[2.2/Assa] The Noxious Clone - Phys CoC Cyclone - Poison & up to 110% phys as extra Chaos dmg

THIS BUILD GUIDE IS STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS: PLEASE POST ANY SUGGESTIONS, QUESTIONS & CRITICISMS IN THE COMMENTS SECTION - I APPRECIATE YOUR FEEDBACK:)

VIDEO:

T13 Wasteland Boss Kill : https://vid.me/Y3TU

T12 Overgrown Ruin Map https://vid.me/cOGU [uploading seems to have messed up the video a bit - i will record a new one soon]


---------------------------Offense------------------------------------------

This is a Cast on Crit build based on Cyclone. Our three spells (Bladefall, Ethereal Knives and Glacial Cascade) deal mainly physical damage, as well as some cold damage. We make use of this big amount of phys damage to gain up to 110% of it as extra chaos damage, and both the phys and chaos damage will poison enemies.

How does the build gain up to 110% phys damage as extra chaos damage?


How does the build apply poison damage?




----------------------------Gem Links ------------------------------------

6L Cyclone - Cast on Critical Strike - Increased Critical Strikes - Glacial Cascade - Bladefall - Ethereal Knives

4L Cwdt-Immortal Call-Increased Duration- Vaal Grace [or Ice Golem or Blood Rage if you like]

4L Blasphemy - Warlord's Mark - Hatred - [Enlighten, optional]

3L Whirling Blades - Faster Attacks - Fortify

Single Gems/To place wherever you find room:
Ice Golem, Blood Rage, Warcry of your Choice, Vaal Lightning Trap [Optional, but nice to have for Atziri runs]


--------------------------------Defense-----------------------------------

We use several layers of defense which let us deal with almost any threat:
- Blasphemy-Warlord's Mark grants 2% life leech and Endurance charges
- Acrobatics + Phase Acro (+ Atziri's step) give us a high chance to dodge attacks & Spells
- Cast when damage taken - Immortal Call makes great use of our endurance charges
- Whirling Blades - Fortify for mobility and tankiness
- Around 5K life (or more when using Belly of the beast) and 70% increased life recovery from flasks due to our passives.
- High Chaos res
- Maimed enemies (slowed down)


---------------------------------Gear---------------------------------------

This is a strong point of the Build: It can be played with minimal gear costing less than 1ex in total - and at the same time there is room to greatly improve the build's performance with some moderate investment. Also there are many gearing options to chose from.

Chest



Weapons

Again there are lots of options to chose from - first i will present my weapons of choice and then list alternatives and leveling uniques.



Gloves


Rings


Other Gear

Nothing special here - use rares with good life and resistances. Try to get some Intelligence and Accuracy wherever you can. If your resistances allow it, use Atziri's Step.
Example Gear (not particularily good:)):


-------------------------Bandits-----------------------------------------
Oak-Passive Point-Passive Point [you can take the additional Frenzy charge if you want to - nothing wrong with that]

-------------------Passive Tree ------------------------------------------
Lvl 93


Leveling

You can level using a Phys Spell like Ethereal Knives, Blade Vortex or Bladefall (or a combination of them) - which one you want to use is largely a matter of taste, but Bladevortex or Bladefall (-trap?) are probably the easiest in terms of mana management. A 4L Blade vortex worked well for me (I used a slow acting mana flask to cast it). The links were BV-Added Fire-Spell Echo-Added Cold (or increased Duration). Additionally i used Herald of Ash and Ice, later switching out HoI for Hatred.

Once you have some CoC starter gear (Crit Daggers + Tabula) and want to switch to CoC, you can use Blasphemy & Assassins Mark to make sure you crit often enough. Mana can be an issue early on - either use Elreon Jewellery or invest a few points into the Essence Sap passive nodes. I don't remember exactly, but i think i switched to CoC around Level 50. Later your Crit chance will be so high that you can drop Assassin's Mark in favour or Warlord's Mark, which will also take care of your Mana issues. (To make sure you don't run out of mana even in curse immune maps, invest one point into mana leech in the Essence Sap cluster. If you can get good elreon jewellery, you can of course skip that...)

68-Point Tree


35-Point Tree

Reserved:)

Changes

28.3.16
Layout improved.
Passive Tree added.

30.3.16
Gem Links added.
Bandits, Leveling section and passive trees added.
Wasteland Boss kill video added.

Could you please add a leveling tree for most efficent way?

And also bandits :)

this is pretty cool. i basically do the same thing but with a legacy consuming dark dagger and pyre ring. that only poisons with your chaos damage, but still effective and easier to get poison to proc. also allows you to spec out deadly infusion for max crit rate (or very close to it).

so you can verify that with noxious strike your spells proc poison from "hitting" bleeding opponents, and it isn't specifically applied via attacks, like the bleed portion is?

Hey, first of all thanks for your interest & comments.:)


I verified that the spells will poison by causing bleed with an (unarmed) auto attack and then manually casting a spell (Bladefall): THe spell poisoned virtually every time - so yes, i can confirm that it works.
Maybe i should clarify that the poison is primarily used for two reasons: It's a very nice amount of extra damage especially against bosses or tanky single targets and it allows me to use southbound gloves.

Regarding Deadly Infusion: Cyclone is at 90.74% & 83.82% (off & main hand) crit chance without any power charges and without using crit gear, so i felt it was not necessary to get more crit chance. Of course Death's Hand will still produce power charges on top of that and make the build crit capped.

Your build idea sounds interesting, i might try that sometime!

Excerpt from the Wiki regarding "on-hit" effects:

<<The term Hit refers to skills which hit opponents and trigger on-hit effects. Apart from damage, on-hit effects include inflicting status ailments, gaining charges, Stunning or knocking back enemies, gaining life or mana, and skill-specific effects like Infernal Blow's explosion. >>

From this it seems clear that the wording of Noxious Strike & Dirty Techniques means any phys/chaos damage source that hits a bleeding enemy.

Very interesting build, I am currently considering trying it out. Quick question.

Most CoC builds take the path towards the witch and the templar to get more AOE and spell dmg/spell crit. Why did you take this path?

Warning: This reply will not be short, since there are many reasons that i have to mention...:)

First of all i should clarify that the AOE as seen in the videos is what you get without quality on Bladefall and EK - adding quality on them would increase the AOE, but i never even felt the need to do that.

Instead of Spell damage nodes, this build uses "increased Physical damage" nodes, with the nice side benefit that they also increase the damage of Cyclone itself: Bino's and Death's hand have good base damage, so our Cyclone damage without spells will actually contribute to single target damage - don't forget that cyclone itself will cause bleeding and poison too.

My line of thinking was that CoC builds tend to have good AOE/clearspeed no matter what you do, but often they feel a bit lacking when it comes to single target damage. This is why i looked into poison as a way to boost the single target damage specifically.


The Dirty Techniques Notable is an important part of the poisoning mechanic used in this build. It adds 50% more chance to poison as compared to our ascendancy (Noxious Strike) alone. This means both; more reliable poisoning and more poison damage. So this notable was an important reason to head for the southeastern part of the tree.

A second reason was the fact that i don't use a Vagan weapon with the "hits cannot be evaded" mod. Many people are not aware that in this case, accuracy becomes as important as your crit chance. (The game checks attacks twice: Did you hit? And then: Did you crit? Accuracy is factored in both times!)
Again the southeastern part of the tree is where we find lots of Accuracy nodes, as well as Dexterity, which adds flat accuracy.

The build does in fact have a very decent spell crit chance (around 50% without charges/unbuffed) because of how the Increased Critical Strikes gem applies to both cyclone and the spells.

This all being said, you could probably still go ahead and grab at least the witch AOE nodes if you wanted to, but you'd probably end up having less life, less weapon crit chance, less accuracy, less move speed, less attack speed, less evasion and less life regen (for running Blood Rage)... a trade-off that i didn't want to make.

Update/Planned Build Variant:

I am considering to remake this build as a Pathfinder/Ranger, using the poison during flask effect. In case anyone out there wants to test this i'd be interested to read about your experiences here!

Sorry to ask a noob question, but how do you get the 142 str in this build to support WL mark level 17?