[3.6] Herald of Viper Assassin - Melt all Content! - [BUDGET FRIENDLY] - 2 MIL+ DPS
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Introduction
 _______ Updates 12/25/18 – Posted up the character build guide. [UPDATE LOG] - With the 3.6 Synthesis patch, I heard that they were going to nerf Herald of Agony, but after looking at the patch notes, I did not see anything nerfed about it at all. :0 Because of this, this build will still be great for a budgeted and content destroying build. If anything, we got a new ring that I might want to test with HoA. Circle of Nostalgia is a ring that grants a reduced mana reservation for HoA and an increased buff effect of HoA. Sounds pretty juicy to test. This will be easy to fit into the build since this build uses mostly rare items. _______ This is officially my third build guide. My third guide was actually going to be on my Dancing Duo Scion, but I wanted to play this build too bad in the new Betrayal league since when I was crunching in the numbers, it looked pretty insane. I built the Dancing Duo Scion back in Delve, but the character moved to standard and still has all of the gear on her. Creating the guide shouldn’t be too difficult in that regard. Anyways, this build is about Herald of Agony being ran on a Shadow/Assassin. Be prepared to melt EVERYTHING. This is going to be a bit of a lengthy introduction and I would recommend you read a bit into it so you get the gist of the build. I take time writing my guides so if you have the time to spare to do some reading, it would be much appreciated. Feel free to skip the to the TL;DR section with just searching that (search for “T L ; D R” all together and without the quotation marks and you will skip directly to the guide and the TLDR section). Without further ado, I present to you, the content melting Herald of Viper Assassin. I played 2 different kinds of Herald of Agony builds. The first one was a really hipster CI Toxic Rain Scion (Pathfinder/Occultist) that was utilizing Incandescent Heart along with Darkscorn to get 25% of my attack/spell damage taken as chaos damage. We were immune to chaos because of CI, but the problem back then was that you lost out a lot on damage by going CI (Chaos Inoculation) and using those two items. With the introduction of Toxic Rain back in 3.4, you could focus on DoT (Damage over Time) so you did not have to worry about scaling physical/projectile damage. I was honestly contemplating writing a guide for that build too, and still might, but we will see. The other one was just a standard Shadow/Trickster using Toxic Rain supported by the Trickster’s ascendancy notables. I thought to go a different route this league after theorizing the build so much on Path of Building. I decided to make this my league starter for Betrayal, even though I knew I would have a slower start than others because of the nature of the build and the fact that I had to respec most of the build after I started using Herald of Agony. The build is focused heavily on the left side of the skill tree and grabbing those nodes as you level is super inefficient unless you can start utilizing your Herald of Agony efficiently. This is why this is NOT a league starter. It is possible to league start with it, but you are most likely going to have to level as a melee build and spec mostly on the right side where you usually start, and then respec everything to the left side of the tree when you can actually utilize the build. I personally league started with the build and it took me a bit to get it going just because I had to farm enough currency to grab Orb of Regrets and have all of my gear ready to use when I was at the correct level to use them. I assure you though… Once you get the build going, it is going to be night and day from when you were leveling up as a melee character. I give you my word that the mountain is worth the climb. The satisfaction is insane. Herald of Agony is a Herald skill that reserves 25% of our mana. It grants us 20% chance to poison and grants more poison damage. The poison damage doesn’t really matter for the build, but the chance to poison does. Now, the way Herald of Agony works is that every time we inflict poison with an attack, we get a single Virulence which can stack up to a maximum of 40. When you gain Virulence, Herald of Agony summons an Agony Crawler. This Agony Crawler has increased damage, increased attack speed and added physical damage which exponentially increases per Virulence. That means if we are always inflicting poison with our attacks, Virulence can stack up quite quick. At 40 stacks, you are looking at 2 million plus damage with this build. Agony Crawl can whip out some INSANE damage and with us having over 100% poison chance, this is an easy feat. Speaking of poison, how do we poison things consistently? This build also uses the skill Viper Strike to get us our poison. Viper Strike inherently comes with a 60% chance to poison mod which makes poisoning even easier for us. Not just that, but the Assassin’s ascendancy notable Noxious Strike also grants us 40% chance to poison. So with the combination of the two, we have 100% chance to poison which means every time we attack, we are guaranteed to poison. Also, don’t forget that Herald of Agony gives us 20% to poison as well. We effectively sit at 120% without needing to spec on the tree or grab gems to increase our poison chance. This is one of the few reasons why I wanted to use an Assassin for this build. Assassin also just gives us reflect immunity if we crit, but honestly, we ourselves deal so little damage where you never see the damage come back to bite us. The real damage is coming from the Agony Crawler. So, we have 120% chance to poison, but what if we have a chance of missing our attacks? You are probably thinking of “Just use Lycosidae, duh!” And yes, most of the time, you would be right, but I really wanted to use this as a league starter and run it on a budget since I already had to focus on getting like 40-50 Orb of Regrets at the start of the league. We still are going to be utilizing the “Hits can’t be Evaded” mod, but not on a shield, but on our weapon instead. One of the required uniques for this build is Ornament of the East. There are two main things that we want from this item. The “Hits can’t be Evaded” and the 44 Life Gain mod. Hits can’t be evaded is pretty self-explanatory and ensures that every single one of our hits poisons, but the 44 life gain also grants us survivability and sustain. You have to also remember that life gain is instant. We essentially have instant leech by using this unique. With the speed that we are going to be attacking at, we will have a solid way to keep us healthy. We also use a Life Gain on Hit Support gem which gives us even more Life Gain on hit as well. This makes it so we do not have to use Lycosidae. Yes, Lycosidae is easily one of the best shields in the game if not the best, but for this kind of build, we are looking for something a bit different. We are using a minion, and a very strong one at that. Since that is our main DPS, we want to focus on a shield that will grant even more DPS to our Agony Crawler. So what is a really good way to increase DPS in general for any build? Frenzy Charges. Since we already have 100% hit chance, we can use the unique shield Victario’s Charity. This shield gives us a 5% chance to grant a Frenzy Charge to our allies on hit. With the speed that we attack at and how fast we stack poison, this 5% chance has a very high occurrence rate. Using the build, I find that my Agony Crawler always has Frenzy Charges. Victario’s Charity also grants allies a Power Charge on kill at a 10% chance, but the Agony Crawler is usually already destroying everything before we, ourselves can kill something. If you are lucky and do get the kill and your Agony Crawler gets a Power Charge, then even better. The shield also grants us a decent amount of flat life too so that is always good in our favor. The other required unique for this build that we use is The Coming Calamity. You can say that this item is the heart of the build and I would say this is the only required unique that could not be replaced because of its unique mods. The Coming Calamity makes it so our Herald skills always reserve 45% of our mana. The more gems you have linking to your Herald skill, the higher the mana multiplier which means more mana reserved. If you are running a 6 link Herald of Agony, chances are your mana reservation is going to be huge. This unique restricts it to 45% no matter how many gems you have linked to Herald of Agony. The other really great thing is that this body armor also gives +2 to Herald gems. This is what really makes the Agony Crawler scale in damage even more. With a level 20 gem, you are getting a level 22 Herald of Agony which scales your Agony Crawler to stupid levels. If you have the currency or get lucky corrupting a level 20 Herald of Agony gem to level 21, then with this armor, you are sitting at a level 23 Herald of Agony. This makes your Agony Crawler INSANE. We also apply Elemental Equilibrium for our Agony of Crawler which means even more DPS. I do not know about you, but I get so excited just thinking and witnessing how crazy the Agony Crawler is. TL;DR: Long story short, we are using a Shadow/Assassin with Herald of Agony and Viper Strike. Viper Strike + Herald of Agony + Noxious Strike (Assassin ascendancy notable) grants us 120% chance to poison. Using Viper Strike with Ornament of the East ensures that every hit poisons because Ornament of the East has the “Hits can’t be Evaded” mod. This lets us drop Lycosidae which is a bit expensive while this is a budget build. We use Victario’s Charity to grant our Agony Crawler Frenzy Charges on hit for a 5% chance. With the speed that we attack at, we grant our Agony Crawler Frenzy Charges all the time. We run our Herald of Agony setup in a The Coming Calamity to grant our Herald of Agony gem 2 more levels and also it makes it so our Herald of Agony only reserves 45%. With this whole setup, we can poison and stack Virulence easily making our Agony Crawler hit like a TANK. This build can be done on a SUPER small budget. The only real required items are Ornament of the East, Victario’s Charity (you can even use a different shield if you want, but the Frenzy Charge generation for your Agony Crawler will increase its DPS way more than any other shield) and The Coming Calamity. Each item is a chaos or less. All other gear can just be rare items and any other choice of uniques. Pros & Cons + Solid clear speed (Not insane like Sonic on steroids, but really respectable for a minion build) + Life Gain on Hit+Fortify for instant leech and survivability + 2 million+ Agony Crawler DPS + Budget friendly/Super cheap to build (a lot of opportunities to get better gear and min-maxing / required items cost less than a total of 5 chaos) + 120% chance to poison and 100% hit chance ensuring you will never miss and are always inflicting poison to generate Virulence stacks + Can do all content in the game + Can handle all map mods (some mods might be slightly annoying, but still completely possible / we still dish out over a million damage even against Hexproof enemies) + Dual curse setup (additional curse is granted through the tree and not from gear or items which saves you from finding it on gear which can get expensive) + Face-tank a majority of content (with some small dodge mechanics for certain bosses and telegraphed attacks) + 6k+ life with grabbing life on gear and following the skill tree - NOT a league starter (if you do league start with it, be prepared to respec your tree a LOT) - Need to be close to enemies to apply poison with Viper Strike - Need to buy/trade a large amount of Orb of Regrets to respec the build (the skill tree is not optimized to level with from level 1 / the build is mostly on the left side of the skill tree, meaning it is not optimal to level up with until you actually get Herald of Agony running and have enough skill points to grab the nodes on the left side of the tree) - Need to level the build to at least level 53 (To use The Coming Calamity and when it might be ‘ok’ to respec the build) to start the build at a minimum (I usually start my builds at level 70 or at the minimal level where I meet all of the gear level and attribute requirements / starting the build from level 1 with the tree is extremely inefficient). Requirements Required Attributes
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Strength: 111 Dexterity: 155 Intelligence: 155 These are based off of if you are using level 20 gems. Do note, if you use skill gems over level 20, these requirements could slightly change and increase. This is more so for the min/maxing and players who have currency to use for level 21 gems and 20+ quality gems. Required Items/Uniques
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Needed so our hits can’t be evaded. Also grants us some instant life leech. Needed to grant our Agony Crawler Frenzy Charges for a huge DPS spike. Can be done without it, but this is easily the best in slot shield for DPS. You are going to lose out on a lot of extra DPS otherwise. Needed so our Herald of Agony reserves only 45% of mana. Also grants +2 levels to our Herald of Agony gem. Optional/Recommended Uniques and Items
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Gives us some life and grants us more attack speed which means we can inflict poison quicker. This means faster Virulence stacks. The main reason though is the Intimidate on hit. This gives our Agony Crawler even more DPS. Rare gloves still work too. Like I said, recommended and totally optional. You only need a one abyssal socket version so it is really affordable. You can find a pair for like 5-7 chaos. I was really lucky to pick mine up for 4 chaos. Gives us Chill and Freeze immunity. This allows us to skip out on a chill/freeze flask and lets us spam Viper Strike without worrying about getting interrupted from those ailments. This is personally my favorite ring in the whole game. I hate chill/freeze with a passion. What stops us from getting poison stacks? Becoming frozen. You can easily see why I recommend this item. Obviously not needed neither, but does wonders and especially so in red maps and end-game content/bosses. A pair of Elder boots with the mod “Socketed Gems are Supported by Level # Fortify.” This is an Elder mod. We use Viper Strike as a 4 link setup, but with these boots, we can drop Fortify out of our 4 link Viper Strike setup so we can use more support gems. This mod gives us a pseudo 5 link. I honestly HIGHLY recommend this because the more support gems we can use with Viper Strike, the better. You are either going to have to drop Melee Splash Support or Life Gain on Hit Support if you use the regular 4 link Viper Strike setup. This is going to be explained more in the “Skill Gems” section. You can find a pair of boots with this Elder mod for a chaos or less. Obviously if you are looking for life+resists along with this mod, it is going to get a lot more expensive. Alternatives?
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Since this build can be done on such a low budget, I wouldn’t really say there are really any other alternatives. As long as you use the three required unique items, everything else can just be done with rare gear. If you want to use any other uniques or items in general, the sky is the limit. This build has a lot of room for customizing and min-maxing. Build Budget This is my first guide where I am going to start including this. I think listing the cost of items will help players know what the potential cost of a build can be. This can give people an idea on how much currency is needed to run the build, and to see if you have the amount of currency to start it. This is more so for the unique items and required items. The prices can obviously fluctuate, but I am going to use the prices that they were currently at, at this specific time of the league when I found or bought them.
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You can get Ornament of the East for 1 chaos or less. You can easily find these running for 1 alchemy or less too. I actually bought mine just for 1 alchemy. You can get Victario’s Charity for 1 alchemy or less. You can get The Coming Calamity for 1 chaos or less. You might be able to find them cheaper as well. I actually originally bought mine for 1 alchemy and linked it myself. As you can see, these are the three required items for the build and it doesn’t even exceed 3 chaos. Even if you wanted the better rolls for these items, you are still looking at under 5 chaos (and potentially still just 3 chaos if you can find them for cheap). The power level of this build for this low of a budget is INSANE. You can use whatever other rares and obviously these will vary on price when you are min-maxing, but to get the build up and running for only 3 chaos sounds like a deal to me. Since everything else can be rare items, the build potential is limitless. You can pour an infinite amount of currency to min-max this build. Gear This section is what I am currently using for my build. Your setup will most likely be different depending on how long you have been playing this league and your budget. Since this build only has three required uniques, you can literally get whatever rare gear or use whatever other uniques that you want for your own flavor. The ceiling for improvement for this build is infinite since only three uniques are required. You have a lot of free choice for all of the other gear slots. My Current Gear
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Main Hand/Weapon Slot #1
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This is the main weapon that we are going to be using for this build. Ornament of the East is usually a great leveling weapon for claw builds and easily gets outclassed by the other unique claws in DPS later. For this build though, it is probably the best item we could wish for. Ornament of the East grants us 44 life gain on hit, which means instant leech. We also run Viper Strike linked to a Life Gain on Hit Support so we get even more instant leech. This helps greatly with our survivability and can make us not so reliant on a life flasks for recovery. The other main reason why we use this item is because it has the “Hits can’t be Evaded” mod. This allows us to drop Lycosidae and use another shield that will benefit this build more. Lycosidae is no doubt one of the best shields if not the best, but because we are running a Herald of Agony minion build, there are better shields to increase the Agony Crawler’s DPS. This item used along with Viper Strike allows us to apply poison at 100% of the time since we are never missing our attacks. This is absolutely busted and works wonders to building Virulence stacks. I would honestly say this is the best in slot item. We do not really care about the +1 to dexterity gems and the supported by level 10 Faster Attacks. Our Viper Strike setup is actually not socketed into this because we need more than 2 other supports to make sure our Viper Strike sustains and keeps us surviving. You are not losing out on this, trust me. One of the main reasons why Ornament of the East loses out on other unique/rare claws is because the DPS isn’t too great. It’s good to level with, but dishing out DPS can be a bit difficult depending on your build. For this build, we actually want to deal less damage so we can hit the enemy with as many Viper Strikes as we can. This effectively gets us more poisons per hit which means more Virulence stacks. If we were one-shotting everything with this claw, then there would be no point in running Herald of Agony. By doing low outputs of damage, we guarantee more poison/Virulence stacks since the enemies are not dying right away. It also gives us more instant life leech too. Try to get the best increased attack speed roll you can get. The max roll is 15%. We do not care about the damage. We only care about the attack speed. You can ignore all the other mods. Off Hand/Shield Slot #2
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The second star and required unique for this build. Since we already have “Hits can’t be Evaded” with our Ornament of the East, this allows us to use a shield that will boost our DPS for our Agony Crawler. Lycosidae would generally go into this slot, but because we are running Herald of Agony, this shield works better for it. Also, we are trying to make this a SUPER budget build. This shield has a 5% chance to give our allies a Frenzy Charge on hit. Since we never miss our attacks because of Ornament of the East, we have good chance of granting Frenzy Charges to our Agony Crawler. If we get lucky and kill a minion we have a 10% chance to grant a Power Charge to our Agony Crawler. Now, since our attack is so low, you might be thinking that this will never be the case. With the speed that we are using Viper Strike, you will be surprised that you will be getting some kills too. If you do, the Power Charges increases the Agony Crawler’s DPS even more. If it has Power Charges and Frenzy Charges, the Agony Crawler’s DPS gets out of control. Now, it is possible to use a different shield for your own flavor, but if you want that busted DPS for your Agony Crawler who is the main star of the build, then I recommend and even say this shield is required. If you want to get more life or any other mods/attributes and would rather focus on even more survivability for your shield, you can also go that route. You will lose out on DPS for your Agony Crawler, but you instead have more survivability and more life. Body Armor Slot
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The third star and required item for this build. You could even say this unique item is the heart of the build. The Coming Calamity makes it so that our Herald skills always reserve 45%. Normally this is not a good thing since Herald skills only reserve 25% of your mana, but the more gems we have linked with our Herald of Agony, the more mana it will reserve. Since we are going to be utilizing a 5 or 6 link for the build, it is going to easily reserve more than 45% mana which is why this unique is so amazing. The other main reason why this body armor is so good is that it gives +2 levels to our Herald skills. This makes Agony Crawler even more busted. With a level 20 Herald of Agony gem, it effectively goes to a level 22 gem. If you are lucky enough to corrupt a Herald of Agony gem to level 21 or trade for one, then it goes to a level 23 gem which further increases the insanity levels of the Agony Crawler. The scaling for the Agony Crawler gets scarier with the gem levels and Virulence stacks. You can easily reach over a million damage this way. You could also opt to use another unique/rare body armor, but you are going to be missing out on some massive DPS if you do. Unfortunately The Coming Calamity does not have any real defensive life rolls on it unless you are going energy shield, but for this build, energy shield is irrelevant. I would still choose this body armor over anything else because the benefits just simply outweigh everything else. Helmet Slot
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I was originally using a rare Bone Helmet with a high life roll just for more life and survival. I was extremely lucky enough to get ‘Summoned Agony Crawler fires # additional Projectiles” on a random Uber Lab run while carrying somebody. Starkonja is pretty much the standard unique helmet that you can find with helmet enchants. It does give us more dexterity along with more evasion rating so that means higher evade chance and it also gives us a pretty juicy flat life roll. Any helmet with the additional projectiles helmet enchant is best in slot. Just using a simple rare Bone Helmet with life+resists is already more than enough though. If anything, it will still give you at least a 30% increase in minion damage (Bone helmets have an increased minion damage implicit by default) so you are good there. Try to get this helmet enchant when you can though. The extra two projectiles just means map clearing becomes even smoother and bosses drop even faster. This was the rare helmet I was using until I got a helmet with the desired helmet enchant. The helmet enchant+life and any other stats/resists that you need is easily best in slot. Gloves Slot
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Tombfist is not needed for the build, but I would recommend it if you have the currency and already have your resists filled out. Tombfist grants us some more attack speed and some more extra life. The main reason why I use the gloves is more so for the Intimidate mod to give us more DPS for our Agony Crawler. This is really just an extra boost in DPS which I wanted since I already had my resistances capped. A pair of rare gloves will work here too. If anything, you might get more survivability with a pair of rare gloves because you can focus on getting a high life roll+resists. If you are struggling in capping your resists, then you definitely want to get a rare pair of gloves here instead. Survivability over DPS, any day. I mean, unless you one shot everything from a mile away… then yeah, you do that. We get Intimidate on hit if we socket a Murderous Eye Jewel into the abyssal socket. We do not really care about Maim so we do not need a Searching Eye Jewel. I would focus on grabbing as much life as you can on your jewel. If you can, try to find an abyss jewel that has some added flat fire damage so you can activate Elemental Equilibrium. This will be explained more in the “Jewels” section. Boots Slot
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These are the current rare boots that I am using. Remember how I mentioned earlier on how we are not going to be using Viper Strike in our Ornament of the East? We need our Viper Strike on a 4 link which is why we do not socket that setup in our Ornament of the East. Now, we could technically socket our Viper Strike setup in a helmet or gloves too, but there is a reason why we want to socket it in our boots. Reason being is because an Elder pair of boots can grant us “Socketed Gems are Supported by Level # Fortify.” This means we can get a pseudo 5 link for our Viper Strike setup. I would highly recommend this but you can also do without it. If you do not get a rare pair of Elder boots with the Fortify mod, your Viper Strike setup will slightly change and you will have to decide between using Melee Splash Support or Life Gain on Hit Support for your fourth link. But, if you get a pair of Elder boots with this mod, you can forgo this headache and have a pseudo 5 link with all of them. These usually only run you a chaos. Obviously prioritize life+resists as usual. Finding life+resists may be a bit difficult for an Elder pair of boots with the Fortify mod, but if you can, get them immediately. If you already have your resists capped through other means, then just focus on getting the highest life roll you can with any other mods that you fancy. Belt Slot
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A Stygian Vise with good life rolls and resists is always solid for any build. Focus on trying to get at least 90 life and get as many resists on it as you can. Any other mods are just extra and quality of life. Depending on where you have your resists, you might need to get triple resists+life. Just get what works for you. For the abyss jewel, grab a Ghastly Eye Jewel (since Ghastly Eye Jewels are the only abyss jewels that has minion modifiers on them) and prioritize in life, minion attack speed and added flat physical/cold/lightning damage. If you are missing out on any resists or attributes, then prioritize that before the minion mods. This is the current Ghastly Eye Jewel that I am using for my Stygian Vise. Ring #1 Slot
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Now, Dream Fragments is totally not needed here. You can simply get a rare ring with life+resists which will greatly increase your life and survivability, but this is simply my favorite unique ring in the whole game. I hate chill and freeze with a passion. This ring grants us chill/freeze immunity which is actually pretty important for this build. Reason being is because we are usually face-tanking because we need to use Viper Strike to poison and build our Virulence stacks. If we get frozen, then that means we cannot attack which means no poisoning and gaining Virulence stacks. We want to apply poison as fast as we can and chill can drastically slow us down in that regard too. Back in Delve, I had a corrupted Dream Fragments with a “Cannot be Ignited” implicit. If you can get this on your Dream Fragments, then you have a dual resist ring for free. You can drop your ignite flask if you do which opens more utility for your build. It is totally viable to go the rare ring route here too. Just get the standard life+resists and you should be set. If you find that most of your resists are already capped, you can also just focus on getting as much life as you can on you rare ring. Some extra mods that can be beneficial are Elder rings for life gain on it to further increase your instant leech capabilities. Your survival will also increase with this and especially if you have splash. Hitting a mob will instant leech you back up and keep you healthy. Choose what works for you. Dream Fragments is my own preference. I honestly might swap it out though because I have not had to deal with much chill or freeze so far. It will get my character over 7K life if I do too. Ring #2 Slot
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Pretty standard rare ring here. Just some life+resists. The flat physical does not really matter much to us because we do not really care about the damage that ‘we’ are dealing, but more so our Agony Crawler. I was missing some fire/lightning resistance so I just crafted it onto the ring to cap off my resistances. I just found this randomly in a syndicate safehouse. Priortize in life+resists and get whatever else you want on your ring. Another good suggestion I would give is if you already capped your elemental resists, try to find some chaos resistance. Granted, past leagues you did not have to worry much about chaos resistance, but chaos damage seems to be a lot more important this league because of the syndicate. There is nothing wrong with ever grabbing chaos resist if you can, anyways. Pick your poison. Amulet Slot
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The current amulet that I am using. Pretty standard rare amulet here as well. Just some life+resists and some other random mods. I bought this for 1 alchemy. Something like this barely costs anything but there are some similar amulets that cost way more. If you are lucky, you will be able to get a really cheap one with a high life roll on it. Since we do not really care about our Viper Strike’s DPS, then we do not really have to look for any specific mods. The flat fire damage on the amulet was how I was originally activating Elemental Equilibrium for my Agony Crawler. Really, just get a rare amulet with life+resists. Just remember that you have to find flat fire damage somewhere on your gear. You can get it on your abyss jewels or your amulet. Whatever works best for you, go for it. One super important thing to take note of is when getting your gear/items, watch out for anything that will add cold/lightning damage. It is going to ruin our Elemental Equilibrium setup if you have some other elements hitting. We only want to be dealing fire damage as an element, nothing else. Jewels
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These are the current abyss jewels I am using for my three sockets on the skill tree. I crafted these jewels myself but generally these Ghastly Eye Jewels run about 50 chaos to multiple exalts depending on who is currently online selling them. This is why I would rather craft them myself. Also, I did this on a budget so I did not want to go that route either. The Agony Crawler usually suffers from slow movement and slow attack speed. We would normally focus on getting minion movement speed as well, but since we have Victario’s Charity, we can grant our Agony Crawler Frenzy Charges which makes it pretty quick. We want extra minion attack speed to further boost the Agony Crawler’s busted damage. Focus on grabbing life and minion attack speed. Any other extra mods are just a bonus. If you can somehow get minion movement speed alongside those two mods, then even better. I would still prioritize your Ghastly Eye Jewel in life > minion attack speed > minion movement speed. Also, if you need any extra attributes or resists, you can also find them on your abyss jewels. There is a lot of flexibility here. Get the mods that you currently need for your build and you will be set. Flasks
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These are the current flasks that I am using for this character. As you can see, most of these are just for utility. We have the standard curse, bleed and shock immunity flasks alongside +3000 to armor and +3000 to evasion rating. The flasks here are really just for defensive measures and all we really need because we are not the one dealing the damage. I also use a Blood of the Karui for my healing potion because it simply is my favorite healing potion. This build has a very active playstyle and one thing that I noticed was that I do not get hit too much and if I do, I usually instant leech it back up with Viper Strike. Blood of the Karui guarantees me some slight healing and when I do take a hard hit after some bursts of damage, at the end of the flask effect, I recover back to full life. This has sustained me through all of the content so far. You can easily sub this for an instant recovery potion at low life if needed too. Just use what you currently need in your current situation. I have not had any trouble as of yet just running my flask setup as is. Maybe it could also be because the Agony Crawler just destroys everything before I can get into some real danger though. Also remember that we have instant leech/gain with our Viper Strike setup+Oranment of the East’s 44 life gain on hit. Skill Gems The current skill gem link setups that I use. There are some links that you can change to your liking, but this is what I currently use and it works perfect for me. Do note that a lot of your mana will be reserved due to our Herald of Agony setup (but only 45% here because of The Coming Calamity) and also because of the Generosity setup we use for our Agony Crawler. Now, with this setup we effectively reserve 90%+ of our mana. We do get some reduced mana reservation on our tree as well so that helps. Do not worry about running out of mana though. Even with that low of mana, we can sustain our mana even while spamming Whirling Blades and Viper Strike. Some of your links could possibly differ depending on different items and whatnot, but this what I currently use and it has been sustaining me to level 90.
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6 Link – Main Minion Damage – Herald of Agony Setup
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Herald of Agony > Pierce > Physical to Lightning > Minion Damage > Damage on Full Life Support > Elemental Damage with Attacks Support This is your main Herald of Agony setup which will be socketed into your body armor. The current setup of gems there is the order of importance and priority of the gems. You want to have Pierce in your setup because it helps clear out trash a lot better and makes mapping smooth. Some slight decrease in DPS to have our Agony Crawler’s Tail Spike pierce is totally worth it. Playing without Pierce may net you some more DPS, but the clear speed feels really clunky without it. This is why I prioritize it right after the Herald of Agony gem. As for the other gems, they are ordered in priority of the most damage you can get. If you only run a 4 link, then you just run the first four gems, if you have a 5 link, then run the first five gems and with a 6 link… you get the picture. Even while running this as a 4 link, you are still getting nearly a million damage and that is without factoring in Frenzy Charges for your Agony Crawler. Scary stuff. You might also be wondering why there is a Physical to Lightning gem in this setup. This is actually our most damaging gem in the link. The reason being is because we grab Elemental Equilibrium (https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Elemental_Equilibrium) on the skill tree. What this does is whatever element we hit an enemy with, they gain +25% to that resistance you hit an enemy with and -50% resistance to the other two resistances. Since we deal fire damage with our attacks (from gear or jewels), then that means we give the enemy +25% to fire resistance and -50% to lightning and cold resistance. Our Agony Crawler is going to be dealing physical/cold/lightning damage with the current setup so this gives us a huge boost of DPS. Just make sure to remember that you are only dealing fire damage and none of the other two elements otherwise it will break your Elemental Equilibrium setup. 3 Link – Movement –Movement/Utility Setup
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Flame Dash > Convocation > Faster Casting Support Flame Dash is easily one of the best movement skills in the game. Though this is not our main source of movement, it is really important to be able to scale across bridges, gaps and the like. Our main movement skill is actually Whirling Blades but obviously Whirling Blades cannot go over the gaps that I mentioned. Pairing Flame Dash to get us over ledges along with Whirling Blades gets us around the map efficiently. We also use Convocation in this setup. Convocation is extremely important to the build to summon our Agony Crawler directly where you are currently at. Convocation is now instant cast so this is a huge buff for us. Though the cooldown is a bit on the slower side, being able to summon our Agony Crawler directly to us can determine your survival at times. Try to get close to the boss and then use Convocation to move your Agony Crawler point blank to the boss. Reason being is so more Tail Spikes can hit which will multiply the already disgusting damage you are dealing per spike. Your Agony Crawler should be pretty fast because of the Frenzy Charges too though, so you might not have to use Convocation much, but it is great to have it as some utility. This is socketed in our Ornament of the East. 3 Link – CWDT/Utility – Cast when Damaged Taken/Utility Setup
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Cast when Damage Taken Support (level 2) > Immortal Call (level 4) > Frost Bomb (level 11) The standard CWDT setup but with Frost Bomb attached. Immortal Call is there to grant us some physical invisibility which can save us in rapid bursts damage. It gives us enough time to instant leech our life back up if needed. Frost Bomb is linked along with the setup so it can lower the cold resistance of the enemies that get hit by Frost Bomb. Frost Bomb gives -25% cold resistance and reduces the overall life and energy shield regeneration by 75%. This is some great utility for survival and netting more DPS for our Agony Crawler. Make sure to keep the levels of these gems at the said levels so Cast when Damage Taken Support can proc them correctly. We want this setup to pop as much as we can which is why they are at those current levels only. Do not level them or you will ruin the setup. This is socketed in my Victario’s Charity. 4 Link – Curse/Main Movement – Curse on Hit/Movement Setup
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Curse on Hit Support > Conductivity > Elemental Weakness > Whirling Blades This is your dual curse setup linked to your main movement skill, Whirling Blades. The reason why we do not socket this into our Ornament of the East to make use of the faster attacks mod is because we can squeeze in an extra curse by socketing this setup into a 4 socket item. When you Whirling Blades into a mob or boss, you are going to be cursing them with Conductivity and Elemental Weakness. Elemental Weakness is just there to drop all of their elemental resistances by over -40% so that means more DPS for our Agony Crawler. Conductivity also drops the enemy’s lightning resistance by another -40% as well. Another great thing about Conductivity is that it gives us 14% chance to shock. With the base of 5% chance to shock that the Agony Crawler already has, we have an effective 19% chance to shock which is not too shabby. If you shock an enemy on top of all of the other modifiers, buffs and curses we have, then the DPS sky rockets. If you shock the enemy and your Agony Crawler has Frenzy Charges, you are dealing nearly 4 million damage. Pretty insane damage for a budget, if you ask me. Just make sure to hit enemies with your Whirling Blades. This is currently socketed into my Starkonja’s Head. 3 Link – Aura – Aura Setup
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Generosity Support > Hatred > Spirit Offering | Ghastly Eye Jewel This aura setup is really just for your Agony Crawler. Generosity Support increases the effectiveness of our Hatred for our Agony Crawler, but it does not affect us as the trade-off. This is completely fine since it is our Agony Crawler that we want to get stronger. This setup will eat up a ton of your mana reservation but I assure you the damage increase is HUGE. If you do not decide to use Tombfist here and instead use rare gloves and have another socket to work with, you can socket in something like an Enlighten to reduce the mana reservation for your Generosity Support setup. You can also just socket in a Portal gem if you really want some free portals too. It is totally up to you. You do not need to use a Tombfist with two abyssal sockets. Just one abyss socket will do for the Intimidation. Maim does not do much for us in this build. This setup is socketed in my Tombfist. 4 Link – Viper Strike/Utility – Poison Setup/Utility Setup #2
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or Viper Strike > Multistrike Support > Fortify > Melee Splash Support/Life Gain on Hit Support This is our main attack for the build and the way that we inflict poison to stack up our Virulence for our Agony Crawler. Now, remember how I mentioned about the Elder pair of boots granting Fortify as one of the mods? If you get some rare boots that do not have the mod, then your Viper Strike setup will change. The current setup of gems is what I would prioritize them in. If you only have a regular 4 link, then I would drop Life Gain on Hit Support. The Melee Splash Support support racks up our Virulence stacks so much smoother since we can hit multiple targets. I would say that is much more important than gaining some extra life on hit. Now, if you do get the Elder pair of boots with the Fortify mod though, then you can drop the regular Fortify Support gem and add in the Life Gain on Hit Support gem. I would highly recommend this since the life gain on hit just increases our survivability by that much more and plus, instant leech? Sign me up! Viper Strike along with Herald of Agony and Noxious Strike (from our Assassin ascendancy) gives us 120% chance to poison. Having it linked along with Multistrike Support and Melee Splash Support supports keeps our Virulence stacks healthy. *Want to try out some fun hipster builds? Check out my thread below!* [Build/Stream Thread] https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2246315 Last edited by Bakuhakubasugasu#6072 on Mar 7, 2019, 10:07:19 AM Last bumped on Apr 18, 2019, 9:46:04 AM
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Bandits
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Kill all of them! We need as many extra skill points as we can get.
Passive Tree You can fully utilize this build at level 53 since that is the level when you can finally use The Coming Calamity. I personally start my builds at level 70. I do not start my builds from the ground up, but I level my characters up to 70 or the minimum level before I can use all of my items and gear. I leveled with a simple Double Strike setup like I usually do for all of my melee builds. I actually league started with this build and I had a bit of a slower start compared to others because I had to scrape up enough currency to get Orb of Regrets so I could respec. The skill tree is totally optimized for the build. Trying to level with the current tree is going to be a huge pain. You may be in a similar position unless you convert one of your characters over to this build and not league starting with it. I would recommend you go this route rather than league start with it unless you want to deal with the headaches and the bumps along the road. When you do get past this hump though, the build is like butter.
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Level 70 Level 100 I would focus on the level 70 tree if you are starting from the ground up or for when you respec your skill points. If you have enough respec points available, you can fully start this build at level 53 since that is the level requirement for The Coming Calamity. You should have all of the needed gems by this time as well. You will have an extreme makeover by this point of time when you convert from whatever you were using previously. The level 100 skill tree is my end game build with my current end-game crafted jewels and gear that I am currently using. Your build will most likely look different, but you can build this character on how you want it to be. This build is really just the template to use. Ascendancies and Pantheons Ascendancies
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 1st Lab: Unstable Infusion 2nd Lab: Noxious Strike 3rd Lab: Opportunistic 4th Lab: Ambush and Assassinate Now, this is the order that I personally grabbed these nodes in. Unstable Infusion gives us early Power Charge generation which will help with the leveling process of the build. Grabbing Noxious Strike second seems very questionable, but you have to remember that we are a Herald of Agony build. The 40% chance to poison on hit is extremely important. This passive notable along with Viper Strike gives us 100% chance to poison. This makes it so we do not need to invest in any poison on the tree and on items. This is why Assassin is extremely beneficial to the build. We also get a free 50% chance to Maim on hit on poisoned enemies too. Honestly, the main passive here is Noxious Strike. The other nodes are really just extra utility for the build. Pantheons
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 Soul of Lunaris as your Major God. Since the Agony Crawler is really the main DPS for this build, we just want to maneuver around the map as fast and as defensively as we can. This Major God gives us 1% additional physical damage and movement speed for each nearby enemy to a max of 8%. Since we are running and using Whirling Blades to run through packs, we are always going to be triggering this Pantheon. The three other souls we can capture with this Major God also help our survival. Thraxia gives us a 10% chance to avoid projectile damage. Sebbert gives us a 5% chance to dodge attack and spells if we’ve been hit recently. Lycius makes it so we avoid any projectiles that chain. This can be really good against spikers.  Soul of Tukohama as your Minor God. Soul of Tukohama is really strong for this build. Since we are usually going to be stationary since we need to keep hitting enemies with Viper Strike to build up our Virulence stacks with poison, Soul of Tukohama grants us additional physical damage reduction. While we are stationary, this Pantheon grants us 2% additional physical damage each second for a maximum of 8%. 8% might not seem like much, but that could potentially make or a break you getting one-shot at times. Capturing Tahsin along with this Pantheon nets us some life regeneration too. While we are stationary, we gain 0.5% of life regenerated per second for every single up to a maximum of 2%. You will find that you will be stationary a lot of the time since we need to apply our Virulence stacks with Viper Strike. Playstyle The cadence of this build fluctuates back and forth. There are times when you are going to always be running around and using Whirling Blades to move and hit mobs with. Then there are going to be times where you stop and hit mobs and enemies with Viper Strike. You are going to notice that you interchange between these actions over and over. It’s literally, hold down Whirling Blades to get around then when you see a pack, Whirling Blades through them. When you stop, then you hold down Viper Strike to poison everything. You pretty much just repeat this over and over until you clear the whole map and kill the boss. Since we use Victario’s Charity, we usually are getting Frenzy Charges for our Agony Crawler. One weakness with Agony Crawler is that it is too slow. With all of the attack speed we get from our jewels along with the Frenzy Charge generation, it grants enough speed for our Agony Crawler to catch up and attack fast enough. If you do want the Agony Crawler to catch up to you in a flash, then you use Convocation which is also a key skill we use for this build. For boss fights, I would suggest you use Whirling Blades to apply the two curses on them first, and then literally just hold down Viper Strike until the Agony Crawler gets summoned and destroys them. One of the tips I would give is to get as close as possible to the boss and then use Convocation to summon your Agony Crawler point blank to the boss. The reason why is because we can have more of the projectiles from Tail Spike to hit the boss which means our damage is multiplied. I have had red-tier bosses melt and get one-shotted from this. It is basically like using Barrage. You obviously want as many projectiles to hit as you can. If you have the helmet enchant for your Agony Crawler too? Then this is even MORE damage at point blank range. Pop your flasks when you Whirling Blades into mobs or when you are about to reach mobs. The flasks are really just for defenses and survival. Leave all of the damage to your Agony Crawler. Just always be on the move with the build. Whirling Blades out of telegraphed attacks when you need to or just dangerous attacks in general. We are fairly tanky with all of our life and having Fortify up, but there is nothing wrong with being safe. You want to stay close to bosses as much as you can though, that way you can keep your Virulence stacks as high as you can with Viper Strike to keep your Agony Crawler at max damage. Remember, Agony Crawler’s DPS speed and damage scales with Virulence stacks. You can use Spirit Offering while mapping or during boss fights if there are minion corpses, but generally you are already going to melt them already. But hey, there is nothing wrong with more DPS, right? Media Here are some sample gameplay videos so you can see the build in action. Videos
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Conclusion At end game we are sitting at over 6K life and easily more if you invest into more life on your gear. We have over 200% life on the tree to make sure we are nice and healthy which scales well with the skill tree. Our attacks cannot be evaded because of Ornaments of the East with 100%+ chance to poison ensuring that we keep our Virulence stacks as high as we can. Life gain on hit+Fortify gives us more sustain and survivability including instant leech on top of that. The build has a really great balance and you are actually able to face-tank while being a summoner/minion build. This is one of the reasons why I think this build is very unique by being able to be a summoner while still being tanky enough to face-tank. Overview of Current Gear (all together)
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Path of Building/Pastebin Code
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https://pastebin.com/jFDwrfSn
This is the third guide that I have finished and posted so far. Technically it would have been my fourth one, but I put my Dancing Duo Scion build on hold from last league (Delve), because all of the new additions to the Expansion and Betrayal got me too hyped up. I would honestly say this is the cheapest budget I have ever used to league start and just build in general with this level of power and damage. I can honestly say I only spent 2 alchemy orbs and 1 chaos to get the required gear. Most of the other gear was just self-found and crafted. I am honestly really happy with how this build turned out and I hope that anyone else that uses this build experiences the same joy and passion that I had. Good luck and enjoy the build, exiles! *Want to try out some fun hipster builds? Check out my thread below!* [Build/Stream Thread] https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2246315 Last edited by Bakuhakubasugasu#6072 on Mar 12, 2019, 10:00:38 AM
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Interesting build and i agree with the strength of the agony crawler considering I was running a poison build usinc a 4-linked herald and with little investment it was wrecking.
A couple questions though: First, can't you just get the claw poison node and run blade flurry instead of viper strike? That would free up both multistrike and melee splash from that link and give you some better range with the only real cost being a bigger issue with poison reduction maps. Would let you easily use lgoh and maybe faster attack on it as well. Also was thinking instead of focusing the points and effort at increasing shock chance and reducing lightning res and instead crafting shock on focus on a ring so it's actually useful on bosses. Fun looking build though! |
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" Thanks for stopping by, exile. :) The Claw poison node only gives us a 10% chance to poison. Even if you grab both in the Claw wheel, it only gives us 20%. You also have to remember that you have wasting a good amount of points to even grab those nodes. You are better off using those skill points to grab more life and more minion nodes for increasing your Agony Crawlers DPS. Like I said, the tree is mostly focused on the left side of the tree. We don't want to have to waste skill points on the right as it doesn't benefit our build much. The only reason why we go slightly right of the tree is just to grab the three life nodes. Also it gets us some minor dexterity which is needed for the build too. Blade Flurry is not as good as the Viper Strike setup in hitting multiple targets. Blade Flurry does have AoE, but it does not stack up Virulence stacks as fast as the said Viper Strike setup. I have tried Blade Flurry with it before and it felt way more clunky. I think once you try Viper Strike with the setup, you will really see and feel the difference. Blade Flurry as single target might be okay though, but we want a setup that is good everywhere. With just Viper Strike and the Noxious Strike node from the Assassin, we already sit at 100% with literally no investment. Adding Herald of Agony on top of that, we have 120% chance to poison naturally. That is way better than wasting poison gems or nodes on the tree to achieve. We can optimize the DPS for the Agony Crawler and grab more life nodes. As for the shock chance thing, we are not really investing into shock chance at all. It is just an extra mod we get from Conductivity. Nowhere on the tree are we grabbing shock. We need to focus all of our skill points on DPS for our Agony Crawler and life nodes. You would be surprised at how much shocks we get inflicted with the speed that the Agony Crawler attacks at. Plus, the bosses usually melt before you get to 40 Virulence stacks or before shock happens. 19% chance to shock is still quite a decent amount of chance. Even the 5% chance to give allies a Frenzy Charge from Victario's Charity is always activating for us. We'll take any extra bonuses we can get. :) I haven't really focused on the 'Focus' mods much this league yet. I haven't used them in any build as of yet. I have some ideas, but those will probably be for other builds. Thanks for stopping by and the suggestions. Let me know if you need anything else. *Want to try out some fun hipster builds? Check out my thread below!* [Build/Stream Thread] https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2246315 Last edited by Bakuhakubasugasu#6072 on Dec 25, 2018, 4:21:52 PM
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" Phone browsing isn't great for looking at the skill tree so I was mostly going by memory of an old CoC blade flurry+bladefall+vortex build that used agony last keague. That said thinking back it was probably bladefall that was building up virulence stacks more than flurry, I'll have to check out the differences. I was also wondering about the assassin nodes you get, specifically the crit and power charge nodes instead if the poison heal (just had a thought that the latter probably has more to do with you not actually getting the kill for the heal, have you tested if you get any heals for your crawler killing?). Culling strike on crit would surely be more useful both for power charges to your crawler and the healer in addition to bosses. I imagine the crit chance isn't insane but considering the power charge and crit nodes are purely self damage that you don't really need it can't hurt. I'm probably underestimating how much that extra conductivity does for damagenot counting the shock, would have to check out PoB for that. Darn phone. Thank you for the responses! |
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" Phone browsing can definitely be a bit annoying. I check the forums on my phone when I'm not on my PC so I understand completely. You were most likely thinking of Bladefall but I've seen some Herald of Agony builds use Blade Flurry too. Just depends on your taste, I guess. If you did use Bladefall though, you would have to invest into more chance to poison which means more skill points used up. As you said, I have experimented with all of the nodes for the Assassin with this build. Toxic Delivery only recovers your life if "you" kill the enemies, not your minions (Agony Crawler). Plus, we don't actually want to deal extra damage so we can make sure we hit the enemies more with Viper Strike so we can stack poison/Virulence stacks more efficiently. This is probably like one of the rare occasions where doing more damage is not optimal for the build. We apply Culling Strike on critical strike pretty efficiently. Though we don't have an absurd amount of critical strike chance compared to a regular crit build, we have more than enough to ensure that we can cull our enemies and bosses. The Assassin's passives are really just for utility at this point. *Want to try out some fun hipster builds? Check out my thread below!*
[Build/Stream Thread] https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2246315 |
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are you using some google ads or something this build ended up in my chrome new tab home page
 Last edited by dvasan#5121 on Dec 26, 2018, 2:08:59 AM
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" I'm not using anything lol. I don't know how that popped up on your Chrome's tab but I didn't do anything special to the post or anything of that sort. Don't know how that happened. :O *Want to try out some fun hipster builds? Check out my thread below!*
[Build/Stream Thread] https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2246315 |
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Same happened to me. Maybe just an improvement from google, indexing the poe forum/website since they were getting more traffic/interest lately? I dunno.
I’ll definitely give a more thorough look at this build. Thanks! |
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" Yeah, not sure what kind of witchcraft is going on but I do appreciate you guys sill giving the build a look. Let me know if you have any questions or concerns and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. Good luck, exile! *Want to try out some fun hipster builds? Check out my thread below!*
[Build/Stream Thread] https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2246315 |
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