[3.6] "The KnightKing" Budget League Starter -> 5+Mill Shaper DPS This Season

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arelil wrote:

I’ve seen a lot of the same questions popping up repeatedly over the past few weeks, so I did a writeup covering some of the most common things I’ve seen.


OP did a good job in his initial write-up and outlining the core concepts that make this build what it is, but he’s moved onto other things now and there is a bit of a gap in the information out there. I’ve been playing this build consistently throughout 3.6, and have pretty well capped it out in my opinion, so as a wrap-up to it I wanted to do a write up that goes into more detail on some of the areas that OP’s initial build was light over and were spots that I struggled, primarily early-mid mapping (pre shavs 6-L) and late game (how to kill uber elder with this build and run T16s deathless consistently). Currently I’m sitting at 6.2mil shaper DPS and ~9.3k ES, making this the strongest iteration of this particular build on the 3.6 patch in terms of raw dps + survivability.



First, overall this build can be quite strong, but people need to understand what it is; it is not by any means a speed clearer like MF Tornado Shot, nor is it a gigantic DPS boss killer glass-cannon like GC mines. Rather this is a build that offers the capability to do all content in the game, from deathless uber elder, to T16 map farming, to deep delving. The combo of ice spear and winter orb allows for us to focus dps on high-life targets or large mobs, while at the same time cleaning up other smaller mobs around us with the auto-targeting of winter orb and ensuring we stay alive with massive leeching + on-hit regen.

Finally, this is a build that allows for endless customization, there is no one ‘best’ way to play it, and every different style has trade-offs that we’ll go through throughout this write-up. There are definitely other options out there that work as well, going for longer duration on WO for easier clearing etc. and that’s cool too. There are some sections in here, particularly pertaining to the skill tree, that I think would be beneficial to every build, but most of this write-up is geared towards people looking to min-max dps.

Vid of me killing shaper from (from 75% hp) in ~5 seconds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjvEuoPEwXk

Early-mid mapping

Gearing: Chests & General Playstyle

Spoiler

One of my biggest pain points with the initial build was attempting to go low-life prior to getting a Shavronne’s wrappings. In my experience, you’re either sacrificing a large amount of EHP and DPS to attain a decent amount of chaos resistance, or you end up getting blown up by chaos damage that bypasses your ES stack (and this still does happen even when you are running nearly capped chaos res). It wasn’t a great playstyle for me and made leveling difficult when you start getting into the tail end of yellow maps. Furthermore, with all the recommended uniques I found myself often below cap on my elemental resistances. This led me to look at other alternatives for this stage of the build.

When comparing a low-life build to a CI build, the main tradeoff is damage vs tankiness. With a low-life build we’re able to use our lifepool as additional spell reservation space, allowing us to run additional auras and resulting in higher dps, along with being able to take the ‘pain attunement’ keystone passive. On the negative side, we’re stuck with running a chest (shavronne’s wrappings) that caps out at ~350 es, and prior to getting that are typically running a tabula or another very weak 6L, while at the same time having to worry about all chaos damage 1-shotting us. A CI build allows us to focus much more on raw tankiness (it is possible to make 1k+ ES vaal regalias now) and get a higher overall EHP pool, while sacrificing some of the auras that give us additional DPS. I would recommend going CI prior to getting a 6-Linked Shavs. Even without the dps boosts from going low-life, you should still be around 2-3mil shaper dps.

Gearing: Shields

Spoiler

Running CI also allows you to explore other possibilities for shields. Either a well-rolled spirit shield giving a mix of ES / ele resists as needed / offensive stats is great, or a Light of Lunaris (50-60c currently) for a more offensive option. Both of these can help fill the stopgap before you have the other items needed to transition into a LL shavs build with a prism guardian. Below is an example of a ~2c spell shield that gives us some decent offensive + defensive stats, and would be perfect for using while leveling in low-tier maps with CI.

Gearing: Boots

Spoiler

From a gearing perspective, the single biggest thing I found helpful for increasing survivability was picking up a pair of fennemus’ spinnerets (currently 2-3c). These allow you to gain 15-20 ES per projectile hit on an enemy affected by a spider web (aspect of the spider), and due to it being a ‘gain on hit’ and not a leech, recovery is instant. Between the hits from each projectile in winter orb and ice spear, we’re getting a huge number of hits every second, which translates into a gigantic amount of instant ES recovery, without having to deal with leech caps. The most important stat to look for on these is how much ES you're getting back on hit, followed by overall increased ES% on the boots themselves.

Gearing: Auras

Spoiler

If you do opt to run CI, I would recommend going discipline, hatred, and aspect of the spider / heralds of ice (based on if you’re running spinnerets as outlined above) as your primary auras. Again, this would be my recommended playstyle until you get a 6L shavs picked up. However, if you opt to run LL prior to getting Shavs, OP's original guide has a very thorough section I would defer to.

Gearing: Jewels

Spoiler

Get an ‘Energy From Within’ jewel (~35c) and socket it in your top-center jewel node on the tree.

Get a ‘Tempered Flesh’ jewel (1 alch)– socket it in the left-most socket on the tree. Free 40% crit multi. (socket for placement shown below)

Late Game
Another area in this build that was fairly light was what to do in the late game when youre wanting to try and knock down uber elder, or have 5-10ex to start dropping on stuff, beyond just multi-modding a wand. This is the part of the build that I did the most tinkering with, as I wanted to be able to easily down all endgame challenges. These are my opinions only, and were what I found worked best for me to take down uber elder, T16 syndicate encounters, etc. This is where things get fun :)

The Passive Tree

Spoiler

Note 1: I talk about ‘Pseudo Spell Damage’ at several points throughout this – this is due to the fact that as our build is nearly fully cold damage until the very late game when we start getting a significant amount of chaos damage, % increased spell damage = % increased cold damage = % increased elemental damage. Even at very late stages where you may have 20% chaos damage, spell damage only becomes 1.2x as valuable as those other two stats.

Note 2: To determine if node pathings are better / worse than other pathings, I’ll reference raw ES #’s – these numbers were from the OP’s 3.6 Pastebin PoB link, so anyone else should be able to fairly closely replicate the numbers Im getting.


As I leveled the build, I found some of the biggest issues I had were with non-optimal pathing through the passive tree. Some of the recommended nodes end up giving far less in returns than other options, leading to an overall weaker build.

At a high level, our tree is split into wheels we want to spec into on the left side of the tree, and wheels we want to spec into on the right side of the tree. The problem is that there really isn’t a super-efficient way to get to everything we want to hit without wasting a bunch of points on pathing. This results in the entire top-central portion of the tree having far too many travel nodes allocated in it, and doesn’t effectively take advantage of many of the wheels where we can pick up free stats. The picture below shows what I’m talking about.


To begin to fix this I looked at how we could connect the two sides of our tree more effectively (those nodes that branch left vs those that branch right), and found that if I picked up an ‘Energy from Within’ jewel and socketed it on the top center node (outlined in green above) I could take advantage of the otherwise useless life nodes in the area, converting them into +%ES nodes (this jewel converts all % increased health nodes in its radius to % increased ES nodes). With this in place, we can then connect our tree through ‘Heart and Soul’ and ‘Arcanists Domain’, allowing us to de-spec from the wasted travel intelligence nodes previously connecting the tree. This simple swap costs us a net of 3 points, but gives us overall:
• +18% ES
• +28% mana
• +20% spell damage
• +5% cast speed
• +20% crit strike chance for spells

For an additional two points – putting the net investment up to a total of 5 points – we can pick up cruel preparation (wheel to the left of where Energy from Within is placed). Due to the jewel’s effect, the two points we spend to pick up the Notable give us an additional +15% ES and +5% to all ele resistances.

Taking a look at our updated skill tree, we now have the following (with new additions in yellow):

Right now we’re already sitting with a bunch more ES from where we were before, but we can go much further!

The next easy pickup is the ‘Unnatural Calm’ wheel in the top-center of the tree (highlighted in green). I was rather confused why this wasn’t allocated in the original build, as for a mere 3-point investment we’re picking up a massive +30% ES.


Between all the changes we’ve made so far, we’ve invested 8 additional points, which isn’t possible to do if we’re allocating all other points as the build has recommended. Through lots of PoB trial-and-error, I found some inefficient nodes that I strongly recommend de-speccing from:

Arcane Guarding / Frost Walker

Spoiler

The entire pathing structure to Arcane Guarding / Frost Walker is inefficient in my opinion, especially given our pickup of the ‘Arcanist’s Domain’ notable passive. Currently we’re spending a total of 9 points to get a bunch of primarily offensive stats, including the following
• +47% spell damage
• +10% ele damage
• +27% cold damage
• +10% chance to block spell damage
• +20 intelligence
• +15% cold resistance



These are great stats for our build, but for the amount of points we’re putting into it by pathing through relatively weak nodes means we cant drop our points into more cost-effective options (see above). Taking a look at what we’re getting overall from these nodes, if we total up our spell, ele, and cold damage %’s, we get a total of pseudo 84% spell damage increase. If we split that out over the 9 points it cost us to get there, we’re really only seeing a ~9% damage increase per node we pick up, which is not good, nor worth pathing to. The reason this is a waste comes back to two core principles:
• Minor nodes are relatively inefficient to pick up on their own, and really should only be used to path towards a notable or keystone, and thus the closer the notable to our ‘main’ path the better. We’re spending a total of 9 points to get 2 notables, which is not efficient.
• In POE % increase does not mean % more. For example, if we pick up a node that gave us 10% increased spell damage, our overall dps does not scale by 10%. Rather, these are values that are applied to base damages rather than straight multipliers.

So how can we improve on this? First, the ‘Arcane Guarding’ wheel is in my opinion a lost cause, there is really no way to get around having to waste 2 points to path to it, then spend another 3-4 points to pick up a notable which is decent, but not game-changing. ‘Frost Walker’ on the other hand can easily be reached from ‘Arcanists Domain’ with a one-node investment, and I would still recommend picking it up, as the 2 total points we spend on it give us a net of pseudo +35% spell damage and +15% cold res (or 17.5% pseudo spell damage and 7.5% cold res per point allocated). So overall we end up losing ~50% pseudo spell damage but gain back a net of 7 points to fund our other changes to the tree. Here is what our skilltree looks like now:

Essence Surge

Spoiler

On the hunt for more inefficient pickups, we find the ‘Essence Surge’ wheel, which we are now spending 4 points to path through, for a grand total of +60 ES and some faster ES recharge. Taking a look at the PoB stats on the posted build (after our modifications) we find that these 4 points are giving us a grand total of 318 ES, which may sound like a lot, but for 4 nodes really doesn’t end up being much.


I would recommend despeccing from this tree and putting the 4 points somewhere else. For example, dropping 4 points into the 6% ES ‘Foresight’ wheel gives us the following (note I had to path through and then show unpathing #’s as PoB would attempt to auto-path through the shortest path):


Or even better, if we use those 4 points to pick up the ‘Melding’ wheel we get even more ES:

Other ‘traps’ I’ve seen on people’s PoB’s

Spoiler

The ‘Leadership’ wheel is bad, don’t get it unless you’re near a breakpoint for being able to run an additional aura or something. We’re spending 4 points to only get ~180 ES, 4% reduced mana reserved, and a 4% DPS buff.


Next, we have one that isn’t a bad choice necessarily, but depends if you’ve already picked up all other better wheels and are speccing further into ES. I see lots of people speccing into the ‘foresight’ / ‘Ash, Frost, and Storm’ area. It just isn’t super efficient overall unless you’re parking points there until you can path to a different notable, or need the ele resists provided by ‘Ash, Frost, and Storm’. Furthermore, ‘Path of the Savant’ really isn’t that great, and I wouldn’t waste 3 points to path to it. I would say speccing down into foresight is worth the 4-point investment (+20 ES, +20% ES, +20 int = another +4% ES for 4 points) but past that its ‘meh’. Not a bad tree if youre purely looking to boost ES and have already picked up all the other options though.

4 point initial allocation into Foresight gives us 597 ES:


An additional 4 points only gives us 509 ES. Not horrible by any means, but not as good as the first 4:



Continuing on, the 'Light Eater' node on the top left of the tree doesn’t do too much unless you’re REALLY hurting for more leech. I found after I got the build kitted out I couldn’t even notice the difference after de-speccing from the wheel.



Finally, any notable you’re pathing towards that is giving +increased mana % or +increased mana recovery rate is a waste. We’re reserving the majority of our mana with auras anyways, we don’t care about getting a giant pool (unless you’re planning to run a clarity Watchers. Im sure that there are others I’m missing, feel free to play around with PoB #’s based on your current level and gear.

So what should I spec into instead?

Spoiler

Spec into ‘Trickery’ and ‘Assassination’ – 5 points for an overall 10% DPS boost, plus dex and str points.


The ‘Melding’ wheel is actually really solid – giving us 25% ES for 4 points (6.25% ES per point) as well as more max life (which means more ES if you’re using a Presence of Chayula)


The ‘Influence’ wheel on the top-right side of the tree is a better version of the ‘Leadership’ wheel in just about every way. The notable is better and its directly off the main skill tree (no extra nodes expended pathing there). The % increased non-curse aura effect is actually huge for us as it boosts all our current buffs, giving us more DPS and ES on top of the reduced reservation % you get from pathing to it.

Gearing: Jewels

Spoiler

Watchers eye has tons of good offensive + defensive options. My preferred to-go is ES on-hit while affected by Discipline, as mentioned before we get tons of procs every second due to the large number of hits we’re getting with our projectiles. This also lets us drop our spinneret’s for other late-game options. I wont get too in-depth into other ones to look for here, but ideally try and pick up one with at least two affixes tied to aura’s that youre running, and get at least 1 defensive affix of some sort. As I had focused fairly heavily on offense through the rest of my build, my eye is entirely focused on defense, providing a ton of survivability.

Other gems – as mentioned above, get a Watchers Eye, an Energy from Within, and a Tempered Flesh jewel. For your other slots, pick up jewels with any str/dex you need + any ele resists you need. If you want to go more offensive, crit multi is the best stat to look for (crit multi with cold, crit multi with ele skills, global crit multi) followed by spell damage / cold damage / spell damage while wearing a shield etc. Energy Shield is also a solid affix if you can find and need more defense. For endgame I would shoot for a minimum of 3 targeted affixes though, with at least one crit multi on each jewel. Overall, I would prioritize things as follows:

• 1st Priority: Fill up your resists/stats to use your gems (keeping in mind str / dex gems don’t necessarily need to be at lvl 20, I wouldn’t get dex over ~115 personally)
• 2nd Priority: Crit Multiplier with Cold/Elemental/Spells AND/OR Energy Shield
• 3rd Priority: Spell damage, Projectile Damage, Elemental Damage, Cold Damage

If you have tons of money to burn at the endgame, pick up an ‘Unnatural Instinct’ jewel (currently ~17ex) and socket it at the bottom of your tree. It gives some ridiculous stats (total stats for jewel + 4 points used to path to it):

Gearing: Boots

Spoiler

After picking up a defensive watchers that either gave +on-hit ES or more leech, I would recommend transitioning off of the Spinnerets into something a bit more end-gamed focused.

The first option I would look at is Skyforth’s. These things are great for us, they give us some ES, further reduce our mana reservations by 6%, and also handle all of our power charge generation. This means we can swap out ‘power charge on crit’ in our 6L ice spear setup for a much higher DPS gem, such as controlled destruction. The importance of reduced mana reservations on this also cannot be overstated, it allows us to hit breakpoints with relative aura cost that in turn let us run 7 auras and still have a comfortable mana pool left with which to play.

Another option for those of you with cash to burn is a pair of high-end / synthesized ES-based boots, ideally one with an abyssal socket. Depending what helm enchant you run with and your 6L setup, these could easily be BiS, but would likely cost 20-30ex.

Gearing: Rings

Spoiler

Mark of the Shaper + elder ring in the other slot is where it’s at, MotS is reasonably priced, even for a well-rolled ring, and is basically a free +100% spell damage, as well as some ES and additional lighting damage. I haven’t found any other combos that provide the overall stats from that + a well-crafted elder ring (both offensive and defensive), and this combo has been my build standard for the past several leagues.

Gearing: Amulet

Spoiler

Either Presence of Chayula for a more defensive option (gives a solid ~1.2k ES boost) + a gigantic 60% chaos res, pandemonius for an offensive option, or a GG shaper ammy with ES/crit multi / ele pen / other GG rolls on it. PoC is also far cheaper than a Pan. Currently, with the PoC going for approx. 80c, while a Pan. Is still sitting at 4 ex. I would decide based on your playstyle and other current items / needs – are you getting blown up too easily, are you not killing bosses fast enough, etc. but will mention that unless you pull a really GG shaper amulet, its going to be hard to beat the defensive options offered by PoC, with both a gigantic ES buff + basically providing us all the chaos res we need in a single item.

Gearing: Helmet

Spoiler

• Go for a Vertex or a Hubris Circlet with +1 Ice Spear projectiles on it. I played around a bit with the Ice Spear power charge generation on crit enchant and it didn’t seem to work very well, but I also gave up almost immediately with it, so your mileage may vary. Pretty straightforward. Vertex is better if youre not running Skyforth's as it gives reduced mana cost to gems socketed in the helmet.

Gearing: Wand

Spoiler

As OP said, look for a wand with T1 increased damage per power charge and T1-T2 crit multi. From there, multi-mod and craft on the following:

• Gain #% of cold damage as extra chaos damage
• Add # to # cold damage to spells
• Combo % increased spell damage + gain #% of non-chaos damage as extra chaos damage

Auras

Spoiler

OP’s guide had us running 6 auras originally. Of these, I found next to no use for Clarity, its taking a spot we could drop in another dps / survivability aura and is only giving us mana regen. We’re reserving the majority of our mana, and without some fairly significant investments into mana regen nodes in our tree (see inefficient pathing above) we’re still going to go OOM. It ends up working out much better to simply take a mana flask and cycling it, the flask can literally always be up and can free up a slot to run an additional aura. De-speccing from this frees up some mana to make some additional choices down the road on what auras we DO want to run. When looking at the above list, keep in mind you’ll typically want to keep at least 160 mana or so unreserved (and even that is rather low, I preferred playing with ~230 free), so try and plan your auras around your current skilltree and gear to determine what would fit best.


Necessary auras -- you should always try to run these, theyre giving you the biggest bang for your reservation buck:

• Discipline
• Hatred
• Zealotry
• Herald of Ice



Situational Auras – this lower tier of auras is more hit-and-miss, and can be swapped out based on needs, capabilities, goals etc. To get more auras socketed either pick up skyforths or a vertex (for reduced mana reservation / decrease mana cost for socketed gems, respectively).

• Anger (50% mana reservation) – the purpose of our life pool is to be a secondary bank for reservations (through Prism Guardian’s Blood Magic) and thus we want to try and get as many ‘high value reservations’ in as possible. Since we’re not using life as a primary life pool, ideally we want to reserve as much of it as possible. Anger is another 50% mana reservation aura (the same as Hatred and Zealotry) which provides a very hefty chunk of DPS. Even better, we can run all 3 of our 50% reservation auras and still have a tiny sliver of health left over. The downside of this would be of course having to run discipline against your mana pool, which can be tricky without Skyforths.
• Aspect of the spider (25% mana reservation) – good offensive aura that provides us with a ton of defensive utility as well when running Spinnerets. If you need to cut 1 aura and are not running Spinnerets, this is always an option.
• Arctic Armor (25% mana reservation) – decent defensive aura, if you have the spare mana to run definitely do, this is also a decent one to drop until you pick up Skyforths. This is also the one aura in this list that I do not currently run.
• Purity of Elements (35% mana reservation) – this is one that I run so I can get away with having fairly weak ele resistances overall on my gear. This lets me get away with more affixes focused on +ES, +Str, and +Dex, or picking up offensive items (such as Mark of the Shaper) that have no resistances on them at all. I definitely would not pick this one up until you have Skyforths. You’ll also likely need a lvl 3-4 enlighten or you’ll have a bad time with your mana pool.

Gems and Stats

Spoiler

Ive taken a look at quite a few builds this league and often see people that have way too high of str / dex for no reason. This really amounts to wasted affixes on gear / jewels where you could instead have additional defenses or DPS mods. Trying to plan how high of dex + str you’ll need and then matching your affixes to get as close as possible can help make your affixes go much further.

Don’t necessarily think you have to level all your gems up to 20, it often provides negligible to non-existent differences in dps and survivability, especially for utility gems such as CWDT and immortal call.

Curses scale nearly as well with quality as they do with level, if youre running projectile weakness (and you should) you really shouldn’t be leveling it past 9-10 or so (as your dex allows) – lvl 20 gmp requires 111 dex, which puts you at lvl 9 projectile weakness (109 dex req) whereas lvl 10 ups the cap to 113. Dropping another 2 affix slots on gear to get another 60 dex so you can run a lvl 20 projectile weakness is an absolute waste.

Level 20 anger requires 98 str, I would not get it any higher than that as there is absolutely no need.

Get a phase run gem (don’t really need supports necessarily, but increased duration is nice). Use it. Massive QoL for clearspeed / mapping. Also use a quicksilver flask with the ‘adrenaline’ suffix for mapping (another +30% ms)

Anyhow, that’s about it, hopefully it was informative. Open to any improvements or suggestions.

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CuteMike4U wrote:

This is a fantastic update/post/writeup on this build. I had been struggling with the original build a bit at T14-T15 maps. I spent around 3 ex updating some gear and respecing into your tree and now I'm at 1.15 mil DPS and over 9k ES according to PoB (if I'm reading it right.) I have successfully done 2/4 T16 maps with ease, such a massive improvement on my build. Don't have a lot of currency so will be farming with this gear for quite awhile, but it seems like my current setup will carry me pretty far.

Here's my PoB if you would like to give a once over for any glaring errors. My profile is open too so you should be able to check out my gear. My biggest thing right now is slowly getting my levels up to finish out my skill tree. I couldn't get past 90 with my past build, now I'm just about to ding 93.

Great write up man, thanks for all the effort! This build is beast with these changes.

https://pastebin.com/YrVxnETr

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BiggestNoobEver wrote:

How come nobody takes zealots oath? And how important is aspect of the spider? I play standard and that thing is expensive with other useless stats. A decent item with aspect spider would be even crazier.

Wand is another item I can't afford. I'm thinking of getting a regular t1 crit plus a ton of regular cold spell damage (100+%）is a good alternative?

Tldr wand n aspect of the spider are the only thing I can't afford. Is it okay to skip them? Also no watchers eye. Already have shav wrap though

Thanks

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uDieds wrote:

im following his guide too, originally strugging to do anything above t10..... doing a few respect etc now i breeze t10s in a few mins.... just need better wand and rings and im set i think.. i got lucky and found pandemonious on league so im using that for my amulet currently. cant afford skyforth tho even tho is it worth it considering the acendancy gives power chargers when mana is spent... not sure.

edit: got me a pair of skyforth, tried it for a few t10 maps.. not worth it for the 30ex..... so im back to voidwalker for the pierce additional targets much better clear speed. thats just my opinion.

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ShoveMoneyDeeper wrote:

No idea, I must've failed somewhere at the end, because I can see it is the meta skill, but after finishing all acts and trying T5, managed to barely survive at some points and actually once died to synth mob instance....Dissapointed.
Maybe it is just not my build:) Too much invested already and really don't feel like selling everything off.
See you next league and have great game all!:)