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

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jrmy1992 wrote:

I am interested to see what you think about this. I have a bane occultist that uses 3 curses linked to bane and has two six links. Blight is in my staff and soul rend is in the chest.

About the bane-

Spoiler

I get +4 from the Doedre's Scorn and then a +3 to chaos from my staff

My Bane is lvl21 so that puts me at a lvl28 Bane

L~Temporal Chains +4lvl, Despair +7lvl, Enfeeble +4lvl, Bane +7lvl.

So what do you think? Is it worth using 3 curses with bane in this situation? I use enfeeble to add some survivability. Also is contagion viable?

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

You can definetely play Bane that way. And squeezing three DoTs in is definetely great for damage. You do sacrifice a some DPS by only linking curses to bane. The bonus levels on all curses are definetely a nice cherry on top.
An option to consider would be Vixen's Entrapment, maybe a fourth curse and an Efficacy linked to Bane. It's some investment and would give roughly 15% more Bane damage, so in no way mandatory, your setup is fine.

Contagion is only useable in combination with Essence Drain, it's own damage is laughable. Try it out if you want to, it definetely makes Essence Drain a viable clear skil that is not mana hungry.

I checked out your character and have some feedback I'd like to give considering support gems and item choices.
-Although chaos spells have the "area" tag, they do not scale with area damage. Incr. area damage tree nodes have no effect for you and Concecrated Effect is actively hurting your build. For more details, see Section 1.2 of the guide, alternative support gems under Section 4.
-I strongly recommend reconsidering your flask choices. Not running a Quicksilver Flask of Adrenaline is kinda a crime ;) I only ever use 1 life flask after leveling, but more than 2 is definetely overkill. Witchfire Brew against Bosses actively hurts your build because it will always overwrite your lv28 Bane-Despair with it's lv21 despair aura (ofc its useful to zoom through packs without selfcasting Bane). Overflowing Chalice has little effect on your char. Here are some flasks I'd recommend:


Some other points (much less important than the two above though):
-Chaos DoT's are no ailments. Plus Bane and Blight don't hit. Most affixes on Fenumunus Weave dont help this char. Maybe get aspect of the spider beastcrafted on a rare instead
-Blight loves Infused Channeling Support, one of the best support gems for selfcasting it (since you don't use Spell Totem Support)
-Try to somehow get Arcane Surge (the Arcane Capacitor notable seems to fit your build perfectly or get Arcane Surge Support on something)
-Your staff is great, but why is there a Trigger-Affix? I dont think it works with Blight

Your tree looks nice. I like your rings and belt. Good Aura choices.

Hope I could be helpful, have a nice day exile :)

Thank you for the very informative reply. I will look into fixing the mistakes I have made with the build. I had read through your post but there were some things with my build I had not realized until you pointed it out for me.

I had been using the fenumu for damage reduction with the chest piece but I did not have a six link version of it. After reading your recommendation I will be changing away from that set to better benefit my build.

The staff just happend to be the best one I could find at the time and I have future plans of rolling trigger off the staff in place of something better later. I put blight in the staff due to the trigger making it impossible to self cast essence drain and the trigger has a cool down. Blight in the staff negates the trigger.

As for the area damage and the and flasks. That is something I will be fixing immediately. This is my first true Chaos character. My first chaos damage character was a Shadow using flame surge with 95% fire to chaos conversion back when it was much harder to be able to use chaos as a tool. So this is sort of new to me.

Thank you for the feedback exile! I will be changing my build for the better.

Hi

iam trying to make an Cyclone cwc soulrend and was trying with Shire of shards staff

overall it feels quite nice clearspeed but kinda lack of single target dps. I wonder ifanyone else have tried this approce or should i just scrap this idea

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Sezth wrote:

Hi

iam trying to make an Cyclone cwc soulrend and was trying with Shire of shards staff

overall it feels quite nice clearspeed but kinda lack of single target dps. I wonder ifanyone else have tried this approce or should i just scrap this idea

I tried Cyclone CoC Soulrend the first half of the league (not with Sire of Shards though). Here is my result:


Spamming Soulrend with CoC Cyclone does little in itself since the DoT does not stack and the hit damage is bad (I think, I never really used Soulrend for the hit damage). So we need an additional ingenious idea:
My logical consequence was going poison and double abusing chaos damage over time multiplier and use support gems that work on poison and on soulrend (stuff like swift affliction and void manipulation). So I went Assassin for crit and poison utility plus great survivability of Mist Walker. Going CoC on some non-crit ascendancy like Occultist or Trickster is not viable imo.

1 month later I finally retired the concept, because try as you might, your damage will always be lower than a pur cyclone coc bladefall poison setup, partly because pure ailment support gems (deadly ailments, Vile Toxins) each provide 5-15% more damage than our cdot-supports, making us miss out on lots of damage.
Only upsides of Soulrend were the integrated ES leech (I played a Glorious Vanity ES/Life Hybrid) and the range, but the reduction in damage wasn't worth it imo. On top of that we need additional projectiles to have any area coverage with soulrend while bladefall has amazing aoe automatically build in.

You can look at my char TheChaosDoT and just mentally make my sixlink from
Cyclone, CoC, Bladefall, Awakened Added Chaos Damage, Deadly Ailments, Vile Toxins into
Cyclone, CoC, Soulrend, Swift Affliction, Void Manipulation, Added Chaos / Efficacy / Energy Leech / some other 6th gem
and varify yourself that the damage just doesn't keep up.



Nice concept, I might try again in some leagues, but atm not as good as pure poison. Haven't done a cast while channeling cyclone soulrend yet (pathfinder? or classical occultist/trickster) but I suspect similar problems.
I lost faith in the idea, but hey, maybe you can find something I didn't discover.



On the Sire of Shards: Be aware that your damage will suck. This might be ok if you wanna build a mapper who mainly needs movespeed, area coverage,... but going for a two handed weapon without a single damage stat will hurt. Plus Soulrend in itself (at least the DoT) does not profit from crits which is bad for a crit build. Or maybe you are going for the hit damage, in which case my whole speech was besides the point^^


Lemme hear what you find, I'm intrigued.

This is an amazing write up, thank you for taking the time to put it together!

I've been late to this league start due to work, but now I have some time and I've theorycrafted something new-ish;


If I find the time I'll add a section on cluster jewels but atm I lack the play experience / knowledge, maybe in a month or two.
How have cluster jewels been for your CDoT-char? Anything besides the occasional damage over time multi? Lemme know if you've found something interesting or even op :)

btw polished the guide a bit more :)

A little confused about overriding of skills.

I use ED-Contagion for mob clear. However for single target, I am not sure how to proceed.

Currently, I cast bane mostly for the depair curse. Then I use either wither totem or Vaal blight if available.

Does one override the other or do they stack/work in tandem?

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infrasonicreturns wrote:

A little confused about overriding of skills.

I use ED-Contagion for mob clear. However for single target, I am not sure how to proceed.

Currently, I cast bane mostly for the depair curse. Then I use either wither totem or Vaal blight if available.

Does one override the other or do they stack/work in tandem?

ED, Contagion, Bane, Soulrend and Blight all work together / add up.

Wither-Totems and casting Blight manually with a Spreading Rot Jewel is overkill on withering imo (if thats what your doing).

Blight and Vaal Blight both count towards the limit of 20 Blight stacks on an enemy (as described in the Gem). If you exceed 20 stacks, only the 20 highest damage-dots will apply (usually 3 Vaal Blight and 17 Blight).

The usual way to scale single target is:
a) Make sure to apply all the Withered you can
b) Add a second DoT (Bane, Soulrend, Blight)
c) Gear, passives and stuff, maybe even a third DoT-Spell
(which seems to be exactly what you are doing)

Super helpful guide. Thank you for the post and the work it must have taken to make.

I am attempting to apply your guide to my Toxic Rain Pathfinder.

the build I'm currently attempting to follow is this one. https://www.poe-vault.com/guides/toxic-rain-pathfinder-build-guide

However, I would like to get your opinion on making it less dependent on Herald of Agony. It feels poison heavy to me. I will attempt to link my current gear and skills if/when I figure out how to do that. But for now, any tips you might have would be welcome.

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Lightelder wrote:

"

infrasonicreturns wrote:

A little confused about overriding of skills.

I use ED-Contagion for mob clear. However for single target, I am not sure how to proceed.

Currently, I cast bane mostly for the depair curse. Then I use either wither totem or Vaal blight if available.

Does one override the other or do they stack/work in tandem?

ED, Contagion, Bane, Soulrend and Blight all work together / add up.

Wither-Totems and casting Blight manually with a Spreading Rot Jewel is overkill on withering imo (if thats what your doing).

Blight and Vaal Blight both count towards the limit of 20 Blight stacks on an enemy (as described in the Gem). If you exceed 20 stacks, only the 20 highest damage-dots will apply (usually 3 Vaal Blight and 17 Blight).

The usual way to scale single target is:
a) Make sure to apply all the Withered you can
b) Add a second DoT (Bane, Soulrend, Blight)
c) Gear, passives and stuff, maybe even a third DoT-Spell
(which seems to be exactly what you are doing)

So before I read this post, what I switched to doing for single target is applied multiple blight totems (don't have a socket in my tree for Spreading rot yet), applied Bane (for single curse), then threw an ED on the target. Sounds like I am doing it correctly. Only things I don't do are Withered (since I already have blight and vaal blight on multiple totems, although only 1 totem seems to go off when I cast vaal blight), and contagion (since Contagion is for spreading).


Does that make sense? Anything better I should be doing as I head into maps?