[3.13] TOXIC RAIN + HERALD OF AGONY Pathfinder Build (6-8K life) (UBER ELDER done!) +VIDEO GUIDE!

I will be updating the guide tomorrow. Another thing that i noticed as we now have Chaos tag on Herald, Added Chaos is OP in this case and Empower can be thrown away. Added Chaos is an absolutely beast for any chaos attacks

I've been only casually playing this league because I'm also playing WoW so I just got to maps on this character. How are you managing mana? I have mana leech on my neck and I picked up a mana leech node and I can still burn mana in couple seconds at most so I'm chugging mana pots like crazy

Scaling Dot and using two Praxis rings and 58 mana regen per sec. I can spam TR with ease. Red Elder fight was deathless, however, i did not manage to save Shaper. must get more DPS.

I'm playing similar build (almost the same tree, but bit different approach).

I did not go for Quillrain as it is imho not worth it. Your poison damage will suck big time with the bow and the APS are just not needed (and you'll also have to solve the OOM problem). I use Lioneye's Glare (low damage now, trying to 6L high damage one) and it's just about perfect. I just shoot once into every pack and it dies before I run past it (aka they die before they get out of my Despair). If it has rare mob in it I shoot twice. Thus no need to gimp myself with Quillrain. I think Quillrain is best option for poison assassin, but not that good for pathfinder.

I'm now trying your gem setup and while the pod dot is quite strong every other aspect of TR sucks. I'm gonna switch back to my more poison focused gem setup, as I feel TR is amazing skill for poison delivery.

To the Herald: I'm not sure if anyone else uses Pierce in it's links, but I have to tell you guys, IT IS AMAZING. I found out that crawler uses mostly his shotgun attack and occasionally his vomit attack, so pierce is a must. He just clears whole packs with it. I also found out that it's not that worth to pump his DPS instead of his speed. I'm running around 130% movement speed and without Minion speed support he was just staying behind me most of time and thus not doing any damage at all. That's if you can stay above 30 stack of virulence.

Flasks: I also feel that Witchfire brew is not worth it. The flask does absolutely nothing except dot damage. You can run despair for free through blasphemy with much bigger AoE than from the flask. I run it with Increased AoE and it cover whole screen (just like it used to before AoE nerf). Also with your flask setup you can't use all the fancy flask mods (like Curse immunity, bleed immunity, etc). I use 4 utility flasks and 1 life and it feels great, I can ignore 100% of map mods and their combinations (while on paper I have bit lower damage, it does not feel like it and so far even 8 mod T15 maps are walk in a park).

Now to the duration: It depends, if you use Herald, then you don't want to have TR too long. I tried all 3 options and swift affliction is best of them. It improves all dot damage damage done by TR, it leaves it on some duration so you can enjoy the CC aspect of the skill and it does not get in way of stacking virulence (which was kinda hard with Increased duration as mobs died before they could be hit with pod explosions). Lesser duration could be wort for some heavy poison action, but it felt too short and the CC aspect was barely noticeable (maybe good option for assassins).

When I 6L my bow (that's where I have Herald), I'm gonna put Blind as 6th link to herald and switch from Drillneck to Maloneys.

I also wonder why you guys are going for that insane HP pools? Why? I'm running round 5.4k life and it's more than enough (1 Bubbling life flask is all you need).

Ok, so Animate Guardian works great with Leer Cas+Dying Breath, gives 33% increase damage and enemies have "18% Increased curse effect received" which actually works with Witchfire Brew. I decided not to use Starkonja, great HP but I'd rather lose 5 HP to get +2 minion level and shit ton of resists.

6L Loreweave works, gonna use GGGBBR instead, and another nice thing, if you don't have 30% reduced HoA reservation, you can use the normal 5L and then slap on Blind which adds no additional cost, and it's pretty damn good defensively.

Other notes: Lightning golem is better overall DPS, but I think Flame Golem is still better for map clear (less overall damage but the initial dot damage is greater).

Elreon Rings might be good with this build, also Elder rings (2-3 mana per hit) and delve suffix (4-6% mana cost reduction). I've been trying to get jewels with mana cost reduction, max life and chaos damage, they aren't that expensive.

Also, god damn is chaos impresence expensive :P

I'm currently running this setup and I'm thinking of changing it to the setup below; would like different opinions on it.

1) Changing Cherrubim's to kaom's heart, lose blight in helm and put herald minion 4 socket there.

2) Change quill rain to a high phys dmg bow / lionseye glare (which do you think is better for a pathfinder?)

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Quickfade wrote:

I'm currently running this setup and I'm thinking of changing it to the setup below; would like different opinions on it.

1) Changing Cherrubim's to kaom's heart, lose blight in helm and put herald minion 4 socket there.

2) Change quill rain to a high phys dmg bow / lionseye glare (which do you think is better for a pathfinder?)

Kaom could be good, get a +2 minion helmet.

Quill rain is just the best. About 40% of the damage comes for the DoT, 59% from the poison explosions.

Quill rain's attack speed far outscales the highest phys bow you could get.

To give an example, LG would give you +30k damage per poison -2.22 attack rate. Assuming no dying sun so only 5 pods per attack, we get;

Quill Rain's effective DPS 5.28 x 5 pods x (30k dots + 42k poison) = 1,9m

LG's effective DPS 3.06 x 5 pods x (30k dots + 72k poison) = 1,56m

And because your DPS relies heavily on pod explosions, your clear speed goes down, because under quill rain, a lot of the clear comes from the initial dot. With Dying sun, the different is even bigger.

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miasma23 wrote:

Scaling Dot and using two Praxis rings and 58 mana regen per sec. I can spam TR with ease. Red Elder fight was deathless, however, i did not manage to save Shaper. must get more DPS.

same issue with my build, which is focusing purely on the pod DoT. the damage just isn't there to save shaper. kind of a shame DoTs will always suffer from this downside

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Icemasta wrote:

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Quickfade wrote:

I'm currently running this setup and I'm thinking of changing it to the setup below; would like different opinions on it.

1) Changing Cherrubim's to kaom's heart, lose blight in helm and put herald minion 4 socket there.

2) Change quill rain to a high phys dmg bow / lionseye glare (which do you think is better for a pathfinder?)

Kaom could be good, get a +2 minion helmet.

Quill rain is just the best. About 40% of the damage comes for the DoT, 59% from the poison explosions.

Quill rain's attack speed far outscales the highest phys bow you could get.

To give an example, LG would give you +30k damage per poison -2.22 attack rate. Assuming no dying sun so only 5 pods per attack, we get;

Quill Rain's effective DPS 5.28 x 5 pods x (30k dots + 42k poison) = 1,9m

LG's effective DPS 3.06 x 5 pods x (30k dots + 72k poison) = 1,56m

And because your DPS relies heavily on pod explosions, your clear speed goes down, because under quill rain, a lot of the clear comes from the initial dot. With Dying sun, the different is even bigger.

Thanks for your reply! I was going off what @peetyrscz above said about him using a lionseye and doing much more damage. Also with a slower APS, mana shouldn't be a big an issue as it is now.

Based on what he said, he seems to be doing a ton of damage and walks through t15 maps so that's why I was considering swapping bows.

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Icemasta wrote:

"

Quickfade wrote:

I'm currently running this setup and I'm thinking of changing it to the setup below; would like different opinions on it.

1) Changing Cherrubim's to kaom's heart, lose blight in helm and put herald minion 4 socket there.

2) Change quill rain to a high phys dmg bow / lionseye glare (which do you think is better for a pathfinder?)

Kaom could be good, get a +2 minion helmet.

Quill rain is just the best. About 40% of the damage comes for the DoT, 59% from the poison explosions.

Quill rain's attack speed far outscales the highest phys bow you could get.

To give an example, LG would give you +30k damage per poison -2.22 attack rate. Assuming no dying sun so only 5 pods per attack, we get;

Quill Rain's effective DPS 5.28 x 5 pods x (30k dots + 42k poison) = 1,9m

LG's effective DPS 3.06 x 5 pods x (30k dots + 72k poison) = 1,56m

And because your DPS relies heavily on pod explosions, your clear speed goes down, because under quill rain, a lot of the clear comes from the initial dot. With Dying sun, the different is even bigger.

Also do you reckon the 80% loss in chaos damage from cherrubim's would be massive? Not sure if the extra life from kaom's outweighs the damage loss.