[3.12] DemiVFX's Anti-Cold Res Penta-Curse LL Hexblast Occultist | Satisfying Clear | ✅ 2m Avg Hit ✅

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Pyrok wrote:

How are you guys doing with this? There is very little discussion happening, I'd be interested to know how many of us have stuck with this build, and how your progress is coming along.

I'm playing a variation of this (crit, MoM+EB instead of LL, still going vs cold res as Occultist). I am on a 5link and gear is mediocre at best but I have all the uniques I need for now. Around yellow maps.

Clear is good. I have a blasphemy-frostbite to be able to one-cast vs white packs. That works fine, with casting a curse + triggering vixens I also plow through magic/rare packs. Mapping feels good. Low density areas (Heist going in) are clunky because we kinda rely on Hexblast triggering other Hexblasts / explosions.
Single target is a nightmare. Bosses will go down but it takes time, concentration, timing and many buttons. As I said I am on mediocre gear and maybe even still spoiled from Harvest, but single target is definetely not great.
I like going crit, it helped the damage and will trigger elemental ailments (freezing as a chaos caster feels nice).

Overall a good build. Don't do it in SSF, you absolutely need Vixens Entrapment and Eye of Malice. Gear is dirt cheap. Mapping is fun.

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Brandaris wrote:

I noticed after trying out your latest change (speccing out of malicious intent) that the clearspeed has gone down significantly, after some testing i realized that apparently Malicious intents "inflicted hexes" does seem to count the ones cast by Vixens, thus giving us a nice boost in "isntant" doom for clear and allowing us to pick doomsday for single target to shorten the time between hexblasts. (1 second for maxdoom as opposed to 2-3 ish)
thoughts on this?

Malicious Intent does nothing for Vixens curses, because we get more damage for each 5 doom and Malicious Intent gives 4 Doom. Any hex that gets all it's Doom from Malicious Intent will have effectively no Doom (only 4% incr. curse effect). It helps a bit for self-cast curses but I need like 5 skillpoint to get it which is much to high an investment for the effect. Might be different on other skill trees.

Doomsday imo can be nice. If you have all the Doom-gain-rate-nodes you are at 250% doom gain rate (and they are all on the way to important notables). That's roughly 1.6s for max Doom, so Doomsday is faster. Then again you get all or no doom with doomsday. If you cast 0.6 seconds after Doomsday triggers you gained nothing. Imo it's down to personal taste, Doomsday is good, no Doomsday is good.

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Seiyashi7184 wrote:

Is there a point to using Herald of Agony? Wither stacks are capped at 15 anyway, so you'll always hit it against bosses which are the only ones you'd bother Spell Totem-Withering against anyway. Maybe you gain it a bit faster but I'm not sure the Herald of Agony really adds anything to the Wither stacks, and maybe Clarity or some other aura like alt Herald of Thunder may work better.

We're using HoA because the Circle of Nostalgia we're wearing grants 50% increased chaos damage while we have it

MoM is an interesting idea. I need to switch to Eye of Malice, but the big issue I'm having right now isn't damage but survivability. I'm running crit staves which gives me insane clear with the staff AoE node that scales off power charges, Windshriek, and a 5L Impending Doom setup on my Frostbite. T9 map bosses are 2-5 casts, depending on crits, and the clear is good, but I just get deleted by legion, conq packs, the conqs themselves. Improving my pool is a must, but even with MoM that's about it for defensive layers that I can fit in without vast expense.

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Pyrok wrote:

We're using HoA because the Circle of Nostalgia we're wearing grants 50% increased chaos damage while we have it

Sounds like an awful lot of investment (ring slot, mana reservation, gem slots) for something that is roughly worth 3 skill points. Or does the HoA itself get work done? Is the 20% chance for our corpse explosions to poison any good?

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malebranche wrote:

I'm running crit staves which gives me insane clear with the staff AoE node that scales off power charges, Windshriek, and a 5L Impending Doom setup on my Frostbite. T9 map bosses are 2-5 casts, depending on crits, and the clear is good, but I just get deleted by legion, conq packs, the conqs themselves. Improving my pool is a must, but even with MoM that's about it for defensive layers that I can fit in without vast expense.

I stalked your character cze I am considering going Staff on every caster since 2 years and never did it^^ Wow the staff-crit-cluster is strong, I already noticed the Staff-AoE but that one is sick. And anointing counterweight is a great idea, I never even noticed that node.
I'm not sure if you've asked for advice on survivability but I noticed that you do not have a cwdt-guardskill. You could get an unset ring, drop a void sphere and squeeze cwdt+steelskin or immortal call in. With a second unset ring you could keep the void sphere or get a golem (stone or chaos) in that new cwdt-setup.
Is Void Sphere doing work? I find myself casting so much with this build already that I don't think I could be bothered with it, but that's just me being lazy :) Or is it really good and totally worth the effort?
This is potentially a bad idea, but what do you think of it: If your damage is fine you could also drop the whole doomblast-setup and just rely on hexblast. Frees up a lot of gem sockets but might cost too much dps.

Hey thanks for the thoughts.

I've found the clearspeed to not be quite good enough without the doom blast setup, but that was a lot of gear ago. I should try it again - a cwdt would be nice and would go a long way to helping survivability. I've also thought about trying to get divine flesh going but I just don't have the currency and with my slow progress I'm not sure if I'll get there.

Void Sphere is doing incredible work in heists - I never die to door barrages now with good void sphere placement. Though I do still die often to getting mobbed apart from the doors, or even just one rippy rare.

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Lightelder wrote:

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Pyrok wrote:

We're using HoA because the Circle of Nostalgia we're wearing grants 50% increased chaos damage while we have it

Sounds like an awful lot of investment (ring slot, mana reservation, gem slots) for something that is roughly worth 3 skill points. Or does the HoA itself get work done? Is the 20% chance for our corpse explosions to poison any good?

This build scales purely off of three things: %chaos damage, effectiveness of Frostbite & elemental weakness, and max doom. We get max doom via the tree, and we get virtually every chaos node and curse effectiveness node possible. Once you switch to LL, mana reserve isn't the problem because of Prism Guardian, and you have gem slots to spare. There is nowhere on the tree that you can find 50% chaos damage for three points, including cluster jewels because we're already using them. If you have a better idea that proves out to be a bigger gain in damage, then I'm all ears.

Will things get better with bossing? I am lvl 95 now and I am really having a hard time with the conquerors. Sure i only have 5L Shav's right now but will there be a significant change in dps once i get 6L? My profile is public maybe you can have a look at my setup?

No issues with clearing though. This build is absolutely insane when it comes to clearing!

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Yntensity wrote:

Will things get better with bossing? I am lvl 95 now and I am really having a hard time with the conquerors. Sure i only have 5L Shav's right now but will there be a significant change in dps once i get 6L? My profile is public maybe you can have a look at my setup?

No issues with clearing though. This build is absolutely insane when it comes to clearing!

It doesn't particularly seem like it. The big resounding criticism that you keep seeing about Hexblast (and why the vast majority of the streamers who were playing it re-rolled on day 2) is that the single target damage is extremely poor once you hit late game, and there are very few ways of scaling it to get better. There's a pretty big post on Reddit talking about its flaws. It seems like the skill was designed to be scaled via crit but then they made a last minute decision to ditch that and give it a base 4% crit chance for some reason. There's no other unlimited form of scaling for us.

Can you guys explain, why Eye of Malice Callous Mask, is so good dps wise?
I mean it gives +50% of cold res, does that somehow stack with removing cold res ?

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Raytscha wrote:

Can you guys explain, why Eye of Malice Callous Mask, is so good dps wise?
I mean it gives +50% of cold res, does that somehow stack with removing cold res ?

Someone did the math in the big ignite Hexblast post on the Shadow forums, but TLDR is that if you can get the resists low enough, it actually amplifies the negative resists