[3.9] Facebreaker Cyclone Champion | Deep Delve | Depth 2000, #1 deepest tank in league

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RudyBaby wrote:

For intimidate, I think cyclone hits often enough that intimidate is basically full uptime against anything that matters.

Agree. I put the last of my savings in an Onslaught Circle of Guilt instead.

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RudyBaby wrote:

The legacy Facebreakers is great, but without the +2 corruption I think you're missing out on about +2 maxres. Hard tradeoff there.

As I'm missing the 25% aura effect on my body armour, I think I'm missing out on only +1. Guess it will start hurting as I go lower, but until now I see no effect.

Astral Plates with -15 mana, good life and 20%-ish non-curse aura effect retail for 200 ex or so :( You may want to change the estimate of 350ex for gear in the intro.

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RudyBaby wrote:

- For VMS/Soul Ripper timing I used Lutbot's timer features, where it would put a 20sec long yellow bar on my screen whenever I pressed my VMS hotkey. Note that this feature is completely legal as it does not interact with the game in anyway.

Oh man, that really helps. Have been looking for a good AHS script for a long time, and this does the trick,

Now at 1000 feet, which, to my amazement, puts me in the top 500 of Delvers on Standard). Will never be #1, since Blink is now at 51K and still going strong :)

Elemental penetration is indeed the leading cause of death when coupled with two damage mods (damage, ele damage or crit), as the bats just hit right through my VMS. I guess with a few more 100 feet, elemental penetration will become impassable.

Fungal Zombies are manageable, especially if they are not in the final zone. Going to Sand Stance helps a lot there, as you can hit them while staying out of the poison.

Using for Fungal zones. I will probably need to replace a ring with a choas res ring if I go deeper. Using a legacy version for Sirus A8 (who is now almost a pushover). The DoT is still dangerous, but all other attacks are not.

Two questions:
- What is the best configuration for the other two Delve Bosses? I can do a good job with Aul, especially since I have a "Nearby enemies are blinded" on my armor, but do not have a good handle on killing Kurgal and Ahuatotli
- You stopped at around 2000 depth. Is the build not working there anymore, or did you just stop?

Unfortunately this build doesnt do well against either Ahuatotli or Kurgal at high depths.

Ahuatotli is mostly just physical spells and physical DoT. The DoTs ignore fortify, phys taken as (works only on hits), and any block chance, so they absolutely need to be dodged manually. We are decent against the physical spell hits, but in absence of significant spell block, and ways to generate endurance charges against solo boss, it doesnt work.

Kurgal is similar story with most of his kit being spells that do 85% phys and 15% chaos. Gear swaps with chaos res take care of the chaos portion, but we still lack endurance charge and basalt flask uptime.

In the end, this build wasnt meant to do these two bosses. Nebuloch jugg is a much better fit for those two since it can reliably maintain 10 endurance charges against them.

As for why I stopped, its because it became too hard, the last couple hundred depths from 1800-2000 were painful. At that depth, two very common nodes are Azurite 3, and Smuggler's Stash (those 6 rogue exiles), and both of those become hard or impossible with just 1 speed mod and 1 or 2 damage mods. The ending of Azurite 3 nodes have no spawns to refill our VMS, and the boss and the last few Azurite crystals take too long to kill that our last VMS charge runs out. And smugglers with damage mods can chew right through the full 30k VMS in just a few seconds.

Technically I could slog through another 100 depths, maybe even another 200-300 depths with legacy gear in standard, but 2k was as good a place to stop as any.

Given the importance that physical damage reduction seems to have, would it not be a good idea to remove two life nodes and take the Endurance Charge node above the Nightmare jewel slot (and the regen node leading to it)?

You would go from 34% PDR to 38% PDR, so instead of 66% only 62% of physical damage comes through (a relative improvement of 6%), while you lose about 4% of your life (partly compensated by 1% additional regen)

Well, our primary problem is not being able to generate endurance charges at all in bossfights. If you can spec in Enduring Cry and use it regularly during the bossfight, then yeah an extra Endurance charge is likely worth it on phys-based bosses.

Outside bossfights in general delving, with end charge generation on kill and basalt flask, the build is actually stronger against phys dmg than ele dmg.

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RudyBaby wrote:

Well, our primary problem is not being able to generate endurance charges at all in bossfights. If you can spec in Enduring Cry and use it regularly during the bossfight, then yeah an extra Endurance charge is likely worth it on phys-based bosses.

I guess I could (just for Aul):
- invest 2 regrets to change life nodes to a 5th Endurance charge
- get a 2nd Aegis Aurora where Flame Dash is replaced by Enduring Cry + Blood Magic + Second Wind, put it in my swap gear and swap when I reach Aul.
- invest another 2 regrets to lose the Endurance charge and get life back after Aul

Harvest does not like this build:

- Vaal Purity goes from +phys to more phys
- Vaal Molten Shell has less effect
- Cyclone loses Stun Immunity

Rest in Peace, dear deep Miner

I may try to modify the build to use a high phys dps 1H weapon, so I can continue mining in Standard, but I'm not getting my hopes up.

Thanks for this build guide. I managed to hit my first 40/40, and have learnt a lot about the game playing it. This was my second league, coming to the game from a digital card game background with zero arpg/mmo experience, so it's been a struggle getting my head around a lot of things!

I only ran a low budget of the build, around 25ex excluding a boss dropped bottled faith and awak. melee phys. I was able to get just past 850 in delve, although I think I could have gone a bit further without upgrades if I hadn't burnt out pushing to 100. The build handled the delirium mechanic and simulacrums very well, and I was able to clear all bosses in the game, with the major issue being my poor mechanical play. I will need to put in a lot more practice in Harvest.

I want to push another melee character next league, but after reading the dev manifesto will probably not league start melee unless patchnotes offer up something interesting.

With the Harvest change to Herald of Purity (no more flat phys) this build is pretty much dead.

Well it was fun while it lasted. I'm glad people played and enjoyed the build.

Currently experimenting to see how bad the damage is:

Threw out the Facebreaker, and replaced with a 70 ex 1H and decent gloves:


DPS is now around 160K with everything off. I think it was around 220K before.

VMS is down from 21K to 12K.

Depth 750 was very much do-able so it is still a useful mine for medium depths.

Will report back when I have more data