An extensive guide on Chaos-DoT Spells ft. ED, Bane & Co [3.14 rdy]

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rugalb666 wrote:

[...] wand with the affix "trigger a socketed spell when you use a skill" I found out that frost bomb + cold snap nicely complements bane since I use Occultist ascendances Curse and shield , cold snap has roughly the same area of effect than bane and frost bomb is caste in the middle.

Several advantages:

-Chill ennemies with chilled ground, even more slow down !
-Ennemies dying in the area give you frenzy charge => better damage + good for extending phase run (CWDT set up)
-Frost bomb block life regen
-Extra damage without investment (cold damage + cold dot with cold exposure ) + extra chaos damage on kill (ascendancy property)

I also use fire golem in the wand: no need to worry about golem dying he is cast when I use Bane!

Hmm... I don't get Frost Bomb, damage should be insignificant compared to Bane, since a) we skill cold damage only via ascendency b) won't be supported with gems. My chars will literally deal >99% of their Damage from chaos-DoTs, flat Soulrend Damage and similar stuff won't add up to 1% (I am not exaggerating). Is Frost Bomb really worth it?

While mobs won't live long enough, Cold Snap chill sounds really good vs bosses. Especially when not having to spend the cast time. Good idea.

Being as paranoid as I am, I prefer Chaos Golem to a measly 20% increased Damage. And a chaos-sorcerer taking a flame golem? Nah, that ain't right ;)

Well I am not using frost bomb as permanent thing anymore, it is only useful to slow high life regen which does not happen too often

Not sure if i didnt see it but me and a friend are playing duo chaos builds and we were wondering if blight's stacks and vaal blight's stacks were separate. Any insight?
@Lightender

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Not sure if i didnt see it but me and a friend are playing duo chaos builds and we were wondering if blight's stacks and vaal blight's stacks were separate. Any insight?

Hey, nobody wants to end the light ;)

Not sure how to read your question, I will answer both ways I could understand it. Very niche but very interesting topic, had to think about this quite a bit.

a) Can my friend and I do 40 normal Blight stacks in total?
No. "All damage over time effects [...] usually only the one with the highest damage per second works at any given time (except for poison where all applications stack cumulatively); this is true even in the case of effects applied by different players or sources." (wiki) Blight text overrides the 1-stack-max with a 20-stack max but this is counted per monster not per player. Thus two players can only apply 20 active stacks in total on a mob.

b) Can I have 20 Blight stacks and 3-20 Vaal Blight stacks simultaneously?
No. I am only 99% sure, but this is my reasoning:
The game treats the Blight debuff exactly like the Vaal Blight debuff. Proof: The Spreading Rot Jewel affects both Blight Hinder and Vaal Blight Hinder (can be seen in the tooltip) although Spreading Rot specifically names "Blight" not "Vaal Blight". (Would the game differentiate then this would not be the case)
Let's imagine you somehow applied 15 Blight DOTs and 15 Vaal Blight DoTs. The mobs would only receive the damage from the 20 highest DoTs, most likely 15 Vaal Blights and 5 Blights (all debuffs are on the monster but only the 20 strongest deal damage).

But more importantly:
To synergies instead of interfering with each other I would recommend each skill should only be on one of you two (Blight, Essence Drain+Contagion, Soulrend, Bane). Than you would profit of each others withered, -chaos res to enemies etc. but never override each other DoTs. And if you need help considering which skills to pick then you have come to exactly the right guide :)))

It was route B. Would be nice if there was some clarification from ggg but I'll just go with assuming no to not waste time.

Btw I'm not a noob, I didnt need everything explained like i started yesterday. I asked a question, wanting an answer, not to be coached. Tone it down a bit. Thank you.

Kk, sry, was carried away a bit and wanted to add the reply to the guide, thus over-explaining. (And I get a lot of beginners question, often hard to tell how much the asking player knows)

Useful. So very very useful.

I knew the non-ailment stuff was useful, but the wither totem interaction was off of my radar.

Also the precise numbers on the support gems was excellent.


Thank you.

Nice post, thanks.

I went with chaos DOT during betrayal, and because I usually switch it up between seasons, I didn't try it out for Synth. Maybe next league.

One thing I found that was pretty fun was decay + armageddon brand. Put one on a pack member, and move on. Melt harder targets with blight + wither totems. ED + contagion was always fun too.

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Lightelder wrote:

Kk, sry, was carried away a bit and wanted to add the reply to the guide, thus over-explaining. (And I get a lot of beginners question, often hard to tell how much the asking player knows)

This is a great guide. Good to err on the side of more info rather than less. Even many experienced players don't know everything about the game.

One way to deal with that is to start with, "Hey, I'm going to provide a little more information than you've asked for because it's a great question and some other folks might find this useful." People will always get pissy if they think you think they don't know as much as they do. But it never bothers them if you're assuming they know more than they do. That's human nature. :-)

Thanks for the great guide!

Just one question concerning Decay support (20) vs. Empower (4).

If I compare both in a ED setup in PoB I get approx. 100k for decay support and 140k for empower. Am I missing something? That´s not a huge difference because the total is 660k (decay) vs 700k (empower). Empower is still at 4 exa, so that´s why I am asking. I just might put the 4 exa in something with more bang for the buck.