The Headbang Gang 2.0 - Raging Spirits madness - now with cheap version + leveling guide

One question about clarity; should I level it to max or keep it at a specific level?

got myself a 5L +3 staff. Haven't tried it out just yet. Not positive what I'll put in there. Probably raging - multi - echo - minion damage - ??? either melee physical or increased duration. Not sure which. Need more time to put it on and move gear around for resists/life. Stash is such a mess it's time consuming.

I don't have an empower yet of any level so that's not an option.

Right now I have farming gear on for dominus. It's nice to have quant on gear from standard (though not necessary obviously).

Here's my farming setup


I'll look around to replace the neck with a rarity one. Time to play is tough for me. Not doing the 1 month league since can't get anything done especially with a vacation planned.

the boots, gloves, 1 ring and helmet are all part of rarity gear and I have other gear for high mapping. As I mentioned, haven't tried my +3 staff yet but plan to. I use a ball lightning, spell totem, gmp blind setup for maps instead of the arc quant/cull/rare which is just faster to cast/cull for mf.

I did try cybil's paw earlier and some other fun stuff just to see what would happen. Didn't help too much so back to wand and shield which got me through maps well. I tried up too level 75 with about 3700 life and around 1100 unreserved mana. Wasn't a problem. And at the time my gems were several levels lower.

Build really shines when those gems get into the mid to upper teens.

Something I noticed you could use early on that will give a tiny boost, is very cheap and would actually help you in partying (maybe good for 1 month league leveling parties) is

I leveled through 40 mainly using Flameblast. At level 40, I'm doing enough damage with zombies and skulls that I've pretty much dropped FB (with a few exceptions to the rule).

Madcow: how are you getting 3.7k HP and 1.1k free mana at L75 with your gear?

For leveling I suggest a 4L searing touch. Put SRS in it, then add multistrike, melee phys, and added fire/minion damage/faster casting/echo. Somewhere else in your gear put a searing bond- inc burning (- fire pen - item rarity). Easily gets you to 65, and you can transition easily whenever you feel your spirits are doing enough damage.

Also I've been playing a variant of this build. I suggest melee splash over increased duration for most content, and swap in inc dur for splash toughish boss fights.

"

PepprmintButler wrote:

"

rainku wrote:

I was wondering would frenzy ape spectra works with raging spirits. Did you try that?

I did try that. Not for long though ; these guys are very squishy and stupid. Although it does work in principle, they're extremely good at getting themselves killed (they insist on trying to melee mobs). The synergy is nice but in practice it's too much trouble for me to bother with. Besides, the AoE in which they give charges and the rate at which they do both result in nowhere near constant 3 charges for everyone even in close to best case scenarios.

I see. BTW I am currently lv40 in cruel act1. I found Dying Breath Coiled Staff a pretty good substitute in the 1 month race at the moment.

Aaaand BotW features a mediocre SRS build (using Chober is cool for flavor but ultimately far from optimal, ele auras are weaker than Hatred, no defenses outside of AA, very questionable support choices, etc), meaning this one will never see the spotlight. Oh well.

As for leveling, pure SRS is pretty bad for <30~40. For the 1month I went through Normal with Fire Trap, then started using SRS quite a bit (esp bosses) with just Minion Damage, then the 3L with melee splash was enough to get me through early Cruel fairly fast, then 4L with Faster Casting from Weaver. Still in a2m currently, still on a 4L. I will switch to echo/multistrike as soon as I get them.

"

PepprmintButler wrote:

Aaaand BotW features a mediocre SRS build (using Chober is cool for flavor but ultimately far from optimal, ele auras are weaker than Hatred, no defenses outside of AA, very questionable support choices, etc), meaning this one will never see the spotlight. Oh well.

Damn. It may be that wrath/anger are better overall when you add up the damage done by weapons and spirits. I'm not sure if this is still true after SRS buff. Also I'm pretty sure that stopping to animate not only tires your eyes more, but decreases clear times regardless of additional DPS. Though they do have a point that AW add survivability by continuing with you from fight to fight. Right now I'm experimenting with using zombie/scepter like you do vs. using a cwdt. What are your thoughts?

"

MatrixFactor wrote:

Damn. It may be that wrath/anger are better overall when you add up the damage done by weapons and spirits. I'm not sure if this is still true after SRS buff. Also I'm pretty sure that stopping to animate not only tires your eyes more, but decreases clear times regardless of additional DPS. Though they do have a point that AW add survivability by continuing with you from fight to fight. Right now I'm experimenting with using zombie/scepter like you do vs. using a cwdt. What are your thoughts?

Flat ele auras make sense with Animate Weapon because their base damage is shit and their damage effectiveness is insane. For Raging Spirits, Hatred is clearly the better ele damage aura at lvl20 and more so at lvl26.

Animate Weapon I used extensively in my previous build, and it gets reaaally annoying to have to read every single white drop to find the melee weapons. I can tell you, I now know every single base weapon type in the game... it also takes a fair amount of time to do so.

Having tanks is extremely important. How AW performs compared to zombies/spectres is debatable since you can't do any hard math there, but one important factor is starting a map/zone : with AW you will get 0 tanks until a white weapon drops. The build is quite fragile and weak against the first few packs. Zombies/spectres dont have that problem. Later on, AW can snowball into silly numbers (it's easy to get 15+ out at the same time) but they still have quite a bit less HP than zombies or tank spectres. Although with the damage they do I imagine they can leech quite well, like my spirits do.
I urge you to put in something to tank for you over a cwdt setup, I find it crucial for the defensive ability of this build.

I just uploaded a quick video of my stupid CoC Raging Spirits build I was talking about here a bit earlier, check it out if you're so inclined : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9IZ16n70NA

Also, from reddit :

"

Quarl wrote:

We did look at your build, and one of the reasons we said "there are other raging spirit builds on the forum" is to highlight ones like yours.

Highlighting a build with a +3 staff is a bit risky for us, as players may look at that and assume they can build something the same very easily. (We often get criticism based on the ability for players to emulate a build)

We do like your build, and it was considered, [...]

I'm not too salty anymore :3

"

RediusMaximus wrote:

Spoiler

"

DLimited wrote:

Just a heads-up. I started this as a build for the new 1month league, and it's painful. You need both Multistrike and Echo, both of which are highly sought after gems early on. I did manage to scrape together enough for a Multistrike, and can hopefully use Faster Casting to tide myself over until Echo from the Merciless quest reward. If you can, level as something else (Searing Bond? Flameblast? Detonate Dead?) and respec later on. Otherwise, it's really quite painful.

I leveled through 40 mainly using Flameblast. At level 40, I'm doing enough damage with zombies and skulls that I've pretty much dropped FB (with a few exceptions to the rule).

I'm now level 42 and in A2 Cruel. Once I got Multistrike it started to pick up - I have really good single target damage and can kill most of the exiles + invaders + vaal area bosses, but my own survivability is still lacking. I haven't even got Artic Armor yet, and I'm running a Purity of Fire that I found.

I figure once I get my hands on Haste, Hatred, Reduced Mana, 4L +2 Minion Helmet I'll be set for endgame. Hopefully I can do that sometime soon.