[2.1.1]Contagious Combustion: The Beginner's Secret to Infinite Mana [HC/SC]

AA: Arctic Armor (reservation skillgem)

AC: Abyssal Cry (active skillgem)

Adds: Additional monsters spawned, usually during a boss fight. (for more difficulty and as a way to regain flask charges. We use them as a damage source because of Abyssal Cry.)

DoT/degen: Damage over Time/ Degeneration (same thing, different names)

EB: Eldritch Battery (Keystone: Converts energy sheild from protecting life to protecting mana)

ED: Essence Drain (Active skillgem)

ES: Energy Shield (like life, but not)

FD: Flame Dash (Active skillgem: our get-over-walls/Oh-Shit movement skill)

Inc AOE: Increased Area of Effect (Support gem, does what it says on the tin)

Inc Dur: Increased Duration (Support gem, also does what it says on the tin)

MOM: Mind Over Matter (Keystone: 30% of non-degen damage is taken from mana before life)

Multiproj: Lesser/Greater Multiple Projectiles. (2 different support gems, adding 2 and 4 projectiles respectively)

OOM: Out of Mana (A time when great sadness ensues, sometimes followed by death)

ZO: Zealot's Oath (Keystone: Life Regeneration is converted to Energy Sheild Regeneration)

For our purposes, we shall limit ourselves to 4 links to keep this budget, as that is all I have atm, and I'm still shreking shit.

Essence Drain: ED/Rapid Decay/Controlled Destruction/Void Manipulation.

No surprises here hopefully. 5th and 6th links would probably be slower proj and inc duration, but I'm not using either of them, so damned if I know what actually is best. I'm still operating in a 4 link.

Some of you might notice that we are not using multiproj, nor spell echo, despite this being our primary damage dealer. Due to the interactions of the skills, covered later, multiproj is just a damage decrease with no real benefit, and spell echo directly decreases our clearspeed and safety by forcing us to stand still. We cast each skill once and then move on. None of this "cast till it's dead" crap. That is for 'normal' spellcasters.

Contagion: Contagion/inc AOE/Faster Casting/Inc Dur

Hopefully no surprises there either. Contagion's only purpose is for utility to spread Essence Drain around. Inc Aoe to hit as many as possible, inc duration (duh) and faster casting to decrease our animation downtime. Technically this could be run in a 3 link, as inc dur isn't really necessary in the long run, but we have infinite mana and sockets to spare, so no harm in a bit of bonus utility. I however found is slightly more expedient to replace inc dur with flame dash (our movement skill of choice) as FS benefits from the faster casting and isn't affected by inc-aoe. Just a little bit of efficiency to consider.

Wither: Wither/Spell totem/Faster Casting/Inc Dur

Of course we run wither, and why would you use any other link setup than this? Maybe inc aoe, but for wither's purpose in this build, it doesn't really make sense. We don't wither to kill normal packs, we wither for targets who have too much HP to die easily and begin our chain reaction, like bosses, big rares or magic bears with more life.

Abyssal Cry: Abyssal Cry/Inc AOE/Void Manipulation/Poison.

This is where the magic happens. This is what covers all of our shortfalls. The ace in the hole, the gimmick we are built around. I actually had considered running this in a 5 or 6 link with inc duration and item rarity/rapid decay/added chaos respectively.
Yes, you heard me. Abyssal Cry. In a 6 link. Here's why...


Curse Setup:

In one of our 3-links, we stick Blastphemy/Temporal Chains/Enfeeble
We use blastphemy because it's the easiest way to apply curses for us. We only hit one target per rotation, we aren't running heralds, we rarely take damage if we're not being reckless...blastphemy is the best go-to. Just as a lovely bonus, we grab every aoe node in the tree, just for some bonus efficiency.

We use Temporal Chains because it's temporal chains. Defensively, it slows all nearby mobs down, allowing us to move out of the way and react more intelligently. Offensively, it extends the duration of both ED and the poison afflicted from Abyssal Cry's detonations. (We don't usually care about it extending abyssal cry's primary duration, nor contagion, as they both last over 10 seconds as is. Everything's gonna be long dead by then)

The second curse is a toss-up. We could run Vulnerability for buttones of damage. I run Enfeeble because it synergises nicely with the Evasion/MoM hybrid I've built, and my gear sucks ass so I can't really afford to forsake that extra defense for already-plentiful offense.

Auras: Zip.

Other Uti- Yes, I run no auras! What would you suggest? The heralds? 99.999% of our damage comes from various forms of chaos degens and purple explosions. The only thing in our kit that the heralds would apply to are the essence drain projectile. No, the heralds don't even apply to the abyssal cry explosion because it's a warcry and not a spell! AND elemental damage doesn't increase the strength of the poison that results from it. Haste? Movement speed is always nice, sure, but we don't need the cast speed aside from the minor bonus to animation rotation it gives us. It doesn't affect our damage application in any way, and I already determined that we are using our reserves to compliment our defenses!

Grace then? Well Grace was on the table for consideration, but I ultimately decided against it considering the +1 curse for enfeeble was easier to reach, and a cheaper mana reserve which made it easi-, look let's just continue!

Other Utilities:

Arctic Armor

AA is run almost exclusively because of the chilled ground effect it leaves and the synergy it has with temporal chains with reducing monster attack and movement speeds to act 1 levels of crawl. It also makes devouerers a joke. The % mitigation helps protect us a little when we actually stand still to rotate our spells, and offers a bit of consolation defenses in case we get stunned. Not a huge amount, but it helps. Also we have basically no other physical defense at all. I just stuck this in an unset ring, TBH. I happened to find a good one, so two chromes later, in it went.

Flame Dash

We're using a wand. We've stacked duration. We're running Flame Dash for movement. That's how it works.
Yes, we could theoretically use a dagger for the Whirling blades fortify combo, that would work as well with some very nice synergy, but finding high spell damage daggers is expensive, and I didn't want to bother trying to color my crap gear. Also whirling blades doesn't go through obstacles, which is mainly what I need it to do. "But Bino's!" No.

Don't believe me? 95% inc spell damage dagger, 4 exalts. 117% inc spell damage wand, 25 chaos. Just an example I found on my first poe trade searches...

Cast When Damage Taken

I don't actually run one yet, though I probably should. Colouring problems, honestly. What particular flavour of CWDT you prefer is up to you, we've got a lot of tools from our tree to make basically anything work. (just don't use curses, cause we've already got them checked out ;) )

Golem

Not Ice, Obviously. Otherwise pick your poison.

Vaal Skills

Defensive ones. Vaal Molten shell maybe? Vaal grace? Vaal discipline doesn't really help us a lot, because we already have infinimana. Vaal summon skeletons for a colossal meatsheild? Vaal cold snap for the freeze? Again, pick your poison.

Good stuff.

I'm serious. That's the best I've got. There are no special requirements for this build aside from Evasion/ES bases and a wand+Spell shield with spell damage. I run no uniques, no stats required to make it functional - you might want a bit of dex somewhere because we don't get quite enough in the tree, but beyond that, life, resistances, evasion, ES...item rarity? Chaos res is quite nice to have though, because we are an EB/MoM build, so chaos damage hurts a little more than normal, and I really don't want to run an amathyst flask. Atziri's Promise doesn't fit in this build for hopefully obvious reasons. We don't even need to get a huge amount of ES, only around 400+ or so - currently high end mapping with 600 for my 3800 life on MoM because of our infinimana gimmick, detailed earlier (though you might have figured it out by now.)

If you want my current gear, it's here (assuming the character still exists, it may not)

BringerofSmallpox

I honestly felt comfortable, if a little clunky at first, leveling with contagion/essence drain/Abyssal, just using whatever gear I found, speccing into the tree as I went around on my skillgrimage. We grab life, Chaos damage, Dot Damage, dual curse, increased AOE, and skill effect duration, picking up Eldritch Battery, Mind over Matter and Zealots Oath as we go. I didn't have any particular pathing, although I would suggest not grabbing the Method to the Madness and Atrophy wheels until much later in the build, as you need everything else before grabbing those big, high damage wheels. I picked them up at ~60 and ~80 respectively, filling out life nodes whenever I felt too squishy, but in hardcore you would want to grab those life nodes with priority. It just delays your damage spike is all, but that's always an acceptable trade-off in HC. The tree ultimately looks the same once you get into the 90s.

I haven't updated my internal calculator with act 4 skill nodes yet, so I don't know exactly what level you will get your tree to this point, but my full, imagined build looks something like this: 118 Skill Points

Normal: Oak
Cruel: Kill
Merc: Kill

Pretty simple, right? Fairly standard.

We are talking about the unusual interaction between Zealots Oath, Eldritch Battery and Essence Drain. If those three componants are enough for you to figure out how it works, congrats, you can close this tab and move on.

There are 3 componants to this that you must understand:

Eldritch Battery: Energy Shield protects Mana instead of Life. Spend Energy Shield before Mana for Skill Costs

Zealots Oath: Life Regeneration applies to Energy Shield instead of Life

Essence Drain: Fires a projectile that applies a damage over time debuff when it hits. You are healed for a portion of the debuff damage. The debuff is spread by Contagion. -> Regenerate 0.5% of Debuff Damage as Life

When you hit a target with essence drain you begin regenning 1/200th of that DoT damage as life. With my high-level-but-poorly-geared essence drain in a 4-link, I get pretty close to 11,000 damage per second on the dot. 0.5% of that is around 55. 55 life regen per second isn't a massive amount. However, this is per target. When you start dealing with larger packs like cannibals, and beetles, you can hit upwards of 15-20 - sometimes over 30 targets at a time with contagion spreading the ED debuff around. This puny little 55 suddenly starts healing us for around 800 to upwards of 1500 life for as long as the debuff lasts/monsters remain alive. The highest I ever saw was around 2.1k and a bit, a not-insignificant number.

However, because this is a regen, it is applied to our energy sheild. A realistic average of 500-1000 in light combat ES regen is pretty significant. But wait, there's more. We're running EB, which means this is technically faux-mana-regen. 500-1000 mana regen is nigh-unheard of, even in times of old. In heavy combat, with dozens of mobs around, we can hit 2k, 3k mana regen, fortunately in the situations when you're going to need it the most: Large pack sizes.

There are no situations in game that I can think of where 3k mana regen per second is not enough to solve any mana-related problems you might have. By that point, you may as well have infinite mana regen for all intents and purposes.

"But Kavi, why do we need all this mana regen? You said yourself we only cast our skills once, and surely 55 'mana' per second would be enough for that!" You're right. And it is. But we're running Mind Over Matter, and that's where infiniregen comes in handy. When you consider that 30% of damage taken to life is first taken from the mana, which is protected FIRST by the energy sheild because of EB, which in heavy combat can be regenning at well over 2k/s because of ZO, we basically have a flat 30% mitigation on any attack (or short sequence of attacks) that does not do more than ~5.4k mitigated damage (our life pool the 30% diverted off to our ES pool). If you figure we have infinite mana, with regards to all non-chaos damage, mind over matter gives us a flat, 30% damage mitigation. This is permanent fortify. This is 50% better than permanent fortify! And all you need to do to ensure that you have this infinimana-perma-MoM setup is to be killing targets with ED and contagion and letting it spread around the packs. It's that buggery simple.

Mapping is pretty easy with this build. I'm able to run any map that does not have either Haemomancy or curse immune as is.

Haemomancy is far too dangerous because we rely on our curses and AA for defense and utility. It's extremely risky to give those up in the teir of map when you most need them. Theoretically you could do it if you unspecced out of ZO and just let the ED life regen affect you directly for a bit of buffer, but you would still need to play the map like your balls are tied in a bag full of broken glass: Slowly and gingerly.

Curse immune is dangerous for the same reason. Curses are 30% of our offence and 70% of our defense. Having 1 mob or even 1 pack curse immune isn't the end of the world. But the entire map? Enfeeble/Temp chains are doing a lot of work keeping us safe from the worst of the incoming damage. Lose those and that bag full of broken glass comes back.

No Regen is another sketchy one, because we lose access to our infinimana gimmick, but we're still running our curses and AA, and we do still have mom with a small buffer pool, so it's not the end of the world. Just be very careful and lead with your wither totem to check for surprises around corners. None of this running into the middle of packs to abyssal cry them all from the inside.

Everything else is laughable. Want me to go through the list?

Enfeeble? We do so much overkill damage it barely slows up down.
Temp chains? Annoying at worst. Bit nasty when paired with turbo, but we're running AA and temp chains ourselves, so really at close range the game is running at normal speed with longer debuffs.
Vulnerability? Ha! Barely get hit in the first place. Just don't give Rankangos kisses and you'll be mostly fine. Only get's dangerous when paired with venom (poison on hit) for the most part..
Eleweakness curses? We need so few stats on our gear that we should be horrendously overcapped on resistances.
-max? Same deal. Spells get a bit scary, but with that massive damage penalty on Enfeeble, we shouldn't get bursted down too quickly if we don't facecheck things.
Added elemental damages are a joke because we're rarely scathed.
Generic inc damage can be a little worrysome when coupled with mobs that deal fast chaos damage like those spine serpents because that goes right through our MoMed ES and hits our 5% unreserved mana pool, so we take full damage which hurts, but hasn't killed me outright yet. Niche situation, really.
Same deal with turbo - they don't hit me, faster?
Any monster resistances are laughable because there is no chaos resist that can roll on maps.
Status ailment immunity and EE are non-issues.
Only burning and desecrated ground are really annoying because we have no life regen (it's all on our ES), and MoM doesn't mitigate degen damage anyways, so we have to keep potting to keep our health up. Wouldn't be such a huge deal, but I only run one life flask currently. (probably should run 2... >.>)
Increased crit does basically nothing because enfeeble is enfeeble.
Beyond just means more monsters to kill.
Fracture actually HELPS us, because bigger packs mean a wider contagion proliferation spread.
Reduced regen...meh? Whether we're regenning 600 es/s or 1000es/s really doesn't make a difference compared to 0es/s.
Increased monster life does slow us down a little bit, but more liberal use of Abyssal cry puts our screen-clearing potential still in the top bracket.
Cannot leech does nothing to us because Essence Drain is not a leech.
Cannot be stunned: We don't stun.
All of the Boss modifiers just makes the boss slightly scarier. If the boss still explodes with his blue pack because abyssal cry with poison is a little silly right now, then whoopdeedoo!
Even Twinned is self-countering. Blow up one boss with abyssal next to the other and laugh as the second boss degens to death entirely from the poisonous explosion from the first.

Like...everything's a joke! Haemomancy, curse immune and a few select combinations are reroll-worthy, and even then they can be played around. This build is EXTREMELY SAFE for mapping. The only map I won't run is Haemomancy, and that's just because I have shite gear. I've run some ultra-rippy maps that I wouldn't even touch with any other character and I don't have a care in the world on this guy with a bit of careful play. It makes mapping *really* cheap, and really accessable to inexperienced players. I haven't pushed this deep into maps since I rolled an IW/RF incinerator in 2.0, which for all who do not remember was residentsleeper EZ-mode. With this one, at least it never gets old to make an entire screenwide strongbox explode instantly in purple smoke.

Pro's

1) Needs very little currency to be competitive.
1.5) Great starter character for a new league because of it.

2) Reasonably fast clear time. Covers weaknesses between screenwide explosions and single-target problems.

3) Not especially complicated to play. Rewards player skill with survivability, doesn't punish DPS output too badly.

4) Almost certainly Atziri viable, not skilled enough personally to confirm it. Not sure about Uubers. Maybe Mathil could do it...

5) Can run almost any combination of map mods.

6) Defensible enough for those "Yolo" moments and let's you get away without hating yourself.

7) Who doesn't like making their computer chug to render all the explosions without the fear of being raped while your GPU cries in the corner until it catches up?

8) It's a shadow! Who doesn't love that guy's writing and VO?

9) I have tried to make this relatively imminent-nerf-proof by avoiding mechanics that are obviously going to be changed, something something, kitchen knife?



Con's

1) Inexperience and poor decisions can land you in situations where you hate yourself when you least expect it. When you walk into the middle of the pack and abyssal cry, but then don't have enough ES left to Essence Drain because you got slapped by mobs so much - feels bad man...

2) Zealots Oath + EB means you have no life regen, and we don't leech. You are entirely reliant on health potions and maybe some life on kill for maintaining your health pool. While we are very resistant to spike damage, degens of every kind make us sad, and ground-effect degens make us the saddest of all.

3) EB + Mom being our primary defensive mechanic results in spiky chaos damage making us very sad pandas indeed, with powerful crits undying alchemists in multiproj maps making us almost unfathomably sad pandas.

4) Expediant bosskilling relies on either the bluepack killing it with the explosion+poison stacking, or adds to achieve same. We can use essence drain and wither totems easily enough to just bleed them down while we run in circles, but it feels bad when we just carved our way through the whole map in a cloud of purple dust only to come to a screeching halt and start making loops while we wait for the healthbar to empty.
4.5) If the boss runs out of range when the bluepack explodes...feels REALLY bad man...

5) Evasion based character with no acro/phase acro. I dunno - some people hate the very thought of it.

6) It's a shadow, so the skill tree pathing in his zone makes you hate your life while leveling till you get contagion + ED running. At least we have almost no wasted points in his starting zone, so it doesn't feel too bad after level 12.

7) Probably going to get caught in the blast of the impending bino's/poison nerf.