[3.16 - RETIRING BUILD] VD Brands: S-Tier Bosser, A-Tier Map! -- MURDERED BY GGG_INTERN SOMEWHERE--

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Fanatic88 wrote:

How you interact with this 3s arcanist brand, I struggle with to play with brand recall since the brands are so fast gone ?

3 seconds attached and 5 seconds unattached are the base figures. With increased duration you'll end up with increased duration scaling those.

When clearing your brands won't be attached for very long before everything melts assuming you've leveled and geared enough for decent damage, so the 5 second non attached duration will be more relevant than the 3 second attached duration.

Even with the ~7-9 seconds of duration you'll have between attached time (quite brief while mapping), unattached time (the bottleneck) and duration increases you can simply not use recall if you prefer. You'd still benefit from having the gem in place as an "ohhh shit, time to reset" button to quickly reset your brands if you accidentally double brand rather than having to wait out it's duration but it isn't essential for anything outside of that.

All that said, it's much faster and way less button presses once you get used to it and can be a huge survivability boost getting your sustain kicking in faster against Scourge zergs jumping you, so it's something I'd certainly suggest spending the time to build into your rotations. You'll eventually find the correct rhythm and setup for you (in terms of how many desecrate brands, how many VDs/vDDs brands and how many recalls) if you mess with it a bit and either watch your buffs closely to see uptime you're achieving or else watch it back on replay so you can work at optimising it depending on your gear/content you're running.

For bossing it's less of a concern. You'll have 2 brands on the boss at all times, hopefully, with 2 more waiting to replace them when they expire. If the boss has minions/anything else you can brand be sure to keep optimal uptime on both targets and try to position them so the explosions will overlap. Taking care to watch for brands chaining away from the main target and replacing them with more targeted brands (be it recall or new branding) when it happens.

ok thx,

I have one additional question. It looks like as i lose always the max life corps in my desecrate ground. How I can keep them with to get them always again and again ?

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Fanatic88 wrote:

It looks like as i lose always the max life corps in my desecrate ground. How I can keep them with to get them always again and again ?

Every zone you enter, be it your hideout or a map, will have a pool of monsters in the map that will be included in your desecrate pool.

If you bring spectres into the map they too will be added into the desecrate pool, twice as likely to spawn in your desecrate as any of the normal zone monsters in there.

You can further alter the potential spawns in the pool by using a Phantasmal Desecrate which has a chance to overwrite a certain % of the monsters you spawn with the Phantasmal corpses instead.

So to have your high hp corpses (be it Lithomancer and Stoneskin Flayers for 800%hp or Guard Captain and Auto Enforcer for 750%hp) in your desecrate pool all you need to do is ensure your specters are alive (even briefly) in that zone. If the spectres die in a map you'd need to resummon them again before you leave that zone or else have a spectre bank setup so you can resummon them back in your hideout.

They can die pretty often when you're just getting started and your damage isn't too high, but by the time you're in endgame they'll only die in extreme situations. The majority of resummons I had in my 90s was where I'd intentionally removed the spectres myself so they didn't cause issues with specific mechanics (acid cavern boss) or less predictable boss targeting issues (jumping into a Shaper slam on Uber Elder that was aimed at one of them).

using Desecrate totems should yield more single target than using a second brand just for desecrate. and for clearing you can self cast desecrate cascade to get started probably too, and lay down totems as needed.

do the totems act the same as desecrate brands with placing corpses around the target and does brand recall work with the totems for faster placements as you move to the next pack?

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ログよし wrote:

using Desecrate totems should yield more single target than using a second brand just for desecrate.

I'm guessing this is using double VD (or DD, depending on your setup) brands on a boss and hoping the timings between VD brand casts and desecrate totem casts works out to allow additional VD procs? How would the totem be scaled to get enough cast speed there? Is there much sensitivity on the timings needed (i.e. Would the brands wait for the totem to cast before triggering or do they just miss triggers more like a CoC setup)? If you've a POB messing with a setup be interesting to see it.

I'd imagine, though haven't tried it or given it much thought, what you'd lose in uptime from the totems dying (seems to be a problem commonly mentioned since the FR totem rework, but haven't noticed it using HFT for early leveling in events) or the target going out of range would be a more significant loss in actual gameplay than any potential gains on paper.

Having played it a lot this league I'd be looking for ways to improve the smoothness and QOL rather than pushing for more damage, especially if coming at the cost of smoothness or QOL. The damage is pretty nutty already (and I stopped shortly before the hotfix to spectre spawnrate and never moved to a Phantasmal Desecrate setup, so playing the most pseudo-nerfed version available this league. It was still monstrously strong) so I'd personally be looking at movespeed/clear spread/tank ahead of scaling the single target.

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Soulravel wrote:

do the totems act the same as desecrate brands with placing corpses around the target and does brand recall work with the totems for faster placements as you move to the next pack?

They cast the corpses at the targets feet alright, as long as the target stays within range of the totem. Quite big mechanical differences in the fact that the totem can be damaged and that it won't auto track moving targets like the brand would.

Straight no with the brand recall. That would only relocate the brands, so you'd need to totem or self cast desecrate to restart your damage and sustain.

I must say the build is not expected as it shown. After the switch from armageddon brand to this two button style, the playstayle is very slow and the damage is not very high. At least sourcge kills me directly. I have still issues to kill yellow bosses.

For me it's not a build where you can run T16 with same basic items in 5 days.

I tried but its not a build for me. thank you.

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Fanatic88 wrote:

I must say the build is not expected as it shown. After the switch from armageddon brand to this two button style, the playstayle is very slow and the damage is not very high. At least sourcge kills me directly. I have still issues to kill yellow bosses.

For me it's not a build where you can run T16 with same basic items in 5 days.

I tried but its not a build for me. thank you.

Ah damn, wish we could have helped you out there! There was probably some missing piece of the puzzle that would have resolved it.

Considering I reached rank #8 (at one point rank 3) on the recent race - SSF Endless Delve (level 95) and killed two Auls, I do think basic gear can carry it pretty far.

That said, it IS a very wonky, mechanically-dependent build in that things have to go absolutely right for it to pop off!

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Fanatic88 wrote:

... the playstayle is very slow and the damage is not very high. At least sourcge kills me directly. I have still issues to kill yellow bosses.

For me it's not a build where you can run T16 with same basic items in 5 days.

If you said the issue was not enjoying the playstyle, fair enough. Takes a little time to get into and even when you've gotten used to it it might not be to everyone's tastes... but if the complaint is lack of damage that's not the build. The build was silly strong even when heavily nerfed with the specter desecrate bug at league start (I was doing T16s and endgame bosses on trash gear in GSF with it then, bugged) and it's broken strong currently with that fixed since Endless Delve.

Throw up a POB of what you tried and it'd be quite easy to resolve the issues. There are niche mechanics involved that aren't always intuitive when it comes to damage scaling and execution, so quite common to run into those issues. Glancing at the Arma character if you were using the trigger craft Cane on this build that could explain a part of the problem.

DD is likely to get heavily nerfed next league and while there's an outside chance they might go after ignite mechanics or DD directly (if the latter the builds works great with VD, even for bossing) I'd expect to see corpse scaling mechanics hit in the crossfire which would directly hit this build. Anything less than a 40% damage nerf I'll still heavily consider starting with this, depending on what other changes are made.

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TsuDhoNim wrote:

DD is likely to get heavily nerfed next league and while there's an outside chance they might go after ignite mechanics or DD directly (if the latter the builds works great with VD, even for bossing) I'd expect to see corpse scaling mechanics hit in the crossfire which would directly hit this build. Anything less than a 40% damage nerf I'll still heavily consider starting with this, depending on what other changes are made.

Pretty salty about this, nowhere was DD attracting that much hate until all these HC+SSF events where, naturally, a spell skill with good scaling looks absolutely busted in a low-gear / 10-day environment when the reality is almost absolutely fucking no one has been or will play Crema-DD on Trade League because 1) it's 2-button build and 2) Imagine being a self-caster. Remember people joking about 2-button builds and self-cast being a meme? Suddenly it's got a target on its back.

They could not touch DD at all and it wouldn't see play outside of HCSSF league starters.

People are so programmed by what streamers play, it's tragic.

(also damnit, if not for the Ignite DD-ers I would have placed rank 2 or 3! I refused to go the Ignite route even if I got Berek's Respite and a sick ignite wand. hmmph.)

Hopefully it's DD that gets the bat, not VD. I mean, I do appreciate DD for Maven fights (I'd argue that's more of an arena issue) but VD is what makes this build interesting.