[2.4.3b] CI Dual Curse Crit DoT BF Assassin!

Hello there, this will be my first attempt at writing a guide in this forum.

After coming back to Path of Exile (i took a like 3 years long vacation from it) i found LiftingNerds guides a pretty nice stepping stone to get back into the game and when Blade Flurry got released i kinda took my BV assa (which was oriented on liftings guide) and tinkered on it until i got something i think is worth sharing:

The Chaos Inoculation dual curse critical damage over time blade flurry 1H dagger and shield assassin! *takes a deep breath*

Class Tree:
finished tree at around lvl 95

My tree right now

Remember: should you at any point need Dex or Str to level up a gem just skill into one of the +30 nodes along the path and spec out of it once you meet the requirements via gear.

How does this build work?
We focus on stacking physical and damage over time along with the high base crit chance from a dagger and the assassin ascendancy passives which gives us 100% increased damage from bleeding and poison we inflicted with critical strikes (HUGE DoT effects). That and the bursty nature of Blade Flurry together with a high ES pool (sitting at around 12k with discipline at the moment) and the ability to leech ourself almost instantly to max. ES with Warlords Mark makes for a tanky yet mobile and fun build to play around with.

Keep in mind that Blade Flurry stacks up to 6 times providing more and more damage at each stage, when we reach the maximum we stop casting briefly to release the extra daggers (seems counter intuitive but the burst damage we get from that is worth it!).


Bandits:
SKill Point - Attack Speed - +1 max power charge

Auras:
Discipline
Blasphemy - Warlords Mark
Blasphemy - Vulnerability

Gear:
There is really only 1 required unique in this build, however there are quite a few really really strong and useful ones which i will list below accordingly, as for non unique items go for as much ES as you can get with resistences (we need to be capped for merciless and maps).
If you have all the defense you feel you need, you are free to go for offensive stats like Attack Speed, Crit multi, flat physical dmg increases etc...

Required:

Pretty straight up, allows us run 2 curse araus together with discipline, which is the core of this build.

Strong uniques in order of importance:


My current gear:


Skill links:

Helm: Discipline - Vulnerability - Warlords Mark - Enlighten

Chest: Blade Flurry - Faster Attacks - Increased Critical Damage - Increased AoE - Melee physical damage(5L) - Melee damage on full life(6L)
Note: If you do not have the voidheart and are struggling to keep monsters poisoned you can use a Poison Support instead of inc. AoE.

Weapon / Shield: In one 3L we will use: Shield Charge OR Whirling Blades - Faster Attacks - Fortify
and in the other 3L Vaal Haste - Vaal Discipline - Inc. Duration

In one of the other 2 4L we put our defensive setup:
CWDT(9) - Immortal Call(9) - Vortex(12) - Ice Golem(11)

The last 4L is more or less up to your own preference but here are 2 viable options:
Flame Dash - Faster Casting - Decoy Totem - Minion and Totem elemental resistences
Warchief - Faster attacks - melee physical damage - concentrated effect


Jewels:
We are picking up quite a few jewel nodes in the passive tree, in one of those i am using an Energy within jewel for more energy shield (the node next to the melding passive) but that is not required.
As for general stats on Jewels we want:
Attack Speed - highest priority! no matter if it's as with dagger/shield/one handed melee, we take it all
Physical damage
Damage
Damage over Time
Area Damage
Crit multi
Accuracy rating

Optional: Resistences or Attributes if you need them.

So far i was able to do corrupted T14 maps aswell as Uber Izaro without any problems, will of course keep testing and am anxious to see what you might do with this build.

That's it from me for now, let me know if you have anything to add or any questions.

changelog

Very interesting, and somewhat along the lines of what I was thinking about. How does it perform against poison/bleed immune bosses?

"

Shaiku wrote:

Very interesting, and somewhat along the lines of what I was thinking about. How does it perform against poison/bleed immune bosses?

Poison/Bleed immune bosses are annoying but not really a problem, since we are stacking alot physical damage and are at around 90% crit chance BF itself without DoTs deals ALOT of damage, i would advise to use the Warchief totem 4L against those bosses tho. It is just another source of damage and can deliver some hits while we might have to dodge attacks, although we still have around 12k ES and nice leech values which allow us to facetank MOST bosses.

Okay so i tried this build against a couple of poison/bleed immune bosses...
Bleeding immunity is no problem at all, we barely notice it, poison immunity however is rather annoying, while doable it takes quite some time - we don't need the poison to be able to leech our ES back up so we are able to sustain our "life pool" even without poison, it's just that we miss a huge chunk of damage.

Personally i find immune "core" bosses rather bad game design that favours just a few "meta" builds, but that is just my opinion i guess.

This build IS viable against everything up to and including corrupted T15 maps with some guardian fights taking ALOT of time and ofc skill but that is the case for most builds at that stage anyways.