[3.7] Agony Deliverance Tank. Bosses evaporated by scorpion friend

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djnat wrote:

Ok, this league I took a different approach, I wanted to take the build to pretty solid damage numbers while mantaining decent tankiness and clear capabilities.

This is the final result. Gear is near to min-maxing and at this point all upgrades, even small ones, would cost multiple exalts to achieve. But I think they are not necessary at all.

My fossil crafted lion pelt is the one I used when my crawler was still bi-elemental, but it's still good at the moment even if I went the cold route.

Changes I ran on the "base version" of the character:

- Quad curse
- Deathmark replaces PtL support gem, it's insane on metamorph bosses and in all endgame fights
- Golden rule, it makes virulence ramp up faster and it makes the worst map affix for the build (80% poison chance reduction at awakened level 8) slightly more manageable on single / dual target fights. It also adds corrupted blood immunity with the right corruption and tons of free chaos resistance when you really need it (i.e. chaos packs in Alva's incursions, hunter influenced maps, Chayula pure breachstones).
- Rare bow, I went for a fossil crafted short bow with some good affixes for the crawler, multimodded it and beastcrafted aspect of the avian on it
- Rare quiver, a hunter-influenced one with flat fire, life, attack speed, chance to poison on hit and ideally movement speed is best in slot. 100% chance to poison helps a bit in 80% reduced chance to poison maps. I'm still trying to get a slightly better one with movement speed but you get the idea.
- Spectres setup: stoneskin flayers from delve are really tanky and with feeding frenzy and awakened melee phys support they give a lot of damage to our beloved crawler. The intimidate from the awakened gem is so good that we can replace tombfists with grip of the council gaining a LOT of extra cold damage for our minion(s).
- Frost bomb: very useful in all endgame fights, metamorph bosses and halls of the grandmasters.
- Spirit offering: some extra survivability for our spectres and some nice damage for the crawler.

Cospri's will, Gluttony and Aul's uprising were already used with success in the past leagues, awakened curse on hit adds the 4th curse to the mix. I went for Frostbite for extra damage and some juicy freezes while mapping, but Temporal Chains is a solid defensive option too.

Catalysts help a lot to cap resistances and make the whole structure of the build more solid.

Passive tree wise, I wanted to get between 6k and 7k life in the endgame while still having all the possible utilities. With my current gear I have 80% effective chance to evade because I can reliably apply blind on all mobs, 50% attack dodge chance and 40% spell dodge chance with quartz flask on. That's not counting the defensive benefits from boots enchantment and from Lunaris + Garukhan pantheons I am currently running. The spiritual command notable is super important because we want all the attack speed we can get, since the crafted bow is slow when compared to Quill Rain. This way we can get between 4.5 and 5 aps with Rain of Arrows, which I consider a very good target for both self sustain and virulence stacking.

Planned level 100 PoB: https://pastebin.com/ezrpU25j

My current gear:

Keep in mind that this is really expensive because I amassed an insane amount of currencies in this loot fiesta league, but you can achieve very good results with a lot less.

All content is pretty easy at this point, Sirus gets really demolished by this build, lol. The freeze immunity craft on boots is mainly for Uber Elder and Sirus itself.

My current PoB sits at way over 6M shaper DPS and I didn't obviously check frenzy charges and onslaught on minions because they are non-existent in pure single target fights (like Sirus), but they add a lot of boss damage in fights with adds, where both frenzy charges (from gluttony's poacher's mark) and onslaught (from the Ravenous horde notable) are added to the mix.

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djnat wrote:

The nerf hammer (not unexpectedly) has come!

Agony Crawler now deals 5% increased physical damage per Virulence you have at gem level 1 (from 6%), up to 9% at gem level 20 (from 12%).

The build will still be super enjoyable, at least the way I played it in Metamorph. The nerf to crawler's damage isn't atrocious at all.

On the other hand:

The "Monsters avoid Poison, Blind and Bleeding" map modifier now grants monsters 20/30/50% chance to avoid Poison, Blind and Bleeding (from 25/40/65%) depending on the map tier.

This is a HUGE buff for us, as this one was the only map mod which caused serious issues to our single target DPS (and survivability, since blind is a very important defensive mechanic for us) at awakened level 8.

And we don't have to forget that there are new jewels with some interesting notables which give +5 max stacks to Virulence or 30% slower Virulence decay. ;)