[v1.7] 39k+ DPS with INFERNAL BLOW, +239% life, +6.8% regen, +145% armor, TRIPLE curses + blinds!
" Thanks for the quick reply. I still value your feedback as you know this build inside and out, and the changes of the patch are relatively superfluous as pertains to this setup (quick and dirty summary: player life has been decreased and monster damage decreased in an attempt to improve the efficacy of armor and a significant increase in physical damage nodes). I am going to go with enfeeble/temp/temp chains, I believe. Despite being only in standard league, I love the idea of this build's extreme offense capped with great defenses from those curses. And enduring cry. And molten shell... Are you going to be playing much in the future? I assume your absence is work-related and not boredom with the game. P.S. Love the flexibility of the stats, throwing out a leveled-up 10% conversion trap hooked to increased duration is great. |
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" My absence was caused by the low droprate of high level maps. It wasn't fun to play the same lvl 69-70 instances all the time, since the gear dropping there simply wasn't high level enough. Often you ran out of those maps and had to play/buy even lower maps. Back in the march, NO ONE sold 72+ maps. People were paying 4-5 GCP (exalted was 6 back then) for high level crafting gear alone... Composer, sound designer, game designer, producer, gaming journalist, gamer.
www.soundcloud.com/Artifex28 |
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Hi nocebo
I have tried your build and gained some experience with it. I like it a lot ;-) Your build gave me a lot of inspiration to come up with a mod that hopefully better suits my play-style and helps me overcome some difficulties I ran into. What are those difficulties? In short elemental reflect mobs, non-existent resistances (due to my crap gear) and desync. Of course the latter two have nothing to do with your build.
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- With elemental reflect mobs I can easily one-shoot myself. Its hard to judge safe distances, especially while desynced. - I play solo self-found and my resistances in merciless are negative or barely positive. Hence a lot of content starting from a2 is quite impossible for me at this stage especially if I encounter elemental mages. All the damage this build can dish out becomes useless if you can not reach the mobs, stand your ground long enough to kill them or become perma-frozen. - Desync!!! In the last couple of days I could not play 5min without suffering form major desync. My hits miss a lot despite Resolute Technique, Molten Shell's explosion center is fairly often 1/4 screen off center, mobs I'm supposed to hit directly in front of me don't seem to take damage at all but others half a screen away explode. I died a couple of times due to desync and this has become so frustrating that I did rage quit PoE a few times. Of course I do also experience desync with other toons but its effects are especially bad for melee, and even worse for melee with low attack speed. I was looking for a ways to overcome or minimize these issues without altering the base idea behind your build too much. I don't want to withhold my result and in fact would value your opinion on it. I have not yet started to play, so right now it's pure theory-/build-crafting and I can not yet share my experience or compare damage/survivability to your build. Before this wall of text continuous, my modified build. Concept: The base idea is to maximize single target physical damage, convert parts of it into fire & cold then turn the attack into AoE via Elemental Proliferation. Why fire & cold? Cold to chill/freeze for crowd control and minimize incoming damage fire for AoE damage via burning. Both (freezeing & burinig) require a healthy amount of crit chance to trigger and both scale very well with high single target damage. Play Style:
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Debuff mobs via Elemental Equilibrium with Arc Spelltotem or by teleporting with Lightning Warp then hit them with Infernal Blow or Glacial Hammer. Continue to hit them as long as they stay frozen, teleport/run away as the situation demands, rinse and repeat. Elemental Proliferation should chill/freeze everything around you minimizing incoming damage while burn will boost AoE damage. With most of the mobs frozen, desync should become less of a pain (frozen mobs can't hit regardless where they actually are). Frozen mobs are no threat while recasting Arc Spelltotem. Even a hit and run mode should not penalize overall dps too much since mops hopefully continue to burn while the player is kiting. Attack Skills:
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- Infernal Blow and Glacial Hammer - Infernal Blow as default attack for high AoE damage (burn damage + corps explosions). Hatred hopefully provides enough cold damage to chill/freeze mobs so incoming damage should be minimal to none. Temporal Chains synergizes well by prolonging freeze, chill, burn durations and further slows already chilled mobs to a crawl. Support gems: Elemental Proliferation, Weapon Elemental Damage, Melee Physical Damage, Added Fire Damage, Increased AoE, Faster Attacks, Melee Splash - Glacial Hammer for single target (act bosses) and elemental reflect mobs. With its base chance to freeze and a decent crit chance it should be possible to perma-freeze all mobs around elemental reflect bosses without actually damaging anything other than the boss himself. Support gems: Elemental Proliferation, Weapon Elemental Damage, Melee Physical Damage, Increased AoE, Faster Attacks, Cold Penetration Weapon Choice:
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- To use of Glacial Hammer and Infernal Blow as well as available passive crit nodes in the left part of the skill tree limit the builds weapon choice to staff. This is clearly one of the drawbacks of this build compared to yours. Notable Passives and Keystones:
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- Pyromaniac: improve burn damage (equals AoE damage with this build). - Breath of Rime: Shattering or exploding mobs immediately stopping proliferation could become a problem. Breath of Rime (mobs become chilled as they unfreeze) can partially overcome this and keep mobs at least slowed down. Unfortunately there is no way to compensate in a similar way for the burning effect (at least none that I'm aware of). Misc:
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- Hatred aura is required for this build's defensive mechanisms to work. I'm not sure if cold damage form hatred is enough to reliably freeze/chill mobs. Due to Hatred this build can not spec into Blood Magic. - Mana regeneration could become an issue forcing me into Blood Magic gems which would lower dps considerably and could even render the build useless if the resulting cold damage is too small to freeze. - Accuracy could become a problem. 180 DEX (with an onyx amulet) and 100% increased accuracy from passives will have to do (equals 360 DEX) Build Comparison:
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- defense: "On paper" your build is clearly superior in every way. I hope to make up for the loss in numbers by perma-freezing half the screen and therefore reduce incoming damage substantially. The gain in Energy Shield should help me absorb the occasional big hit and damage spike. This is what I'm hoping for at least but we will have to see if this works at all. -offense: Dps is very hard to compare. My build's physical damage is a little lower due to attack speed, I gave up fire passives (36%) and obviously I'm going to loose some dps due to the Elemental Proliferation socket and lower accuracy (no Resolute Technique). Are +225% crit chance and +90% crit multi burns and a bigger AoE radius enough to compensate? We will see. |
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Thought I'd post my gear as a sample for players around level 45 midway through Cruel. It's definitely not perfect and I don't have Windscream yet (probably won't for awhile) but the build is working well and most of the skills he suggests are represented here.
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Note that I'm going for a more defensively oriented splash Infernal Blow (current setup + Amplify notable means I hit huge, huge areas), but it can be easily changed to replace melee splash and increased aoe with melee physical damage and added fire damage. |
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" Can someone reply on this please, I want to play tonight :) |
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" Well personally I prefer the physical route because it boosts single target dps more than fire. However fire does more AoE damage because it boosts corps explosions. Lets say your weapon does 100 physical and 20 fire damage. without any passives and STR bonus your IB damage is 100*1.25*0.5=62.5 physical and 100*1.25*0.5+20=82.5 fire, total 145. now lets assume to take passives worth 20% increased physical damage: Your IB now does 100*(1+0.2+...)*1.25*0.5= 75 physical and 95 fire, total 170. If you invest above passives in 20% fire instead of physical: IB now does 100*1.25*0.5 = 62.5 physical and (100*1.25*0.5+20)*(1+0.2+...)=99 fire, total 161.5. This means with increased physical you can kill your initial target faster. Now you have to consider the corps explosions. Increased physical does not boost the explosion, increased fire does. If you fighting single mobs or small loose packs physical wins, but if your fighting big tight packs fire is better. You also have to take attack speed into account. Elemental damage scales much better with attack speed than physical. So if you plan to use Multistrike go with fire. Last edited by fae76#3960 on Jun 7, 2013, 6:45:34 PM
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But with IB + Splash and its increased range, you are hitting all mobs in range, and they will all eventually explode and the same time, so the hit dmg is more important then the explosion?
And for single target damage we can use Heavy strike for that if we pump only physical damage. I am 10 mins away from going full physical route. Am I going bad way? Am I missing something? |
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Hi there,
I'll give a try to your build on Anarchy. Back in CB I tried an ele IB build but it wasn't that good. Thanks for sharing. |
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" Keep me posted how you are doing there! :) Composer, sound designer, game designer, producer, gaming journalist, gamer.
www.soundcloud.com/Artifex28 |
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" Yeah sure. Couldn't play that muche since EU here and I work on saturday so wiil see. I love the idea behind arc totem :). |
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