[1.2.4] 11 Aura Low Life Support Culler - Steroids Edition Revamp

Purity of Ice, Fire, Lightning. Determination. Grace. Discipline. Vitality. Haste. Anger. Hatred. Wrath.



Introduction:
The primary goal of this build is to maximize efficiency of party play. You bring lots of mitigation, damage and oh *!@# buttons for your party.. all while making more shiny's drop.

The back story is pretty simple, this build was started back in BETA and evolved into a pretty decent setup and guide in 1.06 during Domination league. I quit the game for a while after domination league.

Now I am playing again and decided to update and revamp. I feel like it's better than ever now as well as much less rigid with gearing requirements. You can follow this guide much more loosely as you obtain new items. The build path, character level and level of skills bring everything together more naturally. The gear, spells and link setup is completely flexible. Run Arc if you like Arc. Run Spark if you like Spark. Run Incinerate if you are as cool as I am. Whatever.

Videos:

• Youtube Example of group play at level 78, with a random party.
• Youtube Example of solo play at level 78, using no summoner nodes.

Mechanics:
There has been some changes since 1.06 that have turbo charged this build. Here is a summary of what those things are.

• Mortal Conviction now provides 60% reduced mana reservation. (Up from 40%)
• Introduction of unique item Solaris Lorica makes this build accessible to anyone.
• Although dps auras were nerfed some, Generosity was added. Sweet.
• Vaal Skills allow us to hyper-buff our party, Vaal Discipline allows us to recharge our shield in sticky situations. Less panic logouts.
• Removal of "Of Suffering" map mod removes requirement of Zealot's Oath, which means our vitality can apply to life to simplify our resource management.
• SRS Was introduced, which like zombies naturally scales well with your build. The difference is you don't need to pay a passive point tax to take advantage of it. No more solo problems.

Build Weakness:
This build use to have the weakness of having slightly less physical damage survivability then your party members, however with the introduction Mortal Conviction change I am now able to run 11 Auras including Determination + Grace in combination with Iron Reflexs which provide 20K Armor at around level 77, so this is no longer a issue. Also solo play was nearly unbearable once you went to full support. With the introduction of missions this was no longer acceptable to me, so I solved this with SRS and feel the build no longer has a major weakness.


Build Strength Summary:
We bring two key Vaal skills to our party as well as every single useful aura in the game with a buffed 66% effect. On top of that the 3 primary DPS Auras all run on Generosity for a total increase of 105% effect. These auras make us bring more effective DPS and survivability than any single character could ever bring to a end game map group. On top of all this we grant Culling Strike to our Incinerate by using the unique item Heartbreaker. Depending on your gear you will peak out at nearly 600% or so item rarity reliably since Incinerate attacks many times per second. A final note about this build which I enjoy is that you can level up pain free as a summoner and easily back up into a pure support build using only the free refund points you are given from quests.


Solo Capability:
I hated that the old build had no solo capabilities. I have solved this by using a alternate +2 Minion rare helmet 2B2R linked with SRS -> Spell Echo -> Multi-Strike -> (Melee Splash/Melee Physical). Because of the giant boost of auras and generosity, I am able to easily do my daily missions or piety runs alone safely and quickly.


Party Capability and Breakdown:
Remember- the entire focus of this build is for party play. The acceptance criteria for every skill, passive node and piece of gear is that it must contribute to your party. Here is the break down for how our various build choices do so.



Gear Requirements and Explanations:
Overtime this build has gotten much cheaper and much more flexible! In fact you could run this build 100% self found over time. The only required mod you need to obtain is Chaos Damage does not bypass Energy Shield because we are ES based and reserved 99% of our life. So chaos damage would instantly kill us without this mod, luckily for us we may get it for very cheap from Solaris Lorica and as you build wealth you may be lucky enough to obtain a Shavronne's Wrappings which is the best in slot item. The items listed below will be in order of priority by usefulness.



Passive Tree Discussion:
The general idea of the tree is to pick up all the aura nodes as efficiently as possible, while gaining as much defensive capabilities as we can. The last thing we want is to rip inside a expensive map roll, leaving our party without a culler. The main build path doesn't digress under different configurations, all that changes is the clusters you pick up and the order in which you do so. The cost listed beneath these is the cost to get to the cluster itself, not the total cost for the node.



Passive Tree Configurations:
So if you are coming into this from scratch with a brand new character, start with "Leveling up as a summoner" then you can back out and transition into "Standard Build Path" once you have the required items and passive points.

Once you hit the "95 Point Base Build" you are ready to go down the various "Standard Build Paths". I provide an "Example Cookie Cutter Build Path" but I would really try to read the "Standard Build Paths" and make your own decisions based on your gear and how your gameplay is going. Since this build is a lot more flexible these days with gear, everyone is going to have different immediate demands while leveling. Try to take your own demands into consideration and traverse the passive tree accordingly.

Shortcuts:
95 Point Base Build
120 Point Example Cookie Cutter Build





Links (My Setup Currently PLEASE READ ALL TEXT):
The links will make heavy use of auras and use a quality level 1 incinerate as your primary spell for culling. If you don't want to use the vaal mask, you can put incinerate in your chest. There are a ton of ways to link, this is just how I am doing it, given my current gem levels and items available to me. Do not think it's the only way!!! In fact this is not my DREAM setup! Lots of factors came into play creating this setup, things like I am poor and Solaris Lorica is easier to chrome this way. I will post more about the 100% best setup later.

I guess the most important note about linking, is you lose faster projectiles by running your Incinerate on a 4L. Once and if I have shavs and hit level 90~ or so and do some field testing I will make the final decision if it's better to run the setup below, OR to put incinerate on 5-6L chest (Gaining faster projectiles), move hatred/wrath/anger/reduced mana back to gloves / boots and put the Vaals/Lightning warp in the helm. I think the 4L cull works okay, and may stick with it to be honest.



My Gear:
This is not my ideal setup, but it's a good start. As much as I like The Vertex, it doesn't align with the builds primary goal of being party centric- a Rare with high IIR would be much better. Also of course I would prefer Shavs over Solaris Lorica.



Bandits:
I killed all the bandits, you should too.


Leveling Up:
I personally had my entire end game support build planned out before I even started and figured out a good summoner path to run while I geared up and leveled that could cheaply be backed out of with base refund points once I was ready for party culling and had enough currency. I talk more about this in the passives section.

nice guide mate, bump 4beztcullstarEU

This looks like exactly what I was seeking. An extremely versatile witch that can cull for groups, or reliably solo MF. How do you recommend leveling it? Just FP/ST your way up and then swap to totems for damage when you get ancestral bond?

I'd love to see the CI variants, as Shav's is out of mine and probably quite a few other people's price range.

Thanks a ton for posting this! :)

EDIT: one other question. Are there any changes you'd make for HC/Nemesis? or do you consider it survivable enough as is?

"

Lajiskin wrote:

This looks like exactly what I was seeking. An extremely versatile witch that can cull for groups, or reliably solo MF. How do you recommend leveling it? Just FP/ST your way up and then swap to totems for damage when you get ancestral bond?

I'd love to see the CI variants, as Shav's is out of mine and probably quite a few other people's price range.

Thanks a ton for posting this! :)

EDIT: one other question. Are there any changes you'd make for HC/Nemesis? or do you consider it survivable enough as is?

For leveling I actually followed a "Auramancer" variation of it here[1]. I later regretted some of my paths once I was geared enough to go low life. However instead of doing that, you could follow the build I made, and just pick up all the zombie nodes along the way, it's really convenient how close they are to the main path.

The reason I didn't continue down the path of "Auramancer" is because although solo play was absolutely amazing for fast cata/library clears however I had two problems 1) I didn't have any real reliable culling, using a 4L for flame totem coulda been a possible option, but my mana and links were tapped from summoner dependencies.. and 2) Once you start hitting 72+ maps certain situations whipe out your entire army in a matter of moments and it's annoying as dick. I was using snapshot mechanics and tabula rasa to 6L zombies and 5L spectres before i finally 6linked my shavs, and having your army die mid map and having to go resummon is pretty annoying.

So yea, the TLDR is that summoner is great for solo farming library/cata/pre 70 maps, but once it's time to join partys you want to back out of those nodes, get some es and utility and go full support for mapping.

As for nemesis: I don't think a culler like this is nemesis safe to be frank. You would need to ditch any spell damage nodes or cast nodes and go pure ES, and also change gearing a bit.

Hope this info helped man, I really enjoyed this build thus far, maybe you can make your own variation of it to fit what you enjoy. Take it easy.

[1] http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMBB2MRUBGWFdcXLxmKGmwajxzcHRQdqiSwKPoqmCymLL8vbzQKN2Y3gzvhQ2NGcU25VdZWY1crWPVakVv0ZOdmnmqsa9ttGW-ecLtxTXNTfRh_xoCkgseDCYVghq6G0YhAj0aQM5Mnms-boZu1na6dxKKjpqym66cIpyuofarEsHe0DLcxuJO71r-XwcXB88M6w23JPcpKzLzQ0NP714bZC9kT4Yji9-aB6rrr7uwY7IryHvba99f6gPrS-wn-SQ==

Auramy? Typo or inscrutable wordplay?
Added to the build list anyway.

Nice guide, exactly what I was looking for!

"

iCubie wrote:

Nice guide, exactly what I was looking for!

Thanks

This may seem like a silly question but I'm new to the game and wondering how you can ever have any high level dex/str gem with so few actual dex/str nodes. I run out of attributes really fast (except int of course). Do you get them via equipment?

this build looks really good will give it a try

but my main question is how do u cull without culling strike effectively in groups? people spam skills so fast(like blender) that you can effectively cull what about getting a heartbreaker as a main hand ? but i think it will decrease your damage output very much