[3.3] Death's Oath Trickster | Deathless Shaper + Guardians

Utilizes Mind over Matter and a decent life pool to feel quite tanky while inflicting chaos upon enemies via Death Aura from

And Blight combined with

Abyssal Cry also helps us clear out packs a bit faster, and causes those purple explosions that are pretty much required for this type of build. These explosions are great because they scale with the monster's life, so the higher you go in tiers, the more damage the cry will do!

It basically feels like RF without the constant degen on your character. The damage is slightly lower in its current state, but I think with some min-maxing on jewels/gems the damage would be improved immensely. My goal was to take down Shaper + Guardians Deathless which I did. I also wanted to farm Chayula comfortable with it, but I think more physical damage mitigation is needed.

Currently I have 75% chaos resistance on the character. Even with this much chaos resistance, I felt like I wasn't tanky enough to do Chayula Deathless. I've been racking my brain on how to improve the damage to push Chayula faster, and to find some form of damage mitigation that would help against him.

On the brightside, the chaos res turns incursions into cake walks. I didn't struggle at all, even in higher tier maps. You'll notice in some of the Guardian Clears below in the video section that I fail one or two incursions because the damage wasn't there. Since then, I started to use a Witchfire brew and it's helped quite a bit. I can clear T16s no problem now.

So, if you're looking for a chill character for T16 maps, and a change of pace from RF, you've come to the right place!

Bandits: Kill all

25 Points
49 Points
77 Points
114 Points

You can use whatever caster uniques that apply to level with. It's pretty straight forward. You can try purely casting Blight, or do the old fasion ED/Contagion leveling. These are just basic outlines so feel free to pick up whatever you feel necessary while leveling!

I'd say Weave the Arcane is pretty good for leveling. Most of these will be preference, as they're all quite good for the build as a whole. This is the order I would go:

Weave the Arcane - Patient Reaper - Swift Killer - Prolonged Pain

Trickster gains so much survivability. Most of it comes in the form of Patient Reaper; this nets us percent life and mana recovery on kill, and the 70% recovery for life and mana. This makes our Mind over Matter better, and if we use Vaal Breach correctly during boss fights, it'll save us a lot of headaches. This also gives us an engine for frenzy charges and power charges during bosses.

Pantheons:
Lunaris: physical damage reduction for mapping. Evade chance for projectiles is nice, too, for incursions.

Solaris: this is for bossing only. Just helps to avoid some of those rippy AoE and high physical damaging moves.

Gruthkul: just some more physical damage reduction. Since we have chaos resistance covered on gear, we don't need more of it with Shakari. The improved Pantheon here is also nice for reduction in enemy attack speed.

Efficacy - Arcane Surge(1) - Swift Affliction - Void Manipulation - Inc AoE/Conc - Less Duration

Spell Totem - Wither - Faster Casting

Abyssal Cry - Onslaught - Vaal Breach/Portal

Shield Charge - Fortify - Culling Strike - Faster Attacks

Efficacy - Void Manipulation - Controlled Destruction - Swift Affliction(In Allelopathy gloves)

Temporal Chains - Blasphemy - Enhance - Despair

Death Aura is a bit tricky to understand at a first glace. There are very few modifiers that affect it, so we have to use Arcane Surge simply to give it the "Duration" tag, which allows us to use Swift Affliction and Less Duration. Without Arcane Surge Socketed, neither of these gems would function, and there aren't better option for damage to replace them with.

In regards to Allelopathy gloves, you can swap these out for a Delirium pair. This allows you to drop one of the links such as Swift Affliction for 30% more damage over time, and socket in a Vaal Blight instead of using the 22/0 quality Blight native to Allelopathy. I feel like this is a better option overall because you'll be able to a res or two, plus life on crafted gloves, compared to Allelopathy's 0 max life.

Vaal Breach and Onslaught can be swapped for other things as well. I just think it's a cute way of getting Onslaught. Plus it makes those purple explosions way more delicious.

Chest: Getting 3B 2G 1R is pretty difficult. The best bet if you can't find a good deal on the market for these colors (I consider a decent price to be 2.5-3EX) is to find a decently rolled Death's Oath, and use the Jeweller's Trick. You're looking for life, attack speed, and all attributes in that order for priority.

Jeweller's Trick is the coined term for using Vorici's Bench to get off colors for difficult gear. Here's a video on that from my homeboi Demi.


I went over the glove options in the Skill Setup section, so I'll cover the other stuff here.

Impresence: Super nice since we're Mind Over Matter. This allows us to have Despair up 100% of the time at no cost to our mana reserved. This allows for the build to comfortably reserve mana for Temp Chains and then leave the rest open for Effective HP.

Breath of the Council: Best in Slot. Gives us up to 100% Chaos Damage, duration for Blight, decent attack speed, and InC AoE which is just nice quality of life.

Helmet: This can be any rare that gives life and res's. The enchant helps if you want to push the build further. I like Temp Chains effect or Despair here. Remember to look for EFFECT and not duration when you search for these.

Rings: Nothing special, just life and resistances. Look for chaos resistance if you can, but don't kill yourself doing so.

Boots: Life, resistances, movement speed. Enchant doesn't matter too much, but the life/mana regen is probably your best bet if you want to min-max.

Shield: Life, resistances.

Belt: When I was crafting on the Elder base, I was shooting for life recovery rate but landed on %maximum health. Both are good, and if you can get them on the same belt you've got it made. It shouldn't made a HUGE impact, but you'll notice it when it counts for sure. Otherwise just shoot for life and resistances.

When crafting up rare gear, some of the slots are Envy craftable. These are essences that give you %chaos resistance for certain slots. The only thing these essences won't apply to are rings; rings give you %chaos damage which is good for the build, but not what you're really looking to use these essences for at first.

It's a bit difficult, but you can manage 75% chaos resistance with a pretty limited budget. You just need a decently leveled Haku and some chaos to purchase some Envy essences with.

Despite already having Despair hooked up to blasphemy, Witchfire brew improves our damage significantly. It's basically like picking the Growth and Decay wheel without the regen. I tested with and without it, and the damage feels so good in T10-16 maps.

Granite + Basalt helps us deal with heavy physical hits which we often struggle with. Chaos isn't an issue, but those poison spitting constructs deal heavy physical, on top of chaos. This combination helps us fight against that, and it's useful against bosses as well.

You can try to get a Spreading Rot Jewel with the mod which makes it so you can't be affected by corrupting blood. This allows you to go Iron Skin or another fancy roll instead of staunching on one of your flasks.

Quicksilver of Warding just helps us get through maps and saves us from rerolling higher tier maps when they get Temp Chains or another annoying curse roll.

For bosses, I swap out the Quicksilver for

This gives us another way to regain our lost health if we can't dodge something.

These allow us to do more single target damage both with our Blight and Death Aura.

Deathless Shaper
Deathless Phoenix
Deathless Hydra
Deathless Chimera
Deathless Minotaur
Chayula's Domain

I love mapping with this dude. It's so chill and I don't have to worry about dying in T16 maps. Most of the map mods are runnable (I think Cannot Regen is the only true dead mod). So it's nice to chisel and vaal for quantity. On Guardian maps I don't think it would be AS flexible with dangerous mods, but possible for sure. I want to revisit this build once I can afford 21/23 gems to try to push it for a cleaner Chayula Kill. If I can kill Chayula clean, and get the damage a bit higher, I might even go after Uber Elder. Right now, though, I'm keeping it around for random Red Elder and Shaper Kills. If you have any questions regarding the build, feel free to drop a comment below or catch me on Twitch. I stream every day and enjoy answering questions. Hope you guys enjoy the build if you give it a try, and stay safe!