[2.4.2] Immortal support - Mana based lowlife guardian curseomancer

This is my current gear and current gem setup and flask setup (may change depending on who I am running with).





While my gear is still far from optimal, it is pretty damn good. Note that you don't actually need a +1 shavs for this build, although it helps. Below you can find my recommendations for gear in each slot

Weapon:


Helm:


Shield:


Chest:


Gloves:


Boots:


Amulet:


Ring 1:


Ring 2:


Belt:


FLASKS:

This is a link to mikelat’s aura calculator for my usual setup:



Most of the curses and auras can be mixed and matched depending on what you want to do with the build and what auras and curses your party is running.

This setup is more attainable for those on a more budget version of the build:



This setup drops the level 4 enligtens, the +1 shavs, skyforths and purity of ice to drop the cost of the build down, and drops the price of the build by something like 200 ex. As this version of the build uses only one level 4 enlighten, just get a +1 gloves or boots and put a level 3 enlighten and a level 21 blood magic in them instead of buying a level 4 if you can't afford it. Adjust clarity to be however high it needs to be to reserve the most mana possible while still being able to cast whirling blades.

Anger: I currently run a level 24 generocitied anger as my main damage aura. Anger is optimal to run as damage because most builds, especially spell builds, do NOT run it. They most often prioritize running wrath, haste, blasphemy, heralds and discipline over the juicy flat damage that anger gives, and for good reason. It is often too much of an investment compared to what you can get from just running heralds instead. Therefore, since no one is running anger, we as a support build should make it a priority to have. It gives the most damage to our group with the least amount of effort. NOTE: be careful that you do not accidentally screw up someone’s elemental equilibrium setup. Always make sure you know if someone is using EE.

Grace: OpieOP pls nerf. Reduces your chance to receive hits and reduces the chance you get CRIT.

Purity of lightning/fire/cold: Increasing max res is one of the most OP things in the entire game, and with our massively empowered auras each of our purities can give 6 or more max res. This is especially important in higher end maps where you often run into added elemental damage mods, volatile blood, ice nova from boxes, BEARS BEARS BEARS, and a whole slew of other things. And even more important than that is reducing the damage taken from reflect. Raising the resistances of very high damage fakener or inquisitor vaal spark can be the difference between getting one shot or chunking for 5k+ life and taking minimal damage. Lastly, running all the purities lets us eschew a ton of resistances from our gear, allowing us to focus purely on mana.

Haste/Vaal Haste: Haste and Vaal haste are pretty much the best auras in the game for clearspeed. With all of your aura nodes and aura effectiveness, you have no excuse to not run them. In an ideal world we would be able to hook both these up to generosity and turbocharge our party, but unfortunately the one thing this build really needs is attack speed. If you want to be able to keep up with the rest of your party, you need to be able to move as fast as they do with whirling blades, and this means you need attack speed as much as they do. I am currently working on getting a version of this build focused more on attack speed going so that you won’t need to unlink them from generosity, more on that later.

Discipline: This should be self-explanatory. Most of the best builds in the game are ES based. Discipline gives ES. And despite the fact that most builds run discipline anyway, yours is better (aura effect).

Temporal Chains: This shit is broken. A large portion of my build is spent optimizing temporal chains so that I can get the full effect of the curse, and the result is that I can hit far over the curse cap, which slows all enemies around me by 75% and get nearly max effect on bosses (now in 2.4 you hit more like 43% slow, but that's still great). This means that by the time anything could possibly hit you it is already dead or you have already whirling bladed away. Combined with the other defensive curses, it allows you to go very close to larger mobs or bosses that may have not gotten one shot by your DPSers with no risk.

Enfeeble: Same reasoning as temporal chains. Even if something somehow manages to attack you through the 75% slow, they will have a very high chance to miss, deal 31% less damage, and be unable to crit you. This curse is often redundant for anything but bosses because by the time you can actually curse anything with blasphemy most of the mobs will be dead, but it is very handy against higher HP targets and bosses, reducing the risk for most boss fights significantly.

Warlords Mark: The main reason I actually run warlords mark is because there are many good builds that rely on it to be able to function, and if you curse over it they often cannot sustain their damage. It also adds much needed additional leech and mana sustain for builds that don’t already use it, and it can enable your vaal sparker friends to sustain righteous fire if they feel like taking a risk.
Vaal Discipline: Pop this whenever you are facetanking or DPSing a boss, or whenever you have very low health from using Doedre’s.

Rallying cry: Since this build uses prayer of glory for attack and cast speed, we have to use a warcry, and rallying cry is the only one that does anything. Try to cast this when you and your carry are standing next to a large mob, it can give a pretty insane damage increase. Be wary of using this skill next to CoC dischargers, as they are liable to oneshot from reflect.

Whirling Blades/Shield Charge: Probably one of the most important parts of the build. If you wanna be able to keep up with the big boys and actually curse anything, you have to use a movement skill like this. These skills are the reason you want to stack attack speed on gloves/weapon/tree/whatever. The speed is low while not running but with all of your buffs up you can easily get over 300% iAS.

Vaal Haste: The reason support builds are good. With all the increased duration from tree and your increased duration gem, this skill lasts over 13 seconds, and should be up 100% of the time once you get enough souls for the first cast.

Vaal Discipline: Pop this during boss fights, for reflect mobs and when you open boxes. The combined effect of Vaal disc + your own overleveled disc + the flat ES from Guardian can easily push ES over the 20k mark on most ES builds, making you and your party nigh-invincible.

Prayer of Glory: This skill allows you to use warcrys without ever having to remove the tape from your whirling blades/shield charge button. More importantly, it gives 15% attack, cast and movement speed to you and your party when you use it, speeding up your whirling blades/shield charge. Use in conjunction with rallying cry to boost deeps and move faster.

Radiant Faith: The cornerstone of the build. This skill gives you most of your energy shield, and allows anyone in your party who is ES based to tank almost any hit in the game. This passive is the reason we stack so much mana in our tree, gear, jewel slots and pretty much everywhere we can. It also gives a ton of flat armour but we actually don’t give a fuck.

Harmony of Purpose: lets us skip one skillpoint that we would otherwise put into conduit.
Unwavering Faith: Mostly useless, but gives us a little phys reduction and lets us profit off of the zealots oath from sorrow of the divine.

Determination: Not only is armour a bad defense to invest any significant resources into, but determination is actually only effective if you ALREADY have a good amount of armour. This aura is pretty substandard because of this.

Arctic Armour & Heralds: These only effect you, and as such are useless for this build.

Hatred: While hatred is a pretty good aura, there are a few problems with running it. First of all, it doesn’t increase the damage of spark or discharge based builds, or really any non phys spell builds. Second, on the builds that it actually does increase the damage for, it greatly raises the chance to get one shot by reflect, which is already a problem with the turbo boosted anger and rallying cry. Finally, any build that does a significant amount of phys damage is probably going to be running it already. Don’t run this unless your party specifically requests it. If you are supporting a BVer chances are they already have it, but if not you might want to replace grace or anger with this.

Wrath: This aura is great. It boosts the damage of almost every good build in the game by a significant margin. Out of all the auras I am not running this is the best one. The reason I don’t run it is simply this; everyone else already runs it. All the spark and vaal spark builds have already included wrath in their build, and CoC dischargers (now Cospri's in 2.4) don’t NEED any more damage (see the section on reflect above in the hatred listing). There will definitely be some parties where you will swap out anger or grace for wrath, but more often than not anger and grace are the better choices.

Vitality: No.

Purity of Elements: Any real build is already res capped, and no one will want to make a character with under capped res and just count on you to be on when they want to play. The only reason to run this aura is if you want to make a million percent sure that everyone in your party is overcapped for elemental equilibrium, ele weakness and vulnerability. For some parties there is an argument for dropping the third curse and running this instead, but it is rare and should only be done on a case by case basis.

Elemental Weakness and other –res curses, projectile weakness, vulnerability, ass mark: While these curses do dramatically increase dps, they also dramatically increase the chance that you one shot your party members to reflect. In addition, the playstyle of this build is to sit on top of the carry and be defensive, while these curses require you to go stand next to enemies. The charges that the curses generate are also irrelevant, as you provide max charges for everyone in the party anyway.

Currently, I am set up to support vaal sparkers and self-cast sparkers, both of which are most likely the fastest clearspeed builds in the game, beating out even the very fastest bow and cospri's builds. Note that this setup also works for elemental bow builds and cospri's, except that you should switch grace out and put in wrath. The key interesting thing about sparkers and vaal sparkers is that they do not really have to stop to aim. They just pause for a microsecond, cast their spell, and the spell does all the work for them, meaning that they don’t ever stop long enough for you to manually curse things to increase their damage. Furthermore, spark and vaal spark already do so much damage that cursing to increase damage is often redundant. Most enemies get one shot anyway.

Therefore, what you really want is to increase the speed at which they can move and cast at, while keeping them from taking any damage. The way you do this is by being as close to them as possible at all times while trying to stand next to whatever they are hitting so that all of your auras are affecting them, while also cursing any enemies they might get near. Meanwhile, you have to cast vaal haste and rallying cry while spamming your Doedre’s elixir to maintain charges. The damage from rallying cry, level 4 generosited anger, the frenzy charges from your flask and the combination of haste and vaal haste will make your carry do even more damage proportionally to monsters despite the two man HP (and frankly in standard they will one shot everything in a sub 6 man party anyway), while simultaneously providing a MASSIVE boost to survivability and movement and clearspeed. If done properly, then not only will you increase the clearspeed of your partner, but between the 3-5k ES they gain from being near you and the ultra-powerful curses you put out they will be nearly unkillable.