[3.0] Headhunter...Hunter | Currency Generator | Pathfinder | Essence Drain | 475k Boss Dps | Bisco

- When given massive AOE, Contagion automatically deals with environmental obstacles (e.g. trees, corners, doorways, etc.) that can make other builds awkward or frustrating at times.

- The regen is extremely fast, and I never found myself missing having a Vaal Pact character, so unless QotF or ED get nerfed in 3.1 it's going to be a very potent build next league as well, especially with the density rework that's being talked about, which leads me to...

- The build scales extremely well with sextanting. I don't know what the future is for sextants in next league's new atlas mechanics but currently, sextanting literally makes your life easier because more packs / pack density also means it's a lot easier for Contagion to connect, resulting in overall faster clear. An entire Shaped Racecourse circle area can be completed in about 4-5 casts with pack sextants and pack size mods on the map, whereas it takes double that on a Racecourse without sextants.

- With ED+Cont, dealing damage and picking up loot don't conflict with each other like they do in a lot of other builds. The smoothness of not constantly breaking tempo - and actually being able to keep a tempo - is an amazing feeling and makes the game really fun.

- This build absolutely destroys breaches. It's actually insane how quickly and efficiently they are dealt with.

- On really open maps like Dunes, you'll get so many off-screen drops that it can sometimes become a hassle to look for them, which means...

- Your move speed is abysmal if you let Rampage run out and your flasks are dry. On one hand this teaches good habits (and is likely often a result of bad/inefficient decisions during a map), but when it does happen it's pretty frustrating. One option is just popping a TP and hopping back in the map for refilled flasks.

- I think harder content is easily accessible with this build, maintaining efficiency, with a few small adjustments. Will get to that in a section below.

- I noticed that to really minmax on time, cast speed becomes important, but it's a fairly minor thing. I have some ideas below on how to streamline that.

- When I wanted to push for harder content (T13-15) the main thing that was lacking was damage (especially on bosses). I switched out Sadima's for Allelopathy gloves: pseudo-5L lv22 Blight, a bit better damage, a bit better AoE . This was mostly for bosses. This also makes the T12 Vault boss drop a LOT faster, which is important for loot.

- Pushing for smooth T14-T16 really needs a lv4 Empower and at least some gems at 21/20. The Guardian boss fights themselves were quite difficult but doable, and I learned to do them deathless. I tried Shaper as a half-joke (21/20 gems and Allelopathy gloves, otherwise build gear) and got him to half health before using up all my portals, but this was largely due to very poor mechanics on my part as all my deaths were due to poorly managing where the vortices ended up. On one hand there would be fewer piling up if I'd killed him faster, but this was mostly my fault and I'm still convinced I can kill him even with that gear setup). With some 21/20's you can probably throw Sadima's back on and still easily deal with the Vault boss. At this point I was even running my own Harb maps when I wanted to try them outside of rota; they're easily doable and you speed up harb pack spawns / the final room by re-casting Wither and spamming Blight.

Gloves: I've already mentioned Allelopathy for the greatly improved Blight, mostly for killing higher tier bosses at an acceptable rate. Sadima's quantity bonus is relatively very good, and I would not have given these up were it not for Allelopathy specifically. The other alternative would be rare gloves with high life and evasion (for movespeed and also evade chance), but for the purpose of this build I don't think it's justifiable.

Rings: The Ventors are honestly the first thing I think should go. Rings with high life, and a mix of the following to taste: resist plugging, chaos damage, cast speed, flat evasion, mana, mana regen (if replacing Goldwyrm's). One other thing I REALLY want to try is (in order to keep Clear Mind intact) using Grace in an Essence Worm for a massive evasion/movespeed boost without reserving mana. In combination with boots I will discuss below, this will let us move around even faster (especially while not under flask buffs for whatever reason).

Boots: This is where it gets interesting. Goldwyrms are actually quite useful since the quantity is pretty good, it gives you a bit of res, and you won't notice how good the mana regen is till it's gone - or at the very least, how much more difficult it is to manage the mana consumption/regeneration equilibrium that's important for this build. The main thing we start to see here is the trade-off of using so much gear that has low base slots. I think the two most interesting options are:
--> Atziri's Step: Life, very high evasion (and derived movespeed), better base movement speed, and strong synergy with Acro/Phase Acro (can be read as "33% more chance to dodge attacks and 53% more chance to dodge spells" relative to the existing passive tree and not wearing them). Basically a speed/survivability/QoL option.
--> Voidwalkers: I think this option is really cool. The first thing it lets us do is immediately remove the three pierce nodes from our tree, which we then allocate to the Nimbleness cluster that we pass by at witch, giving us +4% movespeed and +12% cast speed. We get lots of evasion out of this boot as well (again, derived move speed). More importantly, though, it also gives us phasing. With a way higher overall movement speed, maintained pierce, and slightly faster casting, it makes it way more viable to run (literally) through packs to only cast Contagion chains and not have to re-cast ED.