[3.4] Zerphi Poet VD - Easiest Uber Elder build - Twinned kill - 20000+ life recovery per sec
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This build is not continued due to Zerpi flask nerf!
Alternative leech based PP VD scion build (10k/s life leech rate, 1M Shaper DPS, 9k life) The below mechanics only worked prior to version 3.5, I'll leave the guide up if someone wants to read it. Videos: Twinned Uber Elder video: https://youtu.be/JFktkwJjdks Deathless Uber Elder video with no legacy gear: https://youtu.be/FCBX27Te238 My very first attempt at Uber Elder in Incursion league: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orbRQw2eXwg (my incursion gear down in "Budget" version) News: 3.4 Delve league: There are no significant changes to the build, works as good as before 2018. 07. 21. update: Changed support gems in weapons and gloves 2018. 07. 11. update: Improved the whole guide with more explanations, details and answers! About the build Poet's Pen + Volatile Dead combo is one of the most mainstream meta builds since it came out, but my build's main focus is defense. Two broad approaches to bossing is damage rush or steady tanking, with the first you focus on highest DPS finishing the fight as quick as possible, you have to dodge mostly all boss attacks and do mechanics to survive, and with the second you aim to tank the bosses, ignore most mechanics, do some damage, do the fight as long as it takes slow and steady. My build is in the second category, but Poet+VD has very good baseline damage, even with cheap gear, so the fights don't take too long at all. Uber Elder, Comparison to other builds Being the hardest fight in the game, Uber Elder has many hard mechanics, projectiles and slams from 2 bosses in the 7-13k damage range mostly from pure physical and pure cold types, two types of ground degens to manage, occasional slowing effect, and boss immunity phases. What really makes it hard to cheese even with 80+% phys reduction and 95-100% cold resistance is Shaper balls having 25% cold penetration, with 97% cold resistance they still deal 3k damage per ball, 3+ balls in a row, so tanking all of that also requires big hp pool and recovery. Popular tanky bossing builds like LL/Life RF or melee Slayer look easy, but you still have to play good and actively dodge mechanics to survive because they simply don't have as high mitigation + recovery as the Pathfinder and Zerphi combo. My build can face tank all mechanics of the encounter, that's why it is the easiest in the sense that it requires no dodging at all, you just have to stand still, hold right click, and manage flasks and Blood Rage, which can be permanent with enough investment. Being realistic you can still easily die if you miss flask use, so I recommend it only for softcore, but this is as easy as it gets Cost The most required item is the Zerphi flask, around 15-20 exalts in Delve and other leagues without Perandus Zana, the other uniques are cheaper, not entirely mandatory, and you don't need expensive rares. You can make it in about 20-40 exalts total, and it doesn't scale much higher with more. For a build that you can easily farm Uber Elder and any other boss in the game with, it is a good investment. See "budget" version at the bottom. Build mechanics in short Mitigate both elemental and physical damage taken, and heal a lot from Zerphi flask. For elemental mitigation use flasks with maximum resistances, for physical mitigation use modifiers that convert physical damage taken into elemental. Pathfinder regenerates flask charges, and with enough flask modifiers (reduced flask charges used, increased flask charges gained, and flask effect duration) you can keep up your flasks permanently. Gearing in general For Uber elder you need to have a Sapphire flask and Divination distillate for resistances, and at least 50-60% physical mitigation, for which the easiest choice is Lightning coil and Taste of Hate, but you can stack anything that gives the same modifier. Aim to have around 6500 life. You need to have a Kaom's roots because it makes you immune to slows in the fight. On the gloves you should get support gems that increase the mana cost of your attack, granting more heal, and 3-4 Fevered mind jewels for the same reason. On all other items you need high rolled flat life, resistances enough to cap without flasks, and lastly any source of damage for VD (fire, elemental, spell, area). Xoph's blood, VD helmet enchant, and penetration Watcher's Eye are not necessary, they don't enable anything, only make the fight faster thus easier. Gear used in Deathless Uber Elder video (recommended for most safety): I have different gear for mapping at the bottom! I didn't make use of the 5th flask slot in the video, you can put a second Taste of Hate for easier uptime. Kaom's roots makes you stun immune and even Elder can't slow you down, but if you have cooldown reduction boots, you can do it with those too. Legacy 800% Zerphi isn't necessary, once you regen 20000/s+, which you can easily do with a lower roll, you need to focus on damage reduction. You ideally want Opal rings with Fire damage, like the ones below in mapping gear, but I needed to fix my resists. Improvement options: Glove supports are only for highest mana cost, mine is only 110% * 110% * 120%, and you can get Poison support too with 135%, which is more ideal. I could get more resistances on helmet, to get more life and damage from rings. On belt cooldown recovery and one flask mod is the most important, after that highest life and possibly a second flask mod (duration). If you are on standard get legacy items (Zerphi, Coil, ToH). Stats: lvl95 6706 Life 4.37 attacks per second 336 mana cost 838% of mana cost gained as life (54% increased flask effect) 26% life recovery rate from Watcher's Eye, and 50% from pantheon 20 187 life recovered per second maximum (after 4 seconds of consecutive attacking) 31% physical damage taken as cold (ToH with flask effect) 30% physical damage taken as lightning (L. Coil) 34% Fire penetration 24 585 damage per ball from ingame tooltip with EO (23109 against shaper/elder) 129% movement speed PoB (uber elder): https://pastebin.com/vNLSqCNi Tree: http://poeurl.com/b6zE (in case it doesn't load, use PoB or poeplanner) Pantheon: Arakaali with Arachnoxia and Armala, small for clearspeed Garukhan, for tanking Gruthkul Bandit: I recommend 2 passives for boss killing if you need the damage/hp, but I personally chose Kraityn (6% attack/move speed, 3% attack dodge) for clear speed, which you don't really benefit from on bosses. GEAR BREAKDOWN
Spoiler
Weapon: On Poet's pens preferably you want higher attack speed, but it's easy to cap your attack speed to the cooldown, especially without cooldown reduction gear, so it's not important. If you are looking to spend more currency on it you can get 8-10% elemental penetration with corruption which is nice damage but also expensive.
Body armour: Lightning coil gives the easiest physical mitigation, but it has a big negative resistances downside, you can upgrade it if you get a Horror essence crafted rare chest (15% as cold) on a shaper or elder base (another up to 15% as one elemental) If you get physical mitigation elsewhere or you choose to dodge physical attacks in the fight you can use Kaom's heart, which is also better in general for other boss fights. Gloves: An elder gloves can have the most support gems that work with wand attacks (Poison 135%, Faster attacks 120%, Chance to bleed 110%, Faster Projectiles 110%), you can get all 4 at the same time to get the highest base mana cost, and you can still get flat life rolls too, but it can be expensive. Boots: Kaom's roots is the best in slot item for Uber elder fight because it is the only item that can make a Pathfinder immune to Elder's slow attack currently, it gives you stun immunity, and has very high flat life. For other bosses and mapping you can use rare boots with movement speed and cooldown reduction. Belt: The most important mod on belt is Reduced flask charges used which substantially increases your flask uptime, the most important modifier to make your flask uptime permanent. Secondly you want high flat life, and if your budget allow either Cooldown recovery speed on a shaper belt base (gives dps), or Life recovery rate on an elder belt base (gives more heal). Lastly you want either flask effect duration or a resistance if needed. Flasks: Aside from the above explained Zerphi, Taste of Hate and Divination Distillate flasks, you want an Overflowing Chalice to maximise the uptime of your other flasks and get a nice damage boost as well, and for last slot you can choose anything to your preference, quicksilver, wise oak etc. Wise oak: You can only benefit from Wise oak if either all of your resist are equal, or your Fire is the highest, and Cold is the lowest, because you need the penetration for fire, and for Uber elder you need the cold reduction. Because we also use Taste of Hate, it can make the cold resist really high. In the Twinned video and my regular mapping gear I simply have very low cold resist without flasks (14%) which is very risky, and only ToH makes it equal with the other 2 resists. In the deathless video I made all resists capped without flask, which is safer, and removed Wise. Amulet: Xoph's Blood is usually the best you can get because of the ash debuff it puts on enemies (20% DPS boost and slows), but also currently a bit overpriced, so this is one of the last item you should upgrade to, otherwise you can be fine with a rare amulet with life, spell/fire damage or resistances. Jewels: You need at last 3-4 Fevered mind jewels for high mana cost, and a Conqueror's Potency (increasing flask effect from 46% to 54% gives you +2% maximum resistances from sapphire and distillate flasks!). Watcher's eye jewel + Auras: You should only use Vitality or Anger if you have a Watcher's eye jewel with the matching mod, otherwise you can use Herald of Ash, Arctic Armour, or Purity. Watcher's Eye is not necessary but nice to have, Useful Watcher's eye mods in order of importance, look for the best you can afford: (20-30)% increased Life Recovery Rate while affected by Vitality Damage Penetrates (10-15)% Fire Resistance while affected by Anger Any purity mod that gives Physical->Elemental conversion (40-60)% increased Fire Damage while affected by Anger (6-10)% chance to Dodge Attacks while affected by Grace +(5-8)% chance to Evade Attacks while affected by Grace (10-15)% increased Movement Speed while affected by Grace Do not use (50-70)% increased Life Recovery from Flasks while affected by Vitality, it doesn't work with Zerphi, I tested it myself. Helmet: The +1 VD enchant boosts your dps by 33%, so it is very good, but also expensive and not mandatory. In incursion you can get temple drops with 10% phys taken as elemental. On rings and helmet get high life and resistances to cap you without flask preferably, and spell/fire/elemental damage if you can afford. GEM BREAKDOWN
Spoiler
Main attack: Frenzy can generate frenzy charges and cap your attack speed the easiest (more dps, so it's preferred). Power siphon gives culling strike if you don't have already and generates power charges to easier proc elemental overload. Kinetic blast has the highest mana cost, only use it if you can't get enough with the others.
Blood magic and GMP are always best for highest mana multiplier, and Life gain on hit has nice utility. You can use faster attacks if you don't have it on gloves. You can use multistrike on Frenzy for even higher multiplier. Mana depletion: There are currently 3 ways to drain your mana to keep up Zerphi and Divination Distillate flask, and all have up/downsides: Blood Rage: - It gives just a little degen that you can outheal with base life regen, and the 30% taken from mana drains 100-140 mana with 6-8k life, which is usually a bit more than what the Zerphi refills. When you also activate Distillate the degen is usually not enough, so you have to stand in damage to keep up Zerphi (+management, but usually not an issue in uber elder fight) - Doesn't work early game when you have lower life, because it can't outdegen the mana recovery - Has a several seconds duration, needs re-activating manually or by CWDT (+management) - Physical mitigation (not the conversions, but traditional mitigation like endurance charges, immortal call, or basalt flask) - Gives attack speed and frenzy charges - If comboed with CWDT Immortal Call it can automatically trigger Arakaali->Arachnoxia pantheon (+50% heal rate!) Righteous Fire: - It degens a lot of life, you constantly have to keep attacking and using Zerphi, but it always outdegens any mana gain - Permanent uptime, no re-activation required - Lowers your heal by 500-1500 per second - Huge DPS boost - Vaal RF another huge DPS boost - Can't use recovery pantheon Omeyocan Carnal Boots (not recommended for uber elder): - An incursuon-specific unique item that constantly drains 7% of maximum mana, easily outdegening any mana gain - No life is degened - Can spec out of MoM passive - No management required at all - Has no life or cooldown reduction - Can't use Kaom's Roots (this is the main reason I don't recommend it) I recommend either RF or BR, both have upsides, RF is faster and easier because less management, but with BR you can have much higher heal rate. CWDT+Immortal call combo is only required in combination with Blood Rage to proc the Arakaali->Arachnoxia pantheon (+50% heal rate!), otherwise the phys immunity is not reliable during Uber Elder fight. Auras: You should only use Vitality or Anger if you have a Watcher's eye jewel with the matching mod, otherwise you can use Herald of Ash, Arctic Armour, or Purity. See useful watcher's eye mods above under gear breakdown. Volatile Dead supports: Concentrated effect is always best for bosses, the less aoe downside doesn't effect bossing speed. For the other support I recommend Elemental Focus, but keep in mind using that you will get less flask charges killing monsters (with pathfinder Veteran Bowyer) Unearth supports: GMP always required to provide enough corpses for VD. Combustion applies -19% fire resistance debuff on bosses globally (affects VD) Zerphi mechanics in general: Zerphi’s Last Breath is a mana flask, so naturally it’s effect would end when you reach full mana, but since 3.0 Mind over Matter applies to Damage over Time effects, so you can consistently keep your mana depleted by running Blood Rage or Righteous Fire. Since your mana pool is depleted and you need something for the Mana cost healed as life mod, you have to use Blood Magic to use skills, which still works with the flask. You cannot use the BM keystone because it removes the whole mana pool, thus you can’t activate mana flasks, leaving you with the BM support gem as a drawback, but you can kinda bypass that if you use a staff/mace with the vagan lvl1 BM support mod, a Covenant body armour, or separate trigger socket groups (Poet's Pen). You can use any spell/attack that spends mana except channeling skills. Changes in 3.2 patch: " This means your heal has a 4 second build up time until it becomes maximized, so you have to know when you gonna take damage and start attacking a few seconds before, or just keep constantly attacking/casting. Also if you use blood magic you drop some amount of life at the start, so thats when you are the most vulnerable. You can build up your heal effect before boss fights so you won't be vulnerable when you enter, and you will keep regening if you stop attacking for a few seconds when you move around, or get stunned. There is no cap to the amount healed, you just have to scale the stats it relies on: mana cost, attack/cast speed, flask effect, life recovery rate. You can scale flask effect from skill tree at witch's region, going pathfinder, using the unique Potency jewel, or an Elder belt. You can scale life recovery rate by choosing the Arakaali pantheon with the Arachnoxia extension and having a CWDT Immortal call to proc it, or you can use an Elder belt with life recovery, or a Watcher's Eye jewel with Vitality aura mod, or having Trickster ascendency node. You can stack mana cost by having elder/shaper items with extra supports, or just choosing the highest mana cost supports in your 6L, using several Fevered Mind jewels or other sources of increased mana cost. Pure mana based Zerphi setups are possible, they are very different from what I showcase here, and those would need to balance mana usage to not get full mana nor empty mana too long, and overall need very high mana recovery investment and more attention to keep up the mechanic. Gear progression: Cap your attack speed for your cooldown first, try to get some cheap cooldown reduction gear, this helps the most on clear speed while leveling, then focus on defences, because VD has a very high baseline DPS with even low investment, and once you have high life gear you can upgrade into more DPS for faster boss kills, stacking penetration, getting triple wise oak resist balance, and good opals. Helmet enchant is very good for both clear speed and single target, so early on get one as soon as you can, even if it's a bad base/unique, and replace it later. Leveling: I recommend leveling with 2 Poet's pens and any spell that you like (try Arc, Glacial Cascade, Bladefall) in one wand and Unearth + Bodyswap in the other wand. Also check out the recent Build of the week which is similar to my build. How to play the fight, flask management If you got the necessary stats to facetank the most important thing is flask management, it is the only thing you always have to play good during the fight, but it is also the only thing you do, so it is not difficult, just needs some practice. Just stand in your hideout, activate your flasks and try to keep up them as long as you can, preferably at least for 1 minute. Look for the flask duration markers under the flasks and try to re-activate only when there is a little bit left of the duration. If you choose to tank everything then you don't even have to look at the fight, only make your flask press timings perfect and move your cursor around a bit. If you can't keep up your flasks long enough, make sure you have enough flask modifiers, you need at least a "Reduced flask charges used" mod on belt, but you can also get "Flask effect duration" If you still die with flasks up you can do 2 things: Improve your gear's defensive part, make sure to have enough life, maximum resistances, physical mitigation and heal amount. Try to dodge the shaper balls manually, these do the highest damage in the fight, but they are the easiest to avoid by moving around a little bit, which can make the fight much easier. Facetanking everything however spectacular is not the safest strategy, the more attacks you dodge manually the safer you will be, but don't neglect your flask management! Questions and answers
Spoiler
Why not using Indigon Hubris Circlet?
It doesn't work with Blood Magic, and it requires a lot of mana investment, it can give a lot of damage, but it makes the build less tanky, so I didn't use it in this build. I tried it out on an other character, but I felt it inconsistent, so I didn't continue yet: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2118987 Why not using Bodyswap? At bosses you shouldn't use it because you lose DPS with it. Poet's pen alternates between socketed gems when you have more than one, so when you have Unearth, GMP, Bodyswap, you only create 5 corpses every 2 attacks, or average 2.5 per attack, but you still cast VD at every single attack, requiring 3 (4 with enchant) each. You can fix it with a Dying Sun, but you don't get much else from it, so in my opinion not worth it. It can help a bit in the Uber Elder fight to avoid attacks, but you will eventually get hit by some big ones, so you should aim to be able tank them. Arctic Armour also works while bodyswapping, I tested it. When just mapping Bodyswap is still fine anyway, because you get a lot of corpses from the map monsters and you can gain clear speed with it. Why not using The flow untethered? Not recommended because the buff the Harbinger gives can ruin your cooldown at optimal attack speed. In my test it started skipping every second cast of the socketed spells while I had the buff effectively halving my DPS, and I had no skipping without the buff, altough few players reported they didn't experience any skipping at all, so you can try it, but carefully test it if you are skipping casts or not. Also it has no life and flask mods, which are more important than life recovery rate and attack speed, so you should always aim for a rare belt once you can afford it. How to calculate life heal amount? You multiply your tooltip mana cost, your zerphi heal number, your flask effect modifiers, your life recovery rate modifiers minus your mana cost again because of blood magic, and finally multiply with your attack rate In my example above: 336 mana cost * 544% of mana cost gained as life with 54% increased flask effect with 76% life recovery rate (26% watchers eye + 50% pantheon) minus 336 blood magic cost lastly multiplied by 4.37 attacks per second (336 * 8.38 * 1.76 - 336) * 4.37 = 20187 What is an attack speed cap? How to calculate it? Poet's Pen put's a base 250ms (0.25 seconds) cooldown on the socketed spells, so by default in theory you could activate them 4 times per second. Altough in practise it works only with attacks that are somewhat slower than the actual cooldown, otherwise it starts skipping casts. There is no exact formula for calculation, it can also depend on your internet latency. You should always test your own attack speed and see if it skips casts or not. In my tests without cooldown reduction gear 3.77 attacks per second is the highest that works with the base 250ms cooldown. Can this build kill Uber Atziri? I didn't try it yet on this build, but I will sometime. I will have to swap out VD for other spells at Atziri mirror clone, like Firestorm and Glacial Cascade with cold to fire. Defences are enough as is, anything is tankable except double Flameblast. I already recorded a run in 3.1 with Blade Vortex Zerphi, and I got a lot tankier since then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6kyGkXGOBc Can I do this build with a different class? You must have automatic flask recharge during boss fights without killing monsters, so the only other option is Scion-pathfinder, which has the same flask regeneration, but you will miss flask effectiveness, uptime, and ailment immunity, making you less tanky, but if you already have a scion you can give it a try. Pathfinder is currently one of the best classes in the game imo because it has the highest flexibility in the entire game through easily swapping flasks to any need, any boss, you can alter it from being tanky to being high dps or high clear speed, making it the best allarounder class. Why not going crit? Going crit could only yield more damage than Elemental Overload if you sacrifice survivability, which is not the focus of the build. My Zerphi flask doesn't work or it deactivates, what to do? First read the gem breakdown and Zerphi mechanics sections above, then check how your mana behaves. If you have this problem you probably only use Blood Rage to degen your mana, which can be low enough that your mana still regens and reaches maximum turning off your Zerphi flask. You can try getting more life or getting rid of any mana/mana regen on your gear, but if it still regens after that then you can try using Righteous Fire instead of Blood Rage. "Budget" version, my gear in Incursion leage
Spoiler
Disclaimer Zerphi's Last Breath price can be very different based on the league, in Flashback leagues where Perandus mod is active it can be 2-5 chaos but in regular Challenge leagues it is usually 500-2000 chaos but this is a Zerphi build, you need to at least get the Zerphi flask, Keep in mind that with cheaper gear your survivability is not guaranteed, so you might need different strategies at Uber Elder, such as move around a bit and dodge attacks manually wow! Video of my very first attempt at Uber Elder in Incursion league: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orbRQw2eXwg My gear used in the video: Stats: lvl92 7506 Life 3.77 attacks per second 515 mana cost 776% of mana cost gained as life (54% increased flask effect) 15 066 life recovered per second maximum (after 4 seconds of consecutive attacking) 37% Fire penetration 31232 damage per ball from ingame tooltip with EO and RF 80% movement speed Overall I used much cheaper gear than my standard league version, aside from Zerphi and Kaom's Heart I only spend 20-50c on each item slot on average. This time I intentionally used a different fight strategy than in the deathless video, I tried to dodge most attacks, to showcase that this way it can be even easier. I almost did the fight deathless, but I tried to facetank the tentacle attacks at the end, which didn't work out with 0% physical mitigation. I didn't use Taste of Hate because I wanted better uptime on my Sapphire flask, so I rolled reduced charges on a blue one, and I was lazy to respec my character to Lightning Coil, so I stayed with Kaoms and chose to dodge all physical attacks manually. My regular bossing/mapping gear: PoB (mapping, variety bossing): https://pastebin.com/fk6JbS5K Stats: 8036 Life 5 attacks per second 336 mana cost 1184% of mana cost gained as life 26% life recovery rare from Watcher's Eye, and 50% from pantheon 32 051 life recovered per second maximum (after 4 seconds of consecutive attacking) 44% physical damage taken as cold (ToH with flask effect) 63% Fire penetration 87/87/87% ele resists -> Wise oak 14% reduced dmg taken from all elements 28 080 damage per ball from ingame tooltip with EO (34541 against shaper/elder) 165% movement speed
Gear used in Twinned Uber Elder video
This part is only a showcase, you don't need this much defense for a regular Uber Elder. The gear wasn't fully optimized at that fight, I was in a hurry because I didn't know when they gonna patch the fight, so I had more attack speed than the cooldown would allow, so I was losing on some DPS, but I needed to maximize tankiness, so that's why I went with the higher attack speed for more heal. I also missed CWDT Immortal Call which is very important because it turns on the Arakaali pantheon with the Arachnoxia extension which gives a huge amount of heal rate. PoB (twinned uber elder): https://pastebin.com/vAahsHui IGN: Márkusz My builds: thread/1600072 ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) Last edited by Márkusz on Jan 5, 2019, 1:53:37 PM Last bumped on Jun 17, 2019, 8:52:09 PM
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Zerphi balanced though?
Fake Temp League Elitists LUL
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What hath God wrought
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good job gettin that up quick, u da best
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GG man you set the standard
kids https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbFE90QKJIw
vs adults https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzysxHGZCAU 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 business a-blazing but no more t-shirts | |
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i am not sure if it viable for hc
ign: PlasticSupporter
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next patch> zerphi flask kills for you.
This is a nerf. Poe Pvp experience
https://youtu.be/Z6eg3aB_V1g?t=302 | |
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GG
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your taste of hate seems to be ruining wise oak firepen not sure if you changed something recently
also good job | |
" PoB shows it wrong, ingame I definitely have enough fire resist, and it shows correct penetration too IGN: Márkusz My builds: thread/1600072 ( •_•)>⌐■-■ (⌐■_■) Last edited by Márkusz on Mar 7, 2018, 1:01:25 PM
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