[3.0] AFK Gone Cheap - AFK up to T16 guardians||Shaper killed || 3.0 balls video montage!

Ah, but Firestorm is is a duration skill so it doesn't matter if it's being recast only every .7 or one second.

Blind certainly has great defensive potential for many builds but don't we LOVE getting hit? The more the merrier... bring it on, baby. ;)

And I don't consider Scorching Ray a good choice either, it doesn't hit and thus cannot trigger Fire Burst and if you want to apply a high-lvl curse with CwCH (for example Enfeeble vs the real hard hitters in late game) it will be cast at the very end of the ray... which in most castes is not where we want it. ;)

I'm using Blade Vortex (which also has the Duration tag) as the first CwCH-skill in line (the order of gems defines the order in which they will be cast) so I can quickly spin it up and keep on whirling. Them spinning blades while whirling make for better clear speed.

As the third spell I'm using Bladefall but ideally we want three Duration skills, Molten Shell probably being a good choice in the grand scheme of things but I would have to re-colour my chest for that. The last of my six sockets is blue for AoE which benefits BV, Firestorm and Bladefall... and it can be replaced with Enfeeble for boss fights (or high-lvl Flammability when dealing with highly resistant bosses).

Of course, Incinerate (like all other Channelling skills) is badly punished by CwCH and does very little in terms of damage whereas the triggered skills getting a "more damage" boost from CwCH. So the more spells you have linked, the more effective the leech from the manual cast setup.

Just my two cents.

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tomay wrote:

Ah, but Firestorm is is a duration skill so it does't matter if it's being recast only every .7 or one second.

Blind certainly has great defensive potential but don't we LOVE getting hit? The more the merrier. ;)

I'm using Blade Vortex (which also has the Duration tag) as the first CwCH-skill in line so I can quickly spin it up and keep on whirling.

And of course, Incinerate (like all other Channelling skills) is badly punished by CwCH and does very little in terms of damage whereas the triggered skills getting a "more damage" boost from CwCH. So the more spells you have linked, the more effective the leech from the manual cast setup.

And I don't consider Scorching Ray a good choice either, it doesn't hit and thus cannot trigger Fire Burst and if you want to apply a high-lvl curse with CwCH (for example Enfeeble vs the real hard hitters in late game) it will be cast at the very end of the ray... which in most castes is not where we want it. ;)

Just my two cents.

Firestorm doesn't synergize that well with AoE increases, though. Increasing its area just reduces the number of hits you make against any given target. You really want to constrain its area of effect, not increase it, and we'd have to alter the tree to remove the AoE nodes, and go with flame blast (ugh) and concentrated effect to get a good support synergy; but flame blast works superbly with area boosts, so...Bad synergy there. Although I'm not entirely in love with the AoE nodes anyway; they're mostly there for the Fire Blast (yay) and Fireball explosions at this point. Plus the charge-up on flameblast is rather too slow if you don't throw in faster casting, which doesn't help the triggers and therefore basically wastes a slot. You really want to just kill things immediately, not later.

With incinerate you can also rotate, whereas you can't with flame blast. I also think you're underestimating the damage potential of GMP+Incinerate. This has long been one of the cookie cutter starter builds. We're just taking it up to 11 with CwCH and the uniques.

Incidentally, it's looking like I don't have much need for the life leech gem even without the Eye of Innocence. I'm currently using an Iron Will in that slot, instead, and it's a substantial boost on damage. Which in turn is a substantial boost on mana and life leech. I could probably do another reservation now. I've been able to face tank Beyond bosses and Breach bosses in up to tier 8 maps so far with nary a worry. Breaches just melt before me.

And if you're going to go firestorm because it has duration, why not go with *just* firestorm (as a trigger). You just continue to stack casts in rapid fire.

I don't really see much tangible benefit to leech from having extra spells, or any other benefit. You're still casting the same number of spells in any given time period. You're just cycling through a longer list the more you add on. If you're going to throw in an extra spell, then each triggered spell needs to have a very specific utility that doesn't unduly compromise that of others. But it's pretty certain that there's at most one spell which has optimum healing/leeching and hits for fire burst. Firestorm and fireball are the two clear-cut standouts here. I'm currently thinking the edge goes to fireball, because the high ignite means the Razor will be healing you rapid fire. Also the explosions mean lots of extra hits for Fire Burst, which basically puts it on an even keel with Fire Storm (unless the enemies are spread out slightly too far).

Still, I've not tried a Blade Vortex + Firestorm combo yet, so maybe I'll change my tune slightly if I do. I'm just expecting the same AoE size anti-synergy of flameblast/firestorm.

Really, for me it boils down to: what channeling spell and what trigger spell have the best synergy for the support gems? You'll get a lot more DPS by having good support gems over auxiliary spells. This isn't old school Cast on Crit style triggering, which could both trigger every possible gem, and only had a chance to trigger any given gem (which incentivizes extra trigger spells to up the odds that at least one of them goes off every time). This is basically just "cast two spells at once", and it strikes me that the best approach is to pick two spells and maximize their output with supports and the tree.

Furthermore, I'm not sure we actually do love getting hit that much. Getting hit is always a risky strategy. You have to be sure you will always survive the hits, which is hard to do with a non-ES build. I'd rather just melt the mobs before they ever touch me, as that's both faster and safer. The real treasure of the Eye of Innocence (or Heartbound loop) is that we trigger the CwDT from our own actions with small, controllable chunks of damage. I certainly don't mind throwing in some extra punishment when they do hit, I just don't like the risk associated with *relying* on getting hit a bunch, or the implicit assumption that our DPS must be too weak to kill them before they're swarming us.


For scorching ray casting at the end of the ray: that is no longer true. The latest patch specifically fixed it so that things would be cast at your cursor position, instead. So you can easily control where your ray is triggering the linked spells. This is why I think it's an attractive option. More fire resistance debuff plus the ability to control where spells proc.


I'm intending to work in double curse and use Flammability + Whatever as auras. Enfeeble possibly, and then you just get up close and personal with the blinded baddies and barely care, or just have more wiggle room if something survives the massive fire gout spam. We'll see how things pan out as I make my way to 90+ and start working my way into red maps.

As I said, AoE will be thrown out where it really matters (at boss fights) in favour of a curse. For clearing there is nothing wrong with AoE (especially when using BV). I'm inclined to agree with you about the AoE nodes in the tree, these passive skills could be used to increase the Life pool even more... and if you really want more AoE just pop your Dying Sun flask. ;)

As for auras, we have plenty options... whatever the occasion. Purity of Lightning for example is always handy for the likes of Plateau Totem #2, Shavronne or Dominus (in his Necromancer-form), say Good-Bye to random one-shots there.

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TimeDilation wrote:

Furthermore, I'm not sure we actually do love getting hit that much. Getting hit is always a risky strategy. You have to be sure you will always survive the hits, which is hard to do with a non-ES build. I'd rather just melt the mobs before they ever touch me, as that's both faster and safer. The real treasure of the Eye of Innocence (or Heartbound loop) is that we trigger the CwDT from our own actions with small, controllable chunks of damage. I certainly don't mind throwing in some extra punishment when they do hit, I just don't like the risk associated with *relying* on getting hit a bunch, or the implicit assumption that our DPS must be too weak to kill them before they're swarming us.

Now, I might be spoiled by Belly of the Beast (8.4k HP) and Kaom's Heart (almost 9.5k), so with AA, Fortify, Enfeeble, proper flask management and some damage mitigating Aura it is literally impossible to get one-shot. And I can assure you, it is entirely possible to clear a map wearing Kaom's Heart, it just takes slightly longer. Just whirl into a mob and let CWDT and associated spells work their magic. I do this with Purity of Fire in reflect maps.

I didn't know about GGG "fixing" Scorching Ray but good on them. However, I still believe Incinerate has the edge simply because of the great amount of hits per second*. Reducing the fire resistance certainly has its merits but is rarely necessary and with this build it doesn't rally matter if a boss fight is shortened by a few seconds because its survivability is just awesome.

* I'm thinking of a more "proactive" Fire Burst build with a 6L Staff or Bow (or will just 6 sockets be enough? Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Fire Burst working similar to Ice Storm on Whispering Ice?) and a proper 6-link Incinerate setup with lots of cast speed and GMP for clearing and Slower Projectiles for boss fights. Razor is great for clearing all right but for boss fights it doesn't really matter since the Berserker is "Cloaked in Savagery". Maybe even CI... although the first thirteen passive skills will "go to waste" until we get to the ES nodes above the Scion but Savagery + Vaal Pact is just too good a combo and the game in its current form still favours ES and 10k+ is rather easy to achieve. ;)

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TimeDilation wrote:

I just don't like ... the implicit assumption that our DPS must be too weak to kill them before they're swarming us.

But ain't this the "sad" truth? :D

Even the damage of the fully fledged original 6-link Blade Vortex setup was never good enough to clear even white trash mobs in high-tier maps in a timely manner nor was it ever intended to be (IIRC it was somewhere in the region of 6k DPS, with all 20/20 gems). The fun really starts once they hit us and all hell breaks loose.

The manual BV setup gave us a few extra hits and ignites while whirling and a bit of leech in the process but by far the most ignites are generated by the 90%+ chance of the three spells in the helmet and they only proc when we get hit.

Im having a blast playing this build!
Unfortunately i feel a bit squishy sometimes (just 4.6k hp), but otherwise it is pure kill!

Here's my gear so far

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tomay wrote:

"

TimeDilation wrote:

I just don't like ... the implicit assumption that our DPS must be too weak to kill them before they're swarming us.

But ain't this the "sad" truth? :D

Even the damage of the fully fledged original 6-link Blade Vortex setup was never good enough to clear even white trash mobs in high-tier maps in a timely manner nor was it ever intended to be (IIRC it was somewhere in the region of 6k DPS, with all 20/20 gems). The fun really starts once they hit us and all hell breaks loose.

The manual BV setup gave us a few extra hits and ignites while whirling and a bit of leech in the process but by far the most ignites are generated by the 90%+ chance of the three spells in the helmet and they only proc when we get hit.

They proc if you spam self-damage from the Eye or Loop. I've still not switched into a self-damage CWDT setup, as I'm still waiting for Eye prices to go down (I might actually be able to afford one now, though, after a very good day of trading and drops yesterday). So I can't comment on how fast this really happens, but the fireball GMP should result in significant numbers of ignites and so self-damage ticks. I'll see how it pans out, eventually.

The effect I'm seeing here is that the incinerate+GMP+fireball channel combo duplicates old-school style CoC, but with the benefit of needing no crit and no (largely) useless base weapon attack resulting in high-speed melting. I'm becoming more interested in directing the build towards exploiting that as the central feature, with the CwDT effects being icing on the cake. The razor and scepter are awesome for exploiting a firey death cone in this regard: healing and a bit of extra boss damage from the razor (from the ignite DoTs we're piling up), and significant damage boosts from the scepter. If you remember old-school CoC the basic setup was:
Base attack + CoC + spell 1 + spell 2 + spell 3 + support good for base attack and two spells
Something like barrage + arc + fireball + arctic breath + GMP for a wand based approach, say. Sometimes the third spell is replaced with a support, depending on the situation. What we've got going on here is:
Channel spell + CwcH + trigger spell + three synergized supports + fire burst procs for free
The fire burst effectively duplicates the third spell from CoC, gets its own custom three supports, and eliminates the base attack gem. Two extra gem slots!

As far as your bow idea goes: I have had a similar idea. And, yes, the sockets should all support the Fire Burst regardless of their links. You only need links if they are going to support each other. You'll lose a bit of bonus damage mods--elemental bow implicits aren't as good as the sceptre's, and you can't craft +spell damage onto bows in any form, so most of the other mods the bow gets from the Hysteria will be even more useless than we expect the sceptre's to be. But you might be able to seriously amp up the Fire Burst. The usual three, plus Concentrated effect + Added Cold Damage + ? (maybe culling or item rarity), perhaps. Though keep in mind that getting the right socket colors will be a challenge. Getting 3+ blue sockets onto a bow is not cheap.

And if you like incinerates hits, as do I, then throwing in GMP just makes sense, at least outside of boss fights with few adds (maybe culling strike then?), at which point it makes even more sense to double-dip on the GMP usefulness with a nice, firey projectile.

Just a little heads up from the experimenter front...

If you want to try something insanely funny, equip your chest with Spark + Spell Echo + Faster Casting + Pierce + Greater Multiple Projectiles + Chance to Ignite (BBBBGG, if 5L leave out Pierce).

Two or three casts and the whole screen goes up in flames. :D

Now I haven't tested this in depth yet (i.e. no high tier maps, only some t12) but I'm having a ball here and so far this is looking really good. With maxed gems Spark gives me 5k tooltip DPS (89% chance to Ignite/204% cast speed modifier) which provides very nice leech (more than enough to sustain the 78 mana per cast) on top of a shit ton of ignites and Elemental Overload is permanently up. For boss fights I will probably replace GMP with Slower Projectiles (around 8k DPS).

Okay, again 2 questions.
First: Why don't we use spell echo on the scepter? Does it not work? If it does, shouldn't it give us much higher DPS than any of the other gems in there, considering that it would almost double the fire burst damage?

And then second (probably been answered already), what do you do with your remaining ascendancy points? I'm thinking going all the way up to Aspect of Carnage for the 40% more damage. The 10% more taken damage probably isn't too bad either, unless of course we want to do bosses that have one-shot potential.

Ah, and a third one. What do you think of using http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Xoph's_Blood instead of Eye of innocence? 10% more life, fire penetration and a saved talent point don't sound too bad to me.

Spell Echo doesn't work with Fire Burst.

Aspect of Carnage is what you want as the final Ascendancy. (Btw, you can open the Ascendancy in the skill tree of this guide)

Xoph's Blood is certainly a viable alternative especially for boss fights. For clearing maps, however, you can't beat the awesome healing powers of Eye + Razor. ;)

Trying it on Breach HC, how often do you guys die and from what?