3.8 - Cast on Crit Volatile Dead Necromancer - Extreme Fun - Not budget/GPU/CPU Friendly

I started the league off wanting to make a Cyclone cast on crit VD necromancer using scolds, but due to the recent AoE nerf to cyclone and the removal of mana leech on warlords I decided to scrap the idea.

Instead of using cyclone/scolds we're using a cast on crit shaper bow to trigger desecrate and volatile dead. It is fast, tanky, and extremely fun to play. The build utilizes the Necromancer Ascendancy to consume corpses at an extreme rate to pump up our attack speed while also shocking/chilling our enemies. It also has the added benefit of utilizing offering skills thanks to the ascendancy which helps us move faster (flesh offering) and provides an extra defensive layer (Spirit Offering via CWDT).

It unfortunately takes a fairly large investment to get off the ground, I was unlucky and had to spend ~25ex crafting just the bow I'm using. Best case scenario you're going to be paying 8ex to craft the bow yourself. The build also won't play very well on a potato. Under ideal circumstances we're generating 72 volatile dead balls a second which gets pretty system intensive.

I'd recommend leveling as a generic minion summoning necromancer with 0 budget and transitioning into this build once you've got the bow crafted.

T16 Elder City Square
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYvz1lFiwZY&feature=youtu.be

T15 Blighted Colonnade with Beyond mod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ra0Xwj97-Sc

Depth 230 Aul - Three Damage Mods
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1f8YDO_RZU

Maze of the Minotaur Map
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bT-iy-tNQYI

T16 Purifier - No MTX on Blast Rain or VD - may not be safe for the eyes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dzxEE1YsH4

Shaper Kill - Using Rain of Arrows instead of Blast Rain
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFI-QBHTHrs

Uber Elder Kill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-ALUL618OI

All of these ascendancies are neccessary for the build to work.
If you were trying to level using VD I'd recommend going Mistress of Sacrifice > Plaguebringer > Corpse Pact > Essence Glutton.

Mistress of Sacrifice Gives us the ability to use Flesh offering to get movement and attack speed, and Spirit offering in a cast when damage taken to get a buffer of ~1500 ES every time it procs.

Plaguebringer gives us free AoE which is great, along with 10% more damage and 10% reduced enemy damage which is a large amount of damage mitigation.

Corpse Pact is the MVP of this build. Using a normal cast on crit setup you would have to heavily invest into attack speed to ensure that you're hitting your six casts a second, but thanks to corpse pact we can ramp up to that attack speed in very little time.

Essence glutton is neccessary to ensure that we can continue to attack when our attacks per second is fully ramped up from corpse pact.

Bow:



The bow is a pretty integral part to the build. It gives us an extra link and a lot of damage. It's probably possible to use a slightly worse bow and have this work, but I didn't start using cast on crit VD until I had it, so I can't really comment on how well the build works without it.

I'd try to scour poe.trade for a useable bow that has the cast on crit mod/double damage + attack speed on it before you craft your own, it's likely that you can get a deal on something that is useable for way cheaper than it costs to craft it yourself.

Long Bow Crafting Process:


Hat:

The most important part about the helmet is the enchant. I went with a stark because it's got a lot of things that are good for the build. Dex/Life/Attack Speed/Crit strike chance are all great. Feel free to use a rare with the hat enchant if it's cheaper, just know that you'll need to make up the dex somewhere else.

Neck:

Xoph's Blood is a lot of damage for the build and also goes a long way toward getting us the strength we need to run Kaom's. The King of the Hill annoint gives us a lot of crit chance and the defensive utility of constantly knocking back enemies which is extremely useful while mapping and doing blight encounters.

Quiver:

Look for a quiver with Crit Multi > life > and either Crit Chance or Accuracy.
You're going to need a little accuracy (300+) somewhere on your gear, you can snag it on your quiver or one one of your rings.

I'd leave a suffix open on the quiver for the frenzy charge on critical strike enchant because I like it significantly more than running blood rage, but you can run blood rage for frenzy generation instead.

The movement speed on the quiver prefix is extremely nice, there's not a lot of other benefical prefixes we can get for the build so I'd get it if you can.

For a more defensive option, you can try to find a quiver with multi and blind chance as a suffix instead of accuracy or crit chance.

Chest:

It's the only way I can get a life total I'm comfortable with. It also gives us fire damage. Ideally you'd double corrupt this bad boy and get something good on it, but I haven't managed to put together a double corrupt temple room yet this league.

Rings:

I'm prioritizing all the life gain on hit you I can get + assassin's mark and enough resistances to hit the res cap. I'm currently in the market for an unset version of one of these rings so I can fit in a level 1 clarity to make use of the watcher's eye I'm running, but it's not necessary.

Boots:

Movement Speed/Life/Resists. Not a lot to say here. If you've got enough of a budget grabbing a pair like these with an open prefix so you can slap "Cannot be frozen" on them is the true ggg pair of boots.

Bubonics would be a nice alternative, but I'm starved for links as it is.

Belt:

HH would probably be a lot of fun on the build, but it's hard for me to justify paying for one when Beyond isn't in the map Zana mod pool. I've been crafting different cast on crit bows instead of saving for one, so we're using this nice stygian instead. You're going to need a fat strength roll on a piece of gear, so getting it here was good. The CDR craft on the belt helps because in a lot of situations we're getting way past the attack speed neccessary for the cooldown rate of cast on crit.

Gloves:

I'm addicted to using Shadows and Dusts. They give a lot of movespeed/extra clear, but they're not neccessary. Any gloves with the life/res/dex or str you need to balance out your gear would be a great alternative. If you don't want to run as many CWDT setups as I am, you could also run Tombfists for some nice intimidate action.

Flasks:

Cinderswallow with the crit mod gives us quite a lot of damage in addition to a lot of sustain. Remember to use flesh offering on ignited corpses for extra charges!


Gotta go fast. Getting frozen sucks and I don't have a pair of cannot be frozen boots at the moment.


A warding flask is invaluable and the diamond flask makes the damage of the build a lot smoother.


Wise oak is a lot of damage. Make sure to have Fire resistance be your highest resistance to make use of it. In an ideal world you'd balance your resists to make use of the defensive benefits of the flask. As it stands I've got cold as my lowest resistance to help mitigate some of the damage in the Uber Elder fight.


I'm a big fan of the Blood of the Karui flask. The extra heal at the end of the flask can be a lifesaver in some situations. If you don't have a jewel with the "Corrupted blood cannot be inflicted on you" mod, you'll need to run a life flask that clears bleeding. I was using a Seething Divine flask of Staunching for quite a while.

Rare Jewels:

For our Rare Jewels we're looking for Life and as much Crit Multi as we can get our hands on. I don't have particularly juicy jewels yet, but I'll be working on that. You can also get crit chance/fire damage/spell damage/attack speed/attack speed with bows/life gain on hit/mana gained on hit or a plethora of other mods on your jewels.

Having a jewel with "Corrupting Blood cannot be inflicted on you" is a nice luxury.

Lioneye's Fall:

Lioneye's fall combined with Serpent Stance gives us 100% crit chance and 51% crit multi which is exciting. This goes a long way toward evening out our crit chance.

Watcher's Eye:

You'll want a watcher's eye with Anger Leech. The anger fire damage leech does a lot of work in combination with the life gain on hit from our jewelry to keep us alive.

If you can afford it, the best second damage mod is going to be Anger Penetration. Anger Multi or Precision Multi are a good second option for damage.

The clarity mod on my watcher's eye is neat, but not really neccessary. I don't even have the links at the moment to run a level 1 clarity so I'm not making use of it.

Here's the PoB link: https://pastebin.com/vUtLKCBr

I broke down and bought a HH for giggles later in the league. The build already has problems with the client being able to keep up with it, the HH makes it even worse. As long as the client isn't dying on you, it's a lot of fun though. Here's where my gear ended at the end of the league. I'm not going to go in depth into this setup, the previous one is what I'd recommend running on a lot more reasonable budget.

Belt:

Headhunter is a lot of fun. Even more budget unfriendly than the rest of the build.

Bow:

I crafted another bow and crafted double damage instead of increased crit chance as a suffix. To be honest, I don't notice the difference between the two bows in either mapping or bossing.

Hat:

In order to balances my resists and still fit in the jewels I want in the build I needed to fossil craft a hat with an abyss socket. I wasn't going for the -max fire res specifically, but I hit it anyway so I'll take it.

Amulet:

No change here.

Rings:

I added a ring with warlord's on hit in addition to the assassin's mark on hit. Finding a ring with warlords and life gain on hit was pretty expensive and difficult to find, but I'm enjoying having endurance charges while mapping. In order to properly run this ring I had to modify my tree a little to pick up whispers of doom.

Chest:

I double corrupted four Kaom's and finally hit a double corrupt. The other three poof'd unfortunately.
https://gfycat.com/barrenconsideratehummingbird

Quiver:

I had a filter running for a while trying to find a quiver that I liked more than this, but I didn't get any hits.

Gloves:

Why not get life in addition to spell crit if you can?

Boots:

No change here

The Bow
Run these:
Increased Critical Strikes Support
Desecrate
Volatile Dead
Empower

**Make sure that you put Desecrate in your links before volatile dead so you have corpses to cast your volatile dead**

The two remaining sockets are up for a little debate.

The Bow Attack
I've tested all of the bow skills and would rank them in the following order in terms of useablility.

1.Blast Rain - My favorite single target option. Does not require chain or pierce. It hits four times in a tight area so every attack can score four hits on an enemy. There is a little bit of a lag between firing the skill and it connecting with enemies, so beware of that. It also has a pretty good MTX in the Ebony Blast rain.

2.Rain of Arrows - My favorite skill for map clearing. Does not require chain or pierce. It fires 23 arrows in a wide area. In large packs of enemies you're critting more times with Rain of arrow per attack than with any of the other bow skills I tried. Rain of arrows allows you to push back large groups of enemies with King of the Hill. The single target isn't incredible, but it's still good enough to clear all bosses with ease outside of Guardians/Shaper/Elder. The only time I switch to Blast Rain is when I'm doing difficult endgame content. Rain of arrows also has the best available mtx in the Celestial Rain of arrows MTX.

3.Barrage - Better than Rain of Arrows for single target, I find that it's still worse than Blast rain however. Anything outside of point blank range with barrage ends up missing many of its shots. If you are only firing at point blank at targets it fells very good, but I find it to be slightly unsafe in a lot of situations. Barrage also requires investment into pierce to feel best. Without at least 1 pierce on a quiver I would not recommend barrage. For some reason barrage has absolutely horrible tracking against blight enemes which makes it even less desireable to use this league. No MTX, it doesn't even have the wand barrage skill effect. What's with this @GGG?

4.Toxic Rain - It's like blast rain but the delay between firing the attack and hitting enemies is longer.

5. I didn't like the feel of any of the other bow skills enough that I can recommend them. As we're not running GMP in our damage links, some of the other skills that may be viable on other Cast on Crit bow builds don't feel great. If you have something you've tried that you prefer to any of the skills I'm advocating I'd love to hear which skill it is, and why you like it.

The Last Support gem
It's a tossup for me between Conc Effect and Spell Cascade. I run spell cascde 99% of the time now, but I think that conc is probably better for difficult bossing situations. Despite this, the most recent Uber Elder kill I used cascade for testing purposes and it does just fine.

Here are the Pros and Cons for Each gem.

Spell Cascade:
A quick explanation of how Spell Cascade interacts with Desecrate and VD:


Pros:
1. Higher clearspeed - You're generating at least twice as many balls which means that the damage can more efficently be spread across available targets, increasing our clearspeed.
2. Faster Corpse Engine Ramp - We're consuming at least twice as many corpses with the Spell Cascade setup as we do with conc effect. This means that our attack speed scales up with corpse pact much faster with Spell cascade.
3. More Life Gained on hit - We're hitting with a lot more balls, so we get a bigger return from the "Life Gained for each enemy hit by your spells" mod on our shaped ring.

Cons:
1. Corpse Defecit - We're only generating 10 corpses per cast, but trying to consume 12 every time we crit. This makes it possible to consume every corpse next to the boss you're fighting. If we don't have a generated corpse next to the boss we're no longer getting the chill/shock and reduced damage against targets from our Corpse Pact and Plaguebringer ascendancies. We also run the risk that we'll eat all of the corpses with VD that we might want to consume via CWDT Spirit Offering.

Concentrated Eeffect:
Pros:
1. Less Lag - Clearing maps and creating up to 72 VD balls a second with spell cascade is pretty lag inducing.
2. More Ball Damage - 54% more damage is a lot of damage.
3. A corpse Surplus - You'll always be creating one more corpse than you consume with this setup. This ensures that any target we're fighting will be shocked/chilled and do 10% less damage. It also gives us a bank of corpses to consume when our CWDT spirit offering goes off.

Cons:
1. Less LGOH - Half the balls = half the LGOH
2. Less Corpse Engine Ramping - Less Balls = It takes us longer to ramp up our attack speed via Corpse Pact

Auras
Precision - Helps with smoothing our crit chance and fills in the accuracy gap. Also allows for some good watcher's eye mods that may be cheaper than buying a 2x anger eye.
Anger - Adds flat damage to our spells and attacks. Also allows us to leech via our watcher's eye.
Herald of Ash- Helps with clear and gives more damage.

Utility/Movespeed
Flesh offering- Gives us 22% attack and movement speed when it's up via mistress of sacrifice.
Flame Dash - I've tried out flame dash and blink arrow but find that flame dash is superior.

Cast When Damage Taken Setups
CWDT + Immortal Call - Helps with Porcupines
CWDT + Spirit Offering - Consumes Corpses to give us ES based on our max HP. I'm currently getting ~1500 ES every time this procs. If you watch one of my videos you can see how frequently I'm getting a buffer of ES from this setup.
Combustion + Wave of Conviction - Wave of Conviction + Combustion massively reduces enemy resistances to fire damage.

Path of Building, character is currently level 97:
https://pastebin.com/rb0VSp9N

Alira - Everything she gives is useful