I've been thinking about a build very similar to the Occulist LL option. Thinking of going Xirgil's Crank for recharge chance and +1 gems. 1) worth the loss of ES? And 2) is the flask alone enough for ZO?
The worst loss when going for Xirgil's Crank is that you can't use Shield Charge anymore.
In that case you should go for Leap Slam instead.
The Witch Occultist defensive mechanics are very strong against bosses, while the Scion Ascendant defenses against trashes are pretty amazing. Xirgil can be a nice DPS upgrade from a pure tooltip side but:
- It comes at a heavy ES loss (we are talking about 1k+ LESS ES, depending on how good your shield is)
- You are going to lose Breath of the Council which has the huge duration modifier on it which saves one link on the Wither totem setup to get the maximum amount of debuff stacks
- You are losing clearspeed (reduced contagion area because BotC gives an area modifier)
- You are losing the resistances on your shield, this can make it really hard to get to the resistances cap, especially in the witch variant which has less resistances from the passive tree when compared to the Scion one
Basically you are trading some extra damage and a nice extra defensive mechanic (recharge starting every 5 blocked attacks on average, i.e. every 15 total attacks you don't avoid on average) you get from Xirgil's for 1k+ ES, some clearspeed and resistances.
If you want to run Xirgil's, I highly recommend you add a Rumi's Concoction in the flask setup, replacing the flask you consider less useful for your character.
Keep in mind that ED is a ranged skill; you are rarely in melee range so I don't think Xirgil's recharge will trigger very often. Xirgil's is a very good staff for Blight because that skill involves a more melee-oriented gameplay. For ED, I'd stick with BotC + a good shield.
@Vellaura: SotD is an unique flask, you can buy it on poe.trade with a nearly perfect roll for about 1 chaos.
I'm SSF :(, also i instantly die to chaos damage because of Low Life, is that because my resistance is in the negative? if it was above negative i'd take the damage to my shield?
I'm SSF :(, also i instantly die to chaos damage because of Low Life, is that because my resistance is in the negative? if it was above negative i'd take the damage to my shield?
Thanks :)
Oh ok, if you are SSF you should try to chance all the white sulphur flasks you get or spam ancient orbs on other unique flasks you drop until you get SotD.
You die from chaos damage because you don't own a Shavronne's Wrappings which is required for the build. You can use a Coruscating Elixir until you farm a Shavs. That flask is farmable with the divination card which sadly drops only in a very high tier map (Dark forest).
This build is very difficult to set up when you are solo self found. The heavy unique requirement makes it pretty uncomfortable to play if you don't have the key items in place (Voidwalker, Shav, Breath of the Council, Eye / Presence of Chayula, Bated Breath).
When will the leveling section be put back up? I really want to level this build, but have no idea what I should be using or what helpful uniques will greatly speed up killing things.
Might be silly question.
But how do you place points at Occultist 's Dominion and Deep wisdom without connecting it from the main tree. I do not manage to do that, did i missing something ? Please guide me, Thanks.
Might be silly question.
But how do you place points at Occultist 's Dominion and Deep wisdom without connecting it from the main tree. I do not manage to do that, did i missing something ? Please guide me, Thanks.
The ascendancy point called "path of the Witch" allows you to start both at the Scion and the Witch area. This is very good and makes us save some useless traveling points to get all we need. :)
When will the leveling section be put back up? I really want to level this build, but have no idea what I should be using or what helpful uniques will greatly speed up killing things.
I'm leveling this build too, just winging it until the leveling section gets updated. Here are some tips from my experience so far. Keep in mind that I'm a relative newbie myself.
- for the passive tree, start with the nodes up and to the right. Skip the aura buffs for now and make your way straight for the big chaos damage nodes ending with Atrophy. Then start making your way down towards the Shadow nodes. Go back and pick up defensive nodes as needed (e.g. Melding). Save Pain Attunement and other lowlife-centric nodes until you get your lowlife setup with Shavronne's Wrappings.
- for skills, start out with Contagion as soon as you can use it (level 4 I think). That alone, maybe with a buff like arcane surge, will kill everything at least until you can start using Essence Drain at 12 and probably longer. You will probably need to pick up something else for single target fights - you can use blight to stick with the chaos theme or just take anything you feel like.
- I started running most of the final build's gems as soon as I could to start leveling them, but there are some that aren't really worth using until later. First, there's no point in running two curses until you unlock the Path of the Witch and grab the Whispers of Doom notable, which lets you apply multiple curses to the same enemy (edit: it may be necessary to path over to that node before you get Path of the Witch, and refund the travel nodes later). Second, using Blood Magic before you have Shav's and all your ES gear is obviously pretty risky - I'm just not using Haste and Clarity for now.
- as for useful uniques, I've just been using what I have, upgrading as I level into new options I happen to have in my stash. None of them are particularly fancy or expensive. The one thing that's worth buying if you don't have one is, as with every other build, a Tabula Rasa. Having a 6L from the beginning makes leveling super easy. I started with both contagion and essence drain in it, sharing supports until there were enough usable ones to support both a 6L and a 4L (at which point I moved to essentially the build as written for those two skills, subbing out the gems I couldn't use yet with other compatible supports).
- one final tip: when you first start, buy or transmute a blue wand and a blight gem (the gem just costs 1 wisdom scroll) and trade them in together to a vendor. You'll get a wand with +1 to socketed chaos gems. It's a nice boost for the early game. Note that if you're using a wand you can't use shield charge, which requires a melee weapon. I used flame dash until I got a melee weapon I liked.
Any chance you can stick build history in a spoiler tag, was a good read but when referring back to the guide, it results in more scrolling.
Can you also remove some line breaks between spoilered categories. Some nested spoiler tags could also be nice for subcategories in the longer sections, gear, in particular, stands out there.
I authored 2 ED builds on PoE forums: this one and the Trickster version.
The Scion build is optimal for damage, and it's currently going low life in its main iteration. Its lifebased version, btw, isn't used anymore, but it will be remembered for its past BotW glory. :)
The Trickster build was optimal for survivability, and was a CI build (Chaos Inoculation). I won't update that version anymore, because I think it's pretty dead in the current state of the game.
NEW: Witch variant added! Look at the passive tree sub-section of the guide for more details!
Hello!
First build post here, so feel free to post criticism / suggestions / whatever you want to improve it.
I know there are a lot of Essence Drain builds of all kinds. I just wanted to post mine, since I have received some in-game requests for it after posting some hints in the Witch sub-forum.
This build has its best iteration by going low life. You can start as life based and then switch to CI (and eventually low life) when all your ES items are in place, respeccing some key nodes. I highly recommend going LL in the end, to tackle all the content of the game. I've successfully killed Uber Atziri / Shaper / Guardians multiple times with my build.
The old life based poison version was featured in GGG's Build of The Week in Season 6, Episode 3 (29/9/2016).
The low life one came out after some experiments I made during Breach League. Since this new support gem was introduced in 2.5, I wanted to try it and gain all possible advantages from it... so this new iteration of the Mistress of Agony was born and I think it was probably the best way to play an Essence Drain based character in Path of Exile pre-Fall of Oriath.
I want to point out a thing: this is NOT the best clearspeed build of the world, but it is incredibly efficient for solo playing, farming, mapping, labyrinth runs while being quite safe to play.
Build background and evolution over leagues
Spoiler
I leveled my Scion up to 95 in Talisman League (2.1), when Essence Drain / Wither / Contagion were added to the game.
I decided to publish the build after Ascendancy came out because the character became even stronger than it was (and this was a common feeling in 2.2).
In 2.3 (Prophecy) we got 2 additional ascendancy points, so we could take advantage from the double starting point to save some precious passives which could be invested in a more efficient way.
In 2.4 (Essence) this build received some small nerfs, which fortunately didn't impact the playstyle, the clearspeed or the efficiency of the character in a noticeable way. The details:
- Pierce support gem got a 10% damage nerf and a 20% increase in mana multiplier
- Poison damage was lowered by 2%
- Bosses' curse efficiency reduction became a lot stronger
But some good things were added for us: Essence of Delirium (which allows to craft our endgame dagger), fingerless silk gloves base type (16% free spell damage on implicit mod), Shaper boots (free pierce while mapping) and crystal belt basetype (lots of extra ES from the implicit).
In 2.5 (Breach) the CWC support gem was introduced in PoE. And it came together with some nice new items too, especially Presence of Chayula to play low life while gaining some good survivability tools (extra ES and 60% chaos resistance).
In 2.6 (Legacy) there were no important changes to the ED playstyle. The CWC iteration was still the absolute best, as you can see in this Enfeeble Minotaur kill video.
In 3.0 (Harbinger) there are going to be some changes to the core game mechanics which completely destroy both the CWC and Poison interactions of ED. To summarize:
- Double dipping is gone, so the poison interaction with ED is plain dead
- Energy shield sources in the game are being substantially lowered, so it will be more difficult to achieve consistent ES numbers after Oriath's launch
- Essence Drain damage is being buffed by a significant amount (about 43% at high gem level) to compensate for the fact that it doesn't scale anymore with projectile damage modifiers
- Contagion damage is being buffed by a significant amount (about 25% at high gem level), it is going to have more radius at max level and its cast time is being lowered from 0.85 to 0.6, dramatically increasing the clearspeed of our Ascendant
- Breath of the Council chaos damage bonus is being buffed from 80% max to 100% max
- Vaal Lightning Trap's shock debuff is being nerfed (from 50% increased damage taken to 15%)
- The Scion's Trickster sub-ascendancy is being buffed (50% extra recovery of mana, life and ES after killing a mob is insane while mapping!)
- The Scion's "Path" ascendancy nodes now give 2 extra passive points
- The bandit rewards are going to be adjusted, now we still kill all bandits but we only get 2 passive points instead of 3 total
- Two new interesting support gems we can make use of are being implemented in PoE: Efficacy and Arcane Surge. We will use the first one to replace Slower Projectiles, and the second one as an extra Contagion link to take advantage from the spell damage boost when it is triggered
- Rapid Decay support is being renamed into Swift Affliction support
- Discipline aura now has 30% extra ES recharge rate built into it to compensate for the ES nerf
- Elreon ES% enchants on rings are gone, now we will look at the 20% faster start of ES recharge enchant by Leo for endgame purposes
This character can start from a really cheap gear and do normal Atziri on a really low budget (items like Solaris Lorica are usually dirt cheap even at leagues' starts), but if you want it to really shine at higher levels and destroy the endgame content you have to invest some serious currencies. I personally did a lot of farming and trading to get my Ascendant to her current state.
I can assure you this build is really enjoyable, especially at higher levels. Don't expect to be overpowered at lower levels: the Mistress of Agony enters the ownage mode in the 80s, and the even faster ownage mode in the 90s.
Table of Contents
1. Build mechanics and explanations
2. Pros / Cons
3. Passive Tree
4. Ascendancy Points
5. Gem Setup
6. Gear
7. Flasks, Jewels and Enchantments
8. Bandits
9. Pantheon Powers
10. Leveling and Ascension priorities
1. Build mechanics and explanations
Spoiler
First of all, this is an entirely chaos-based character who relies on the spreading of a damage over time single-target skill, Essence Drain. The spreading happens via Contagion, another damage over time skill, but with a good area of effect radius. Mechanics are simple: you contagion an area, then target the potentially weakest mob in that area and shoot an ED bullet in its direction. When your target dies, the entire Contagion area will be affected by both Contagion and Essence Drain DotS. And the Decay craft on a dagger can push the single target damage a bit further if you like it (but I do not).
This character makes also use of some utility skills and curses to boost both the damage and the survivability. Wither, when applied to a spell totem, constantly debuffs an area, increasing the chaos damage taken by all the foes inside by a stacking percentage (capped at 140% chaos damage taken, or 20 wither stacks). This has proven to be very useful against high health mobs / bosses, especially if you can pre-cast the totem at no damage cost (think about Atziri's phase changes, for example). This Scion also uses Vaal Lightning Trap, if needed, to apply shocking ground to an area, again increasing the damage taken by the mobs affected. Her curses help with sustaining the damage, too: Temporal Chains increases the duration of debuffs on targets (contagion, essence drain, wither or decay for example), allowing for a smoother gameplay, while making enemies' curses on her less effective. Don't go mad if your hideout ED tooltip looks low in terms of damage; it does not take into account the effect of Vaal Lightning Trap, Wither, enemies' chaos resistance reduction (from the Occultist sub-ascendancy) and combat gains (increased damage after killing a cursed enemy for example). The real DPS you do in optimal conditions, when all of the debuffs are up, is way higher.
The defensive options are great too: the Mistress of Agony has got strong evasion mechanics and a decent block chance, plus the extra mitigations from Fortify (applied in a wise way via Shield Charge if needed). She has two very strong defensive curses in her arsenal: Enfeeble and Temporal Chains. The synergistic flask setup and the life regen (converted into ES regen via Zealot's Oath from our only unique flask) from gear / passives / Essence Drain help a lot with survivability when mapping, breaching and lab running.
The theory is simple: we aim to have a decent ES pool (over 8k is achievable without tremendous gear costs, over 10k (with a peak of ~11k) with mirrorworthy gear, reserving most of our mana for curses via Blasphemy, and using a mana potion for no regen situations. The health (converted in ES) regen is quite good because Essence Drain has a regen mechanic included into it (Regenerate 0.5% of Debuff Damage as Life). That 0.5% is added to all the other sources of regen, like the ones we can get from our gear or the passive tree. To take advantage from this extra regen, in the lowlife version we use The Sorrow of the Divine unique flask, so we gain Zealot's Oath and Consecrated ground (and some extra damage too!),
This is not a leech build, so we have to adjust our gameplay accordingly. Dodging whatever mobs throw at us is important, especially in the highest tier maps and unforgiving fights like Uber Trio, Atziri, Core Malachai, Pale Council, Guardians and Shaper.
In optimal conditions of gearing / character level (90+), we should aim at these values:
- Overcapped elemental resistances to deal with Elemental Weakness maps
- Positive chaos resistance
- 9k+ Energy Shield (in the low life version)
2. Pros / Cons
Spoiler
PROS
+ Very funny and active gameplay + Very efficient in solo playing + Safe playstyle, you are a dotter and not a spammer of a single skill so you have time to dodge whatever mobs throw at you + Reflect proof, since chaos damage rocks + Can do all map mods! + More than decent clear speed if you aren't a fan of backtracking for crap currencies :D
CONS
- In parties this build lacks of burst damage, so it's a lot less efficient - Hall of the Grandmasters CI champions cannot be killed with pure chaos damage builds like this one, but if you arrange a Scorching Ray setup in the Shav you can still complete the map to get the bonus objective on the Atlas - No Regen maps: they are perfectly doable, but I find them incredibly annoying; I don't love to spam a mana flask every 5 seconds
If you want to check the build endgame setup with mirrorworthy gear and its full gems / passives you can use this pastebin link in Path of Building:
https://pastebin.com/pLXw3vwQ
Please note that the passive tree is optimized for level 100, with 127 talent points spent; those include the extra passives we get from the Scion Ascendancies and from helping Eramir killing all the bandits.
Witch variant
Spoiler
On request, I deployed a Witch Occultist version of my Ascendant. It's more oriented to defense, but the damage is still very high thanks to the Occultist tools (Void Beacon is amazing).
