Plaguemancer || Beacon of Corruption Degen || EZ Red Maps || Golems?!?!

This is a really cool build. It seems like the most effective method to utilize Beacon of Corruption. I think Maligaro's Lens with necromantic aegis would be very useful due to the increased life, area of effect, and 2% of spectre life grated as regeneration would amount to quite a lot due to all of the extra scaling. That might actually be very powerful defensively.

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Baronfuming wrote:

This is a really cool build. It seems like the most effective method to utilize Beacon of Corruption. I think Maligaro's Lens with necromantic aegis would be very useful due to the increased life, area of effect, and 2% of spectre life grated as regeneration would amount to quite a lot due to all of the extra scaling. That might actually be very powerful defensively.

Necro Aegis adds in a lot of fun factors for the build. I found though that having Poison Zombies really adds a nice touch of defense and offense, especially single target. With that said I have started changing the build slightly.

I have dropped the golem and animate guardian and am now running a wither totem... its just too good not to. This opens up the staff as a questionable choice now. +2 zombies in helm work out quite well and can keep their tanky defense status. Wither totem provides a good damage boost to BoC and one can more effectively run a necro aegis set up. I wouldn't take Maligaro's lense though. I would suggest Mutewind Shield: AoE radius and chaos damage. Good QoL and damage bonus make it a very strong choice. Also you can run a Clay Shaper with it for more minion life. Overall I think it will be for the best. I just need to figure out how I want to incorporate it into the passive tree.

This also was my original idea for the build. I chose animate guardian because of the extra curse effectiveness primarily but with the changes to curses and bosses I feel the damage from the changes will be better.

edit: on a further note for those who find cast speed to slow you can run a very high cast speed wand/scepter instead of clay shaper for another huge QoL improvement. I will probably do this myself.

Multiplicative bonuses aside, if you want to min-max your cloud damage the best way is to completely balance additive minion life and additive minion damage applied to your spectres.

Shrieking Essence of Misery on your wand gives a massive cast speed boost (the one with the cast speed implicit). Other than that, if you're able to finish Uber Lab, the old max block/spell block necro build from Perandus fits this tree perfectly.

I'll use some simple calculations to illustrate how big of a difference min-maxing life/damage makes. Let me know if I made any mistakes (it's been a long day lol).

Given that the cloud damage scales twice through both life and damage, the bare bones damage your minion deals is as follows:

0.1 * (100 + Minion Life)/100 * (100 + Minion Damage)/100 * (Product of Multiplicative Bonuses)

Given Marloe's current gear and tree, without considering Auras affecting the spectres (which makes the difference even more drastic) we have:

195% Tree Damage + 73% Gear Damage, 100% Increased Minion Life

the end result is

0.1 * (100 + 268)/100 * (100 + 100)/100 = 73.6% of Minion's unmodified life in chaos damage per second.

If you shift that 73% from damage to life instead, the end result is

0.1 * (100 + 195)/100 * (100 + 173)/100 = 80.5% of Minion's unmodified life in chaos damage per second.

Not only is it a 10% MORE damage increase, your Zombies also receive a nice 36.5% boost to life (273% vs 200%)

If you're looking to push for higher tier content, or to help your zombies survive longer, don't tunnel vision on increasing minion damage and try for a complete balance between the two modifiers.

Edit: For anyone looking to get a rough estimate on how much actual damage their cloud does, a T12 mob has around 10k HP. On a five link, Marloe will do roughly 2x of that in chaos damage per second unbuffed (my calculations came up to 2.08x). With Soul Weaver instead of Commander and Mistress, it's 3.11x. If you manage to summon one of the mobs with 16k base HP, the cloud will do 50k dps.

you've made a great point, but let me be stupid and ask how/where you're expecting to get the 73% life for 73% damage trade? I've got 27% minion life in tree to get (It would fit into a 95 build), and swapping out two ascendancies (CoD and Mistress, I guess?) to soul weaver brings that to 47%. Of course I could go for 12%life / 16% damage jewels but realistically they're just not available. Fear essences would let me get another 30%, but rolling that on gloves complicates the ring reqs.

I suppose the upshot is to consider Fears on helm/gloves/boots/belt, adding as you can afford points on tree. Fear helm needs +2, gloves need res, boots need movespeed, belt needs +str, but as long as you can afford to gamble on them you'd get a great minion life bonus per gear upgrade/sidegrade.

It's definitely a pain in the ass trying to stack minion life. I don't know how practical it can be since it takes a lot of essences to craft even mediocre gear with minion life on it, so if the only option you have is minion damage that might be what you have to go with.

If you have the choice between life or damage though, whether it's on jewels or the tree, don't be afraid to stack life instead of damage since Zombies benefit way more from the latter.

Either way this build outputs a shit ton of damage as soon as you hit a certain gear/level check. For general mapping 30k vs 33k dps doesn't make too much difference.

ya, gearing for BiS is an extremely massive RNG feat. That is why the gear that is listed is NOT minion life essence rolled rares... though I do have some.

Curretnly I have started a second plaguemancer, again life based. This time things are a little different.

my changes:
Zombies + guardian 4L in helm. 1h + shield or dual wield (not sure yet). Options are Clayshaper for EZ mode or what I am considering, dual scourge claws + some CoH w/ Vulnerability set up. This is an extremely active style and probably will be annoying as you have to hit once every 4 seconds and I am pretty (still need to test) that the claws will need to hit first to scale the cloud damage. Also this opens up the wither totem to easily fit in. The other option I am considering is just a rare rolled essence weapon with Deafening Fear and slapping on cast speed.

New defenses are MoM/EB/ZO bringing the build probably between 8k to 9k effective HP and solving the mana issues. I am considering the Restless Ward but I am not sure if i want to start spaming Enduring Cry and bringing threat onto the character. This would provide completely insane ES regen though.

I have about 10ex to work with this time so I plan on going a BiS route.

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Baronfuming wrote:

This is a really cool build. It seems like the most effective method to utilize Beacon of Corruption. I think Maligaro's Lens with necromantic aegis would be very useful due to the increased life, area of effect, and 2% of spectre life grated as regeneration would amount to quite a lot due to all of the extra scaling. That might actually be very powerful defensively.

I think you have a point. Would be nice to know how much life the spectre has because I don't think it is shown in the tooltip is it?

If you can boost them up to at least 20K life I think this is the best route you can go defensively.

Only thing would be your zombies would take that massive resist de-buff. Would think that would be solved by running purity of elements/jewels with minions resist or possibly not caring because if they die they spawn the cloud and you can easily resummons them. Would be nice to test though.

It was pointed out to me by my friend, C9Q9MD, that the AoE from shields and Necro Aegis is broken. The minions are not gaining the AoE bonus from the shields.

edit: the heal though would be pretty insane in maps... it would actually be pretty nice to have with my MoM/EB/ZO.

edit 2: Good news and bad news... The good news is it pairs extremely well with MoM/EB/ZO because its a flat heal and not regeneration. The bad news is to get the heal you pretty much have to be holding hands with your minion rendering the heal pretty worthless.

edit 3: to give you an idea of the range go to a Vagan hideout. The range you need to be in is equal to 3 tile lengths at the hideout.

Pretty short, maybe too short to be practical. part of the reason I jumped out on the glove comment is I just spent 20c on chromes rolling those stupid gloves to RRRB for an improved CWDT setup (I swapped the wither totem to spell-wither-aoe and then opened my gloves to CWDT-Immortal Call-Increased Duration-Bone offering). This has largely trivialized the Chimera fight, and may make hydra and mino a bit more tolerable; but the last thing I want to do now is roll another set.