[3.19] (Unsuccessful build) Beacon of Madness Ward based Trauma Stacking Juggernaut

TLDR: Beacon of Madness debuff causes reduced Flask Effect, which negates downside of Olroth's Resolve, allowing us to have 100% Perma-Ward. However build dies easily to DoTs.

Showcase: https://youtu.be/TQxSNYXDhHs
PoB: https://pastebin.com/Y84B7zQ0

Noteworthy interactions:

1. Diluting Touch from Beacon of Madness negates the less Ward downside from Olroth’s Resolve, allowing us to reach high number of permanent Ward (up to 3k) with a lot of flask charges gained investments.

2. Binary flask effects (e.g. Onslaught, Unholy Might) are unaffected by reduced flask effects.

3. Self-cursing with Temporal Chains ensures our Diluting Touch never expires and suddenly losing Ward, while also lengthening our flask effects and all other buffs.

4. With high Ward as mitigation and Wasting Touch preventing effective Life recovery, Dissolution of the Flesh is a nice fit to buffer our Life pool against damage over time as most small hits cannot cause us to take damage to Life. Evasion is unnecessary.

5. Partial damage mitigation is extremely effective when Ward subtracts a flat number of final damage taken, so we use Tempest Shield with Glancing Blows, together with a humble amount of Spell Suppression.

6. All Touch debuffs are additive, so on paper our Life and ES recovery is doubled by Malevolence recovery Watcher’s Eye (10% -> 20%), and tripled if we stopped taking DoT recently with Arakaali’s Pantheon (10% -> 30%).

Build diary below.

Beacon of Madness

To those unaware, Beacon of Madness grants 3 variants of powerful buffs at the cost of accumulating Delirium Touches debuffs that eventually overwhelm your character.

A permanent Madness build was actually my first idea when seeing the new Timeclasp granting debuff expiry rate. However after some calculations, even at 200% faster expiry rate, meaning each debuff lasts only 20 / (1 + 200%) = 6.6s, on average we will still get ~3 stacks of each debuff, which felt very bad to play with unlucky streaks.

Then I turned 180 and looked at it another way, will it be possible to just let the debuffs stack up and survive?

Well the short answer is no. I’m unable to make a build Embracing Madness, but I feel I’m getting close. The lynchpin is that there are just too many DoTs in this game.

The four Touches

To recap, when we embrace Madness, we gain one of 4 debuffs every secon, each stacking up to 10 to cripple our character in a devastating way. From the Wiki:

Eroding Touch: You take 6% increased damage per stack.
Paralysing Touch: You have 6% reduced action speed per stack.
Diluting Touch: You have 9% reduced flask charges gained and 9% reduced flask effect per stack.
Wasting Touch: You have 9% reduced life and energy shield recovery per stack.

Each Touch debuff stacks up to 10. Because of their additive nature, theoretically they could each be counteracted with investment. Furthermore, the four debuffs are not equally devastating.

Against Paralysing Touch reducing action speed, the new 3.19 Trickster or Juggernaut can simply ignore.

Against Diluting Touch, we can use binary flask effects (e.g. Phasing, Onslaughts, Unholy Might etc.), or even turn it into an upside for Olroth’s Resolve, which could allow us to get full Ward that does not deplete (imagine an Aegis Aurora that works 100% of the time at 100k Armour). We just need to invest heavily to counteract the 90% reduced flask charges gained.

A short summary, at full debuff stacks we take 60% increased damage (from both Hits and DoTs), have 60% reduced action speed (can be negated), gain 90% reduced flask charges with 90% reduced flask effect, and have 90% reduced Life and ES recovery. These huge numbers we have to deal with.

The Self-Curse Boneshatter package

Since this is already a ramp build that requires one to wait for the Touches to ramp up to get full Ward, and that we are Action Speed locked, my idea is to ramp even more with Boneshatter Trauma stacking. Conveniently the self damage we take lines up with the increasing Ward we have, so we never take too much damage, but there is a cap in Trauma we take, which is about 300 stacks, before Ward is unable to protect us and we start taking Life damage.

This mitigation is achieved with 90% Physical Damage Reduction via Endurance Charges from Juggernaut Ascendancy, Divergent Enduring Cry that lasts long enough thanks to self-cursing, and an Eyes of the Greatwolf granting Global Defences and PDR. The rest is easily filled up with Armour.

The damage amplication from Eroding Touch, is counteracted by our 44 Fortification buffs, effectively letting us take 100% * (1 + 60%) * (1 – 44%) = 89.6% damage from Hits.

Together, assuming we use 8/60 Divergent Boneshatter, each stack causes 91 * (1 – 90%) * 89.6% = 8.15 damage per stack. With 2500 Ward, we feel no pain even at 300 stacks (or 400 when Berserking), which can ramp up to over 20 million DPS on paper.

Attempting to mitigate Damage over Time

Typically Trauma stackers recoup a lot of life as the ramp kicks in, so degen is usually not an issue. While recoup also works through Ward (c.f. Wardloop builds), we have Eroding Touch and Wasting Touch that massively amplifies damage over time we take and cuts down most recovery, ultimately overwhelming this build.

To put into perspective, typically during mapping we can sustain 50 Trauma stacks that translates to around ~400 final self damage. If we would recoup 30% thanks to Reflected jewelry meaning 120 life recouped, it is instead gutted by 90% by Wasting Touch to a miserable 3 life per second.

While instant recovery such as life gain on hit works just fine, there are too few sources that restore sufficient amount. Our ring slots are reserved for self-curse so no Elder/Hunter mod, and Feast of Flesh did just too little.

In the end I chose to forego recovery entirely, and use Dissolution of the Flesh to just tank the DoTs, and my attempt to combat damage over time became mostly binary immunity, bleed immune from a flask, poison immune from Malevolence Watcher’s Eye, ignite immune with charge mastery and burning ground immune from Pantheon.

Sadly, in the game there are still way too many degens that easily kills the character with just 4k Life – Mana Siphoner, Eater of World kamikaze shockers, Essence Drain exiles. With self-curse Temporal Chains you can only watch your life drain away with no hopes of outliving the debuffs cast upon you.

Final thoughts

I think this build works decently well simply as a self-curse Trauma stacker tagged with some 1000 perma Ward without the Madness gimmick, providing some good mitigation without sacrificing so much DoT defense. I levelled all the way to level 89 relatively smoothly (albeit slowly) without clicking the Madness button, and then struggled to reach 90 once Madness and personal frustration kicked in.

If we use Madness the intended way, i.e. as a short buff, it is actually an OK pseudo-Berserk to push our Trauma stacks 50% higher (44 stacks VS 29 stacks of Fortification) on top of 20% double damage.

Self curse sometimes just dies to Elemental Weakness from Hexer circles, especially when you stand still and ramp.

I have also tried a CwC Forbidden Rite Trickster with the Poison/Explode variant of Beacon of Madness, which can make use of the self damage to proc various spells such as Voltaxic Burst. The clear is way better and less clumsy, but the survivability problem is similar – dying to damage over time without sufficient recovery. In addition, every map one needs to wait for the Diluting Touches to ramp up to cover the FR self damage before actually able to map, which quickly gets annoying. The solution was to get more chaos resistance to take less self-damage, but then why use the boots in the first place eh?