[2.6] The Curse Whisperer - Tri-Curse CI Whispering Ice Berserker - Viable for Everything

"

lauris300 wrote:

This amulet or astramentis?

This amu of course! $$$

Vaal Pact, Ghost Reaver and Zealot's Oath
These keystones provided huge bonuses to Chaos Inoculation players without much of a downside. In the Beta, we'll be trying out some extreme changes to Vaal Pact and Ghost Reaver. We'll be iterating on these changes during the Beta

vaal pact no longer has any effect on ES.

the build is dead in 3.0 unless there's a way to stack a lot of int and get a lot of life from it.

"

LastMagus wrote:

Vaal Pact, Ghost Reaver and Zealot's Oath
These keystones provided huge bonuses to Chaos Inoculation players without much of a downside. In the Beta, we'll be trying out some extreme changes to Vaal Pact and Ghost Reaver. We'll be iterating on these changes during the Beta

vaal pact no longer has any effect on ES.

the build is dead in 3.0 unless there's a way to stack a lot of int and get a lot of life from it.

I've posted my thoughts on this issue in the "main thread":

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1667730/page/343/#p14489300

Right now it looks like Berserker may become the 'main' WI class in 3.0, as outlined by Black_Gun. This class seems to be the most fitting for a Life/MoM approach. To counter the nerfs, it gains a major benefit: Cloaked in Savagery will work now. The big question is surviving that Savage Hit before you leech it all back.

We'll see what else GGG reveals in the next month.

I did some testing over 2 days with the Life/MoM WI Berserker. Actually surprised myself, since I expected him to die in T15 with mods sometimes, and maybe kill something in T16 white or blue maps. Turns out, it's not that bad. On a lv 90 char that I had available for re-speccing, I steamrolled T15 and killed all T16 Guardians in rare maps with moderately harmless mods with just a few deaths, and those were mostly me testing which flasks to use and how to adjust the tactics. Didn't have to change the general play style, still facetanked the same things as before. With 4.5k Life.

Defenses used with CI (including the high ES pool itself) can be replaced by other defenses that work with Life. For example, you don't need stun immunity with a Life build, so no US. But no US means that the enemy can miss you, and Blind becomes a very effective defense. And instead of ES you can look for Armour. Izaro and all of T16 deal a significant amount of physical damage, and mitigating even 15-20% of it is great.

And then there is Cloaked in Savagery. It doesn't work with CI, but with Life it's wonderful. As long as you don't get 1-shot, you are always at full life immediately. Life Berserker with that node can ignore reflect even easier than Elementalist. The moment you hit a reflecting mob (i.e. hit yourself hard), CiS kicks in, and you just laugh at Shavronne (Atziri's Mirror probably too, I didn't try that yet). LL gem is not needed for this class with Life: if you aren't taking big hits you can leech enough with Pain Reaver, and if you do take a serious hit you become immortal except for 1-shots.

And you can use Life flasks to repair the damage when not in combat (DoT's, nasty ground, lab traps, etc.) That's really nice for the Lab. After having to navigate carefully with CI for months, I almost forgot how easy the Life builds have it.

Gearing for this approach differs only in the rares (chest, gloves, boots, belt). The uniques are the same as before, except that high %Str roll on Black Sun is good now (2 Str = 1 Life). Astramentis is mandatory though, the Str requirements on good rares won't let you use anything less.


On the rares you want Life/Str, Int and Armour. But pure AR items cannot roll Int. At all. For gloves and boots that's not a problem: use AR/ES items, the amount of AR on them isn't that much lower than on pure AR ones. Of course you want high Int, but I couldn't find any good gloves right away, so I just crafted 30 Int on a pair of semi-decent ones.


You can also use an AR/ES chest, but then you miss out on the BiS rare: Astral Plate. It can have really nice AR plus 12% All Res. The best solution I found was to craft an Astral Plate with Spite. Just like a belt. AR chests don't have that many possible mods, so it's pretty similar to crafting a belt. This is far from perfect, it can be a lot better:

Off-coloring 4 sockets is moderately hard, but the new method (using jews instead of chroms) works fine.

For the belt you want to craft a Leather one and look for Int, Life, AR and resists. I happened to have a crafted Int Crystal belt with AR and an open prefix, so I went with that for now.


The tree:

Use AA and a 35% aura of your choice: Blasphemy WM or a boss-specific Purity. You end up with almost exactly the amount of mana matching 30% of your Life pool, perfect for MoM.

Mana is not an issue at all. Use lv 1 Scorching Ray, it costs 5 mana that you always instantly leech or regen no matter how much MoM loses.

So that was fine for T16 at lv 90 (or 89 actually cause I had to take 1 resist node due to the imperfect gear) with 4.5k Life. Just not as easy as with ES.

Now the bad news: the Shaper definitely needs more Life. With 4.5k you need to react super fast and be really good with flasks, i.e. if your name is Mathil or Zizaran you can probably do it. With some luck. But for a mere mortal it's going to be a huge problem. You blink, and in 0.5 sec your 4.5k Life is gone. MoM won't save you against that stuff either.

You can get more Life, but the price is too high. I already had to drop a couple of sockets and 1 curse (replaced TC with Blind). But trading more DPS for Life results in the DPS getting too low, and time is your enemy when dealing with the Shaper.

However, I'm only lv 90 with far from perfect gear. No enchantments either. Maybe at lv 95 with a few ex investment it'll work better. And there will be more Life on gear in 3.0.

Another idea to try is Kaom's Heart. Losing 5 sockets makes it a bit inconvenient for normal mapping. And a nice amount of Int, AR and resists on a crafted Astral Plate too. A special setup just for the Shaper - maybe. I haven't tried it yet.

Overall, this class can be fine with Life/MoM, especially if obtaining Life becomes easier in 3.0.

"

Kelvynn wrote:

Spoiler

I did some testing over 2 days with the Life/MoM WI Berserker. Actually surprised myself, since I expected him to die in T15 with mods sometimes, and maybe kill something in T16 white or blue maps. Turns out, it's not that bad. On a lv 90 char that I had available for re-speccing, I steamrolled T15 and killed all T16 Guardians in rare maps with moderately harmless mods with just a few deaths, and those were mostly me testing which flasks to use and how to adjust the tactics. Didn't have to change the general play style, still facetanked the same things as before. With 4.5k Life.

Defenses used with CI (including the high ES pool itself) can be replaced by other defenses that work with Life. For example, you don't need stun immunity with a Life build, so no US. But no US means that the enemy can miss you, and Blind becomes a very effective defense. And instead of ES you can look for Armour. Izaro and all of T16 deal a significant amount of physical damage, and mitigating even 15-20% of it is great.

And then there is Cloaked in Savagery. It doesn't work with CI, but with Life it's wonderful. As long as you don't get 1-shot, you are always at full life immediately. Life Berserker with that node can ignore reflect even easier than Elementalist. The moment you hit a reflecting mob (i.e. hit yourself hard), CiS kicks in, and you just laugh at Shavronne (Atziri's Mirror probably too, I didn't try that yet). LL gem is not needed for this class with Life: if you aren't taking big hits you can leech enough with Pain Reaver, and if you do take a serious hit you become immortal except for 1-shots.

And you can use Life flasks to repair the damage when not in combat (DoT's, nasty ground, lab traps, etc.) That's really nice for the Lab. After having to navigate carefully with CI for months, I almost forgot how easy the Life builds have it.

Gearing for this approach differs only in the rares (chest, gloves, boots, belt). The uniques are the same as before, except that high %Str roll on Black Sun is good now (2 Str = 1 Life). Astramentis is mandatory though, the Str requirements on good rares won't let you use anything less.

On the rares you want Life/Str, Int and Armour. But pure AR items cannot roll Int. At all. For gloves and boots that's not a problem: use AR/ES items, the amount of AR on them isn't that much lower than on pure AR ones. Of course you want high Int, but I couldn't find any good gloves right away, so I just crafted 30 Int on a pair of semi-decent ones.

You can also use an AR/ES chest, but then you miss out on the BiS rare: Astral Plate. It can have really nice AR plus 12% All Res. The best solution I found was to craft an Astral Plate with Spite. Just like a belt. AR chests don't have that many possible mods, so it's pretty similar to crafting a belt. This is far from perfect, it can be a lot better:

Off-coloring 4 sockets is moderately hard, but the new method (using jews instead of chroms) works fine.

For the belt you want to craft a Leather one and look for Int, Life, AR and resists. I happened to have a crafted Int Crystal belt with AR and an open prefix, so I went with that for now.

The tree:

Spoiler

https://www.pathofexile.com/fullscreen-passive-skill-tree/AAAABAECAQPuBAcEswceCPQOSA-rEFgRLRGWFm8WvxbpGjgabBqBHNwdFB2-HwIhkCQ3JIskqiUnJpUnLyj6KU8qOCycLR8zhzbFNuk62DwtQYdFR0lPSVFMs1BCUEdRdFVLVcZWSF1JXfJfKl_QYeJmVGebakNrF20ZdhF7jH_GgpuCx4Nfg8yD24P3hMWFMoV7h2WMNo8aj0aQVZMnlSCVLpctmFebtZ2uoS-iAKIuoqOmmacIrj6vja-btQS3PriTvKq86r6KvwjAVMBmwfPDOsau0B_Vptgk2L3jauQi5FHqEOvk6-7sOO8O7-vw1fhf-ej-Cg==
Lightning Walker is not needed, I only took it because I lack lightning resist.

Use AA and a 35% aura of your choice: Blasphemy WM or a boss-specific Purity. You end up with almost exactly the amount of mana matching 30% of your Life pool, perfect for MoM.

Mana is not an issue at all. Use lv 1 Scorching Ray, it costs 5 mana that you always instantly leech or regen no matter how much MoM loses.

So that was fine for T16 at lv 90 (or 89 actually cause I had to take 1 resist node due to the imperfect gear) with 4.5k Life. Just not as easy as with ES.

Now the bad news: the Shaper definitely needs more Life. With 4.5k you need to react super fast and be really good with flasks, i.e. if your name is Mathil or Zizaran you can probably do it. With some luck. But for a mere mortal it's going to be a huge problem. You blink, and in 0.5 sec your 4.5k Life is gone. MoM won't save you against that stuff either.

You can get more Life, but the price is too high. I already had to drop a couple of sockets and 1 curse (replaced TC with Blind). But trading more DPS for Life results in the DPS getting too low, and time is your enemy when dealing with the Shaper.

However, I'm only lv 90 with far from perfect gear. No enchantments either. Maybe at lv 95 with a few ex investment it'll work better. And there will be more Life on gear in 3.0.

Another idea to try is Kaom's Heart. Losing 5 sockets makes it a bit inconvenient for normal mapping. And a nice amount of Int, AR and resists on a crafted Astral Plate too. A special setup just for the Shaper - maybe. I haven't tried it yet.

Overall, this class can be fine with Life/MoM, especially if obtaining Life becomes easier in 3.0.

whats the tooltip dps you reach with that version of the build? I'm asking coz I want to compare it to the life based firestorm berserker I'm currently testing out.

"

Black_Gun wrote:

whats the tooltip dps you reach with that version of the build? I'm asking coz I want to compare it to the life based firestorm berserker I'm currently testing out.

8839 Icestorm tooltip on the test lv 90 char (GoLakers in my profile).

4470 Life with his items. And yes, he can facetank the Shaper Slam with that (and Granite+Basalt flasks). Swapping to Kaom's Heart adds about 1k Life. But that's still too squishy against other stuff that happens in that encounter.

"

Kelvynn wrote:

"

Black_Gun wrote:

whats the tooltip dps you reach with that version of the build? I'm asking coz I want to compare it to the life based firestorm berserker I'm currently testing out.

8839 Icestorm tooltip on the test lv 90 char (GoLakers in my profile).

4470 Life with his items. And yes, he can facetank the Shaper Slam with that (and Granite+Basalt flasks). Swapping to Kaom's Heart adds about 1k Life. But that's still too squishy against other stuff that happens in that encounter.

hmm, 4.5k life sounds too squishy. I mean... yes, if you have fortify and granite and basalt up, you can tank a single heavy phys hit even with that little life. but there are tons of other occasions during the shaper fight, the uber atziri fight, the guardians or just doing high tier 8-prop maps where this amount of life wont nearly cut it.


Since the loss of the key build synergy of WI (scaling both damage and defense via int, allowing for trees that are almost entirely offensive), going for the good old firestorm has become more attractive to me. The key advantage of firestorm over icestorm is that firestorm gains its damage mostly via gem levels (21/20, empower, +3 staff), which means that more points can be put into life nodes without losing damage for doing so, as opposed to WI where every point not going towards int hurts. Additionally, the build can use the Repentance gloves to gain iron will. The firestorm char I'm currently experimenting with is 'Cringeosaurus' in my profile. I'll post the tree and gear below.


According path of building, my firestormer would reach 9.5k life with a tooltip damage of 9.8k (and thats with CD instead of CE!) with perfect gear and lvl 100. the firestorm duration would be 4.4s, and he would get an additional 10% fire pen from xoph's blood, as well as the nice ash debuff on any enemy hitting me. the major drawbacks compared to WI would be two-fold: first, loss of duration on the main skill (4.4s vs ~6ish seconds on current versions of WI or around 5.44s on life based icestormers). and second, the loss of the chilled ground effect. yes, xoph blood's ash effect provides something similar, but only after I got hit. and ofc the build would be a whole lot more expensive at the start of a league, where WI can hit an effective 7-link with 1.5k int with gear that costs less than 100c and can be acquired within the first 4 or 5 days of a new league. the firestormer's damage is carried by lvl 3/4 empower, a +3 staff, xoph's blood and ofc it requires a 6-link. and the firestorm duration helm enchant. but in the end, I feel like it might actually surpass life-based WI with endgame gear and high level.


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Passive tree for my firestormer:
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAECABzcly1Bh48a-ejvfF-YhXvAZjrhPfxmVLiTHb6ExRbpXz-hLwSzPV9JT4w2UEea4OoQJDfYJL6KvSdFnZf0RX4aOIKbBAcqODLRkFVh4uRRiq88BVJTxtgo-sBU8kXr7pMn7DjtPLyqakOiAK4-pwgvnWwLbqrGrlXGtz5KyFBCgsc8LYzP1abvDg5cFCCaO1ZIzzJMs2ebwzoVUL8IWGMW8_4KU1J4DZeVe8ObtW0ZD6sD7qZXkBFf0Ni9g19ZbTGeM4e18m87NZIkixa_GDwmPPZIOtgmlWr6GFY_J4PbJy_QH4Uy_o8fAvhfRUeYV5_fg8xVS1M17-sI9CGQIvQ2xcAa

Bandits: Oak - Kill - Kill

Gear:


My actual jewels are still far from perfect. You would want 5-7% life & 16% increased fire damage/spell damage while holding a staff on each jewel, as well as at least one damage suffix. Ideally, you get 12% area damage and 12% spell damage as the two suffixes. but yeah... good luck finding (and affording) 8-9 such jewels...

@Black_Gun: but that's a 1-curse build. You won't be able to sustain mana without WM, so then you will be taking a lot more damage. CWDT Enfeeble isn't good either, it'll be too little too late.

Won't there be a massive mana issue anyway? What's the cost of Firestorm with that 6L? You can't insta-leech mana, so then when you facetank something like Minotaur it'll be draining your mana faster than you leech it, no? If you actually have 9k life with it, I think you don't need MoM.

Haste + AA, that's 75%, you definitely won't have enough mana to facetank with MoM reliably.

If we are talking lv 100 and the amount of currency that your items cost, I think WI can have just a little less life but higher DPS (by grabbing 1 more socket and 8 more life nodes). And definitely for less currency.

I'm trying to stay within a reasonable budget. If the build requires a +3 staff with 6L to be viable in T16, that kinda writes it off for me.

"

Kelvynn wrote:

@Black_Gun: but that's a 1-curse build. You won't be able to sustain mana without WM, so then you will be taking a lot more damage. CWDT Enfeeble isn't good either, it'll be too little too late.

what?!?

we're talking about berserker, he has built-in mana leech. ofc I can sustain my mana without WM... there is really no reason to have 100% uptime on warlords mark on a berserker. I'm only having a cwdt(1) - wm(5) setup so that I can safely run reflect maps without having to use a ruby flask. (reflect damage is too low to reliably trigger cloaked in savagery.)

for bossfights, I would take it out and stick to enfeeble only. I can, of course, put my enfeeble in an orb of storms - cast on hit - enfeeble - inc dura setup for when I do endgame content.

note that we're talking about a life based berserker with cloaked in savagery and vaal pact here. this build can easily outleech anything that doesnt oneshot it; and temp chains doesnt help at all against oneshots. so we can also skip that curse. I am, however, still experimenting. Maybe it would be a good idea to use a doedres ring or spend some passives for a second curse and use flammability.

"

Won't there be a massive mana issue anyway? What's the cost of Firestorm with that 6L? You can't insta-leech mana, so then when you facetank something like Minotaur it'll be draining your mana faster than you leech it, no? If you actually have 9k life with it, I think you don't need MoM.

true, I havent been playing a lot lately and didnt reach MoM yet, but you're probably right. MoM might not be needed at all.

"

Haste + AA, that's 75%, you definitely won't have enough mana to facetank with MoM reliably.

well, without MoM I could run this setup. or, alternatively, I can run AA + a purity for endgame content. the mana cost is at 136, which is steep but sustainable with my berserker leech as long as I have about 25% of my mana unreserved.

"

If we are talking lv 100 and the amount of currency that your items cost, I think WI can have just a little less life but higher DPS (by grabbing 1 more socket and 8 more life nodes). And definitely for less currency.

dont get me wrong, I would very much prefer to keep playing WI. but I'm just afraid the life you can reasonably reach on WI will be very uncomfortable in the endgame. in general, WI will probably feel a whole lot weaker in 3.0, and I'm not sure I really want to keep on playing a build that feels so much worse than what I was used to...

anyhow, show me a clean shaper kill on a life-based WI char that doesnt involve mathil-like skill and we can talk. until then, I assume that the transition to life will make WI lose a ton of its tankiness and a noticable amount of offensive power.

"

I'm trying to stay within a reasonable budget. If the build requires a +3 staff with 6L to be viable in T16, that kinda writes it off for me.

fair enough.


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btw have you ever tried WI without vaal pact? I mean... even with the nerfs to ES numbers, a CI based WI char should still be able to easily reach 10k ES without giving up a lot of int. using ZO, some regen and a beast fur shawl (increases the life leeched per second by 40%, from 20% per second to 28% per second!) could yield a net ES recovery of around 35-40% of our maximum ES per second. which might be enough to deal with the shaper or guardians on easily-rolled t16 maps. but I'm not sure if thats a viable approach, would have to test it out myself. the nice thing about this approach would be that we could keep on playing elementalist. or switch to scion (the elementalist- & raider-subclasses seem like a nice combo).