[3.6] Speedy Melee Herald of Agony Occultist | ALL MAPS | ALL MODS | SHAPER VIABLE | LEAGUE STARTER

Also, are there any mods that can increase the crawler damage? Does Kaom's Heart increase it? I had it once, but got rid of it in favor of cwdt. I'm currently at 6500 life, 500 es, capped (109) resists, and 20% chaos. I can post my PoB when I get home if that would help in assessing next steps.

Finally all guardians are done, Hydra was the easiest, Phoenix the hardest.
I thought having vulnerability on Phoenix is fine since his damage is fire based, but his damage is phy based, converted to fire. Even his sweep attack could oneshot now, his fire bomb anyway and normal attacks hit very hard. I guess i will try him again without such a bad mod and see how it goes.

The Betrayal aura looks very cool but unfortunatly it is gem based and therefore you only see it in hideout and maps. :(


@fragme11
Only minion damage increases the damage of the crawler.
But it scales poorly with Virulence stacks.

The biggest boost for your crawler is Spirit Offering.
Flesh Offering is good too but it doesent scale that well.
Since Offerings are a pain to use manually, i use it in a CwDT setup.

When you convert a max level gem to a max quality one, you better replace it with a bought lvl 19 one. Put the other gem in a secondary weapon to lvl it up again. Else you would loose way too much damage.

I did use Holy Relic for a while but i think it isnt useful here but could work well in a Zombie build. It is like a Golem, who dies too often and provides next to nothing.

Whirling Blades is a bit faster and more precise than Shield Charge but with the missing aoe, it generates less life and virulence. Dont forget to link a poison gem with it.

A low lvl max quality Temp Chains in a CwDT setup gives you 33% less action speed, which is nearly as good as your max lvl Temp Chain (36%). But then you are free to use a better Amulett with high life and good stats.

Armor doesent work like resist and its mitigation depends on how much damage you receive. The bigger the hit, the less mitigation it gives. This makes it so that it is great against many small hits but rather useless against big hits. If you are afraid of big phy based hits, you better stack huge amounts of armor combined with a big stack of endurance charges. Anything else is pretty much wasted.

Since we are running an Enfeeble aura which helps with Evasion, it seems better to improve evasion. Your gear should give you around 20% evasion, with Enfeeble it is more than 50% (bear in mind bosses are reducing it). Against a blinded mob, you have around 75% evasion in total. Evasion is just great in this build!

Dont invest into ES, it is rather useless since you get hit constantly and LgoH fills up your life only.

I would invest more into chaos resist if possible, it makes it easier against some nasty mobs in high tier maps and you can use the Forbidden Taste flask without a problem. This is quite a lifesaver and i use 2 of them now.

All in all you need more life. If possible you should have a high amount of life and some strength (which converts to life) in all of your gear.

Thanks for the feedback. I've made most of those changes. I still haven't gotten my offering setup or poison in my whirly dhirly. I did spend some chaos to get 20% qual gems that increased things a little bit more.

I'm up to 8100 life now, thanks to redoing all gems and going to belly of the beast. I hadn't tried before, but I did take out all 4 guardians, and came close to taking out shaper. I had him to phase 3, but died a couple times to standing too close to his side during the beam attack, and kept getting killed on my way back in before I could get fortify up.

I also added a 20% blind craft on my claw instead of 33% minion damage. Is that recommended? I'd like to work more evasion into my build, but I needed resists on shield and 4 red gems on my armor, so there's not much evasion there.

I added 15% chaos resists to get me to 35%, and with a few exa investment, could likely get some better items that would allow me to take that to 50%.

Any other recommendations? I'm not sure what to upgrade next, other than looking for items that are 3+ exa each, which is probably just where I'm at.

Great build. As there are essentially no required uniques it gives great freedom to experiment with equipment.

I got into early maps with it then decided to try switching to a bow (Quill Rain) and using Rain of Arrows - Curse on hit - Projectile weakness - Poison - LGoH. It seems to work just as well, and being able to pick off packs at the edge of the screen feels a little safer. It also makes it clearer to the player that their own damage is negligible, and it is the crawler that does all the heavy hitting. The player just needs to quickly and reliably deal a huge number of hits.

I'm also using Dread Banner, to boost physical damage dealt by the crawler.

I didn't need to make any changes at all to the passive tree as none of it is specific to melee.

Ive tested the variant with Quill Rain and Rain of Arrows.

Pros:
Crawler damage is higher, alot higher with Projectile weakness.
It can even be improved by changing the Pierce gem (which isnt needed anymore)
and by using a 6 link with enfeeble. Without Blasphemy and some mana reserved nodes even a Hatred aura seems possible. Thanks to the higher Crawler damage boss fights will be even faster.

Cons:
Mobility is bad, Blink arrow has a 3s cooldown and Flame Dash is even worse. Hopefully the next version will change that.
There is no Fortify and Temp Chains anymore. Without a Shield you have less life. These really hurt your defences.
You cant use a movement skill and Rain of Arrows at the same time.
You need to move your mouse alot to hit most of the mobs quickly.

The melee variant can generate Virulence and LgoH with Shield charge and Static Strike on the move while charging around. That is a huge bonus and with Shield charge it feels alot more mobile.

Hard hitting mobs which move fast are an issue.
The constant reposition of Rain of Arrows makes you quite immobile
and when the mob moves out of the rain, you not generate anything.
I just died to one of those convoys on a red map for the first time (no fun at lvl 94).
I never had an issue with them when using Shield charge, Static Strike and Molten Strike which
can always generate some Virulence or LgoH stacks even while charging around.

It may sound strange but the melee variant is just safer in this build.
I could facetank 95% of the bosses and for the rest i had enough mobility to avoid oneshots.

I so hoped to try the Quill Rain variant in the next league but unless the Crawler gets nerfed badly i probably will stick to the melee variant again.
It is just faster at maping and safer.

No changes required for 3.6.

Hi there,
since Bloodseeker nerf via leech nerf I need a new league starter ... was first thinking about some other gladiator build and that is how HoAg got my attention and I found your build, wich in my opionion offers WAY better clear-ability than the gladiator version.

Looks amazing to me and I will start 3.6 with this in only a few houres. Thank you for your work with this guide. Hype.


edit: not sure yet wich ability I will use to spread the poison yet ... propably molten strike

Any differences with 3.5 version ?

"

iamshoes wrote:

Any differences with 3.5 version ?

No changes are required but I'm sure there will be useful synthesis implicits.

Quillrain is up 285% almost 4c now. 11% Occultists this league.