[3.0] HC/SC Nowlech's Trickster Essence Drain (LifeMoM/CI/LL) ~Shaper and Uber Atziri! Videos!

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I must be missing something about essence drain that I'm hoping someone can explain to me.

PoB shows most of the essence drain builds that people list here with extremely low dps compared to pretty much any other build. Importing this build directly, for example, shows a dot damage somewhere around 100-120k with frenzy and power charges up. Putting wither to full stacks in this case increases the dps from the dot+decay to something like 200k. The pob link uses gear that is reasonably mid-tier, so there could be some improvement from getting extra spell damage/chaos/dot/whatever, but nothing that is going to grossly impact the build. Ghazzy's version is more like 45k and goes up to ~100k with wither and gear..

Other builds that I've been looking into over the past few days have dps numbers ranging from this sort of number as the extreme low end of what you see from most. Many, many builds can comfortably move into the high hundreds of thousands for moderate investment, and of course there are quite a few that can easily reach into the million+, or higher still (although mostly crit versions and costly).

I'm not writing this to be conflicting or anything like that, I actually want to understand how it works. People have been using ED to kill high tier maps and bosses almost since its inception, and I can't work out how that works given the massive discrepancy in what builds _should_ do vs. the outcome. I'm hoping someone has some insight? How can you comfortably kill shaper on a build that is parsing in the low 100k's when many builds struggle while closing in on millions? Is it just slow but survivable? What's the missing link?

Does the skill just not work AT ALL in groups, when the monster hp goes up and contagion cant spread it?

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Any ideas on how to pierce now?

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Breath of the Council any good for this or is the attackspeed too slow for whirling blades?

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Nowlech wrote:

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Breath of the Council any good for this or is the attackspeed too slow for whirling blades?

I have it selected in the PoB link, it's okay. A shield with spell damage, and a decay dagger gives us a lot of damage, as much as a Breath of the council. You also can't use whirling blades with a Breath, you have to use Leap slam, which I don't personally like too much.

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Seems like my post didn't get through?!
Anyways, anything specific to look out for when it comes to the atlas? As in what path/maps to aim for and which maps to shape?

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Any specific unique you would recommend for the life-based version of this build? also 1h+shield or a 2hander?