[3.7] Agony Deliverance Tank. Bosses evaporated by scorpion friend

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WaffleT wrote:

I'm now wondering how well those poison stacks can be maintained, getting to 10 should be easy but with a 2 second duration they would fade away pretty fast on any fight where you are keeping mobile. Pity that there is no way to keep tabs on how many stacks they have and eyeballing damage isn't really reliable

Since a single stack of poison lasts for 2 seconds and Virulence stacks last much less than that the way I see it that in the singe traget fights your damage really starts to matter keeping up Virulence and Vile Toxins stacks is the same thing. Even with adds, ten 2 second stacks is pretty realistic to keep up considering RoA coverage.

Also to help a little bit with poison stacks I picked Whispers of Doom in my tree with the cost of life and apply Temporal Chains as my second curse. With my current gear at level 92 I have 6600 life and I can tank the Shaper slam with Rumi's and a basalt up (if he hits me ofc hehe) and I'll hit 7k life by level 95 which I plan to grind to.

Syndicate isn't much of a problem for me at the moment either. Granted I had It That Fled removed this round. It usually took a 4 stack of Fortification or Intervention in a T16 map to kill me and they are pretty rare. I just killed the Mastermind and plan on keeping It That Fled this time round and see if my 3 chaos res is enough :)

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WaffleT wrote:

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faraddox wrote:

But most damage come from elemental conversion. Or i missed something? And with these supports you are losing more elemental multiplier from ele focus.

Pob doesn't show Vile toxins giving any extra damage until you go into the configuration tab and set the # of poisons on the enemy up to 10. Then lvl 21 vile toxins becomes a 50% more damage support gem (7.5% more damage then elemental focus), or 45% more damage (2.5% more then focus) with a lvl 20 gem.

This is only true however on targets where you can sustain the 10 poison stacks, so not for clearing or on targets the force you to move for a few seconds. Hard to properly rank it as a support gem in those instances but it being green is good for interchangeability with pierce and an interesting option

Can you plan full endgame gear in pob? All bis items. Not just your char snapshot :)

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LaBBe_ wrote:

Since a single stack of poison lasts for 2 seconds and Virulence stacks last much less than that the way I see it that in the singe traget fights your damage really starts to matter keeping up Virulence and Vile Toxins stacks is the same thing. Even with adds, ten 2 second stacks is pretty realistic to keep up considering RoA coverage.

Also to help a little bit with poison stacks I picked Whispers of Doom in my tree with the cost of life and apply Temporal Chains as my second curse. With my current gear at level 92 I have 6600 life and I can tank the Shaper slam with Rumi's and a basalt up (if he hits me ofc hehe) and I'll hit 7k life by level 95 which I plan to grind to.

Syndicate isn't much of a problem for me at the moment either. Granted I had It That Fled removed this round. It usually took a 4 stack of Fortification or Intervention in a T16 map to kill me and they are pretty rare. I just killed the Mastermind and plan on keeping It That Fled this time round and see if my 3 chaos res is enough :)

Oh I certainly agree that keeping poison stacks and virulence stacks have the same action. Thats part of why I think I would need to try it out for a few hours. Everything less the uber elder falls over too fast to check and even uber elder and shaper most of the fight have a few targets to hit to max the virulence stacks faster then 10 poisons, I would often attack whatever section had highest monster density rather then the shaper himself that the scorpion was attacking

Temp chains increases the poison duration to 2.8 seconds on a white mob but only 2.16 seconds on a high boss. I sometimes unfairly dismiss curses but when I see their effectiveness on high tier targets are so diminished it makes it hard to justify them

Enfeeble or temp chains reduce damage taken by about 6-10% on high tier targets with 80% curse resistance but their opportunity cost to add into the build is often more then it would be to just get 6-10% more life. I just hit 8.4k at lvl 94 with a pure focus on life.

Admittedly my chaos resistance is trash. I know I should have fixed that but I just kill it that fled before he can hit me and nothing else chaos is really that noticeable. I did die to the essence drainer in the hall of the grandmasters super fast and needed to offscreen them on respawn.

In my opinion the hardest content in the game atm is the Minotaur with rippy map mods. Fortifications and the other guardians can all be offscreened and watched if you know its rolled with too many damage mods so I don't die to them but minotaur burrows and can one shot you through anything if you stack too much damage on him + unevadable/undodgeable boulders. Uber elder and shaper don't have map mods so they are much easier

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faraddox wrote:

Can you plan full endgame gear in pob? All bis items. Not just your char snapshot :)

This is my current character now that I think I'm done upgrading
https://pastebin.com/LMyuNeJu

Upgrades I made since the original post is
- 2 Mights of the meek
- 2 socket tombfist
- Extra jewel socket with the levels
- Crafted more life on rares

The only things to upgrade from here is that my rare jewels could use more life and my helm could be multimodded to have more resistances. I really should have gotten chaos resistance but It never seemed a high priority since I never died to chaos

None of the rares are "Bis" as rares can always have more life and resistances but I don't like to invest mirror level stuff in characters

I guess with unlimited budget I would swap
Physical to lightning - Elemental damage with attacks - Elemental focus
into
lvl 21 Vile Toxins - Lvl 4 Empower - Maim

Thats about 10% more damage (mostly from vile toxins assuming max poison stacks) but pretty expensive. You'd probably get better damage by spending that currency on jewels wth 3-4 mods on them

Hey im pretty like this Build leveling .Very much fun , but can u explain why u had 1 HoA in the Chest and another in the Boots?

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WaffleT wrote:

Enfeeble or temp chains reduce damage taken by about 6-10% on high tier targets with 80% curse resistance but their opportunity cost to add into the build is often more then it would be to just get 6-10% more life. I just hit 8.4k at lvl 94 with a pure focus on life.

You're right. I'm generally a melee player at heart and like to slow enemies down but that is hardly necessary when the Agony Crawler is going ham and I can hang a little further back. :) Switched to your two Meek setup, gained 1k life and lost a bit of Agony attack speed from a jewel but it's not a big deal. Since I had an empty socket now I addded Faster Attacks for Virulence QoL.

Also a though cropped in my head today. How would chain compare to pierce while clearing? Having looked back at my Ascendant and Deadeye Elemental Hit characters in previous leagues who used pierce and chain to clear respectively, I have a slight recollection of chain being a little more effective. So I tested it and honestly it feels quite good.

Of course you can't chain if you pierce so I switched Projectile Weakness to Poacher's Mark. The extra LGoH is nice, Agony generates Frenzy Charges which give him a little damage back from using the Chain Support and they make him run even faster! The damage lost from dropping Projectile Weakness is not very significant in my opinion because of boss 80% less curse effectiveness, which I had completely forgotten when picking up the second curse instead of life previously, d'oh. Hexproof areas are also no problem like this.

One big downside to this setup is that it pretty much forces swapping gems between Chain and Vile Toxins for bigger bosses which is pretty funny I ended up in this situation considering the reason I switched to this version of HoAg was that there were no gem swaps. Also Projectile Weakness is propably better for delving because of Knockback.

Here is a video of Minotaur map clear using chain. I'm going to use this setup for a couple of days and see how it feels during a longer period of time.

Really appreciated for the detailed explanations on ele conversion.

The scorpion attack speed is 2.48 in your POB. Mine is only 1.8. Have no clue looking at your gears. Jews may give some 10% IAS. But even I put in a faster attack it cannot reach 2.4. What I should do to improve this?

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wxn7465 wrote:

Really appreciated for the detailed explanations on ele conversion.

The scorpion attack speed is 2.48 in your POB. Mine is only 1.8. Have no clue looking at your gears. Jews may give some 10% IAS. But even I put in a faster attack it cannot reach 2.4. What I should do to improve this?

now i figured out that i did not set up 40 virulence in pob. This gives huge buff to attack speed! sorry for the stupid question :D

Hey, just AMAZING build. Having so much fun with it already while leveling. I have just one question that may seem dumb: How do you deal with the cold damage you get from hatred? Because then you are dealing cold damage all the time... Thanks!

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How do you deal with the cold damage you get from hatred? Because then you are dealing cold damage all the time...

With Generosity. In addition of making auras more effective, it also makes them not affect you :)

So I've been playing this build for a while now (just hit 71) and got most of the gear in place apart from a decent quiver + amulet + jewels. I have to say this is a really really strong build, consistently 1 - 2 shotting uniques is pretty good, and with the betrayal encounters being killed in literally seconds is actually a massive boost to some of the survival issues people have been having with them.

Last league and as my league starter I did a gladiator version using cyclone to stack virulence, it worked pretty ok but this version actually makes it easier to stack them and imo has much much better defenses through being ranged with dodge and being able to kite than relying purely on max block.

Definitely going to try to fit this in again as a league staple in the future.