[3.01] [HC] Dark Pact Slayer (tanky, low cost, self cast dark pact)

Gonna run this as my league starter, what do you think would be better early game a 5 link Cherrubim's or a decent 6 link rare?

Normally a generic 6L is usually easier to get, you can probably even just use a tabula for most content if you have a good shield. When prices go down after a week or two then refining things like getting 5L Cherrubim's is worthwhile (you wont want to go with a low roll Cherrubim's if you are investing currency into it).

Used a similar build in the 10 day HC race (went crit and didn't use iron will). Was surprisngly good for clearing and solid for bossing too with conc effect. Was fast clearing t10s-t11s with not much investment. Super tanky and insane AOE.

Sounds like patch notes will be out tomorrow. Still mulling over the new vaal pact placement and changes. It does provide a very easy opportunity to use it but at the significant disadvantage of losing all life regen (which is usually in the range of 600hp/sec to 1200hp/sec). It is possible that something can be changed to accommodate for this but I will leave it open ended for now :).

Well i wouldnt recommend this build at all anymore. Dark pact received roughly a 20% nerf to dmg on self cast as well as no longer gaining radius to self cast. if your still wanting to go DP go DP Totems as it hasnt been changed and will be much stronger.

I think it is easy to get discouraged by nerfs, best thing I can advise is to wait for the patch notes and see what we get as far as buffs to the build. It could very well be that if they did not nerf some elements that the build would become overpowered.

I'm trying to stay optimistic. I think a regen based build is still possible... you could get something like 10% regen from the tree and have the 20% recovery per second with max leech going.

30% life per second would be less than what I'm doing now (i think i have ~8% regen + the 30% leech per second)

The other option would be to embrace the new vaal pact and have 40% health gain at all times when leeching.

My friend is trying to convince me that i am going to be leeching 98% of the time and i wont see a difference. I think he might be right... Although i might try and run 2 worm flasks for scenarios where there's nothing to kill.

I'm gonna spec out of brutal fervor to emulate losing that 10% and play around with it tonight.

Honestly the biggest question in my mind at this point is how does the radius nerf actually feel in game. Thats one thing we wont know until we can try it.

Just tested out the build with 3.1 conditions and the build is still good as well as the clear speed. Only issue I had was bossing. Ended up linking 3 vaal summon skeletons with minion life and was able to bosses up to t13. Build def. feels bad compared to the former Zerker DP VP.

Explain me how blood magic passive work in this build, i level 50, but when i pick up blood magic warlords mark start reserve my hp, but in videos i see that he have mana. Help plz :/.

Alright,

@StillbornCake You have to run warlords mark with cast on damage taken link, cannot link with blasphemy. The videos will be all taken down soon as I will be making new ones, might just leave them up until I get my character rolling again.

I am actually very optimistic about the build right now, although it got hit in dps/life regen I think this will not break the build for a couple of reasons.

Going to just make a couple of edits and I will list off some of the things I noticed from the patch notes and items that have been revealed so far.