[3.2 kinda] Meatball Mage — Volatile Dead/Cremation Trickster

Another build guide, another food related name. Mmm.

This is a guide for a fairly basic Volatile Dead build with a good mix of damage and tankiness and the ability to do pretty much any content. Berserker is used to grant unconditional life and mana leech to fuel Mind over Matter, as well as a good chunk of damage. I ran this as my starter for Abyss and it's one of the most robust starters I've ever played.

I'm sorry the guide isn't as detailed as it could be, but this is all I have time for right now. I'll try to respond to any posts here, PMs, etc.

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CONTENTS

1. Pros and Cons
2. Skill Tree and Path of Building Import
3. Gear
4. Gems
5. Pantheon
6. Levelling
7. Playstyle
8. Stats
9. Videos



1. PROS AND CONS

Pros:

• Really easy to play. No need to carefully manage buffs or flasks, positioning is just a matter of keeping your distance, and you barely have to aim your skills. Also very forgiving due to being able to facetank most content.
• Great damage. DPS is very hard to estimate due to the mechanics of the skills, but you can get north of 200k Shaper DPS without too much effort and push past 500k with a bit more spending. Boss DPS numbers are very similar to squishier, harder to play crit versions.
• Great AoE coverage. Volatile Dead homes in on enemies from over a screen away. You'll never miss stragglers.
• Tanky. Over 8k EHP, and you're constantly leech capped on both life and mana (even against single targets) due to hitting very frequently. Facetanks most of the game if you so desire, including most bosses up to T15. Can survive all guardian skills except for Phoenix Discharge.
• Can do just about all content. Have to avoid ele reflect and no-leech maps, and slower recovery can be annoying for hard bosses. Have personally done Atziri, all Guardians, Elder, Vaal Temple, etc with ease. Should be fine for Shaper (but I suck at Shaper so cannot confirm). Would not recommend for Uber Atziri due to Volatile Dead's target splitting mechanics making split phase awkward.
• Easy to gear. No uniques required or even strongly recommended, completely SSF viable, can do well on a budget.
• This can be a pro or a con depending on your opinion, but plays differently to most builds in that you don't just hold down one button. You have to use three different skills in combat, and none of them are particularly spammable.

Cons:

• Clear speed is fine but not great. Have to use two skills to kill a pack in most cases. Somewhat made up for by having long range homing missiles seeking out packs that you aren't focusing on, but obviously not a top tier clear speed build.
• This can be a pro or a con depending on your opinion, but plays differently to most builds in that you don't just hold down one button. You have to use three different skills in combat, and none of them are particularly spammable.
• Can't do ele reflect and no-leech maps.
• Can't really do Uber Atziri, and a poor choice for Uber Lab farming as you will almost always accidentally destroy Izaro's helpers and lose keys.
• Can't use Volatile Dead for early levelling like other variants can. Have to wait until level 40+.

2. SKILL TREE AND PATH OF BUILDING IMPORT

Firstly, kill all bandits.

The final level 90 skill tree looks like this.

Levelling tress look something like this:

27 points
48 points
66 points
92 points

Path of Building data for a cleaned-up version of my actual character: https://pastebin.com/9qMnhCB9.

If you don't know what Path of Building is, learn all about it here.



3. GEAR

Note: Don't pigeonhole yourself into one of these tiers forever. You can start off with low budget gear, farm up some currency and then buy better gear, and so on.




4. GEMS

All gems should be levelled to 20 unless otherwise specified.




5. PANTHEON

Every major god has potential usefulness to the build. However, I would suggest either Lunaris for the clear speed bonus, or Arakaali for the regen trick. Specifically, if you use CwDT Blood Rage + Immortal Call, you can trigger the "stopped taking damage over time" part pretty easily, and boost your leech rate by 50%! Plus frenzy charges are cool.

For minor gods, either Garukhan for the speed or Shakari for poison immunity. Nothing too exciting.



6. Levelling

Here are the levelling trees again:

27 points
48 points
66 points
92 points
Final

In terms of skills, I found VD a bit weak early, particularly because we pick up very few damage nodes early. Would not recommend until you are level 40-50 and can put it on at least a 4L. Until then I just used Sunder + Ancestral Protector, but if you want to stay as a caster I would recommend Firestorm + Flame Totem. And make sure to kill all bandits!



7. Playstyle

Best way to get an idea of the playstyle is to watch the video below. However, a few tips from my experience with the build so far:

• Drop your corpses under mobs if possible! The corpse explosion damage is very significant, and can often one-shot packs if you stack enough elemental damage.
• Try to chain VDs when you can, but don't worry too much about it. It can often be quicker to Desecrate under a pack and blow them up than wait for the VDs from your last pack to hit them.
• In breaches, abysses and similar situations you can often forget about Desecrate and just spam VD. It's glorious.
• Spell Cascade repeats in a line out from you. If you want to cluster Cremations on top of each other, cast Cremation at a 90° angle to your Desecrate and they will stack up nicely.
• Don't forget that Cremation is there to proc Elemental Overload as well as deal damage. It's very important to keep it running while doing bosses.
• Cremation is not just for bosses! It's great for abysses, and even for packs in very confined spaces when you know they won't move much.
• You benefit hugely from having setup time. Cremations last 8 seconds and VD balls maybe 5. Whenever you can (e.g. strongboxes, phased bosses, bosses with a small aggro range), try to have your Cremations running and some VD balls waiting before you start the fight. Check out the video below to see this used to great effect against Dominus' second phase.
• You have to cast two spells to deal damage against a fresh pack, and your stun immunity is only if you've killed recently. Be careful about wading into packs and getting stunlocked.

8. Stats



9. Videos

T14 Palace Run — Likely the only video I'll ever record due to time constraints. At least you get to watch the build's boss deletion in action — for context, each phase of Palace Dominus has about 2.5 million life.


Thank you for reading! I hope this guide is useful and you enjoy the build.

"

I_K_S wrote:

Hey man!

First, thank you for this build. I returned in game from a long pause and have had a lots of fun with this build. Just finding helmet to make transition to volatile from sunder.

I have some questions from gems.

In arcane surge you have a mention NOT TO level it over 7, thats pretty clear.
But i was wondering how come you have immortal call on lvl-1? Also you have some others, like gmp which are lvl 17. I quess those are because requirment or that they simply werent full lvl when you made this.

But about that immortal call, is that supposed to let be lvl 1?



And thanks again, this is really really really fun build to play =)