Deleted

Thanks for the fast reply. Yeah, I'm currently running Grace + Vaal Grace + Vaal Haste + Warlord's mark. I have 15% mana left over but with warlord's mark, and the 0.4% mana leech node, mana is not a problem at all.

I've been thinking about that too, about trying to corrupt a xoph's for +1 curse, I think that would be OPOP lol.

Do you think perseverance + sulphur makes up adequately in HC for the lack of elemental weakness?

Considering we have 30% fire pen w/o elemental weakness, and most mobs are at what? 35%? it's still good DPS.

Like I said, about the ripping, I just did stupid stuff since I'm new to PoE I didn't understand all the mechanics, I feel like I'm a veteran already now, though :)




Oh, crap. I didn't even realize you switched the build!!!! Time to re-do everything, lol. My current character is Slithiced (which is a carbon copy of your old build w/o ele weakness and Warlord's mark instead).


It looks like the changes you made were:

You picked up Vaal pact and left off 4 axe nodes at the bottom, and then also you changed LGOH to weapon elemental damage, right? Which makes perfect sense since we're using vaal pact now.


Final Edit I promise! :)

I see what changes you made, you dropped some of the 1% regen nodes and picked up more life leech, man that synergizes so well with Vaal Pact and warlord's mark, I think I might even corrupt my belt, perseverance for +1 endurance charge and pick up that easy +1 endurance charge on the left side of the passive tree. This is awesome. That would be 5 endurance charges for 20% more mitigation on top of Kintsugi + fortify support and my granite flask/-20% physical flask. That would make us SOO tank for something like uber lab with disruptor charges lol.

"

Do you think perseverance + sulphur makes up adequately in HC for the lack of elemental weakness?

Perseverance is a bad choice imo
The attack damage it gives is bad because we have no armor
the fortify is unreliable.

Instead a rustic sash with wed would shit on that belt.

Sulphur is going to give you some extra damage sure, but ele weakness is just free on hit always up.

"

It looks like the changes you made were:

You picked up Vaal pact and left off 4 axe nodes at the bottom, and then also you changed LGOH to weapon elemental damage, right? Which makes perfect sense since we're using vaal pact now.

Yes with the final end game tree some changes were made and diff choices were taken.

Im still testing and if i find better options ill continue to update


Endurance charges are neat and indeed free mitigation, but that would be a swap off damage.

Elemental weakness is 30% res removed (bosses have curse mitigation so its not the same on bosses)

Whereas

Warlords allows the gloves to be better crafted etc, gives extra leech for defensive aspects, as well as endurance charges. But no extra dmg

fire penetration confirmed better then added fire

Build updated
Gem links updated


explanation

"

Say you have no penetration and are hitting a mob with 70 res. The mob is taking 30% of the damage. Say you then have 30% penetration against the same 70-res mob. That mob is now effectively has 40 res, so is taking 60% of the damage. In this case, 30% pen doubled your actual damage dealt (from 30% of listed damage to 60%).

Now look at the same situation against an 0-res monster. With no penetration you're dealing 100% damage. With 30% penetration you're dealing 130% damage - only a 30% increase compared to the doubling in the previous example.

And so on.
-@viperesque

I did the switch to Vaal Pact and it takes me a while to get used to it.

My personal experiences:

- Leech is insane, cause when the balls land on a pack you'll be at full HP all the time.
- I miss Blood Rage, for easier frenzy charge generation, right now it's taking a while and with the Darkray Vector's it can be a bit frustrating when you're running around with no movement speed.
- It's also weird to not have life regen anymore, we had a very fair amount of regen, which is nice for either chaos dmg (poison, desc ground, ...).


I did some crazy T14-T15's earlier and all I can say is you need to trust the build. It's amazing!
Did a Volcano map with mods: Undead, Vulnerability, Onslaught, Extra Cold, -11max, Beyond, 60% less regen.
It was a "failed" corruption to get my Shaper's Orb there. All in all it went very smooth. Just had to avoid getting charged by 10 Rhoa's, cause 1 hit me for ~4k dmg. But other than that no real issues, even the boss melted away.

Hi Ben,

very nice build. A lot of fun, nice dmg and good mitigation. I am 88 atm in BHC, following the older version with lgoh. I want to ask, if I should switch to vaal pact now?, its only better for SC or you suggest to do it in HC too?

Thx for the guide and updates!

I think all in all Vaal Pact is especially better for bossfights.

For regular mapping LGOH can just be as good imo, + the fact that you can still use Blood Rage for that extra attackspeed and awesome Frenzy charge generation. Also with LGOH I was able to grab more life nodes, because pathing to Vaal Pact did require me to spec out of some life nodes, which wasn't already that high. I had 6.7k on level 93. When going Vaal Pact I dropped to 6.3, and I have tier 1 life on every rare piece of gear.

For this build 6.3k is "enough" to clear red maps, it's just feeling low when you see CI friends having 12K+ ES.

"

Ir4kandj7 wrote:

Hi Ben,

very nice build. A lot of fun, nice dmg and good mitigation. I am 88 atm in BHC, following the older version with lgoh. I want to ask, if I should switch to vaal pact now?, its only better for SC or you suggest to do it in HC too?

Thx for the guide and updates!

I havent been able to post videos yet about the vaal pact changes but soon I will be uploading some.

So far VaalPact has enabled me to do twinned daresso t15 with dmg mods @ 5k life(deathless).

Still leveling and gearing untill i think its ready to showcase

"

I did some crazy T14-T15's earlier and all I can say is you need to trust the build. It's amazing!
Did a Volcano map with mods: Undead, Vulnerability, Onslaught, Extra Cold, -11max, Beyond, 60% less regen.

Can you link your gear? What auras are you running?

I'm currently doing warlords mark + herald of ash at about 5k hp but I don't think I can tank t15 yet...

Oh, man! This is incredibly strong build!
I did 3rd Lab at 70lvl and Uber Lab at !!!80lvl!!! on the first try!!!
Below my current gear


P.S. Also I would reccomend to get Constitution as soon as you can and then go to the "Shadow's" frenzy charge.

"

Brewtus2 wrote:

Can you link your gear? What auras are you running?

I'm currently doing warlords mark + herald of ash at about 5k hp but I don't think I can tank t15 yet...

We're an evasion/dodge based build, and you're not running grace..
I really don't get it. You either go full evasion, which is an amazing defense, or you start messing things up with a Basalt flask and using a leech/endurance charge curse to try and mitigate the damage you wouldn't have taken in the first place if you just ran Grace. If you wanna mitigate damage, then go full armour. Evasion is about getting 1 big hit and then let monsters swing at you for 5minutes without hitting you. So the more evasion you'll have, the more swings they'll have to make.


Let me first say I didn't take, and I'm not intended to take the damage nodes below duelist. In SC I probably would, but for HC I really wanna push that HP up as high as possible.

I had 6.7k with the LGOH setup, 6.3K with Vaal Pact.

Because I see 6.3K too much of a risk for Volatiles, I decided to experiment a bit and use Kaom's Heart.

With Kaom's:
- 7.8K HP
- Taking a hit more frequently, like 1 out of 4 swings from a monster hit me.
- I lost a few thousand evasion, which I tried to get back by upgrading my helmet to a higher Evasion piece + got a Grace level 21. Ideally I would want perfect rings with crafted Evasion on them, that's something to aim for in the future :)

It's the Evasion/Dodge that's making us this tanky.







Conclusion:
Idk both setups have their advantage, and there's not many downsides imo to using Kintsugi or Kaom's. I did pretty hard red maps with previous setup, and this setup... The T14 Volcano was with the Kaom's setup and that was probably the hardest map I ever did on this char. A rhoa charge hit me for 4K, so I don't think I'll run mods like that again, it was an unlucky failed corruption, but I wanted that Shaper's Orb :) For now I'm sticking with Kaom's, because next level I'll probably get 8K HP which I feel is a lovely number for HC.