[3.12 build idea] BEXSAYSBOOM, Maw of Mischief theory crafting
So Bex's unique finally arrived, let's see if we can make a build out of it! Here's some ideas from different players that I discussed with.
What's the skill Deathwish?
Death wish is a channeling skill that gives 40% inc atk/cast/movespeed when channeling, on release, affected minions explodes and deals a base fire spell damage + 13% of minion's max hp. It's a skill that cannot be reflected (Currently that is bugged and reflect can kill you), scales with fire damage, AoE damage, and if you use Spiritual Aid notable/ the Scourge, then minion damage as well. The Explosion also scales with Minion's life, so it is more efficient to use Minions with large life pool.
My first impression of this skill & Explanation
Because Death Wish could only be 5L, it is essential to make the explosion worth it to begin with. My first thought was to use Soulwrest and CwC - Desecrate - Offering - damage support to sustain the explosion while channeling. Turns out that summon Phantasms only has 2.5k base life, and because it's a support gem it cannot be modified by +2 to minion skill gems from Necromancer, which means the 13% minion life explosion would not be worth it. Which brings us to the next point, what minions have good base health? According to the PoEDB spectre spreadsheet, SRS at lv 68 (equivalent to lv19 gem) has 3.1k, Summon Skeletons have 1.8k hp, Raise Zombie has 6.4k hp, Herald of Purity sentinels have 9.6k hp. Zombies and SRS both have unique items outside of passive skills to increase that hp: Zombies have the Aukuna's Will gloves(80-100% inc) and Mon'Tregul's Grasp ( +5000 base hp) SRS has Tavukai (80-100% inc) So how do we utilizes the juicy 13% hp explosion? This leads to my newest idea after talking to Coffeepowered, Suitsizesmall, and the Necromancer global chat: HoP sentinels spawn when you kill, that includes DW's explosion, so it's safe to say HoP is going into the build very smoothly. When Sentinels are targeted to explode, they respawn if DW explosion kills enemies, or hits unique bosses. With that massive base health that scales even better with level, it brings us to the next part: What's the pros and cons of this build path? Pros - According to different variant you could have : 1.Durability - Either Necromancer's aura/offering route/Chieftain's 2.High-tier map Viability - The damage is enough for map bosses regardless of style 3.Accessibility - The helmet costs 10C about now Cons - - This is not one of those Zooming build where you fast map everything - Highly dependent on what you prefer - Min-Maxing could be expensive (Check Gavve's Elegant Hubris usage)
How do we start the process of exploding minions?
First, it is important to note that DW's channeling stacks would be lost if your affected minions were destroyed because of new summon that exceed maximum amount of that minions you have, so I personally chose SRS specifically for easy sustain via the set up of : Summon Raging Spirits - Spell Totem - Multiple Totems - Elemental Army - Minion Life Summon Raging Spirits - Unleash - Minion Life - Empower - Minion Speed The SRS spawns would charge quickly to enemies into melee range and all you have to do is Channel DW and release to see that sweet juicy explosion, as a bonus you get sentinels and their explosion hurts even more, AND they sustain themselves. Since we hit and deals fire damage, unfortunately we cannot use Elemental Equilibrium like other builds, so we use Elemental Army to apply Fire exposure, Combustion to further lower enemies fire resist. After consideration of gameplay smoothness, we use Unleash self casting SRS for initial spawns, and totems for bosses.
Deathwish set-up
Deathwish only has 4 potential support slots, to maximize our damage from the explosion, I use Deathwish - Infused Channelling - Inspiration - Fire Penetration - Combustion
Cluster Jewel usage
One thing we need to be careful of is that if our minion dies before channelling, there will be no explosions, so we fix this with a medium cluster jewel with Minion life on it, and roll Blessed Rebirth passive. This should fix the occassion that your minions dying to packs before exploding.
Summary of discussion update #1
Thanks to the community fork we now can estimate the damage of our Maw of Mischief explosion on PoB. After looking at the discussion session below, it is clear that this build has variant that does not require Necromancer ascendancy to work Gavve's version uses Elegant Hubris for potentially massive Minion life+ Minion Damage nodes conversion, check out Gavve's PoB link for multiple version of this including Necromancer skeleton + Herald of Purity with or without Cover in Ash, Chieftain for all the quality of life we have for explosion etc. Currently the trend is having HoP scaling massive Life pool to chain explode themselves with other minions, and base on the on-hit summon of HoP it sustains itself during boss fight. For clearing, Replica Siegebreaker allows us to put Unleash on Skeleton and because of summon limit, some of them dies and put Burning ground to kill any mobs that survived.
Different Minions interaction
Arakaali's fang's spiders are immune to damage but currently at 3.12.2 they are targeted by Deathwish, but due to lack of health it's not worth it. Heist NPCs are not your minion and cannot be targeted. Skitterbots cannot be targeted by Deathwish. Dancing Dervish can be targeted by Deathwish because technically they are not immune to damage, but once it is exploded you need to rampage again to trigger the sword. Summon Skeletons: fastest cast speed and cluster summon than any other minion spells. Summon Raging Spirits: Tavukai makes SRS very tanky, relatively fast casting but only cast one at a time Raise Zombie: Slowest cast speed out of all choices on the list, but has the most health scaling potential outside of Sentinel of Purity. Herald of Purity: Currently holding the best hp scaling and could be triggered by Deathwish. Herald of Agony: to be tested Raise Spectre: I personally have not tried any of the spectres, if anyone tested it please leave it down the comment and I will manually add the interaction into the thread. Dominating Blow: The minions are targetable by Deathwish but due to the nature of attack skill vs channelling skill I cannot recommend this.
Weapon
Ideally you would want +2 to all minion related gems for weapon, this could either be achieved by getting Convoking Wand (check out Ghazzy's guide on how to craft +2 minion gems wand), or a long staff which will grant you +2 to all minion skill gems. The reason that this is ideal is due to the scaling of minion life, each level above lv.20 minion gems would exponentially scale your damage because minion's life scale that way, and that amount of hp would make our explosion's damage increase massively. ### Unfortunately this is still WIP and need further discussion onto what we use for weapons or what defense. This build was based on the template from Ghazzy's Phantasm build and definitely still works for Deathwish like most summoner build Let me know what you all think and please comment to discuss with each other to make Bex's unique item Endgame viable :D Also big thankyou Bex for making this unique, the explosion effect is so cool and satisfying :P Last edited by Suzu520 on Oct 11, 2020, 3:47:44 AM Last bumped on Feb 26, 2021, 6:48:10 AM
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Really like the idea of this unique and tried it out briefly yesterday on my Occultist with just the basic gem + the helmet and it did surprisingly decent damage for pretty much zero scaling at that point.
Will probably want to hunt some more currency and theory craft before respecing or leveling a new character. Your SRS plan looks pretty solid and has some decent synergy along with QoL to get the kills going. Tried with just summon skeletons last night and that felt rather clunky. And one weird thing was that had access to an Arakaali's Fang and despite reading somewhere that they couldn't be targeted they blew up as well and were able to get some kills. Not sure if this intended behavior however. Will probably try to get some Hex's into the build for dmg (flammability) and survivability (enfeeble and temp. chains). Mostly thinking of this since I got a lot of curse gear laying around due to the occultist. It would be nice to find a way for EE but without going down the route of getting orb of storm/storm brand down before each pack to trigger lightning dmg it feels tricky. Not really sure the best way of scaling things either since PoB doesn't have the skill added yet but we should be able to get it from both improving our fire damage and getting increased minion life. Hopefully it can get added and that some PoB genius can figure out the ideal pathing. |
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" Thanks for the reply :D And thankyou, I made an adjustment to the build and now it's super smooth, you unleash SRS to start, then HoP sentinels will do the rest you just constantly tap and release your DW, During Bosses, you drop SRS totem and you focus on Deathwish channeling and positioning to stay alive. | |
I really like your idea for this build!
Would you be willing to post a PoB of it? I looked at the character in your profile and it seems to be missing a few gear items. Thanks! Last edited by FTWhitledge on Sep 27, 2020, 2:44:40 AM
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Nice idea. I'm trying a different approach using zombies and Mon'tregul to maximum HP . The suggestion of using HoP is great but my problem now is how to summon the zombies fast? I'm trying cyclone and CWC with Aukunas. Not smothest but ok. Some advices to improve my zombie summon speedy? Thanks.
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Hi!
I'm actually doing pretty much this atm. Currently level 88 so I haven't tried any endgame yet. I went for 1 cluster jewel (like 50-60c total cost) and an Elegant Hubris (fairly easy to get a decent one since Divines are so cheap now). I also went with the Siegebreaker belt since that helps with trash clear (Skeletons + unleash = dead minions = caustic ground) Note: You absolutely don't need an Elegant Hubris with 240% minion life and 160% minion damage that I have for it to be good. I played with 2 Clusters up until level 85 and had 0 issues. Here is my POB pastebin (Community fork) if anyone is interested: https://pastebin.com/UqSB2rzZ I put in 3 different spectres so that you can see the difference in life/damage if you want to try this out with spectres (1 unleash = 4 spectres when mapping, thats why I don't go for +1 spectre node). And no, I don't use Detonate Dead, I have it at level 1 and doubled the corpse life (6% DD vs 13% Death Wish) just to get an idea of the damage (Im not saying this is 100% correct, its just a quick "fix"). And in case you just want to see the Skilltree here it is: https://pastebin.com/DniT9uUP It is pretty weird due to the Elegant Hubris so don't follow this blindly ofcourse. Right now my Skeletons have 24911 hp. My Sentinels of purity have 423390 hp (yes that's 423 thousand) Spectres range from 95266 (Bramble Cobra with 0.8 life multiplier) to 952677 hp (Stoneskin Flayer with 8.0 life multiplier) Yes, thats almost a million hp. All in all I've put in about 4-5 ex into the build (boots are self found). These are the specific ones I use, rest is just cheap life and resists. Wand: 30c (+1 spell skill gem with open suffix) Kaoms heart : 45c Maw of Mischief: 25c (was about 60c when I bought it) Cluster jewels: 1 ex Elegant hubris: 10c + 1 ex divining it Empower level 3: 35c +2 duration gem corruption Vix Lunaris (Invictus Solaris also works): 15c Soul's wick: 1c You absolutely don't need a +1 wand with trigger socketed spells. I'm even considering switching it out for an Earendel's Embrace so my skeletons cover enemies in ash. Note: This means switching out Vitality (completely optional anyway) for Blasphemy + Flammability. I just want to say it is kinda of clunky and NO it's not a fast build. But on most fights I just hold right click and then press summon skeleton since that releases the Death Wish and summons 16 new ones (7 survives rest spread caustic ground which works great for clearing trash). For the rare mobs and bosses I do pretty much the same thing but wait for the Sentinel of puritys to get close. This is not a min-max build in any way but instead an outline of whats possible with just a little investement. I havent even bothered with flasks yet. Highest content I've done is a Syndicate Hideout at area level 83 and they insta died when my sentinels exploded. I've also considered using zombies with Grasp + Aukuna's Will (Just under 150k hp with 3 zombies) but I prefer the 7 Skeletons for clear (Lord of the dead node is blocked by Elegant Hubris). But I can see the Unleash + Zombie beeing great as well (Summon 4 zombies, 3 survive = 1 spread caustic ground) since the caustic ground damage is a lot higher compared to skeletons. And regarding bandits, I killed all. I am considering switching it out to helping Alira to be able to drop Clarity and go for this setup in the helmet: Inspiration - Fire pen (Awakened) - Combustion - Conc/Inc Aoe effect (Infused channeling also works great if you dont want to switch gems at all) since you summon the skeletons in the middle of the packs anyway. If my calculations are somewhat correct each Sentinel of purity explodes for about 1.4 million damage. With the other setup (Earendel's Embrace + Blasph flammability) and a Cinderswallow urn flask and a Wise oak flask this increases to about 2.2 million per exploded sentinel (1.8 million without flasks). And DO NOTE that this is WITHOUT the +13 stacks bonus from Death Wish. However, realistically you'll only hit 11 at best (4 Sentinels + 7 skeletons) since the spectre route is clunky without auto Desecrate (no trigger wand in the highest damage setup). You could add a SRS/Zombie totem if you really want to hit 13 minions but I don't see the point of that. And just to say it again: This is a quick calculation/theorycraft (that Im playing and learning from as we speak) and might be somewhat off. But it gives you an idea of it's power. Even if you halve the power (if my calculations are wrong) it's still very strong for such a little investement. | |
" Hey Thanks for the reply!! :D Sorry about the missing gear, I've been trying a lot of different set up and used up all my currency so now I'm using Phantasm for clearing, I'll try to put something up in PoB, meanwhile look up Ghazzy's phantasm low budget tree, it scales pretty much the same as our build except we take Elemental overload for our character's damage | |
" Thanks for the reply ! I think Aukuna gloves make it possible to summon Zombies with Unleash, that would mean you'll get at least 4 zombies with one cast (Same with my SRS approach), however one thing I noticed is that this build lacks cast speed to make Unleash feels smooth, so I'm still waiting for some insights from other players. | |
" Wow that's some really detailed information that's gonna be useful for those Deathwish players :o, Thanks for sharing this :D And yeah, this build seems to not be a zooming build, but definitely got beefy damage, your approach sounds solid and I didn't even think of the caustic cloud interaction at all. Sentinels of Purity are definitely gonna be mandatory for Death wish build imo, the hp scaling is too high to ignore and you basically cycle through explosion during boss fight so it's doing damage. My experience of Death wish currently is that once minions explodes, there's nothing left to damage or protect you, so I think your style of having the belt to spawn caustic cloud is a great idea for us. | |
Would the cluster jewel node Blessed Rebirth allow you to cast Death wish on your sentinels for 4seconds? Or does killing sentinels with death wish while killing some mobs spawn new sentinels from herald of purity?
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