3.17 TOXIC RAIN CHAMPION - Fast, Tanky, Deadly! - League-Start to End-Game

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Beskaius wrote:

what's the point to use Caustic Arrow and nova?

i boost 3m dps with vaal blight and vaal haste on or i miss something?

Caustic + Arrow Nova + Chain improves clear speed in maps. You really don't need millions of DPS to wipe out regular white mobs.

Vaal blight + haste or frenzy + culling strike improves DPS for single target.

I know it's the end of the league but I want to keep playing the build, and I could really use some help figuring out how to upgrade my gear. A lot of it is such that: if I remove one piece, I'm removing 2 others as well so that I can balance my strength & intelligence. spell suppression, resists, and AOE radius. Mana isn't a problem rn, but if I switch to Viridi's I'd take out the onslaught flask for a mana flask.

Some upgrades I'm considering:
High templar gloves with despair on hit, so I can change out a ring
Viridi's veil with an Elreon ring, after templar gloves + TR 40% enchant

Rare chest with: high life, frenzy on hit, and maximum life as energy shield. for the defense, and so I can swap out Maloney's with a really good quiver


In general, I see where I can boost my damage up, but I still feel squishy against bosses in general and I'm not sure why. My evasion and armor are both relatively high. I wonder if it's worth it to drop some damage nodes for the moment so I can grab more life on the tree. What do you guys think? Is there anything I'm missing for the build?

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ExtraCorrigible wrote:

I know it's the end of the league but I want to keep playing the build, and I could really use some help figuring out how to upgrade my gear. A lot of it is such that: if I remove one piece, I'm removing 2 others as well so that I can balance my strength & intelligence. spell suppression, resists, and AOE radius. Mana isn't a problem rn, but if I switch to Viridi's I'd take out the onslaught flask for a mana flask.

Some upgrades I'm considering:
High templar gloves with despair on hit, so I can change out a ring
Viridi's veil with an Elreon ring, after templar gloves + TR 40% enchant

Rare chest with: high life, frenzy on hit, and maximum life as energy shield. for the defense, and so I can swap out Maloney's with a really good quiver


In general, I see where I can boost my damage up, but I still feel squishy against bosses in general and I'm not sure why. My evasion and armor are both relatively high. I wonder if it's worth it to drop some damage nodes for the moment so I can grab more life on the tree. What do you guys think? Is there anything I'm missing for the build?

First priority is fixing your AOE modifier. Right now, your TR pod size is nice and big, unfortunately your pod drop zone is also so spread out that you aren't getting enough pods on target.

The dying sun flask should go. It's great for clearing maps, but you've already got that covered with caustic arrow in your quiver.

Then the gloves need to go. The increased area of effect there is messing up your AOE.

That will leave you with exactly 1.39 AOE mod, which is perfect. Your single target DPS will increase substantially. Right now you're probably pushing out about 1.5 million DPS, with those changes you're going to be getting double that.

Drop Ghost Dance, and the two points past it on the tree. Ghost Dance only works when you have enough energy shield to make the recovery worthwhile. You need close to 1k ES for that, so the points are better spent elsewhere. I'd suggest picking up a second medium cluster jewel.

A second medium cluster would let you move your Watcher's Eye over to the end of the cluster, then you could pick up a Thread of Hope and pick up Harrier, Potency of will, and the two extra Skill Duration nodes next to Potency of Will.

Toxic Rain gets a significant damage boost from gem levels, so a level 21 / quality 20 gem should be a priority. An amulet with +gem levels and Empower 4 are next on the list, although both of those are expensive by comparison.

Ailment immunity is critical, and I'm not sure how you're achieving it. Typically we get Freeze immunity from upgrading Soul of the Brine King in the pantheon. Shock immunity by running Soul of Garukhan in the pantheon plus a flask suffix, reduced effect of shock. Ignite immunity comes from a flask suffix, immunity to ignite for X seconds, removes all burning on use.


Run through those changes and you'll be doing a lot better!

I fixed the aoe modifier, I forgot that the TR skill itself adds 10% to aoe, so now it should be perfect. I also ended up dropping ghost dance bc you're right, and also since I'm using eldritch battery my ES isn't as important to my defenses, which is what I'm mainly trying to improve rn.

I still feel squishy against bosses, I had a hard time doing a 10-boss maven last night, and a hard time with Constrictor. Are there any other talents that I should focus on to improve defenses? Or does that mean I need to swap to a rare chest instead.

I also changed my flask & pantheon setup to have more ailment immunity, but as I saw with Constrictor, the pure chaos DOT was also really rough, and I should've swapped to Arakaali for that. Wondering if I should just stick with Arakaali, since I have unwavering evil so it's not like I get stunned.

I'm also not sure what you mean by picking up a 2nd cluster jewel, maybe my profile isn't showing it but I do have 2 cluster jewels. Here's a POB of my current build after those changes.

https://pastebin.com/732SUqvd

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ExtraCorrigible wrote:

I fixed the aoe modifier, I forgot that the TR skill itself adds 10% to aoe, so now it should be perfect. I also ended up dropping ghost dance bc you're right, and also since I'm using eldritch battery my ES isn't as important to my defenses, which is what I'm mainly trying to improve rn.

I still feel squishy against bosses, I had a hard time doing a 10-boss maven last night, and a hard time with Constrictor. Are there any other talents that I should focus on to improve defenses? Or does that mean I need to swap to a rare chest instead.

I also changed my flask & pantheon setup to have more ailment immunity, but as I saw with Constrictor, the pure chaos DOT was also really rough, and I should've swapped to Arakaali for that. Wondering if I should just stick with Arakaali, since I have unwavering evil so it's not like I get stunned.

I'm also not sure what you mean by picking up a 2nd cluster jewel, maybe my profile isn't showing it but I do have 2 cluster jewels. Here's a POB of my current build after those changes.

https://pastebin.com/732SUqvd

Your profile wasn't showing one of the medium cluster jewels when I checked it 12 hours or so ago... it's there now.

AOE is correct now. This should help a lot on bosses.

We don't use Brine King for the stun immunity, he's for the Freeze immunity we get from upgrading with ... Litanus, I think? For fights where I know there's going to be a lot of Chaos damage being thrown around, I used to swap out a flask for an Amethyst(With an anti-freeze suffix) and swap my pantheon to Arakali and Shakari. Eventually I managed to shuffle my gear around enough that I have decent Chaos resistance - I've found that anything above about 30% makes those fights pretty easy. Still have to dodge around some of the stuff, but it's ok.

For tankiness in general... you could switch out your molten shell for a vaal molten shell, that gives you more uptime with the caveat that you need to cast the vaal version manually. The regular molten shell will still trigger from the CWDT gem though. Make sure you are planting your banner, activating your enduring cry and keeping your flasks up. With that, you should be close to immortal... you'll have 350k eHP against physical. I'm only running 387k, and I'm running fully juiced T16s with an occasional death - about 1 death in 50+ maps.

If you want to get to even more tank, yes, you'll need to swap Queen of the Forest for a rare chest, which will mean juggling around all your gear again. It's a constant challenge for this build. :)

Yeah it's a bit tough haha. I do forget to place my banner often, and my enduring cry, so maybe I just need to be more active in my defenses. The vaal molten shell is still a good idea. If I link it to the CWDT, though, it won't trigger the normal version then, I would just have to manually press it every time?

Also, even without Brine King I don't think I've ever been frozen since I picked up Unwaveringly Evil, so maybe there's a bug there? Or maybe it prevents you from being frozen as long as you're casting a chaos skill?

For my rare chest, I have one that would work, with life, max life, and mas life as ES so that I could swap back into ghost dance and it would actually feel impactful, but I'm going to try being more active and see how much that helps. I'm also planning on:

swapping gloves for High Templar gloves with max frenzy and despair on hit
swapping my despair ring for an elreon ring
swapping diadem for a Viridi's with a good enchant. If I can get the currency I'll go for 40% dmg, if not maybe increased despair effect?

The only thing I'm wondering is if I should instead keep my current gloves, and get an elreon ring with despair instead. It would make it harder to balance attributes though, since it's easy to get an Elreon with 50+ intelligence or strenth. But Viridi's would be another great level of defense by giving me back my ES and making me hexproof.

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ExtraCorrigible wrote:

Yeah it's a bit tough haha. I do forget to place my banner often, and my enduring cry, so maybe I just need to be more active in my defenses. The vaal molten shell is still a good idea. If I link it to the CWDT, though, it won't trigger the normal version then, I would just have to manually press it every time?

Also, even without Brine King I don't think I've ever been frozen since I picked up Unwaveringly Evil, so maybe there's a bug there? Or maybe it prevents you from being frozen as long as you're casting a chaos skill?

For my rare chest, I have one that would work, with life, max life, and mas life as ES so that I could swap back into ghost dance and it would actually feel impactful, but I'm going to try being more active and see how much that helps. I'm also planning on:

swapping gloves for High Templar gloves with max frenzy and despair on hit
swapping my despair ring for an elreon ring
swapping diadem for a Viridi's with a good enchant. If I can get the currency I'll go for 40% dmg, if not maybe increased despair effect?

The only thing I'm wondering is if I should instead keep my current gloves, and get an elreon ring with despair instead. It would make it harder to balance attributes though, since it's easy to get an Elreon with 50+ intelligence or strenth. But Viridi's would be another great level of defense by giving me back my ES and making me hexproof.

The Vaal MS needs to be manually activated. The regular molten shell will still be triggered by and auto-activated by CWDT, so you're getting VMS for free.

Unwaveringly evil protects from stuns, not Freeze. We don't get frozen often, but when we do it's usually a death sentence.

Remember that while swapping to Viridi's, you need to drop a ring down to just Magic, which is 4 less affixes in total. On the other hand, no need to have your resists above 75 any more, as you aren't affected by elemental weakness curse. You'll also need to allocated some affixes for -mana to non-channeling skills on rings and amulet, and you'll need an enduring mana flask. Still well worthwhile IMO, that's the setup I've been running for most of the league. I've run QOTF chest, Diadem, a bunch of different gear sets, and this has been the best all around for me by a large margin.

So I was bored and decided to play around with Glorious Vanity Jewel in my build.

Corrupted soul gives 15% of life as extra mana shield. combined with 10% on my armour thats 25% for Ghost shield so almost 2000 energy shield. ive ran a few jucied T16 maps with delerium and its noticeably tankier. very impressed with it so far. the penalty of 50% of damage bypassing energy shield doesnt seem to make a dent at all.

Just a thought for you smart folk out there!

Over half the people on Softcore ladder are using Vridi's Veil, is it not worth it?

I'm about to swap to Viridi's myself: Diadem has been fantastic though, tons of sustain, really valuable attributes, and its let me run an additional aura for a while. But Viridi's seems really good too, lots of stuff I want, its just been a bit of a hassle getting my stuff ready so I can swap all at once. I bought a good magic ring, and a better ring on my other slot too so everything stays balanced. Trying to just swap into it is no bueno