[2.1] SlipperySiren's Ghostbusting and Leo Trolling Vacuumer

This is a build I used for ghostbusting in Warbands (2.0). I was part of a 2-4 person team from people in my main account's guild. This build survived the 2.1 patch and still works fine. I moved the gear to this account just to goof off (and because I wanted to use my main Scion for another build).

For those who are unaware, the idea with ghostbusting is that tormented spirits (ghosts) add extra iir and iiq to white and blue mobs they touch. They add even bigger magic find boosts to rare and unique mobs they haunt (which causes the ghost to disappear). We started after the first 2.0 nerf and in about a month of playing, we each walked away with 50+ exalts worth of gear and currency. Prior to the 2.1 nerf, white and blue mobs could stack magic find boosts from each ghost in the map. With the 2.1 nerf, those mobs are only affected by the first ghost they touch. Rares and uniques can still be haunted by multiple ghosts. The team I was playing with in Warbands stumbled upon ghostbusting from some streamers such as MollariGaming. He and another team (I forgot who) helped give us hints on how to make it work right.

We built a 3-person ghostbusting team:

• Vacuumer (this build): collects up the entire map's worth of monsters into one place, then runs the whole map's worth of mobs into every ghost. This build cannot do any damage. More details below.
• No-kill DPSer: uses some complex mechanics to do large amounts of damage while simultaneously having 0 possibility of killing anything
• Culler: we used a ball lightning totem culler, after experimenting with many different ones. Ball lightning gives far more coverage than flame totem or incinerate totem. Totems are dropped after the DPSer has lowered all the mobs health down to 1. This makes it trivial to get guaranteed flask culls on every single mob in the map.

Pros

• Makes ghostbusting possible
• Nearly unkillable
• Your tankiness increases as you get more mobs to surround you.
• Fun build for trolling Leo missions, especially in Sarn (on a typical Sarn Leo mission, only 1 or 2 people had builds that could kill me)
• This build variant can actually do a little bit of damage, which is useful sometimes when the rest of the party rips and you want to finish off a few last mobs that only have a little life left.

Cons

• 0 dps (well technically a few hundred dps max with my build)
• Totally useless for solo play (other than ghostbusting)
• Chaos damage wrecks the build (our primary vacuumer was CI) (with better gear you could have good chaos resistance)

Passive tree

• Scion is by far the best class for this because of access to jewels
• Note that this build does not use Ancestral Bond, as is typically done with ghostbusting vacuumers. This frees up 5 skill points. We rely on Dyadian Dawn to prevent our damage. The only downsides are that we can't pick a tankier belt, and our tempest shield does a tiny bit of damage (which is both good and bad). Opinions vary, but I like this approach more.

I am running a similar build on my Aegis Mjolner character. I pop on Empire's Grasp, an Aurumvorax, and an Ambu's Charge for pulling. Then I swap to Mjolner and Southbound to DPS everything down to 1 life.

Do you really think it is worth it to cap 100% knockback when you can just roll 1-2 flasks with melee knockback that will have 100% uptime with Avenger's? I run all 3 resist flasks; 2 are rolled with Avenger's of Fending and the third is Avenger's of Warding. An Avenger's of Iron Skin Granite and an Avenger's of Staunching Jade Flask.

Also how do you deal with regen mobs and regen aura rares? By the time you ghost the map and come back in with your culler those mobs will be at full health again.

Is it better to zone in multiple charcters at the start to increase the group quantity bonus? Or does that not matter.

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noremac13 wrote:

I am running a similar build on my Aegis Mjolner character. I pop on Empire's Grasp, an Aurumvorax, and an Ambu's Charge for pulling. Then I swap to Mjolner and Southbound to DPS everything down to 1 life.

Hmm, that's a really interesting idea. I've been considering ghostbusting in Talisman and that sounds like a good alternative. I really like how you're defeating the MF penalty of Aurumvorax with no-kill.

Mind sharing your tree and gear?

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noremac13 wrote:

Do you really think it is worth it to cap 100% knockback when you can just roll 1-2 flasks with melee knockback that will have 100% uptime with Avenger's? I run all 3 resist flasks; 2 are rolled with Avenger's of Fending and the third is Avenger's of Warding. An Avenger's of Iron Skin Granite and an Avenger's of Staunching Jade Flask.

It's certainly doable to just rely on flasks to cap knockback. When you only have a few mobs around, the flasks can't be sustained, but it's also usually easy to keep small packs hugged anyway.

If you feel like trolling PvP, capping knockback is pretty important. Few competing builds crit enough to keep flasks up 100% of the time.

The other case where capping knockback helps is if you play with two clients. You do the vacuuming on your main client then just afk in the middle of the pack while you alt-tab to your MF killer. With high knockback, the vacuumer does a better job keeping the mobs aggroed and in a tight area. Without very high knockback, the packs will wander away, either escaping or moving out of melee range where the reactive gems stop helping with LGoH.

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noremac13 wrote:

Also how do you deal with regen mobs and regen aura rares? By the time you ghost the map and come back in with your culler those mobs will be at full health again.

Is it better to zone in multiple charcters at the start to increase the group quantity bonus? Or does that not matter.

There are a few ways of doing the post-vacuuming work.

If you're playing solo, you could build a hybrid vacuumer and no-kill dpser like you suggested either. This toon would need to be tanky enough to AFK in packs. For non-regen situations, you just take them down to 1 life and then use a 2nd client to cull them (culling strike not needed). For the regen packs, bring your culler to a safe distance, swap back to the DPSer and bring them back down to 1 life, then quickly go back to the culler and kill. Repeat as necessary. If you use totems for culling, it might be possible to do rapid alt-tab switching for really fast regen packs. DPS down, alt-tab, drop totem, alt-tab, repeat. Flask culling would be challenging.

A second solo method is to have a pure vacuumer. AFK-ing isn't as important, but it's useful. Once everything is ghosted, bring in a high DPS MF character. The MFer does both DPS and MF, but since it plays solo you don't have to worry about using culling strike. This is the approach that MollariGaming uses.

At the other extreme is what you do with 3 or more people. You have one pure vacuumer: max tankiness and vacuuuming only. The second person is the MFer: stack MF and tankiness, DPS and culling strike not needed at all. The remaining people run no-kill DPS builds. They bring mobs down to 1 life and keep the mobs aggroed and away from the MFer. While in killing phase, the vacuumer can help by either concentrating the enemies or spreading them out if things get too sketchy. On Warbands, this is the way we built the team. I played the culler. Ball lightning totems would do mass kills on 1-life packs for instant Distillation Divinate recharges. They also gave far better coverage than flame totem. I think they proc more total hits on dense packs than incinerate totem, but I haven't tested the latter.

If you have two people with low ping to the same server, you basically play like a 3 person group, but either one person plays a hybrid build or the vacuumer swaps to one of the other two roles after vacuuming. When only 2 people in our Warbands team were online, I played the culler and the other guy would do vacuuming then swap to no-kill DPS.

For DPSing, we tried 2h RT Cyclone and physical bows. The latter was dramatically better due to the defensiveness of not getting into melee range. Built right, you can also turn physical bow builds into reasonable solo DPS+MFers.

For solo DPS+MF, caustic arrow and flame totem are the best options I know of. If you're rich enough to stack DPS, tankiness, and MF all at the same time, Windripper would be a good choice.

My tree is just a basic high-block high-armor tree with using Aegis in mind.

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwEAxthYYz38jM_2SF8_wQQUIBo-eWjvDn7iqW5QR3k5d-PAGuRR6dUB3HgNbztnm4TZtfKuPkd-L8xybDWSxq69NsGCbEbYvQthPC0MX8T2ZU1NRjIJr2yDXxjXxBWvp3Kpvqdi7GjyU6U9D_cyrKpVqYnYGbSE7_AfBjkU9nzZWfOXtGhYLYPawaLqogD7qoY7nz4aOHIPagHXlhUgdO0S4QSz8wYt0pBVlG9xhWaeLOkJMwUtwGZRYGZUVykWQLcxhrPRNnrvPAVG14V9jHbiLECg73zAv0a3qZXTbwz3rK8blzJO

Basically I have Aurumvorax and Empires Grasp on also the Dyadian Dawn belt keeps me from doing no physical damage but I can still do elemental damage which allows me to skip getting Ancestral Bond. Also it keeps me from killing mobs while Cycloning but once I want to kill them I can with Discharge.

Once I swap on Southbound and Mjolner I can just stand AFK and let the Vengeance and Reckoning procs autocast Discharge for me. Volls Devotion isn't really needed since Ambu's Charge generates a massive amount of Endurance charges from all the monsters landing crits on me. However if you have a Voll's Devotion you can swap out Ambu's for a Kingsguard for even more ridiculous sustain.

I tried doing it 3 player like you were talking about but my friends don't really have the best builds for it. The DPS character was a Fakener and he put on Southbound to make sure he didn't kill anything but the lag was way too much and at a certain point he would die even with Vaal Pact. Ele reflect was also an instant 1-shot.

I am currently leveling up another MF character though to use the Mallori method with the Bladefall totems. It looked pretty good and that way lowering them to 1 health won't be necessary.

Thanks for the info. Your approach sounds interesting.

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noremac13 wrote:

Volls Devotion isn't really needed since Ambu's Charge generates a massive amount of Endurance charges from all the monsters landing crits on me. However if you have a Voll's Devotion you can swap out Ambu's for a Kingsguard for even more ridiculous sustain.

If you're discharging endurance charges, won't you be triggering ignites? Ignites do DoT damage and that bypasses the no-kill restriction of Southbound.

I have RT so I can't crit and no ignite chance in the tree so I never ignite.

Hi there,

I have a question, if I take RT and use a 3 white socket Prismatic Eclipse, wouldn't that be better? More melee range and less mobs wander away? (if not 100% knockback)

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Prismatic_Eclipse

A friend and I are theory crafting a duo farm group for Ghosthunting.

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eviL_Bison wrote:

Hi there,

I have a question, if I take RT and use a 3 white socket Prismatic Eclipse, wouldn't that be better? More melee range and less mobs wander away? (if not 100% knockback)

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Prismatic_Eclipse

A friend and I are theory crafting a duo farm group for Ghosthunting.

With a 3W Prismatic Eclipse, your weapon will have 6+6=12 range, versus 7+2=9 for a master-crafted vagan thrusting sword. If you're insanely lucky, you can also get a +2 range implicit on a prismatic, for 14 total range. You'll lose a lot of attack speed (1.3 vs. 1.9+).

As long as you don't see the mobs escaping due to the slow attack speed, I suspect 3W prismatic + is the better option. Very expensive, so use it if you have it!