GhazzyTV - Essence Drain & Contagion (or Bane/Soulrend) Trickster [SC/HC/Uber Elder/Shaper]

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samlzy1993 wrote:

Hi Ghazzy I'm doing a build similar to this one in preparation for next league and I'm trying it out now on Harbinger. I just wanted to know how you sustain your frenzies and power charges against bosses? I see a lot of on-kill options (eg orb of storms PCOC) , the Trickster ascendancy itself has some, but so far the only on-hit option for frenzies is Frenzy. Thanks in advance!

PCOC = Power Charge on Crit (not kill) - but for us that doesn't do a lot, since our crit chance is really low (~5%).

You could also gain Power charges via Jaws of Agony and a Multi / Cluster Trap setup in the 2nd weapon slot. But a) that's quite clunky and b) Frenzy Charges are giving way more damage for us compared to Power Charges. I've been doing that on my Wander, but didn't feel it's worthwhile for this char.

There might be other uniques that can provide charges - I did not search for them yet. I guess the "easiest" way is to rely on add / spawn phases in boss fights. ;)

One tip I have for people who are struggling with DPS.. make sure your totem is placed in spots that are close enough to work but far enough away to not die (and remember to recast if it DOES die). I often place my totem just behind my character to shield it. A lot of times I was totally forgetting about my totem being alive and realized that it was dead most of the time. Once I started placing my totem in a better location, my DPS skyrocketed. Look out for the bluish circle around your target and if it's not there, recast your totem.

Hope this helps somebody.

@kiinetic:

Apart from all those mentioned earlier, in my opinion, the level of your "Arcane Surge Support" gem is also very high (Level: 15, Mana spending requirement = 178!)... In this case, you must cast your "Contagion" skill (Level 21, Mana cost: 28) at least 7 (178 ÷ 28 = 6.35) times in a row in order to gain access to it!

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BeeAntOS wrote:

@kiinetic:

Apart from all those mentioned earlier, in my opinion, the level of your "Arcane Surge Support" gem is also very high (Level: 15, Mana spending requirement = 178!)... In this case, you must cast your "Contagion" skill (Level 21, Mana cost: 28) at least 7 (178 ÷ 28 = 6.35) times in a row in order to gain access to it!

Well, in principle correct, but the mana cost of his Contagion is 28 * 1.2 * 1.4 * 1.1 = 51.7 due to the 3 support spells. Base mana cost is 28.

But anyways he has to cast it 4 times which is a lot.

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It is usually mob packs that I am dying to when I get to tier 7/8 maps. But maybe I need to adjust my play style then as well, and also pay more attention to map mods. Currently I usually just shield charge around maniacally until I see a mob pack then hit Contagion then ED. Then sometimes I get into trouble and just die when I run into a large mob pack.

I've found if you just charge into the middle of the pack something happens where you get locked and can't cast ED to clear the mobs and you die. I have a "cannot be silenced" corruption on a gem as well as trying Brine King for general mapping but nothing helps. If I charge into the middle of a pack I can't get ED and Contagion off and I get rekt. Idk why people get stuck, I've seen a lot of people in this thread talk about it though. Just try to manoeuvre around the outside of a pack and get a bunch of EDs going. The more mobs affected by ED the more regen you have, I've seen as high as 20k life regen per second in some maps but even with only 1 mob with ED on it I get like over 700 life regen per sec. So it's a pretty safe build as long as you're not suiciding into the middle of packs, Idk if it's a but or what but with Brine King I shouldn't be getting stun-locked, I can't be silenced, I even use Whirling Blades to get out since I don't like Shield Charge since it gets stuck on every pebble, but still it happens. Not on as low of maps as you do, but I do a lot of t15 beachheads to lvl and if I charge into the middle on those maps or anything about t13 I'll insta-die as well.

Good point, this seems to be exactly what is happening. Thanks for the info!

Unfortunately, no luck with the corruption. :( But at least ~500 more ES, a few % more evasion and 1% (!!! :) ) more phys. mit.

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Surfinn wrote:

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Ghazzy wrote:

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Surfinn wrote:

Two guardians down! I ALMOST had a third (Minotaur), but ran out of portals with like 10% HP remaining.

Guardian of the Minotaur

How the hell do people do this deathless? Guy hits like a monster truck.

Hey,

Lair of the Hydra requires you to use Convocation as few times as possible to avoid the boss from Chain killing your spectres.

Minotaur requires you to "kite", basically you can't stand within range, and as soon as those circles showing where the stones are falling appears, get all your spectres out of it ASAP, they can pretty much facetank his hits but those rocks is whats killing your spectres!

Hey, was this supposed to be in a different thread (spectres)?

Thanks for the advice though. I get stuck when I'm trying to kite and have to pass through the electric barriers. That shit just ruins me. I feel like I literally cannot stand anywhere unless I pass through. I think it may have been an increased AOE mod though, lol.

FailFish..... yep.. this is what happens when I respond to threads waaaayyy to late, sorry about that!
Basically, you have to kite him and avoid standing in the rock circles. He's a tough one.

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weppe1337 wrote:

do we benefit more from higher res or more life/Mana?

are there any caps or stats minimums to strive towards? watched your video and liked it btw.

reddit has alot to say about res cap at 168 or 169 because of the hidden res you have as a baseline on your character? and thus only capping at 109

GGG made it so we can see the resistances properly in our Hideouts now, you want to be 35-40% above the cap which is usually 75 unless gear or tree increases that number.

After that, the res is useless and you will benefit more eHP from life/mana.

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Aloone wrote:

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Ghazzy wrote:

Hey,

You'll need Allelopathy Gloves to make bosses/single target as well as Vaal Totems or rares with "nearby allies cannot die" mod to make the build function properly!
Change Pierce for Empower whenever you can, and if you have Allelopathy Gloves then pierce is no longer needed as Blight will deal with those situations where Pierce would otherwise help. Could use Decay or Poison instead.

Are your resistances capped?
You need higher numeric rolls of life on your rare pieces to up your eHP as well! :)

Thank You for reply!

I have around 110 all resist to avoid that -res maps. So there is problem because when i will change my gloves for that epic i will have no 110 or is this not that important?. And with that gloves should i use normal skill gems as before? Contaign etc etc?

And what about body armour? What you should recommend me?

Obtain rare items with higher HP and resistances is not that easy, but i will try.

Thank You for advises

I'd recommend Tabula Rasa and later a corrupted Tabula Rasa (+1 gem lvls).
The resistances is VERY important so make sure to get that via your rare items.


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Okeeey... so, to respond to the @Kinetic discussion:

Sai > BotC for boss farming, sorry @Garyas but it's just better with a high spell damage roll. Even more so when he isn't prioritising Blight which I don't promote in my own personal playstyle according to the guide. Yes, Blight focus helps a lot and changes the playstyle a lot vs bosses.

However, I must underline the fact that the build is designed for map clearing in general which is the main reason I have not gone in to focusing on the Blight approach. If you wish to focus this build vs bosses the solution is very simple: Change wep/shield for a +3 chaos staff and you'll see bosses completely melt, this also allows for a chest switch to Cherrubim's for even more damage if you so wish.
However, the gear you've listed @kinetic is dope AF. And you are or at least shouldn't have any problems dealing with the end-game bosses, though as you stated it WILL be slower due to not being designed for boss killing which a +3 staff would solve for you. This also drops the clear speed though as you're forced to use Flame Dash.

This build is extremely cheap for what you get but the moment you want to focus on bosses with ED/Contagion you have to lose something for that gain, in this scenario that's dropping some clear speed (which can be solved with Bisco's Leash rampage whilst running maps imo) and use a +3 staff which will significantly drop bosses faster.


I hope the answer is sufficient :)

TL;DR: Blight is too strong to ignore. We lose next to nothing, gain close to 200% DPS.

This is your build guide Ghazzy, so I will just make this one post to make a counter point, then drop the discussion completely. I would normally not care, but in the current game, and considering some of the choices you have already made with your character, I feel that you are simply wrong. The gear used for this analysis is in the spoiler below. I am also basing the arguments on your current character in Harbinger SC, and the gear posted by Kinetc.

First, the why: You state that A: You have no Blight focus. B: Sai > BotC for boss killing due to A.

Let's start with A. You area already using Allelopathy and 2x Spreading Rot. This is my reason for the post, and why I feel saying you have no focus on Blight falls short. You could just drop Allelopathy and Spreading Rot completely for some proper jewels and attack speed gloves, and your argument would be completely fine and there would be no need to read any further. My problem is that you do use these 3 items, so I hope you'll indulge me in going through some details.


First off, the Sai is better for map clearing. This is only because of possible attack speed craft on the Sai, enabling us to Shield Charge faster. For map clearing, a build like this has many times more DPS on AoE than what is needed to clear the map relatively effectively, even in t15-16 on a budget due to the +1 tabula. This makes only the ED DPS and attack speed relevant, so my argument only works on boss killing, which was the topic in question anyway.


Now let's look at boss killing for a character with Allelopathy and 2x Spreading Rot. First, we need to know what makes Spreading Rot activate. 2x Spreading Rot means:

Enemies Hindered by Blight take 50% increased Chaos Damage
Blight has 100% increased Hinder Duration

And now, how Blight's hinder works:

Enemies who aren't already debuffed by Blight are also hindered for a shorter secondary duration, slowing their movement. Base secondary duration is 0.8 seconds.

With no additional modifiers to Duration from the tree, a 4L wither totem setup with 20/20 gems, not activating 20% cast speed from movement skills, and Temporal Chains at 20% effectiveness assuming Guardians/Shaper, we have the following (and my current Allelopathy gloves at 29% hinder duration):

Wither: 5.39 casts/s, 4.33s duration, giving 23.34/20 stacks with constant uptime.
Arcane Surge: 4.2s
Blight - Hinder duration: 1.88s
Blight - DoT duration 2.88s
Essence Drain 4.38s

To make use of the current setup that you guys run, you have a 4 second time frame to cast ED, Contagion, and make sure Wither totem is alive. Then you have to tag the boss with Blight, and then tag it again after 3s to reactivate Spreading Rot. If you hit the boss with Blight sooner than that, you effectively remove Spreading Rot from the equation for another 3 seconds. Then your Wither totem might die for a second, and with 0.5s placement speed you fall down to 10 Wither stacks for quite a while again.

This playstyle is by no means impossible, it is just inhuman to actually pull off while you are playing the game. You do get some benefits from it that should not be written off, however. You can run a CWDT setup and you get 10% more single target DPS from Decay (yes, on a 6L 21/20 ED, 4 empower, decay from the weapon is a whooping 10% more damage).



Now, let's invest 3 points into Potency of Will and equip a breath of the Council. Let's only look at the duration modifiers first:

Wither: 5.39 casts/s, 6.17s duration, giving 33.26/20 stacks with constant uptime.
Arcane Surge: 7.6s
Blight - Hinder duration: 2.56s
Blight - DoT duration: 5.19s (5.53 casts/s, 28.7/20 stacks possible)
Essence Drain - 7.89s

The most important point for me to make here is that with the increased duration nodes and BotC, wither totem goes from being unreliable to actually being able to maintain high stacks against more hectic bosses such as Hydra and Phoenix. This alone makes BotC worth it over the 10% DPS increase from the Sai. Spreading Rot uptime actually gets worse with this setup, which is an interesting point to make.

The time windows with the increased duration is much more comfortable. The no duration setup forces you to constantly cast different spells to be sure everything is up, while you have room for error and actual boss tactics with more duration. All this time can be used for something very strong: Blight. If you look at the numbers for BotC and PoW, you will see that you actually have room to cast everything and stack 20 stacks of Blight to maintain full uptime for your damage (although ironically, that does require the same hectic playstyle as the version that I am trying to say is bad). At a bare minimum, spending half a second, to a second channeling Blight every now and then will result in superior DPS to that of the non duration style.

All of this comes back to an interesting point. This is a budget build. BotC + Allelopathy is in the same pricerange as +1 tabula. I simply feel that it is well worth the mention at this point, as well as being vastly supperior to ANY other ED setup when it comes to killing bosses.

Unless Ghazzy explicitly wants to keep this discussion alive, I will not comment any further on this, and return to my own thread for further discussion on the Blight/ED/contagion playstyle.

Shit.

This whole time I have been just channeling blight while making sure ED, Contagion and Wither are active.

Is this the wrong way to play? You're just supposed to tag the boss every few seconds with blight?

Channeling blight actually makes your dps WORSE and messes up spreading rot?

No, you should channel Blight to reach as many stacks as possible. The point that Nedieth brought up is that due to how long each spell lasts in both setups and because of how you have to adapt the ideal rotation, the Spreading Rot uptime is less over the full cycle in the 2nd setup compared to the 1st. But overall damage will be (significantly) higher in the 2nd due to increased duration and how it affects the rotation.

In general: I was about to write a reply earlier, didn't find the time and when I opened the thread again, Nedieth had already posted his very in-depth analysis, covering all the various aspects.

Just a few additional comments:
- I would say that if you do not focus on Blight, you might as well drop Allelopathy and 2x Spreading Rot, get 2 good rare jewels and a pair of rare Fingerless Silk Gloves. I tried a Blightless setup once and used rares that gave me more life / mana / overcap resists, which made the build quite a bit more tanky. That setup also allows you to run a "better" CWDT setup, faster Contagion cast, a Golem, Clarity (or some other utility spells).
- If you focus on Blight, do it all the way as the increase in overall damage is quite drastic (vs bosses). You can still run a CWDT setup, just without increased duration. I think the tradeoff is very justified, but of course depends also on personal preference and playstyle. Dropping CWDT altogether is also an option, but esp. against Porcupines and the like, CWDT is quite noticeable.
- Irrespective of overall damage considerations, BotC adds a bunch of QoL improvements. Longer duration is always nice and makes for a more forgiving playstyle. Increased AoE (even if not by much) is something positive to take into the complete picture as well.

Regarding the Decay Sai topic:
Yes, a perfectly rolled Decay Sai can have more "increased" damage than BotC, so in the tooltip, ED is stronger in that scenario. But as explained by Nedieth, the tooltip is not everything.
Perfect Sai btw would be (imho):
Prefixes:
+30% increased damage over time
+79% increased spell damage
+39% increased spell damage (from hybrid spell damage / max mana stat)
Suffices:
Decay
+27% Attack speed
something :)

So in total 148% increased damage and Decay and faster attacks for Shield Charge

Looking a pure damage, that's 148% vs 100% increased damage for BotC + the Decay.
The additional 48% increased damage are an effective increase of about 5% increased damage (assuming 800% increased damage for ED anyways, which is on the low end, especially since we are looking at the high-end spectrum of the build with that Sai). The Decay adds another approx. 15k single target DoT dps, which is maybe 15% of the ED DoT dps (at best, again depending of the overall gear).

And that's for the perfect Sai. Figure the chances to roll that item or the price to buy it.

And finally: my previous post was directed specifically at Kiinetic and his particular Sai.
That Sai is far from perfect with "only" 67% increased damage (i.e. 33% less than a perfect BotC, which is quite easy / cheap to obtain). So before Decay, you actually loose dps. Not even considering the whole topic of Blight as discussed by Nedieth. Than you add maybe 15% single target dps via Decay single target only ...

That's why I replied in the first place: the statement that he would lose half of his damage when switching from Sai to BotC is something that I felt should be commented on, in order not to mislead new players or to at least give them another view on the matter.


All things being said, I think it's extremely useful to have this discussion and I hope that it gives new insights to players of his and related builds. At least I have learned quite a lot about the mechanics from this thread and that discussion in particular.

My guess is that Ghazzy is fine with having that discussion here - it's not that he wants to dictate a particular build to other players. I think he even mentioned explicitely somewhere on the previous pages that this guide is intended as a starting point, and that everyone of course is free to make his or her own adaptations, according to personal preferences, style and also goals.

Not having any detailed discussions and just blindly following a predescribed guide, that's not interesting, at least not to me. And you definitely don't need a forum for that :)