[2.5] CoC Vortex Elementalist *Insane dps* 2-3 shot Guardians - Shaper down! [Video Inside]

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Mopstah wrote:

Hey guys, thanks a lot to OP for the build and everyone else for the great info as well. I'm running this now too and loving it. I have a few comments and a question to ask of anyone wiling to help, though:

I'm running occulist. Was using it for my old build and thought it was worth trying to port over instead of re specing. I can confirm it's pretty darn good. Lots of ES, an extra power charge and 20% increased crit along with a third curse. It's not bad at all.

My concern is low burn damage. I tried to squeeze in an empower like Mathil did but I feel now my crit is too low. With 6 power charges it's around 48% for cyclone and vortex. Should I replace the empower with crit strikes gem? If I do I'm around 68% crit. Would that help my burn damage melt better like some videos I've seen?

Right now my tool tip is 23k avg damage in hideout. But as I've said the burn damage seems underwhelming. Running Wm, am, and discipline. Third curse is used by my friend I usually play with who uses vulnerability. Should I perhaps consider dropping Wm for ele weakness? If I have leech on my boots is that enough?

Thanks all.

Edit: ok, so I'm loving my vortex build as occulist. I really do. But every so often I'm getting one shot. Like, point blank sawed off shotgun to the face styles. Is this the handy work of elemental reflect? And will it force me to swap to elementalist?

If you speak about mathil's build, he is using "voice of the storm" amulet for the Critical strikes issues...so if you've got a free curse point by your ascendancy you can get this necklace and stack Lightning res...for your burning damage did you try to add flammability ?

In my opinion warlord's mark is useless if you have the leech enchant on boots...

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Mopstah wrote:

I'm running occulist.
My concern is low burn damage.

You have a choose - more es or more damage. But es is not double-dipping here.. usually Elementalist has a 40-60% more damage than occultist.. even without d-d. I test it before, on one of my old characters - it does not worth it.

Thanks for the feedback guys. I did go ahead and make the switch. The loss of a power charge and an extra curse hurts. But it's better overall as elementalist. Much more versatile and the ele reflect protection just seems mandatory.

Regarding mana leech, I have to say that Warlords mark seems MANDATORY for me. The boot enchant is not enough as it doesn't work well on bosses.

Just as an example, I was doing a juicy lair map and got to the boss. No problem so far. Got him down to about 20% life quickly but then I ran out of mana. I stood there and got ripped. Lol. That's when I replaced ele weakness with Warlords mark again and now I never run out of mana when cycloning.

Perhaps I'm just not playing properly, and if so please let me know what you guys do to not run out of mana when not using Warlords mark, but it was an issue with me for bosses without it and when the "...when you've killed recently" enchant on my boots hasn't procced.

Thanks!

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Mopstah wrote:

Thanks for the feedback guys. I did go ahead and make the switch. The loss of a power charge and an extra curse hurts. But it's better overall as elementalist. Much more versatile and the ele reflect protection just seems mandatory.

Regarding mana leech, I have to say that Warlords mark seems MANDATORY for me. The boot enchant is not enough as it doesn't work well on bosses.

Just as an example, I was doing a juicy lair map and got to the boss. No problem so far. Got him down to about 20% life quickly but then I ran out of mana. I stood there and got ripped. Lol. That's when I replaced ele weakness with Warlords mark again and now I never run out of mana when cycloning.

Perhaps I'm just not playing properly, and if so please let me know what you guys do to not run out of mana when not using Warlords mark, but it was an issue with me for bosses without it and when the "...when you've killed recently" enchant on my boots hasn't procced.

Thanks!

Took my two minutes to see what's wrong: you are not running clarity...and more than that you chosed to pick a +1 curse from the tree and lose a LOT of spell dmg/resist...wanted to switch myself to a CI character with +1 curse for this build but it's not possible or you will lose too much dps...if you do some short controlled cyclones and you have some mana regen i don't see where you can have some mana issues btw.

Clarity is a great idea. I should be running that. Thanks for the tip.

As for the curse, I rather enjoy 2 curses, and the thought of dropping WM for something more aggressive like ele weakness is now very appealing with the idea of running clarity for mana.

How is the 2nd curse hurting my damage and resists? Can you elaborate? Would 4-5 spell damage nodes really outweigh the damage of a second curse by that much? I also find having more than 1 curse helps for partying since my friend can run one of his own too.

Thanks again for the feedback. Much appreciated.

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Mopstah wrote:

Clarity is a great idea. I should be running that. Thanks for the tip.

As for the curse, I rather enjoy 2 curses, and the thought of dropping WM for something more aggressive like ele weakness is now very appealing with the idea of running clarity for mana.

How is the 2nd curse hurting my damage and resists? Can you elaborate? Would 4-5 spell damage nodes really outweigh the damage of a second curse by that much? I also find having more than 1 curse helps for partying since my friend can run one of his own too.

Thanks again for the feedback. Much appreciated.

Well the +1 curse is really far away from the original tree...just check what you miss by getting that and you will see that you are losing a lot of useful things...

OK guys, I am writing this post in hopes that I can help someone else who was in my situation - attempting to run this build and failing.

I was getting bored with breach league, recently watched Mathil's build video and thought, hey that looks fun. Put together a mix of his build, this one, and one from another similar PoE thread which references this one as well. They are all similar with a few exceptions. I also know that I have certain tendencies and as a result prefer certain curses/passive allocations to others, so I made it my own a little bit while still borrowing heavily from others, of course.

I started playing this build, with a very good budget that I built up, and I got REKT. I didn't know what was wrong. Tweaked my build a bit, got REKT even harder. All my tooltips were great, 10K ES, but was getting destroyed. Anyway, I'll keep my story short and simply post what I did to make this build work EXCELLENT for me, which hopefully may help some others too.

In short, I went more defensive. This build has tons of DPS. I needed some help.

- Went for Ghost Reaver/Vaal Pact. And using Warlord's Mark.

For me, this is MANDATORY. Life regen doesn't cut it. Life leech without Vaal Pact did NOT work. Ele reflect, even with elementalist ascendency, was not pretty and I couldn't recover fast enough. My health is now almost always at full. When I take a big hit and go down to 10%, it SHOOTS right back up. It feels so smooth and provides the sustain I need, although dropping jewel slots to path all the way to VP was painful, I admit. Warlord's mark feels great, and the extra endurance charges are nice, too.

- I took essence surge. Bought Death's Door boots with crit enchant.

OK, so I'm a bit lazy and perhaps not the fastest at mashing my flasks when I need to. Better players probably find this as way overkill, but for me, it was necessary. No more bleeding, no more waiting long periods of time for my ES to recharge.

Also, I got tired of unreliable crits. Especially on bosses - it made my life leech unpredictable, and if you have been trying empower instead of crit strikes gem or just generally going through packs of mobs without getting a crit proc, you will appreciate this boot enchant. I'm procing a lot more reliable now, and every time I would have a drought/bad crit RNG, my enchant kicks in and I get rolling again. Synergizes well with my life leech setup.

Even with all this defense, my dps is quite good. 30K average tooltip in hideout with AoE (no conc, but with my boot enchant active). 47K avg with conc. 55K in maps with 5 power charges up. With my new defensive setup, I have a MUCH easier time with ignite immune bosses such as the T13 Lair boss and Phoenix Guardian. Before I made these changes, I just didn't crit enough or have enough leech/recharge, and I would RIP constantly. Now I can do these bosses without a problem.

A few additional tips for dummies/build noobs like me, that may not have realized how important certain parts of this build are: make sure to run clarity with blood magic! Otherwise, you won't have enough mana even with clarity active. And don't do maps with conc effect - save it for tough bosses. The extra tooltip dps looks nice, but you'll clear 10x faster and take a lot less ele reflect with AoE.

Sorry for the wall of text - finally figured out how to make this build work for me personally and wanted to share.

Thanks to everyone for their guides/comments.

Regarding the issues mentioned one post ahead of me ...

I had the same issues, my character got wrecked every time a double blue pack came up.

I tried out different solutions and the best for me was to first get my crit chance up to about 75% with max charges. If you crit on the first enemy you encounter, the others trailing it wont start hitting you if you just blast them away.
To ensure this the Diamond Flask is the optimal solution. Maybe you even find yourself not critting the last 4-5 hits. You just push the Flask and boom it goes again.
Another way I gave a try to make sure the slow hard hitter wont get me was adding more movement speed. with Ondars and a 4%+ belt enchant you wont get critically slow when cycloning.

Now im on ~6k ES with Level 81, kicking T13 maps.

This build relies on 4 important points :

- Curses (i use 3, i switch ring on easy maps to play with 2)
- Leech
- Critical strikes
- Spell damage (for double dipping)

Many of you chosed to pick a +1 curse from the tree and in my opinion that's a really bad choice, because 1 item cannot give you what the tree gives you in term of pure stats.

For leech, the boots enchant are mandatory and anough if you got anough damage...also think about getting the +vortex damage on helm if you got the currency for it.

For critical strikes, many complaint are : "i cannot proc anough so i die" it's the most difficult part of that build, i have no issue with that anymore mainly because i focused on % global critical on every piece it was possible to get some (chayula amulet is awesome but you lose +1 curse potential AND global crit).

For spell damage, stop focusing only on ES and try to get some spell damage too, the damage up is insane...Oh and focus on getting a 21/20 vortex...your damage will climb A LOT.

Talking about damage - use Vaal Lightining Trap or Vinktar bottle. Shock status on bosses boosts you dps like a rocket - it feels like x2 or even more.. and life-leech from vinktar is crazy (not enough to facetank everything, but still awesome).