



Please also note that you can see my gem links in my gear.

And it's a sad one - you may not have noticed but in the last section you'll notice something unfortunate about my claw. I went to yolo it last night, and I bricked a static ele dmg roll on it - which makes it pretty much dead for the EE variant. :(

http://cb.poedb.tw/us/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwABAdwB5wUtBTwGIA48FCAUTRR1GFYYkRjbGlUb-hx4IWAlvCXfKPoppTGeMfs1kjXWNug6UkCgQzFEnkUKR35IeErITeNQR1O7V1RYdV8_YSFhUmVNaHRuqm87dKB07XTxd9d343gNeWh673_jgseE2YTvhmCHaojtirOQbJOolKCYrZtYpBmmV6knqW6plKn6tfK2LLyfvTa-p768v9XAGsEExVPYTdi92mLawdtP3DLfv-DD4e_kUeXF7nrvDvTG9Ub56PoY_Ev-jw==