GhazzyTV - Essence Drain & Contagion (or Bane/Soulrend) Trickster [SC/HC/Uber Elder/Shaper]

This is with regular 6L shav, with flasks and Arcane surge up. Efficacy still lvl 11/20q, I'll update the screenshot when I take it to lvl 20. Ascendant combat buffs take this value a bit up.

Even using a perfect Cherrubim's while going life based cuts DPS by about 16%. If you go for godly jewels the difference is less than 16% of course, but at that point you are looking at insanely expensive 4mod jewels which don't make any sense against going lowlife.

I want to underline the blight gloves thing. A lot of people are convinced that the hinder debuff coming from blight is always on the target when channelling blight itself, which isn't the case at all. It has a duration which isn't refreshed while channelling. So the effect of the 2 spreading rot jewels in fights which don't last a few seconds is totally negligible. And the damage of Blight itself is negligible until you get a certain amount of stacks, which does not happen if you don't stand still and channel continuously, because to reach max blight stacks you need about 4 seconds of channelling or a bit less depending on your total cast speed, and you have to move a lot in guardian / Shaper / Atziri fights to avoid easy deaths. And you still have to keep Arcane surge, Wither totem and ED debuff up while facing boss mechanics to do full DPS.

I don't personally like the blight gloves at all because they completely change the playstyle of a super safe and mobility-friendly skill like ED forcing a quasi melee interaction with bosses to stay and channel. They also have poor ES when compared to good fingerless silk or sorcerer bases, and no resists. And they use 4 sockets for a Blight setup which are needed for other utility skills / auras / vaal discipline / whatever.

It's a matter of personal preference, that's all. :)

Since your chars are set to private, Essence drain 21/20 + Empower 4, i guess? :)

edit: with the Hinder, you are correct, but you can reapply the hinder. I am not sure what's the DR on the effect, but i guess you can have the hinder 50% of the time applied

Yes, the character has a full endgame setup except for the Efficacy support gem, which I am still leveling (11/20 when I took the screenshot, it should give about 9% more damage at level cap).

About the hinder, you can reapply it when the Blight damage over time debuff expires.

This means you can achieve a max of 48% hinder uptime if you cast Blight only to apply it every 5.19 - 5.75 seconds (depending on the fact you are facing a Guardian / Shaper or a Standard boss).

Doing so, btw, you are basically negating the damage component of Blight, so the gloves make even less sense to me.

well, there's come the strategy and fighting style. Basically all fight have some sort of phase where all you can do is walk around since your ED is up, your totem is up, boss does nothing but slams into emptiness

All guardians have resets when they disappear, so it's actually convenience for Blight

Hydra - when shooting, you can channel
Minotaur - when staying in semi - melee forcing him to cleave, you can channel while ED is ticking and totem is up
Phoenix - when he blows, you snipe from distance, when he cyclones, you can channel, slowing him down getting more time
Chimaera - the 3 hit combo is nice vulnerable spot where you can channel


So, for me, Blight is cool since i like more action oriented play style (playing just ED wasn't exactly my taste at boss fights, as when ED is up, all i could do is wiggle around and wait for dot to kill him.

+ on lower bosses like T10-T13, i just charge the boss and apply full dot of Blight while keeping ED up
In my case 50k + 20x10k , so even without the hinder, i do significantly more dmg than with just ED :) But as you said, those are the 5-10s fights, and I am lazy to move so i just tank and channel.

I am not sure if Shaper is not hinder immune, i am gonna test it later this week. I am not efficient shaper killer, all my kills so far were clutches :)

Shaper is actually the fight where you can have the best time with blight applications.

While he channels the big laser, you can channel blight pretty safely.

In the adds which go towards Zana phase, Blight can be very good too.

The actual ED playstyle already includes a minimum of 4 actions to cycle (double contagion for Arcane Surge uptime, keep ED up 100% of the time, keep Wither totem up) plus eventual using of the movement skill to Fortify or avoid things, and cooldown / vaal skill usage (Vaal Discipline / Vaal Lightning Trap).

Adding another action can be funny, that's for sure, but it doesn't have to interfere with the main ED mechanics otherwise it can result in a DPS loss instead of gain. :)

Big wall of text incoming again:

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CoolTrainerJoey wrote:

Very fun so far! I had a couple questions as I've almost gotten zapped at around 84 doing t8 maps~

1) Question about defense: I see a lot of builds have negative chaos resist during mapping. Isn't that pretty Rippy? I spent some time getting to max res and +66% chaos res but sacrificed damage. Was wondering if it was worth it, and if not, how do people not die to chaos in maps?

2) Right now i'm using a high armor shield because without it I have under 1k armor which is super scary to me since even with the armor shield, i'm starting to feel squishy. I might be doing something wrong or is spell block super good? (I'll link my current gear, if you'd take a look at it!)

3) CoD is 40% MoM correct? I was wondering if your MoM calculator takes factor into play (thanks for the calc btw!)

Current Gear:

Hey,

The chaos res isn't that vital tbh, not many enemies deal chaos damage and this build packs a ton of eHP.

Armour is worse the harder the enemy hit is (stupid design... we know..)

Gear seems solid to me, just make sure you follow the MoM calculator to have enough unreserved mana to sustain the mitigating effect it provides, and yes, CoD means you get 40% MoM effect :)

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Influx wrote:

Hi there,

i'm pretty new to PoE, although I actually played it first way back in the beta. I just picked the game up again and am trying your Build. I'm having an absolute blast with it, thank you for posting this :).

I do have some questions:

- The video is outdated, right? I noticed the skilltree and gem choices are quite different
- I use Whirling Blade instead of Shield Charge, because it feels a bit smoother to me. Is there any drawback for that other than being restricted to daggers/swords? Once i get my hands on a decent wand i might switch back.
- Besides Arcane Surge, is there any gem i should not level up? I migh have screwed myself a bit here, because i already level AS to 11. It needs 80 Mana to pop and my contagion only costs 38 right now. But it should catch up eventually, right?

Hey,

My pleasure!

Video is, as stated, for 2.6 I am trying to make time to update all my build guide gameplay footage to 3.0 the best I can!

The choice of mobility spell is down to a personal taste.
It'll catch up a bit eventually, sure, then again, AS will proc after you've spent enough mana so it will proc on the third cast which is fine, I would like to bring it down to every second cast personally.

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indiol94 wrote:

Hi,

Im a newb and while leveling this Build I did now understood the focus on Frenzy Charges. Why would we get bonus for it both in Passives and Ascendency when we do not have any skill that procs Frenzy?

Swift Killer ascendancy generates both Frenzy & Power charges to you, and makes them provide even more damage.

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Vhil wrote:

Hey, thanks a lot for your work! I've just a few questions, since i want to play this build in hc.

Would you still recommend the leveling path as linked in your guide or should i pick MoM earlier and also some more life nodes and the chaos wheel at the top a little later?
Is this build save for doing Uber lab solo in perspective of surviving a trap, if i make a mistake (not standing 3 seconds in sawblades, just one or two hits)

Hey,

Cheers!

The build is originally designed for hardcore, so yes.
It works great for Uber Lab farming :)

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Ghazzy wrote:

The Delirium is not better than BoTC imo.

Care to elaborate on why you feel this way?

Numbers wise delirium beats out BoTC in dps every time.

How are other people feeling about stun currently? I feel that when playing this character I either need to use the brine king pantheon or kaom's roots. Don't know how to get around it, I had two deaths pre-maps (and 0 since) from getting stunlocked. SSF so I found the easiest fix for me was to use brine king soul and later wear kaom's but that's not what the guide recommends, so how do you circumvent stuns? Purely relying on CWDT IC?

And before anyone says anything, I'm not standing in the middle of packs. I'm getting stunned by extra damage blues with ranged attacks (mostly skeleton archers).

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Mortichar wrote:

How are other people feeling about stun currently? I feel that when playing this character I either need to use the brine king pantheon or kaom's roots. Don't know how to get around it, I had two deaths pre-maps (and 0 since) from getting stunlocked. SSF so I found the easiest fix for me was to use brine king soul and later wear kaom's but that's not what the guide recommends, so how do you circumvent stuns? Purely relying on CWDT IC?

And before anyone says anything, I'm not standing in the middle of packs. I'm getting stunned by extra damage blues with ranged attacks (mostly skeleton archers).

Boot lab enchantment, I've had no issues.

Hi. I copied the char almost 1:1, gems are lvl 18-19, 6l, BoTC, but dps is too low - 7-13k with boosts. See my char https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Nakamikado/characters. I read here , that some guys have 40-90k dps with the same build. How this is possible? Take me too long time to kill bosses even on low tier maps. Life 5.5k, mana 3.3k.