A dead build's swan song : The Masochist Reaver [1.1.5]

I'd like to show you this build before it dies, and die it will with the changes in 1.2 :(
Which is a shame, it was one of the most fun things I ever theorycrafted, and a very good showcase of the crazy possibilities PoE offers.

Credit : the original idea for this build was given to me by theorycrafting extraordinaire Sinnodrak. Many props and thanks to him.

THE CONCEPT

This build is centered around the combination of a very popular unique and a much beloved gem (/s) :



Why the hell would we want to curse ourselves with Punishment, you ask ? A reasonable question altogether. Well, with our physical damage we will be reflecting a whole lot of damage onto ourselves, which will let us proc a lot of spells with Cast When Damage Taken ! Guaranteed damage, no need to wait for stuff to hit us !



Okay, maybe, but we're killing ourselves in the process, you say ? That's a concern, BUT ! We can actually out-leech the reflected damage thanks to the huge amount of Life leech with Claws on the tree and...


(we can also get more leech through the following, if necessary/desired)


But why the hell go through all this trouble, you may be thinking. Well, you could look at it this way : now we have a setup that is akin to Cast on Crit, except we can put the trigger gems separately from the triggering attack, and we're only limited in their number by available sockets. And then your imagination's the limit - put a ton of utility spells on a lvl1-4 CwDT and they will each proc 3-4 times a second while you attack ; put a big DPS spell with 3-4 damage supports in a 5-6L, and that will proc every other second or so ! See below for an example of it in action.

GAMEPLAY VIDEO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnAruiuPgTE

EXAMPLE OF PROCCED SPELLS SETUP

Here are the things used in the video above :

Main damage : Discharge

(charges are generated with Romira's, and we take RT)

Secondary Damage & utility : Arc and Cold Snap prolif

The offhand Doryani's (which is not used to attack) provides a huge damage boost to our spells and some nice free leech, but it also provides free Elemental Proliferation to our high level Arc and Cold Snap, so we can shock stack and freeze mobs relatively consistently. The charges generated by Romira's means we don't have to worry about the cooldown on Cold Snap.

Utility : teleportation and troll defense

Lightning Warp on low level CwDT lets say "screw walking" (except when there are no mobs on screen obviously). It also keeps us Reaving at maximum stacks without interruption, which is pretty damn cool. LW will automatically put us in the direction of the source of the damage, which is usually the direction we are attacking in since most of the incoming damage is reflect. Meaning you can more or less steer where you are going and keep traveling the map like this if the mob density is enough.
The frost walls will usually be cast in the same position where LW will land, providing some nice protection against projectiles and melee mobs. It doesn't impede our attacks (Reave goes through, so do our spells) or our movement.

Utility : double-cursing

Ele weakness to boost our spells and Vulnerability to boost our attack damage which in turn boosts the rate at which our spells proc. We can use Windscreams for the dual curse, or Whispers of Doom, or an ammy, it doesn't really matter.

Utility : blind and end charges

We'll be shooting out a whole lot of lightning balls, which makes for pretty reliable blinding. The endurance charges every few seconds will help with our Discharge damage.

THE PASSIVES

Here's the tree I'm using in 1.1.5 (which will be defunct in a few days with 1.2)

It's a Shadow start with some 1h attack speed and phys damage, claw damage and leech nodes, all power charges, the soon to be dead perma-curse Hex Master, Resolute Technique, AoE nodes and some ele/spell damage nodes where points allow.

WHY THIS BUILD IS NOW DEAD

Strike one - the claw passives lose 6% life leech. It's not impossible to overcome, but does hurt a good bit.

Strike two, the big one - Hex Master does not give permanent curses anymore, just 100% increased duration. There would be the option of keeping Shackles on (which is a nerf in itself, since they are garbage) and recasting Punishment regularly, but that means that we cannot use cwdt curses anymore, which is one of the major appeals of the setup.

If you want to try and make this concept work in 1.2, please do so and prove me wrong ! I'd be delighted ! :D

Bump for the most awe-inspiring build ever! This is truly an impressive display of game knowledge and creativity!

9/10

would not bang - elbows too pointy

awsome build, too bad it may not work in 1.2

bump for awesomely fun idea

Thanks for the credit, excellent write up. Glad to see you enjoyed the build :)

It might be possible to combine this concept with RaizQT's Vaal Molten Shell build. One of the biggest problems with that is needing enemies to hit you all the time. If you could find some way of making your Vaal Molten Shell deal some physical damage then you could create an incredibly powerful feedback loop.

Whether this would be any more effective than just using EK, I can't really say. Feedback loops are also a double edged sword.

Edit: It looks like theres no way of out-leeching the damage that EK would deal, so you would need to rely on a large enough HP pool or regen to be able to survive. You'd probably die no matter what against extremely tanky enemies.

"

civ77 wrote:

It might be possible to combine this concept with RaizQT's Vaal Molten Shell build. One of the biggest problems with that is needing enemies to hit you all the time. If you could find some way of making your Vaal Molten Shell deal some physical damage then you could create an incredibly powerful feedback loop.

Funnily enough I've been doing a VMS build lately. It looks a lot like Raiz's.

It's not possible to trigger VMS with reflect damage from punishment or other. Reflect damage does not trigger any on-hit or on-block effect (it does work with on-damage effects which is the base for this build here). So even if VMS was to do phys, it would not help. This is precisely to avoid feedback loops. (source : discussed this with a GGG employee by PM).

On a side note, this build is still possible to do in 1.2.x, contrarily to what I said above. The nerf to punishment actually works in our favor (easier to outleech it). CwdT cursing still works (I should have read the glove mods better !). One needs to wear shackles permanently, but thats not such a biggie (my VMS build does it just fine). There's now also the very interesting possibility of self-exploding molten shell now that a bug was fixed in 1.2.0, namely that damage mitigated by IC was not counted correctly. So you can do cwdt IC+MS and if IC is long enough MS will trigger from the reflect damage prevented.

Use Curse on hit in Gloves.. continues working