[1.2 ] The "semi-tank": Aegis+Abyssus Heavy Strike build

I played this Marauder in 1.1.x.
I'll probably not revive him and did not test my 1.2 skilltree in this guide, however it does what I expect it to do (life, damage, armor, shieldblock).
The stats in the screenshot below are way off what they would be with the new skilltree.
But as the playstyle and gem selection has not changed at all, I leave it as it is.

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1. Introduction
2. Skilltree
3. Bandit Choices
4. Gem Setup
5. Gear
6. My Gear and Character Screen


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1. Introduction

Aegis makes you facetank almost anything in the game.

While this feels amazing at first, it's not all great and wonderful, it also comes at a quite hefty cost.

You're required to invest in at least some Block and Energy Shield nodes to make it work, and in the end, even with very good gear, your damage will be lacking.

Even guys with mirrored weapons tend to run around with 15-17k DpS, which I personally consider too low. I want to at least oneshoot (or three-shoot with multistrike) white monsters in 75 maps. Otherwise I don't really have the feeling my character is a Demigod.

The idea I came up with is:
We couple Aegis Aurora with Abyssus.

This Unique is one of the "un-tankiest" items in the game as you take ~50% more physical damage.
It however comes with +40-60 physical damage, which is a HUGE DpS boost (I jumped up 5k once I equipped it).


So what happens if we take the tankiest and the untankiest item in the game?
As long as we block at least some attacks, Aegis still works as intended, kepping life full and ES up all day long.
As long as hits that go through do not oneshoot you, it's also not an issue not to block.

I was oneshot once so far, by a "powerful crits" rare rock golem in a 78 map, before I had taken the "20% reduced damage from crits" node.
After taking that, it has not happened again (so far, it probably will, but who cares?).

So: this is still very, very tanky.
You can yolo into most game situations, the more monsters, the better, but you cannot afk (which I don't really want anyways) any situation.
You are still forced to play at least a little bit careful, dodge Vaal smashes and Touch of God at least. ;-)
Though I actually survived an unblocked "Touch of God" in a Level 74 map, don't know how, but I did, a little life remained and I didn't die. Cool stuff.

Pros:
*very tanky
*good damage output
*stand in the middle of everything and murder them
*you can swap your Abyssus for a tanky helm in any situations, and be unkillable again

Cons:
*Aegis Aurora is lame and costs 5-7 Exalted Orbs.
*Dex and Int gem requirements have to be handled with gear. Cannot be done in a satisfying way with my skilltree.

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2. Skilltree


3. Bandit Quest Rewards


4. Gem setup




5. Gear


My gear and character screen (Lvl 86), Verion 1.1 (!!!)


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Death Log, counter: 12

Some thoughts on Aegis Aurora

So I had some currency stashed up and thought:
"Hey, let's finally join the club of immortals and buy... the shield..."

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What Aegis Aurora costs you

1. You are 100% required to get spellblock, or this shield does nothing for you against half the monsters in the game.

So you have to wear Stone of Lazhwar or some other spellblock, some may even say, you also need Bringer of Rain and Rainbowstrides (I don't think so, I think I'm actually doing alright with 63% block/39% spellblock).

This is not only a hefty cost in terms of currency, you are also sacrificing at least two life rolls (Aegis and Lazwhar), if you are going for RBS and BoR too, you have only one life roll and 30% elemental resist on 5 out of possible 9 item slots!
This a) makes it an absolute lategame item, as you need a ton of and life/block nodes, and some very good (expensive) life/resist gear on the rest.

Don't get me wrong, Life and Block nodes are very strong and should be taken anyway when using a shield, the block/spellblock mechanic is obviously very powerful, but it is also very costly.
Block Nodes come at about "2% block per point" (the bigger nodes too, if you calculate travelling cost), which means +30% block is at least 15 skillpoints that are not life and that are not damage.

Aegis Aurora also has shitty ES.

I went from...

...to this:


...which let my ES drop from 2k to 1.2k, my life from 5k to 4.5k and I was also forced to replace skillpoints to meet stat requirements and the missing life leech (4 points spent, had to be life, so I went down to 3.8-4k).

This will be replaced once I level up further, but it makes it very costly at ~Lvl 75-80.

Again: Not saying it is not worth it, but it comes at a very brutal cost.

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What Aegis Aurora does for you

It removes strategy, or at least it reduces it to absurdity.

Usually a strategical approach in an ARPG would be:
a) you don't want to get surrounded
b) you want to fight monsters in small packs, not huge packs
c) you want to kill ads before the boss, as their DpS adds up

With Aegis, it is the other way around:
The more you are hit, the better for you.
Ideally you want hundreds of monsters hitting you at the same time, so your ES gets recharged like crazy.
You are actually stronger in the beginning of a fight than in the end, as the number of monsters gets diminished, AA's effectiveness drops as well.

Best monsters for you are fast shooters like plumed chimeras, tentacle miscreations and voidbearers, you can also stand in Dominus' shooting skill and recharge your ES with it.

While this is funny, this is also absurd.

You want to get cornered, surrounded, shotgunned, machinegunned, the more, the better.

I'm now literally happy when a map boss is in company of splitting voidbearers, as they keep my ES full all day and I'm invincible. Yeah... not. ;)

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What Aegis Aurora doesn't do for you

1. Slow, heavy hitters
It doesn't do anything for you against those.
And most monsters are at least "slow", if not also heavy hitting.
A pack of Zombies will most likely not recharge your ES.
Fighting a boss like Kole, AA is virtually useless compared to a shield with similar block, but more life, ES, armor.
Same for Rhoa's or rare Monsters with extra damage and powerful crits.

2. ES recharge in between hits
I actually had more uptime on my ES with the "Zealot's Oath" keystone I was using before and some more careful play.

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Conclusion

AA is a situational item, it is all or nothing.

In some situations it makes you literally 100% invincible (big crowds of fasthitting monsters with low damage per hit), in some it does nothing at all (the opposite, few slow and heavyhitting monsters).

I am not regretting spending my Exalts on it, but I don't think it is overpowered at all, you will have to pay a price for using it.

In most builds the price is DpS.

And if you combine it with a Kaom's Heart and sacrifice your 5-6L, all mirrored weapons in the world will not grant you any DpS that deserves any mentioning (in my book).

Some thoughts on stun

Another random post...

Stun in PoE
... isn't what I would call a "stun".
In other games, be it Dota-style games or ARPG's, a stun will make you do nothing for a couple of seconds. You stand there, can't use skills and can't do shit, and usually you get killed during that time period.

In PoE, stuns are "animation interupts" or "mini stuns".
Doesn't matter if you get stunned or if the monster gets stunned, it doesn't do too much, except for cancelling the current or next attack.
This may be deadly, if in example you rely on your attacks to keep you alive via life leech, but it is generally more annoying than dangerous.

I personally consider stuns so uninteresting and unthreatening that - if I don't play CI - I will never even consider taking "Unwavering Stance" in the skilltree or wearing the an "Eye of Chayula" around my neck.

On the other hand, you can stun monsters quite effectively without focussing on it at all.

Against everything but the toughest rare monsters and bosses, this is simply achieved by pure DpS.
You hit them so hard that their animations get cancelled, and before they can attack again, they are usually murdered anyways. Without the stun gem or stun passives, most monsters are stunned simply because you hit them in the face.

When it comes to "stunning bosses", things are a little harder.

Here it is...
... more beneficial to "permastun": A boss that doesn't do anything is obviously easier to handle than a boss that casts spells or hits pretty hard.
...but they have way more life, and same as it goes for "shocking", it is harder to get the stun in the first place, while it is much more needed than against trash monsters you kill anyways without bothering about stun at all.

So: stun looks good on paper, but it doesn't really work when it matters, only when it doesn't matter. I had the same experience in Titan Quest. There were pretty strong "crowd control" skills, but all bosses were immune to this. Hmmm...

Should I use the Stun gem?
It most likely costs a ~40% damage multiplier, meaning: you are not doing 20k DpS, you are doing 14k DpS.
So: you are reducing your chance to stun because you do less damage, on the other hand, you are reducing the stun treshold, so you need "not as much damage to stun". And this is stronger than the DpS (in termas of stunning), you will stun some bosses with this gem that you wouldn't have stunned if you would have replaced it with a DpS gem.

Ideally you want to swap "stun" for the "multistrike" gem, as this will increase your Damage per HIT and in the same process lower the stun treshold, making it far easier to stun.
But multistrike is also the best Damage per second gem there is, and it has an in-built "auto-aim" that I really don't want to miss.
I tested it for quite a while, there's so many small and/or fast moving creatures in this game, I simply cannot play melee without it or without getting annoyed. M-)


So: Is the Stun Gem worth it?
I'd say: No. Not really.
The only good part is: it has no mana multiplier, which can help a lot.
It does make a difference if your Heavy Strike costs 40 or 60 mana.

Using the stun gem, I was able to "stunlock" all minor bosses (Brutus, Kole, the bandits, the other dudes with names that hang around in certain areas,...), but against the bigger ones, I was not really impressed by my stunning abilities. Piety and Dominus still did what they wanted, and I'm not even talking their map versions.
So; hooray, I stunned the useless trash bosses...

How about stun nodes then?

Ugh!

They come in two forms:
There's "Bone Breaker" on the left of Marauder. This is a mace cluster with (in terms of DpS) horrible point efficiency. Yes, you get some stun treshold reduction, but the damage... if you walk it to the end, you get ~10% increased damage per node. Not worth it!

Then there's the stun wheel next to unwavering stance. This is so far off any interesting nodes I didn't even think twice about it.

If you evaluate the benefit of a skillpoint investment, you do not only want to look at the single point, you also want to look at the "travel cost" to get there.
And to me, this looks so unattractive in this case!

No, simply no!

How about "stun duration"?
(gear, passives)
The stun is so short this doesn't matter whatsoever.
One splitsecond or two, that's just irrelevant.
I'd prefer to attack and stun again over increasing the stun duration.

very nice read.

but again i cant believe that ZO can be compared with AA.

the regen from ZO is in combat just to slow ... i just cant see it work out with a ~1k ES

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hitreza wrote:

very nice read.

but again i cant believe that ZO can be compared with AA.

the regen from ZO is in combat just to slow ... i just cant see it work out with a ~1k ES

Is the word "Zealot's Oath" still somewhere in the guide?
Thought I deleted it all.

Zealot's Oath works pretty nice in regular combat situations:
You versus one boss, you versus 5 monsters...

If it gets crazy, like shrines with 3 rares, 20 fast shooting monsters and a whole lot of other monsters and random desync, ZO simply doesn't stand a chance.

That's why I switched.

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BisuProbe wrote:

and dont forget that most players would rather not be bothered by annoying things like mana cost, so the Soultaker/BoR/aegis is still a solid unique combi and decent dps for endgame especially in 4 month leagues. a 1h 300dps axe is still one of the best in temp leagues.

The 40something Exalteds for Soultaker can easily be invested in a 400 DpS weapon, if you only want to run Heavy Strike and 2 auras.
I understand Soultaker for Cyclone builds, but it is so freaking easy to run 2 auras and a normal attack on mana I would never say; "Buy this axe".

"

and did u not read evantis stun marauder build. its not just about duration, u simply need high damage per hit and high reduced enemy stun threshold and u can start stunlocking map bosses.

That's what I wrote.
Guess why I removed "multistrike" for the "stun" gem while testing. That's some serious damage per hit and stun treshold reduction.


I can stunlock the trivial bosses, like 74 Gorge, 75 Plateau, 73 Dry Peninsula, 76 Precinct and all the other useless bosses.
But I can facetank them all anyways, they literally do nothing to me but take a little more time, so why would I want to stun them?

And you write it yourself:

"

if atziri wasn't stun immune she would have been completely trivialised long ago.

...when stun would actually matter, when it would make a difference, it doesn't work.

Decided to make my personal Unique List, I have to leave it somewhere, you can ignore this:

I can't see the skill tree, don't know why ???

The passive tree has been reworked, I didn't update the build yet.