[3.4] The Mistress of Agony - Lowlife BlightDrain Ascendant / Occultist - ALL content viable!

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Dreamvveaver wrote:

Gone through some upgrades and am now sitting at 32k dot dps without flasks.

All my jewels have damage over time + spell damage while dual wielding + spell damage.
Is there anything else I can do to push my dps out even higher?
I mean, most maps are a breeze and bosses are downed relatively fast but more damage is always fun :)

You are at a point where your gear is nearing perfection.

Your possible upgrades:

1. A decay dagger with a better spell damage roll with a free affix where you can craft damage over time with Leo

2. A corrupted Consuming dark with Culling strike implicit for guardian / uber / shaper runs, and corrupted 21/20 ED supports

3. Rings with the chaos damage essence craft, high resistances and craftable ES% but they can be insanely expensive, even in a temp league

4. +1 6L Shav :D

Seriously, at this point I think all your gear improvements are very expensive if compared with the "little" upgrades they can offer (with a "perfect" decay dagger plus good envy rings you can gain about 3k dot tooltip... sure, +1 Shav could be a ton more damage, but hey, we are talking about an item which usually costs 1.5-2 mirrors). I call those "luxury" items.

Tooltip damage means nothing in the current state of PoE, since there are builds which literally double my dot tooltip on ED but are 10 times slower than me when doing uber Atziri / Shaper / maps. The goal of my Ascendant is to be fast, safe and comfortable at mapping (that's why I run haste aura with a ton of aura effectiveness nodes, which also affect discipline and clarity) and to be fast and pretty safe even at "profitable" bosses like Uber Atziri and Shaper (and there aren't many ED builds around which have an effective single target output of over 1 million DPS against Shaper himself).

Broke 10k es so I took down shaper and uber atziri with ~28k tooltip. Ezgaming

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puffsley wrote:

Broke 10k es so I took down shaper and uber atziri with ~28k tooltip. Ezgaming

Congrats for the kills! I'm glad you completed the endgame content with this build. :)

Legacy league brought me another beauty!



This is another "luxury" upgrade I would recommend to the "rich" ones who want to make boss farming (especially Shaper) even faster!

Hey, iam now on t10 maps, and build is still awsome(i have public account u can check). I dont understand what is so good in "sai", block? inflict decay? For block we can use spirit shield with tons spell damage or other dagger with much more spell dmg
I use now. With culling strike, 69 spell dmg, and 50 ES + 10% faster ES recharge (cost 1 Alchemy). I dont know, did culling strike works (sorry iam rly newbie) but es bonus is very nice.
Can u tell me about sai and how it works?
About Heartbreaker should i change him for something cost less then 2ex?

Ok I guess I might be missing something. Most of this build is off the ranger start. I got through all the left side work and am just sitting on skillpoints at 55. Am I suppose to be using these or hoarding them till I can get a carry through merc lab?

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Balcerr wrote:

Hey, iam now on t10 maps, and build is still awsome(i have public account u can check). I dont understand what is so good in "sai", block? inflict decay? For block we can use spirit shield with tons spell damage or other dagger with much more spell dmg
I use now

. With culling strike, 69 spell dmg, and 50 ES + 10% faster ES recharge (cost 1 Alchemy). I dont know, did culling strike works (sorry iam rly newbie) but es bonus is very nice.
Can u tell me about sai and how it works?
About Heartbreaker should i change him for something cost less then 2ex?

The decay mod is very good for Essence drain. It can be done on a weapon with the Essence of Delirium, and the best weapon choice for us when dual wielding is the Sai dagger base for the block implicit.


@ricklington: you should connect with extra 5 points to the ranger area, and you can respec those point later with the free refunds you get from quests when you get the Path of the Ranger ascendancy.

Hey, i was thinking to enjoy one last essence drain build before the double dipping reworks. I scanned over your skill tree and setup and was wondering what exactly would be the pros and cons of scion compared to occultist. They would seem to perform very similar.
If there is no obvious dealbreaker i might miss, i will probably make myself a occultist as i am really enjoying wicked ward in the lab.

cheers

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lordchopf wrote:

Hey, i was thinking to enjoy one last essence drain build before the double dipping reworks. I scanned over your skill tree and setup and was wondering what exactly would be the pros and cons of scion compared to occultist. They would seem to perform very similar.
If there is no obvious dealbreaker i might miss, i will probably make myself a occultist as i am really enjoying wicked ward in the lab.

cheers

They are very similar. I tried an ED Occultist in the past and I didn't like the interaction between Contagion and Profane Bloom. For me, it resulted in a clearspeed loss, since Profane Bloom's explosion interrupts the spreading of ED via Contagion if it (and not Contagion / ED themselves) kills nearby mobs.

BTW I'll make a quick comparison between the two ascendancies:


OCCULTIST

- Slightly more ES
- Wicked Ward defense
- Free extra curse if you take the Malediction node


ASCENDANT

- Better passive tree optimization
- Amazing defenses and ES / mana regen while mapping / moving with WB thanks to the Trickster sub-ascendancy
- Slightly better overall damage
- You can reach an amazing character efficiency at lower lewels since Ascendant has more free passive points to use


If you really want to go Occultist, I highly recommend to spend 4 extra passive points to take Essence Surge, which synergizes with Wicked Ward perfectly.

The extra curse is huge for me, as is the interaction from Contagion/PBloom. This is gonna be a tough one to decide for me.

Thanks for the quick reply and the comparison!