[3.1] Detonate Dead - Poet's Pen & QotF Pathfinder - Uberlab farmer + 15+ maps down
 Hello and welcome to my first ever guide for Path of Exile. My name is pietjanssen and I have been playing Path of Exile since 2013. I recently hit my 1k hours played milestone on Steam and so I've wanted to share one of my recently made succesful uberlab farmers. Have you always wanted to do Uberlab, but also wanted to do some mapping? Well, look no further, because this is probably one of the most versatile characters I've played. Be sure to follow My twitch channel to check out my other builds and gameplay. How it works In patch 3.1, the newly added Poet's Pen caught my eye once I realised it's potential. "Trigger a socketed spell when you attack? That's amazing!" This build revolves around using a Poet's Pen to spam Frenzy and casting Unearth + Detonate Dead while you're at it. Pro's & Con's + Fast movement speed thanks to QotF (300%+) + Ridiculous Flask uptime + Ranged + Aesthetic - Evasion based - Trouble finding damage - Not resistant to bleeds Required Gear
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Obviously, you need two Poet's Pens. (Note that I have one with a white socket. This is handy since it can help you with trying out other gems, like I have.) To get the incredible movement speed I claimed was possible, you will need the Queen of the Forest chestpiece. "1% Increased Movement Speed per 450 Evasion rating, up to 100%" Be careful with the last three words. It's not recommended to keep stacking Evasion up a certain point, since it caps. Good thing about this build is that a 6L is not required AT ALL. To be honest, a 6L doesn't help the build that much like with other builds. Your damage to solely dependent on how fast you shoot with your main attack, Frenzy. Quick maths (Cooldown Recovery Speed)
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The poet's pen both has a cooldown of 250ms. This means that you can't spam your Frenzy too hard, since you will lose dps if you shoot too fast. Luckily there is a way to decrease this cooldown. With the Shaper mods, you can get the line "#% Increased Cooldown Recovery Speed". This effect has diminishing returns, so you can't stack it too high. But with 2 items having Cooldown Recovery Speed you should be able to reduce the Cooldown Time from 0.25 to 0.20. So you should aim towards having a Frenzy attack time of the same as the cooldown time of your Poet's pen skill.  Quick maths (base avg. damage comparison)
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Detonate Dead
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Spell: Level 21 Detonate Dead + 3 levels from Poet's Pen = 1537.5 avg fire damage (1230 to 1845). Spell cascade = 1537.5 * 3 * 0.69 (31% less damage) Conc Effect = 1537.5 * 3 * 0.69 * 1.54 (54% more area damage) = 4901 avg damage per Frenzy attack. + Helmet Enchantment = 45% chance to add another boom = (1537.5 * 3 * 0.69 * 1.54) + (1537.5 * 0.69 * 1.54 * 0.45) = 5636 avg damage per Frenzy attack. Corpse Explosion: Not sure how much HP a Level 83 corpse has (that is lvl 20 Unearth gem + 3 levels from Poet's Pen), but according to PoB a level 80 corpse has 12466 hp, so let's use that to calculate the corpse damage explosion. Level 80 corpse = 6% of 12466 = 12466 * 0.06 = 747.96 avg base damage. Spell cascade = 747.96 * 3 * 0.69 (31% less damage) Conc Effect = 747.96 * 3 * 0.69 * 1.54 (54% more area damage) = 2384 avg damage per Frenzy attack. Helmet Enchantment = 45% chance to add another boom = (747.96 * 3 * 0.69 * 1.54) + (747.96 * 0.69 * 1.54 * 0.45) = 2742 avg damage per Frenzy attack. total: 4901 + 2384 = 7285 avg damage per Frenzy attack. or total with enchantment: 5636 + 2742 = 8378 avg damage per Frenzy attack. (Correct me if I'm wrong here) Volatile Dead
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Volatile Dead base damage: Level 21 Volatile Dead + 3 level from Poet's Pen = 969 avg fire damage (775 to 1163) * 3 (balls). Ele focus = 969 * 3 * 1.49 (49% more ele damage) Conc effect = 969 * 3 * 1.49 * 1.54 (54% more area damage) = 6670 avg damage per Frenzy attack. + Helmet Enchantment = add another boom = 969 * 4 * 1.49 * 1.54 = 8894 avg damage per Frenzy attack. Corpse Explosion: Not sure how much HP a Level 83 corpse has (that is lvl 20 Unearth gem + 3 levels from Poet's Pen), but according to PoB a level 80 corpse has 12466 hp, so let's use that to calculate the corpse damage explosion. Level 80 corpse = 3% of 12466 = 12466 * 0.03 = 373.98 avg base damage. Ele focus = 373.98 * 3 * 1.49 (49% more ele damage) Conc Effect = 373.98 * 3 * 1.49 * 1.54 (54% more area damage) = 2574 avg damage per Frenzy attack. + Helmet Enchantment = add another boom = 373.98 * 4 * 1.49 * 1.54 = 3433 avg damage per Frenzy attack. total: 6670 + 2574 = 9244 avg damage per Frenzy attack. or total with enchanement: 8894 + 3433 = 12327 avg damage per Frenzy attack. Shotgun mode
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It is possible to stack a certain number of Volatile Dead balls before a fight begins. This is called "shotgunning". Using this method and having enough damage modifiers it's possible to one-shot a boss. To calculate the avg damage of a shotgun, we have to use the amount of time a ball stays alive, my own findings tell me it's around 5 seconds, and then calculate that with how many balls you can spam within that 5 seconds. There doesn't seem to be a cap of the maximum amount of life balls there can be. Because Poet's Pen has a cooldown of 0.25 seconds, we can safely say you can have up to 3 * 4 * 5 = 60 balls alive at a time. Lowering the cooldown using Cooldown Recovery Speed, it's possible to lower it at a reasonable 0.20 seconds, which is in total 75 balls alive. Adding the helmet enchantment we can add another ball to every attack, so it becomes 100 balls alive. 1 ball deals 2223 avg base fire damage from our calculation above. 60 * 2223 = 133380 avg BASE fire damage. 75 * 2223 = 166725 avg BASE fire damage. 100 * 2223 = 222300 avg BASE fire damage. (Correct me if I'm wrong. This also assumes ALL balls hit the same target.) Skill Gems
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Poet's Pen #1
This is a required gem setup to make your corpses for the other Poet's Pen Unearth - GWP - Culling Strike Poet's Pen #2 You got some options here. You either go Detonate Dead for faster clear or Volatile Dead to "shotgun" bosses. I prefer Detonate Dead over Volatile Dead since it has more raw damage. Detonate Dead - Spell Cascade - Elemental Focus (Or Conc) OR Volatile Dead - Conc - Elemental Focus You can also try: Bodyswap - Conc - Elemental Focus (This makes your map clearing extremely easy, but also risky) Gryphon For navigation, I use Flame Dash in my 2nd slot weapon. Flame Dash - Faster Casting - Culling Strike Chest In order to use the Poet's Pen effectively, we want something to shoot with. On the wiki you can find that there are 7 attacks useable by a wand. Of these 7 only one is actually good, Frenzy. This gem setup is not the main damage for the build, so don't bother trying to use Barrage or Kinetic Blast. Frenzy is actually really good, since it generates frenzy charges for free. Frenzy - GWP - Curse on Hit - Flammability (or Warlord's Mark) - Faster attacks - Chain Gloves For the Gloves I use a simple CwdT setup. CwdT - Immortal Call - Increased duration - Summon Fire golem (This golem provides the biggest boost to our damage) Boots Phase run makes it alot easier to navigate through groups of enemies blocking your way in the Labyrinth. Enhance increases the Quality of Phase run, which increases your overall movement speed. Phase Run - Faster Casting - Increased Duration - Enhance Ring Grace Helmet For the gem setup in the helmet it depends on what helmet we take (See "Current Gear" for more info) Orb of Storms - PCoC - Increased Critical Strikes - Increased duration OR Physical to Lightning Support - Added Fire damage - GWP Current Gear
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Weapons
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Other than the Poet's Pens, I use a Gryphon to navigate quickly through the lab with an Evasion shield for more movement speed. Helmets
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Devoto's Devotion -> More movement speed for faster navigation Rat's Nest -> More damage for faster Izaro and boss kills Lightpoacher -> Amazing map clear Aim for getting Evasion rating on rings and jewels so you can actually cap out your Queen of the Forest. I haven't done it perfectly, but I am capped out. Flasks
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Atziri's Promise OR The Wise Oak You can either go Atziri's Promise (<-- Cheap) OR go The Wise Oak and balance your resistances. Damage wise, it's the same. Incredible movement speed boost thanks to Pathfinder. To hit the QotF movement cap, I use 1 Stibnite flask to max out. Passive Tree
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Currently level 90 PoB Pastebin Leveling Equip your Poet's Pens as fast as you can. These puppies are amazing to level with. Just go with Unearth and Detonate dead from the start and you'll blast through all leveling content. Work your way towards the Health near the Marauder. ~Level 20 Take the Marauder health for a huge survivability boost. ~Level 40 Flask duration nodes are really important and strong. Mind over Matter helps with the survivability. ~Level 60 Take more Evasion and start building some small crit. ~Level 80 Play style 1. Keep your distance - Remember, you're Evasion based. You can't tank big hits. 2. Abuse your range. 3. Hold Right mouse button for maximum damage. Media
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 Defense + Movement speed (Fully buffed) Videos This build is losely based on Jelbishi's build for farming Uberlab Last edited by pietjanssen#0614 on Feb 15, 2018, 9:49:12 AM Last bumped on Mar 20, 2018, 6:01:24 AM
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hi, trying to follow this today is it really necessary to have a cooldown recovery speed? prices for that are holy cow,10ex cheapest for the belt
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" Hey, nice to see someone is interested in this build! To answer your question I don't think it's necessary to get cooldown recovery. It's just that it adds alot of dps if you can afford it. I mean think about it. Triggering your spells 5 times/s instead of 4 times/s means you basically deal 25% MORE damage. That's alot. The main dps increase though is the head enchancement for Volatile Dead (If you're going that gem instead of Detonate Dead). It adds another ball so instead of 3 that's 4 balls. That's basically 33% MORE damage. That's insane for just 1 enchancement. They're insanely expensive though. What did you think of the build so far? Last edited by pietjanssen#0614 on Feb 13, 2018, 11:18:52 AM
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you literally copied Jeli's tree without really understanding why he did certain things.
The duration nodes were so that the blade vortex stays on 20 stacks for the maximum time possible, however on your build the only thing duration will effect is the phase run duration. just 1 duration node is all you need to have phase run's cooldown be shorter than it's active time (100% phase run up time if you keep recasting). However, if you're not full lab running you don't need the duration at all (as moving TOO fast has always been a problem with taking a lab farmer into maps, flasks/250ms is good enough for mapping. *edit* does duration effect how long the balls remain? On the shadow side you went through will of blades to get nullification, but you switched your dps from physical to elemental (aka, you have two useless points now) it'd be better to go through coldhearted calculation and remove the 3 points from will of blades. The tooltip dps for this is incredibly low, you may need to revisit the build and try an entirely different tree, not copy a physical/duration build and expect it to work on a poet's pen fire/ele setup. I was interested in trying something other than the boring blade flurry lab runner I do every league, but blade flurry's clocking in 350k boss dps, and this build has 72k boss dps (+46k from corpse explosion, but idea is to kill with balls right?). Maybe the tooltip is wrong since it doesn't count that you can stack 100 balls in the boss room before he spawns. I'd like to see a video of an uberlab run in action (both as volatile dead and detonate dead), otherwise I'm doing blade flurry again zzz. Last edited by Mr_Aek#2486 on Feb 14, 2018, 3:54:16 AM
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" It's true I copied his tree, yes, but in my defence I didn't really wanna change it up alot. (Edit: I might wanna redo my tree. Thanks for the wake-up call) " The reason I still went with the duration nodes was because I didn't like spamming Phase run. I like it having a long duration. " Don't think they do. " True, but it doesn't count alot of modfiers, like how fast it's casting and like you said, "shotgunning" the boss down. The main problem my character has right now is that the boss killing is still a bit tricky, since I don't have the helmet enchantment for Volatile Dead. If I had that, I'm sure I would instantly kill Izaro. I'm using Detonate Dead most of the time, since it instantly kills mobs, and feels alot better to use. Also I feel the raw dps output (if you don't count shotgunning Izaro with Volatile Dead) is higher than spamming Volatile Dead: Detonate Dead dps: Level 21 Detonate Dead + 3 levels from Poet's Pen = 1537.5 avg fire damage (1230 to 1845). Spell cascade = 1537.5 * 3 * 0.69 (31% less damage) Conc Effect = 1537.5 * 3 * 0.69 * 1.54 (54% more area damage) Helmet Enchantment = 45% chance to add another boom = (1537.5 * 3 * 0.69 * 1.54) + (1537.5 * 0.69 * 1.54 * 0.45) = 5636 avg damage per Frenzy attack. (Correct me if I'm wrong here) Volatile Dead dps: Level 21 Volatile Dead + 3 level from Poet's Pen = 969 avg fire damage (775 to 1163) * 3 (balls). Ele focus = 969 * 3 * 1.47 (47% more ele damage) Conc effect = 969 * 3 * 1.47 * 1.54 (54% more area damage) = 6580 avg damage per Frenzy attack. + Helmet Enchantment = add another boom = 969 * 4 * 1.47 * 1.54 = 8774 avg damage per Frenzy attack. (Correct me if I'm wrong. This also assumes ALL balls hit the same target.) EDIT: This is apparantly only true for the initial spell damage. The corpse explosions are 3% of the exploded corpse max hp as fire damage for Volatile Dead and 6% for Detonate Dead. " Might do that in the next few days. Last edited by pietjanssen#0614 on Feb 14, 2018, 6:16:26 PM
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Can you check my char for me? i feel like my damage is really low!, especially with boss!
ty so much https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/BETTERPC/characters |
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Try swapping culling strike for cremation, use a weapon swap have volitile/cremation for bosses and dd/culling strike for trash. You don't need the running swap for mapping.
As I said 1 duration node for phase run is good, I just put phase run in my flask mash, and pop all flasks/ phase between packs. When running lab get phase run duration emchant on helm. Normally pretty cheap. Still, I'd relook at the tree, maybe crit isn't the way to go? What if you went elemental overload and use the rest of the points from crit to stack flat damage abyss jewels with life. Also running a juicy flat ele jewel + anger should be more dps than clearmind, though you sacrafice mom defense unless you used a 2nd essence worm and clear mind. (Use a high res rare helm when using 2 essence worms, and the unique helm with one essence worm for uber) My shitty uberlab bv character was able to farm t16 maps if i swapped to inc aoe rare helm 2 essence worms and a fat spell damage ammy. You can do kinda the same thing, have different gear for lab and maps. Ima play around with non-crit, if we can get the pob dps up to 150-200k boss dps (more than double the current) I can see it as a viable option. |
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" Thank you for being interested in this build! I've updated the skill tree a little bit, since yesterday: I opted out of Skill effect duration, because of Mr_Aek's comment. Instead I invested in using Elemental Equilibrium and some nodes into elemental damage. I also swapped 1 jewel in for the Pure Talent jewel, to make use of the movement speed and base crit it provides. Check out my updated PoB for reference. Have you checked out my Youtube video yet? You can compare the damage I deal and you can judge for yourself if it's acceptable or not. |
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Thank you for both answers!
feel really good with movespeed but damage is not enough, i can clear tier 9 but very hard to kill bosses because of low damage! i Saw your video and your damage s much better than mine (its took me 2-3 min to kill izaro) I think non crit ver with ele over load will be better, wat do you think? |
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" I don't know. I heard having a crit multiplier of around 300% is enough to make crit viable. Cant tell you where I heard that from, though. Can't remember. If you're going to want to do non-crit, I don't really know yet how to get the best damage. You can't really go low-life, since I'm using Mind Over Matter and an Essense Worm to get some much needed life. You're also gonna have to spec into alot of elemental damage nodes in the tree, probably use Elemental Overload aswell for even more elemental damage. I get around 35% crit chance (or 57% effective crit chance) with my spells, so I think this is viable enough. Since I'm a pathfinder I can always use my Diamond Flask to get alot of crits. " Could you share your PoB once you think you have a good non-crit version? " Getting back to your question, you wanna make sure your Attack Time of Frenzy does not go lower than your Cooldown Time of either Unearth or Detonate/Volatile Dead. You wanna get it to be exactly the same. This way you don't waste attacks by using a whole attack animation of only using a Frenzy attack, because frenzy is not our main damage. Your jewels in your passive tree and your jewel in your belt are also pretty low-tier. You might wanna upgrade those to have either at least 2 of these stats: #% Increased Evasion Rating #% Increased Damage #% Increased Fire damage #% to Critical Strike Multiplier while Dual Wielding #% to Global Critical Strike Multiplier Your ring and amulet are also somewhat low-tier. You might wanna use a good Opal Ring for elemental damage and get #% increased fire damage and crit multiplier. Have you only tried out Detonate Dead or also Volatile Dead? You should try both and see which one you like better. Note that in my build and video I'm using a lvl 21 Detonate Dead and lvl 21 Volatile Dead. That increases my damage by a lot as well. Last edited by pietjanssen#0614 on Feb 15, 2018, 8:23:14 PM
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