[3.5] League Starter W.O.E Sund Slayer / 35c Day 1 Cost / U-Lab Sprinter / High Damage Mitigation

"

Hemaka1 wrote:

Another drawback is that now we won't be able to take both cull and overleech before uberlab. I guess that will somewhat slow leveling process.

Cull is the important one of those two in terms of running the Uber Lab and you'll get that doing your second Labrynth run towards the end of Act 7, when your around L55-60.

.

Thinking of converting this to a Scion with Slayer/Jugg ascendencies, any thoughts?

"

Megalos wrote:

Thinking of converting this to a Scion with Slayer/Jugg ascendencies, any thoughts?

You should theory-craft it, put it through Path of Building and then let us know the results in detail.

So since were all just killing time waiting for the patch notes, how did the Abyss season go for everyone? Did you meet your league goals or find any interesting new builds?

I ended up sinking a bit of currency into a new build I completely theory-crafted from scratch, based on items dropped during the first month or so of the league & it actually turned out to be the first ever really successful build I made from nothing. I might even use the character this season as my low-level item/currency farmer? Check it out in my profile if you like, the character is called "AbyClawChar" and is a Crit-based Spectral Throw (Templar - Inquisitor) character. I hadn't finished tinkering with it yet, but levelling it from L70-L85 was the fastest I've ever managed with any build. It has amazing speed in flying through and obliterating maps from T1-10. The total build cost was between 2Ex and 3Ex, I think any number of different gloves would actually be better and the build could have it's DPS basically tripled just by getting eDPS based rings and a 6-link Belly, so there's a heap of room for improvement with another 5Ex - 10Ex investment over the course of a league. Alternatively, the build is also perfectly fine running MF rings and a SHaper/Elder amulet with 8% quant too, while keeping a 5-link Belly of the Beast to leave it as a cheap currency farmer.

It went very smoothly for me thanks to this build. A lot more fun and enjoyable than my Harbinger league gameplay. This build certainly did what it advertised and achieved my goals. I am a casual player so I only get on a few times a week. With a bit of luck you can get wealthy in no time. I got lucky at the start of the league and got a Ancestral Warchief enchant (sold for 2ex, I should have sold for more, lesson learnt) and then mid way got a Molten Strike proj enchant (sold for 18ex, cause it is a meta enchant). That net me around 20ex in total.

I started sinking those ex into other builds. I made two, first is a Slayer Shrapnel Shot with Arborix bow, the other is the EK nova with Lightpoacher helm and Inpulsa chest. The Shrapnel Shot feels clunky so I ended up scraping the build. The EK nova feels great and the Lightpoacher helm is just op. And in 3.2, they are buffing it (removed pierce but it can fork or chain!!). I want to improve EK but I ran out of currency because I sunk too much into the Shrapnel Shot character. All in all it was a fun league and I hope this will continue into 3.2. Also, anyone have any idea what build they going to play after some uber lab farming? Because of the Ascendancy changes, builds are getting very interesting and I have no idea what I should try.

PS: Patch Notes are out, I don't see any noticeable nerf to this build, so hooray!

LOL, these are possibly the weirdest patch-notes I've ever seen for a new season from GG. They basically left everything in the game mostly untouched except for a few Ascendancy reworks. They left almost all skills, supports, weapons, jewels and gear completely as is.

So changes to any of our gear, items or skills:
- None at all.

Things to look for this season:
- Abyss cracks are a 10% chance to occur in any map, as is a Breach or Garbinger floating blue turd. Abyssal depths won't spawn in anything less than Tier 3 or higher maps, though. In order to get an Abyss Belt drop, you have to complete the Abyssal Depth & the final drop from that last portal thing that spams yellow bosses will drop a guaranteed belt and jewel.
- GGG will almost absolutely fuck up the shrines in the Lab at the start of the new season (they've done it 4 leagues in a row now), where by they will give no boost, or the wrong boost. While annoying, this will actually give us an advantage, as many players won't run the Uber Lab themselves in the first week until this is fixed unless they can buy an escort to do it for them. So make sure to charge people upwards of 10c per carry, as it will be a premium service in the opening week.
- Map mods have become multiplicative with other map modifiers. This means that map bosses for us are going to hit substantially harder in modded maps than previously and take a bit longer to kill. Your likely going to notice this by the time you hit tier 9 maps, i'd say. Having said that though, we were boosted with a 30% damage boost, so we still come out way on top once properly geared, but it will sting when you first start doing modded maps with low level skill gems and still some levelling gear initially.
- You are now twice as likely to obtain maps you have not yet completed on the Atlas as maps you have. This is intended to help players who choose to play solo complete their Atlas.
- Mob density was nerfed in good maps, slightly buffed in crap maps. So yeah, maps suck even worse now.
- The Vault map was nerfed to the ground.
- A greater variety of Div cards drop in all maps now, valuable Div cards have been shifted to even shitter maps than they were before.
- 27 new prophecies added to the prophecy pool, most if not all are steaming piles of garbage and only further dilute the pool, making it harder to farm for good prophecies.
- Zana Mods for this season:
Level 2 Onslaught: 2 Chaos
Level 3: Bloodlines: 3 Chaos
Level 4: Torment: 3 Chaos
Level 4: Fortune Favours the Brave: 4 Chaos
Level 5: Nemesis: 4 Chaos
level 6: Beyond: 4 Chaos
Level 7: Perandus: 5 Chaos
Level 8: Harbinger: 6 Chaos

So are we going to swap "Soul of Solaris" with "Soul of the Brine King" in Pantheon? Do you think this change (and the ascendency change in 3.2) can have a negative impact on gameplay? This build was my sec char in this game, it was pretty fun.

Are the POB links in you first post updated for use with the updated POB? This build likes like a wonderful sleeper build for this league as everyone obsesses over the new totem builds.

I would love to try this build out, but I rely heavily on POB as I am still very much a newb.

It might be a little late, but here's my experience with this build in Abyss League (softcore):

I used this build as my leaguestarter. I planned to grind (Uber)lab early in the league, as you suggested. My goal was to farm currency to fund my other builds.

Leveling was fast and easy. Had a couple of random deaths on the way, mostly because of low defences/res/life. Kitava was a bigger issue, died more than ten times during that battle.

During the first two weeks of Abyss League i did not have the time to play more than an hour daily on average. The positive effect of this was that the build's key items were very cheap at the time i bought them. The only two things I remember spending more than 3c on was a Well rolled Rumi's for 8c and a somewhat usable Carnage heart for 18c (carnage heart's price was rising at the time i bought it, probably due to many players rerolling their chars/ leveling alternative chars and the Vaal Pact changes).

Making money from the lab did not work as good as i expected. Grabbing that lootchest in the first area did not pay out for me (did this in Merc lab). For me, running T1 maps was more rewarding (and fun) than that. A couple of 4+ key Merciless Izaro kills only rewarded me with a few sellable gems (1alch to 2c at best) and a pretty nice +25% Sunder damage enchant on my BoR. So i tackled Uberlab at lvl 75ish. I had about 4.9k HP at that point (if i'm not remembering that wrong). Argus was no problem at all. But i kept dying to traps and Izaro himself. The traps killed me mostly due to lag. My latency sometimes skyrocketed near traps for whatever reasons (especially the spikes + green circle aura thingies made my game lagy as hell). Oftentimes the overleech from killing the flask worms ended while smaller game freezes got me stuck in traps. And without the bleed immunity i could count down the seconds to my death. If i was lucky enough to get to the final Izaro fight, i was oneshoted several times. Enduring cry and a basalt flask instead of the quicksilver flask did not help (looking back i'm sure the problem was that Izaro sucked on the days i had time to play). On top of that came the many crashes PoE had in early 3.1. And each death/gamecrash meant an offering wasted. I had to farm offerings in maps because buying them (about 4c at the time) would have been a flat currency loss. Selling the offerings would have been more rewarding than a crashed lab run. In total it felt like i was only able to finish the Uberlab for about 10-20 times (might have been more). Only drops worth to mention was an Abyssus, which was at 8c at the time, a few offerings and some midnight fragments. Enchantments were meh.
To summarize it: Uberlab was frustrating as hell for me and it did not pay out. So after some low tier mapping, i put this build aside and leveled a TS/BA Raider build for content clearing (this was during christmas holiday time).

In late january i gave this build and Uberlab another chance, since the constant crashes were fixed. AND IT WORKED LIKE A CHARM. I had no problems with traps (my strategy for spikes traps: weapon swap to WoE because higher damage per hit = longer overleech, kill flask worms, weapon swap back to Brightbeak and go for it). Now with lvl 86 and 5.4k HP Izaro, of corse, was easier too. I avoided running clunky Uberlab layouts and nasty Izaro buffs (shoutout to poelab). I did not hit any good helm enchants (except for the +40% EK damage on a lightpoacher i got a few days ago, while practicing my lab skills) but i got some pretty nice leveled quality gems (a fair amount of them sold for 20+ cahos and that was late in the league).

And another VERY IMPORTANT THING i was not aware of: IZARO PHASES aka the reason he stops taking damage for quite some time during the fist two encounters. I might simply have overread it in your build guide or it is not mentioned. I'll write this down beause it might help some people: Once you bring Izaro down to 2/3 (1/3) of his health, he goes back to his pit and you can progress through the lab. BUT when there is one of his buffs (gargoyles etc.) rising from the ground, he keeps fighting until the spawning animation of that buff is completed. At that point your flasks might be empty. So with much lower evasion/block chance it worked better for me to gain distance/ leap slam away and let him hit my warchief totem until the buff spawning-animation is done (before that i kept hitting him, thinking i had to deal a little more damage to make him go back to his pit).


Maping with this build however was quite fun. Especially Lookout, where the enemies were standing in line to be crushed by Sunder. Brightbeak did a good job on clearing (the insane attack speed scales so well with the flat added damage from abyss jewels). WoE was used for bosses/hard Rares/Abysses/Breaches. And even in T12+ alch and go maps i was able to do bosses without dying.
Funny side note: after a Zana rotation i ended up in someone else's map. It was Lair map with the Rigwald based boss. Since everybody else left, including the map maker and there were more portals left for him to reenter, i decided to clear the map. It had a couple of mods on it, which i don't remember. My level was in the low 70s and my gems were around lvl 18/19 with no or little quality. I died to the boss when i got him close to culling range. When i later tried to finish that map for my atlas i wasted almost all the portals of 3 WHITE maps to the boss. At that time my level was in the mid 80s and my gems were at lvl 17/18 with 20% quality on each. I had more DPS and more life in an easier version of the map and performed way worse. It bugs me until this day that i don't know why this happened or why i did perform so well at a lower level in a harder map.


Also: permanent attack in place (via the numlock trick or macro) made the build feel way smoother to me, especially moving with Leapslam.


Conclusion:

I had my highs and lows with this build in Abyss league. But it is a solid leaguestarter and tomorrow i'll start Bestiary league with this exact build again. I just hope to have better luck in Uberlab this time^^.


@Adam
Thank you for this build guide. What you did with Nathan's (i think he goes by the name Jelbishi in this forum) short Viedo guide is overwhelming. You did a great job on the structure of this guide. It's easy to find the sections i'm looking for. Also the sections are well thought, esecially those which go beyond the actual build (the lab farming/currency making advice for example). I really love the fact that you kept the guide updated every now and then. And i'm happy to know that you will continue to do so.


Oh and i might miss some letters in the text. I blame my keyboard.