[2.6] CI Poison Blink arrow/Mirror arrow Occultist

Hello!

What can you say about the Atziri fight? Of course it is doable, but is it easy? I'm looking for a build, which can do both twinned T15 and Uber on HC, and which is not BF mine :) Also, does self-cast version outperform trap version on hardest bosses? When you literally can't have too much DPS.

Why chaos dmg support? I have been tooling around with inc proj attack dmg, void manipulation, rapid decay gems intermixed and I really cant seem to figure out a way to tell which is better.

What about running a Wither totem against bosses and tough mobs?



With Potency of Will and Exceptional Performance, my totem lasts 15 seconds, so I only have to recast if it gets destroyed. Wither also gets the +duration from our passives and temporal chains. Seems like a nice synergy for just two sockets :) You could also go 4L with Faster Casting and Increased Duration, which will affect both the totem and Wither, making more stacks possible. But that may be overkill.

I have a 6L with 3G 2B and 1R. Is Increased Duration the best choice for the red socket, or would a level 3 Empower be better? In the long run, I'll just invest the chromes to get another green.

And what do you think about the "Atrophy" and "Method to the Madness" passives? They are close, is the +chaos damage worth it?

I want to follow up with some feedback and say thank you for this amazing build! Once you get to Lioneye's Glare at level 66, you'll blast through everything.

I'm using a Wither totem linked with Faster Casting and Inc Duration and I just did merciless Malachai at level 74. It was an incredibly easy fight, never got close to dying. I swapped LMP/GMP out for Slower Projectiles on both Mirror and Blink Arrow, and once Malachai has full Wither stacks on him, it's pretty much game over :)

Defence is amazing as well. Above all, the combination of Soul Strike and Wicked Ward. What I didn't know: When you recharge shield and arrive at full, Wicked Ward still remains active for the rest of the 4 seconds. So if you take more hits, you'll start recharging immediately. Pretty cool.

Overall, probably the strongest build I've played so far. And I've played Voltaxic Spark in 2.2.

TODO: Corrupt every Soul Strike on the planet until I get +1 arrow :)

"

morterion wrote:

Hello!

What can you say about the Atziri fight? Of course it is doable, but is it easy? I'm looking for a build, which can do both twinned T15 and Uber on HC, and which is not BF mine :) Also, does self-cast version outperform trap version on hardest bosses? When you literally can't have too much DPS.

I'm not that experienced with uber atziri, so I can't tell you exactly how well it would do. It's tanky, abuses mass curse effect, and has above average damage, so I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to do. As for traps, I'd say just avoid the trap version all together, it looks fancy and cool but if you want actual good clear speed use self casting.

"

johnce6 wrote:

Why chaos dmg support? I have been tooling around with inc proj attack dmg, void manipulation, rapid decay gems intermixed and I really cant seem to figure out a way to tell which is better.

It's just as a way to get flat chaos damage. You scale the damage through so many ways. The base damage of the clones is not that much, so having any flat damage (and especially flat chaos damage) is insanely powerful. It's probably the best possible support gem you can use for this build. Remember that the only way to get any base damage on a poison scaling build is through physical damage and chaos damage. Physical damage can only be gotten through your bow, which is 85-302 damage. Added chaos damage is 170–256. So it basically doubles your damage, PLUS its chaos damage and most mobs can't resist chaos damage.

"

hartz4 wrote:

What about running a Wither totem against bosses and tough mobs?

With Potency of Will and Exceptional Performance, my totem lasts 15 seconds, so I only have to recast if it gets destroyed. Wither also gets the +duration from our passives and temporal chains. Seems like a nice synergy for just two sockets :) You could also go 4L with Faster Casting and Increased Duration, which will affect both the totem and Wither, making more stacks possible. But that may be overkill.

I have a 6L with 3G 2B and 1R. Is Increased Duration the best choice for the red socket, or would a level 3 Empower be better? In the long run, I'll just invest the chromes to get another green.

And what do you think about the "Atrophy" and "Method to the Madness" passives? They are close, is the +chaos damage worth it?

Wither totem is fine I guess, I just prefer having a cast on damage taken/immortal call setup. To use wither totem you basically have to have minimum a 3 link right? So maybe the best setup for boots/gloves is like wither totem>faster casting>spell totem> spirit offering then cwdt>immortal call>increased duration>vaal discpline. You lose the increased duration on the wither totem but no idea if that matters at all.

Generally the only damage nodes worth taking are minion damage nodes. Because half your damage is physical, and half your damage is chaos, and poison benefits from both physical/chaos, the best way to increase your damage is through those nodes. I'd rather just invest 3-4 points into a jewel slot than put any points into a chaos damage node.

"

hartz4 wrote:

I want to follow up with some feedback and say thank you for this amazing build! Once you get to Lioneye's Glare at level 66, you'll blast through everything.

I'm using a Wither totem linked with Faster Casting and Inc Duration and I just did merciless Malachai at level 74. It was an incredibly easy fight, never got close to dying. I swapped LMP/GMP out for Slower Projectiles on both Mirror and Blink Arrow, and once Malachai has full Wither stacks on him, it's pretty much game over :)

Defence is amazing as well. Above all, the combination of Soul Strike and Wicked Ward. What I didn't know: When you recharge shield and arrive at full, Wicked Ward still remains active for the rest of the 4 seconds. So if you take more hits, you'll start recharging immediately. Pretty cool.

Overall, probably the strongest build I've played so far. And I've played Voltaxic Spark in 2.2.

TODO: Corrupt every Soul Strike on the planet until I get +1 arrow :)

My Gear

Glad to hear you are enjoying the build. I think it is powerful in certain ways but also weak in certain ways. It's powerful because you never have to look at the map you just rolled, because you can run everything (not many builds like that exist). It's almost impossible to die once you get good gear no matter what the map mod is, and it can stack rarity/quantity without much issue.

It's weakness is it will never be able to clear maps as fast as the top tier builds will. Just because of the mechanics of the skill itself. It's like a slightly faster totem build, you need build up time. You can't just press flameblast and 1 shot the entire screen with ignite in .5 seconds. You need to put your clones down and that takes time. Not to say that the clear speed is BAD, but the clear speed is not comparable to something like coc discharge/most elementalist builds.

As for your gear, only thing I'd change out is slower projectiles gem for GMP. And I'd get a different belt. Your minions won't benefit at all from the % physical damage on that belt. You can get a tri resist/high es belt for pretty cheap.




Ill probably be playing next league and using this build. It's still the most fun build I've ever done and I've played this game since beta. I skipped out on prophecy league but ill be back for atlas and I can update the guide a little more/add some more videos of the updated build.

I'm always willing to answer any questions you guys have so feel free to always leave comments/questions, I love reading and answering them.

will this build be viable in 2.4?

"

babioraz wrote:

will this build be viable in 2.4?

Yes. I will be playing this league and I will update the guide in a week or two once I've tested everything that I've wanted to test.

With the poison nerfs, it's slightly nerfed but I think it will be barely noticeable at all. I played this build before spirit offering was even in the game and it still felt strong.

The only major thing I would want to test is http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Essence_of_Delirium

If this works on minions and is scaled through minion damage then I could see this being better than lioneye's. 500 damage base chaos damage per second is extremely high for mirror/blink arrow. Lioneye's base damage is only like 300 and its physical damage that you have to scale through poison.

If you actually rolled a super high phys damage bow with this essence AND you can scale it with minion damage, it would 100% be better than lioneye's.

Everything else is the same.

After respeccing my Occultist into Caustic Arrow, I'm now leveling this build again :)

Thanks for all your feedback on my previous post. When I posted my gear I still had my boss gem setup (slower proj instead of GMP).

So we're not running discipline, right? After the curse nerf on bosses in 2.4, maybe it would be a good option in some situations. You could go Temp Chains and Enfeeble, and Discipline for full defense mode ;)

Also, 2.3 brought some interesting gloves.

Hello I just want to say thanks for the build guide. I had a lot of fun playing it in Essence league and it is just one of the safest builds that can do high tier maps. I can farm Atziri quite easily deathless and have done three to four T15 maps all deathless (Core Malachai deathless as well). However I could not for the life of me kill Uber Atziri, her four clones phase lasts way too long (since this build's DPS is still quite low) and you just can't sustain through. And I have done all this with just about ~3ex worth of gear (no Heretic's Veil but I am triple blasphemy). What revisions could I do to my 5-link setup to boost my DPS on blink/mirror arrow?

Edit: Some ideas and questions I think would be good to consider here. Does less projectiles dmg or more projectiles dmg from gem links (like GMP or slower projectile) even affect the clones' DPS at all? Since increased projectile dmg doesn't I don't see how it would.
I have tried an Essence of Delirium enchanted Harbinger bow but it was just so slow without attack speed modifiers and it made gameplay a lot worse for me. It did seem to kill things just as fast in ~T12 (not sure if faster, they were almost one-shotting anyways).
For Blasphemy, I found that Temp Chains and Projectile Weakness are absolutely crucial. Temp chains allows you to blink or walk into any large mob group fearlessly, and Projectile Weakness allows you to mow them down like grass. I think Vuln can easily be replaced by Discipline or Enfeeble, but for low tier Vuln is still pretty ok.
Is a Shavronne's Wrappings build variant of this possible? It would allow us to run a lot more auras, like a Discipline to make up for the shav loss of ES, then two more damaging auras. Do auras like Hatred or any of the Heralds help your clones much at all? With the new Uber Labyrinth we can go for the Ascendancy +1 curse and maybe quad curse enemies too.

"

001010011100101110 wrote:

Hello I just want to say thanks for the build guide. I had a lot of fun playing it in Essence league and it is just one of the safest builds that can do high tier maps. I can farm Atziri quite easily deathless and have done three to four T15 maps all deathless (Core Malachai deathless as well). However I could not for the life of me kill Uber Atziri, her four clones phase lasts way too long (since this build's DPS is still quite low) and you just can't sustain through. And I have done all this with just about ~3ex worth of gear (no Heretic's Veil but I am triple blasphemy). What revisions could I do to my 5-link setup to boost my DPS on blink/mirror arrow?

Edit: Some ideas and questions I think would be good to consider here. Does less projectiles dmg or more projectiles dmg from gem links (like GMP or slower projectile) even affect the clones' DPS at all? Since increased projectile dmg doesn't I don't see how it would.
I have tried an Essence of Delirium enchanted Harbinger bow but it was just so slow without attack speed modifiers and it made gameplay a lot worse for me. It did seem to kill things just as fast in ~T12 (not sure if faster, they were almost one-shotting anyways).
For Blasphemy, I found that Temp Chains and Projectile Weakness are absolutely crucial. Temp chains allows you to blink or walk into any large mob group fearlessly, and Projectile Weakness allows you to mow them down like grass. I think Vuln can easily be replaced by Discipline or Enfeeble, but for low tier Vuln is still pretty ok.
Is a Shavronne's Wrappings build variant of this possible? It would allow us to run a lot more auras, like a Discipline to make up for the shav loss of ES, then two more damaging auras. Do auras like Hatred or any of the Heralds help your clones much at all? With the new Uber Labyrinth we can go for the Ascendancy +1 curse and maybe quad curse enemies too.

Hey very sorry for the late reply I haven't been playing poe at all lately (just been a bit burn't out and haven't felt like playing last couple leagues).

Uber atziri is hard I think. I remember trying it when I had pretty decent gear and it was pretty difficult. I'm also really bad at uber atziri and have no experience doing it so maybe a more experienced player with this build could do it. But it's for sure very hard.

Yes temp chains/projectile weakness are the two best curses for sure. For the last one, I messed around with all the options you mentioned and it's hard to tell what's best. Vuln is good if you just want clear speed, and discipline is probably best if you want survivability. Enfeeble is nice for bosses but to use the third curse you have to give up something. So I'd say discipline to play it safe and vuln for fast clear speed/slightly less safe.

Shavronne's isn't very good for this build, you don't gain much and you lose a lot. Because this build doesn't really benefit at all from low life. I've done the math/tested it and it's just not better in anyway.

For this build, hatred/heralds help but not enough to be worth it. Like to use those you are basically giving up the third curse of vuln and those will in no way increase your damage more than vuln, not even close.

I can't help at all with the uber labytrinth part since I haven't played since that was introduced.

"

hartz4 wrote:

After respeccing my Occultist into Caustic Arrow, I'm now leveling this build again :)

Thanks for all your feedback on my previous post. When I posted my gear I still had my boss gem setup (slower proj instead of GMP).

So we're not running discipline, right? After the curse nerf on bosses in 2.4, maybe it would be a good option in some situations. You could go Temp Chains and Enfeeble, and Discipline for full defense mode ;)

Also, 2.3 brought some interesting gloves.

You can run discipline its perfectly fine. I prefer to run discpline+2 curses, but 3 curse setup is perfectly viable as well. I would NEVER drop projectile weakness though. It's way too much of a dps loss cause pierce is so huge for the build.

Those gloves are pretty bad for this build since we are poison based not elemental based. It's a dps increase but losing 200+ es on gloves is just not worth it.

Sorry for the late replies, maybe next league ill come back and finally update the build, but hope people are still enjoying the build. Poison will probably get nerfed next season so who knows maybe the build will become bad when that happens. This build abuses double dipping to the max with minion damage so it could possibly get nerfed into the ground if they nerf double dipping