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

It seems that the Occultist version will be A LOT stronger when compared to the Ascendant one in 3.5.

The Ascendant will still be pretty decent for the clear speed (Profane Bloom is still a problem) but the Occultist's boss damage potential will be a lot higher.

The passive tree will stay nearly unchanged after Betrayal comes out. I'll update the main post of the thread tomorrow, hopefully before the league starts.

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SADleem wrote:

Question : Would it be worth using Apep's Supremacy just purely for the nice faster start of energy shield recharge? Or just stick with the good old spell damage + as much ES as possible shield?

Thanks in advance to whomever can advise. :-)

The flat added chaos isn't great for us. So offensively, Rathpith Globe or even a good % spell damage yellow shield wins.

However the defensive properties of this beauty are almost insane for a CI build.
Bleeding damage being converted to chaos means it's effectively negated.
On top of that, 3% more maximum all res is insane, and again CI doesn't feel the poison at all.

May not be that good for a low-life character, I have never played low-life so I'll let someone more experienced chip in.

Sorry not sure if this has been answered already, is this viable in 3.5?

I wanna give it ago. :)

Since I don't see any other replies...

I love ED and am leveling an alt, but she's only up to level 30ish and I cannot confirm the viability of the build in Incursion/Delve content (which is when I struggled with it in the past, eventually abandoning it).

Given that ED is a boss killer DOT build, I expect it to be viable with the Syndicate - but again, I'm afraid I can't confirm it from actual high-level experience.

You'd probably want to go Occultist since none of the new and shiny node powers have been granted to Ascendant. If you plan to go low life, in fact, Occultist is definitely the superior choice as it gives you a free Presence of Chayula effect, so then you 'only' need a Shavronne's. For CI a case for an OCC/TRI ascendant could be made, though personally I'm still going Occultist.

This is my PoB build:
https://pastebin.com/Gt2F5NeQ

That's CI and you can see that I just put in some budget gear and the numbers coming out look fairly respectable. (The Doryani's boots are there because I got a pair, Sin Trek is another cheap option for good ES boots). With the new chaos craftable mods available now, it could scale even better.

I didn't have the time to update the build but it's viable for sure.

Occultist version is FAR superior when compared to the Ascendant one.

In the upcoming days I will do further testing, but it seems that in the Betrayal league Occultist is the way to go.

After a "meh" league for ED like Betrayal, it seems that Synthesis will be a good one to play around chaos spells. I'm theorycrafting about the possible interactions between ED and Soulrend and I'll update the build when I test a couple of builds in the new league.

I'll not start with ED btw, it will be my second character, so eventual updates will come after about 2 weeks of the league.

Cheers!

I know you obviously haven't tested any of this, but I would like to pick your brain if I may. I plan to start the league as an ED MoM trickster.

ED has some huge changes coming. It does not hit anymore, but now it's an area skill. So I'm guessing Decay is out, what other alternative to Empower to have as a 6th link? Do we cast often enough for Intensify, I wonder? Or maybe a better choice would be a simple Concentrated Effect?

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Rukbat16 wrote:

I know you obviously haven't tested any of this, but I would like to pick your brain if I may. I plan to start the league as an ED MoM trickster.

ED has some huge changes coming. It does not hit anymore, but now it's an area skill. So I'm guessing Decay is out, what other alternative to Empower to have as a 6th link? Do we cast often enough for Intensify, I wonder? Or maybe a better choice would be a simple Concentrated Effect?

Essence Drain still hits, it's the area explosion which does not. It only applies the damage over time debuff of the skill rather than on a single target. I am not sure that the dot component of ED will scale with area damage multipliers, we'll see when the patch goes live. I'm afraid the area tag will only affect the radius of the "explosion".

When can we get a 3.7 update for this fantastic guide? <3
A lot of new really good gems and what not.

Also, Blight VS Soulrend? Which would be better?