[DEAD] FunRoom's Crit Herald of Agony PF/Ascendant [Budget] [Uber Elder] [2.8M+ Shaper DPS]

I understand what you are saying, however, increased damage taken as a debuff to the enemy and increased damage for yourself are not even close to the same thing. If I remove the debuff of increased damage taken from both malediction 10 percent and projectile weakness 44 percent (I think) and then just add flat increased damage to myself it is nowhere near the same increase.

Second - If I take your path of building link at 40 virulence and EE triggered I get 1.27mil for tail spike (bossing setup). If I then disable assassin's mark and put in projectile weakness instead I get 1.78mil or ~500k more dps (https://pastebin.com/LCsnYhxS). It's not that expensive to swap a curse - on my Pathfinder I dropped blind and faster attacks for curse on hit and projectile weakness to accomplish this.

The increased damage taken debuff to the enemy scales incredibly with any upgrades you make - even small ones. I will grant that you lose some crit - goes from 12 percent to 5 and perhaps some life recovery from dropping faster attacks, but depending what you are doing, an upgrade of nearly 500k dps more damage may be worth it - and since it is just gem swaps it is practically free.

I want to mention again, that I killed my first Uber Elder ever with your build - with no changes - except I don't think I had the Assassin's mark ring at the time. It is completely viable for everything and offers more survivability than what I propose here. As an aside I have been unable to repeat the kill on my occultist doing nearly double dps (mainly because of chill and my mediocre playing skill :P). I just wanted to share my findings.

Sigh - I forgot to toggle on Shaper to apply the 80 percent curse reduction and after doing so only get a measly 80k more dps with my changes. The dps increase would primarily be for trash which... who cares. Thanks again for the build.

"

CapnSparrow wrote:

...

Yep, my bossing setup is bad and I know it. I cannot reliably generate power charges during boss fights and switching curses would definitely be better. I am just too lazy to get a ring switched for the job.

I also thought about finding corrupted gloves with elemental weakness on hit for dual curse setup, but bosses' curse resistance is high and I again consider this is not worth it.

Overall this is a lazy build for doing all contents. Freezing and shattering enemies is always worth sacrificing some damage imo.

Okay, hopefully one last thing and I'll stop being annoying... (no promises)
I used yoke of suffering with this setup and it is pretty amazing. I can pretty much keep shock up 100% (without increasing lightning resist) due to speed of attack from quill rain and Master Alchemist node.

I do not have a way to compare to the uptime of shock for the minion when he has phys to lightning and assassin's mark - decent on trash and map bosses, but I imagine due to the bosses curse resist it isn't quite as good.

The best bossing setup I've come up with so far on paper is with giving us lightning damage and giving the minion added fire instead of phys to lightning, however, this leaves you with a terrible job of coloring the chest piece with 3 red (if using empower), 2 green and 1 blue. That setup brings it up to 2mil shaper dps with the significant cost increase being +4 empower gem - everything else is still the same cost wise. Also, coloring the chest that way leaves you unable to swap in the summon phantasm gem.

I played my own variation of a Bow Minion Agony PF to 99 and respec'd to Dancing Duo/Agony - far more optimized build

Quill Rain isnt the best bow, its good but the 'best' Bow is a +1 Socketed Gems, 20% Socketed Attacks deal 20% more plus a Vicious Projectile affix from an Elder bow and this can only be crafted with Fossils - the bow crafted onto a fast base is fine to stack 40 poisons on single target and is an effective +1 7.5 link

Anyway I did Delve 600 on my setup, probably could of done 700 or 800 as it wasnt really slowing down

So is the HoA change a nerf? It looks like a nerf... but it's hard for me to gauge how much of a nerf it is though. Quill Rain change is trivial since it is merely a tool to provide virulence stacks and heal us - it was never providing any serious damage to begin with.

I have been thinking about doing a dancing duo thing with HoA too and using ball lightning with GMP and poison as the delivery but the life gain on hit was sooo good with Quill Rain.

My main concern about dancing duo was the accuracy problem, particularly until you get command of the pit, but it sounds like the banners might manage that quite nicely.

somehow double posted...

"

CapnSparrow wrote:

So is the HoA change a nerf?

This nerf is meant to nerf additional non-physical damage to the agony crawler with abyss jewels, several auras, added elemental supports and the decay support gem. In this build, the dps source is purely converted from agony crawler's physical damage, which means, the whole build is intact.

That is fantastic news. The more I play this build the more I really appreciate what you did here - pretty ingenious overall.

In fact, I tested it as an SSF starter (only SSF character I made for the league so had zero items to start with) for the last week of the league and got all my ascendancy points and got to level 88 and like tier 8 maps within about 40 hours of play (I have kids so there is probably quite a bit of AFK time in there too lol) - and that was with doing all master quests and delving etc. I did chance a Quill Rain fairly quickly though. Never got a Calamity, (chanced destroyer regalia's like crazy but no dice) but did craft a +2 helm which was enough to reach tier 8 and still felt no resistance. Only thing holding me back was really map drops.

More testimony on how good a starter this build really is and how viable for it is for SSF as well.

Wow this looks amazing, this build was robust against quill rain's nerf and the HoA change, cant wait to try it in 3.5, thank you! Also, what changes do you suggest to tweak this for lab running?

"

murye wrote:

Wow this looks amazing, this build was robust against quill rain's nerf and the HoA change, cant wait to try it in 3.5, thank you! Also, what changes do you suggest to tweak this for lab running?

I ran Uber Lab on SSF within about 30 hours without Calamity even. Bring an extra life flask maybe? You really don't have to tweak anything.