[2.1] Life based EB CoE Wander | 70k GMP+Chain Kinetic Blast 4.5k life with Coil

hi there shotgun surgeon!

i realy like this build and was wondering what would be more effective ? to try this build with a level 84 shadow ? or with my level 93 scion ?

do you think it would make a big difference ?

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Shotgun_Surgeon wrote:

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therealjcool wrote:

Maybe you could test with a 20/20 Lgoh gem at your gear level? I would be very interested to see what happens on reflect. You may survive after all, thus eliminating the need for VP.

I'll be sure to give it a try when I get home from work today, although I'm not optimistic that it'll work with my damage numbers.

54 life on hit with a 20/20 gem, with all 15 projectile hits and 60 AoE's getting a single hit results in a potential 4,050 life/attack

2% Life Leech with my 70k DPS is approximately 19k damage/projectile hit, and 14k damage/AoE, resulting in an average 380 life on hit per projectile hit, and 280 life on hit per AoE hit. For a potential 22,500 life in a single attack if I get the max potential hits. Realistically it's probably closer to 10-40 hits on large packs, which is still over 10k life leeched per attack, compared to a couple thousand with LGoH.

Then there comes the reflect calculations, which would be 14% of damage reflected at 75% resists. So that 19k damage per projectile results in 665 damage per projectile reflected back, and 490 damage per AoE. As you can see, even with Vaal Pact Life Leech, I'm still only mitigating about half of reflected damage through leech, the rest comes down to block/evasion and flasks. Back when Thornflesh was a thing I was able to reflect a potential 40k damage per attack against a large pack(Back then I actually had to run Purity of Lightning and skip Anger just to survive), which is also why I never run ele reflect maps. Multiplied by my 4-5 APS we're talking about trying to mitigate over 100k DPS worth of reflected damage after elemental resists, which is far, far worse than an ele reflect rare ever could be.

Thankfully I kill everything instantly so Ele Reflect rares die at around the same time the pack surrounding them does, so there's always enough nearby mobs to leech from to make up for the fact that I don't have enough leech to completely mitigate reflect against a single target.

So long story short, if you look at the videos section of my guide, and see the Ele Reflect Map I did, I was still struggling to survive even while using both LGoH and Life Leech, and removing WED to keep my damage from getting dangerously high, and that was only barely enough to really be reflect proof. This build sadly just doesn't handle reflect too well.

I see, thank you for providing some numbers on that. Still, if you can, it would be VERY helpful for me to know up to which amount of damage lgoh would work. So if you can reduce your damage, to, say, 30k GMP and also factor in the added defenses I have (more life/possibly MoM)I guess lgoh should be good enough. Because realistically, I'm not gonna surpass 30-40k on a HC temp league. And it is enough anyways, since I only play lvl80+ maps with cursers and supporters, boosting my damage to double and ele resists to 81/82 all at least.
I respecced to my new tree at 84, using MoM instead of Acro. The damage loss wasn't as big as I feared, I went from 17k GMP to 15.8 without Heartseeker cluster. This is what we in HC call "acceptable losses" :D
However, my 1100 ES was not enough to cover me at nearly 5k HP, for instance when hitting a reflect rare my ES would be instantly gone, and I couldn't fire sometimes. So yeah, running EB I'd have to get more ES gear, I'm guessing in the 2k range to be comfortable.

Sadly I died like a complete noob last night, opening a freeze Box without any freeze flasks - duh. I was lvl 84 and 3/4 so ofc juuuust shy of the lvl85 achievement. Was 100% my fault tho and completely avoidable, so yeah - in retrospect I'd say you CAN play this in HC, if your a good/experienced player.

Now I'm just trying to decide on Acro vs. MoM for next league, because I'm definitely rolling this again - so much fun! Acro feels better when playing alone because you get less hits, while MoM feels safer in group where others take the hits, but you may still catch a huge hit due to desync / general chaos on screen. Hm. I'm thinking best to wear Armor/ES gear, since there's not much evasion scaling left anyway. A bit of armor should also make Corrupting Blood less deadly.

For gear I want to drop Blood Dancers next season so I can either wear Maligaro's (to make up for the loss of Heartseeker), or Southbound. These gloves are very interesting because they provide both offensive (high flat cold damage) and great defensive (up to 16% maximum life and a T1 cold resist).

Here's my "final" MoM tree for the HC version of this wander; 176% life and enough life regen to run Blood Rage without noticeable degen (if u have some armor).


And here's my gear at "time of death" - of course I had just dumped all my currentcy into a formidable 6L armor ;P Using added cold as 6th link because of the colors I already had present, and liking it very much! Provided a huge damage boost (more than slower projectiles, weirdly) and made me freeze everything that wasn't a 1shot. Which wasnt much honestly.



I also died carrying , found that just before opening the darn box!

Well... story continues next league, I hope! Haha.

So long mate

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azamantes wrote:

hi there shotgun surgeon!

i realy like this build and was wondering what would be more effective ? to try this build with a level 84 shadow ? or with my level 93 scion ?

do you think it would make a big difference ?

Nah, Scion's a perfectly good option, and you should be fine using that. Just use something like this, that's actually pretty close to how my Shadow's passive tree is currently set up. Modify as needed based on whatever gear and other preferences you happen to have.

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therealjcool wrote:

Sadly I died like a complete noob last night, opening a freeze Box without any freeze flasks - duh. I was lvl 84 and 3/4 so ofc juuuust shy of the lvl85 achievement. Was 100% my fault tho and completely avoidable, so yeah - in retrospect I'd say you CAN play this in HC, if your a good/experienced player.

That's a shame, still surprised the idea worked as well as it did, I play far too recklessly to ever consider HC, didn't even end up playing a Wander in the 1 month, although I'm planning to go back to it for the Darkshrine thing, since I do love my infinite DPS glass cannons.

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therealjcool wrote:

Now I'm just trying to decide on Acro vs. MoM for next league, because I'm definitely rolling this again - so much fun! Acro feels better when playing alone because you get less hits, while MoM feels safer in group where others take the hits, but you may still catch a huge hit due to desync / general chaos on screen. Hm. I'm thinking best to wear Armor/ES gear, since there's not much evasion scaling left anyway. A bit of armor should also make Corrupting Blood less deadly.

Both are certainly quite tricky to get working properly, I used to go EB+MoM back when the old EB was a thing in 1.3, had the same issue, where as soon as I found a reflect rare I'd instantly run out of mana, but at least that kind of worked as a way to make me reflect immune. And of course Acro causes you to run into the usual issues with sustain as well. Defenses are quite tricky to figure out for the Right side of the passive tree. Here's hoping the next 3 month brings with it some more defensive options for Shadows and the like.

Unfortunately Corrupting Blood and other bleeds are not affected by Armour, you can still reduce the damage using Endurance Changes or Immortal Call though.

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therealjcool wrote:

For gear I want to drop Blood Dancers next season so I can either wear Maligaro's (to make up for the loss of Heartseeker), or Southbound. These gloves are very interesting because they provide both offensive (high flat cold damage) and great defensive (up to 16% maximum life and a T1 cold resist).

Southbound are certainly a viable option, that being said, you do need to be careful with them, Burning Damage can ensure that you kill enemies even if you don't freeze them, but that still means you need to crit at least once just before the enemy dies to successfully kill tougher enemies like bosses. So bad luck can result in enemies not dying and causing a lot of troubles. That being said, it's a pretty significant DPS and survivability boost, and definitely has a lot of upsides. Although if you're playing in a party then I suppose you can completely bypass the downsides by having a party member finish off anyone you fail to freeze.

As far as Blood Dance and LGoH are concerned, for VP Life Leech and LGoH to be essentially equal in terms of life gain, you need to do about 4k damage/hit(3k is enough, but since the AoE's deal less damage, you need 4k so the AoE's leech as much as LGoH as well), which at 4APS is about a tooltip of about 16k DPS. While using Blood Dance, I'd say that number widens a bit, since you need to take the Life Regen into account, as it does push things slightly in favour of LGoH, but even then, I'd say at a 20-25k tooltip you start to reach a point where LGoH begins to be a risky means of sustain. On the plus side, my whole GMP+Chain way of dealing damage ensures you take much longer to reach that tooltip, since the typical Pierce set-up would be at around 30-40k DPS at that point(While also having a slower clear speed), and you'd have no choice but to use Life Leech to not die then.

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therealjcool wrote:

And here's my gear at "time of death" - of course I had just dumped all my currentcy into a formidable 6L armor ;P Using added cold as 6th link because of the colors I already had present, and liking it very much! Provided a huge damage boost (more than slower projectiles, weirdly) and made me freeze everything that wasn't a 1shot. Which wasnt much honestly.

Yeah, the Added <element> Damage gems are quite strong post-2.0, especially if you don't have fully levelled auras, or a really high DPS weapon. So on a budget those gems are essentially impossible to beat.

Thanks again for your input. Not sure how much time I have, but I'm gonna roll this char again and report back with new findings, if any.
In the meantime, here's a great low-budget tip:

Try using facebreaker gloves instead of maligaros! Their 60% global crit multiplier mod is huge and actually gave me more damage than maligaros. And you can pick up a 6xx% roll one for 1 alch, since it doesn't matter anyway :)

EB + ES on hit is an incredibly creative way to get the most out of your mana reservation.

Love the detailed explanation on damage scaling for wanders.

How good would you rate this wand? I randomly found it in Warbands but haven't really been able to make a successful wander with it:



Also what are your thoughts on GMP Lightning Arrow with Chain vs GMP KB with Chain?

Also is there any way to get the crit multi nodes at scion start? I kept trying but the trees had like 120% life :X.

Oh wow, that's actually a really nice wand. Crit multi ftw.

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MatrixFactor wrote:

Love the detailed explanation on damage scaling for wanders.

How good would you rate this wand? I randomly found it in Warbands but haven't really been able to make a successful wander with it:

Also what are your thoughts on GMP Lightning Arrow with Chain vs GMP KB with Chain?

Also is there any way to get the crit multi nodes at scion start? I kept trying but the trees had like 120% life :X.

That wand's pretty great, it should work fine. As far as taking the Crit Multi at the Scion Start, it'd be nice, but as far as I can tell, it's virtually impossible to actually do. My current passive tree doesn't even take Throatseeker. Honestly I'd prioritize the Witch's flask nodes before taking any more damage nodes, since the damage is so insane already. I'm actually planning on experimenting with that on my current wander in Darkshrine.


For Lightning Arrow vs. KB, they scale in a similar way with GMP+Chain. Looking at the raw numbers, you get a potential 75 damage dealing entities with Kinetic Blast, and 60 with Lightning Arrow, and KB's AoE's can hit multiple enemies while LA's additional hits can't. I think a lot of what gives KB such an edge is its 146% base damage, there are single target skills that don't have that much base damage, and KB has a really strong built in AoE mechanic on top of that.

As far as raw damage dealing potential is concerned, LA deals about a total 6540% base damage at level 20 across all 60 hits. And Kinetic Blast could deal up to 8796% base damage across all 75 hits, while the AoE's also have the potential to overlap and hit more than one target.

So all other things being equal I'd say KB has both a higher damage potential and better AoE coverage. Mind you that's only really going to be the case with elemental weapons, since Wands are better elemental weapons than bows are by far, but much worse as physical weapons. Still you'd need a pretty insane bow to compare to a Wand in terms of raw damage. At least with the skills balanced how they currently are.

I think no matter how you go about it, Wands have the fastest clear speed. Bows still win in single target though, unfortunately.

What would be the best added master mod on this wand? Would you take flat phys, flat element(lightning) or spell damage?

i tried the build on my level 84 shadow. clear speed is insane. i had to press tab during some dried lake runs. i was feeling like normal difficulty...every mob was melting in 1 sec.


then i tried some maps.... and i had to say holy shit...no movement speed skill is a big con.

i ran a simple rare strand with chilled ground and beyond......chilled ground everywhere...beyond mobs with slow aura...tar everywhere..poison clouds...flicker strikers..beyond mobs with literally 3 times more hp than every other mob. how did you level to 90+ with this build lol ??

one other thing i noticed is the single target...it's bad..like very bad :)

edit: by the way my gear/gems were not 20/20 and...i was using a rare 6l chest...maybe that would explain some of these issues.