[2.3-2.6] Budget Hardcore Abyssal Cry Berserker

Hi Barren,

thank you for this guide. I was completly new to PoE and used your Build in Essence to start. Now im a LvL 89 Berserker and running through some Tier 9,10 Maps. The skill abyssal cry was a good clear and healing skill after i deafeated the first Laby, helped me out in many situations when my flask were out. I did a few changes only to the gear: changed Triumphant to Atziris Splendor for some more effective ressistance, since i boosted the Dmg of Abyssal Cry with jewels and Gems. I changed from Dark Dagger later to Doon Chubiari for some more single target Dmg with Flame Surge and i am using now Poison Support for Abyssal Cry so the kitchen knife can still deliver the poison from dieing enemies. I dont have to be that scary anymore if i run into many mobs for abyssal cry, with determination and mortel shell i get arround 18k armor and abyssal cry keeps blowing up the entire screen. Thanks for your guide!

Hey, I'm thrilled to hear that! well done getting to that kinda tier on your first character and I hope you're gunna keep playing in 2.5 & 3.0.

What about using wyrmsign gloves for your flame surge, giving your a 5 link, a 5 link cospiri chest with poison on your abyssal cry, and trading the consuming dark for a breath of the council giving you more aoe, duration, and a bunch of chaos damage.

Haven't tried the build yet, but I have a berserker I'm not using I might spec into this and give it a try.

I didn't want to recommend cospri's will because abyssal cry will often offscreen mobs so they won't be in range of blasphemy. It would help trim down your skill tree though with multicurse so it could absolutely work.

with wyrmsign you might lose clearspeed if you use enduring cry.

good suggestions to keep in mind, though, if you wanna give the build a try.

Yeah, wasn't planning on using enduring cry, was saying wyrmsign just for the conc effect support with a life roll.

I've only ever used abyssal cry sporadically, and the only thing I didn't like about it was the long cooldown, which going berserker fixes. A buddy of mine did ZiggyD's dreamfeather viperstrike build and that uses abyssal cry for it's aoe and I was pretty impressed with how it did.

Didn't realize abyssal cry would offscreen like that, hmmm, still think cospri's could be sweet for the hex immune though, and even if you didn't change the tree, you could run enfeeble/temp chains blasphemy and use a witchfire brew for the vulnerability and run tri curse, and since witchfire is a stibnite flask would help keep you alive when you run in a pack to blow it up.

League ends monday, will probably play around some with this in standard before new league starts.

Abyssal cry is surprisingly powerful, especially considering how underused it is. Cospri's definitely has a lot of upsides for the build but yea i think you'd have trouble with the poison coverage and imo the upsides can't make up for that. I've not tried it though, so maybe it's totally fine and i'm wrong.

Lemme know how your tests go.

Ok, so, after playing around with it a bit, I gotta say I'm much more impressed with abyssal cry clear speed than I thought I would be. My initial plan of using cospiri chest I decided against simply because I wasn't factoring in that it has a 193 dex requirement and I don't want to have to spend that many mod slots on my gear going for dex to wear it.

I must admit I didn't go with your tree, but made my own. I was going to use your tree but as I was specing into it I decided to look at the numbers a bit more. Per your own guide you focused mainly on life and jewel sockets, which is absolutely fine, but I just really didn't feel like trying to roll or buy a bunch of jewels for something I knew I'd only be using for a few days between leagues, so, here's the tree I made and used.

www.poeurl.com/SSe

So some highlights of your tree vs mine, I'm ignoring the differences between +armour, evasion, energy shield, and resistances because those are just incidental to both of our trees and a focus of neither.

You have 213% life vs my 215%, essentially the same, unless you make it a point to get life on all your jewels which increases the cost exponentially.

you have ~70 chaos and ~70 area damage on your jewels, I have 110% chaos in the tree with another ~25 on jewels so about the same

you have more life regen in yours, but I don't value that much for this build, mine has enough to comfortably run blood rage for frenzy charges which is the only part that matters to me.

two of the reasons I consider my tree to be better though, I worked in hex master and skittering runes. Since the build somewhat relies on curses for it's survivability, having massively increased range and effectiveness on them is very much worth the point investment IMO.

also, if you choose to run vulnerability, since that's a debuff on the mobs not a buff on your, it's effectively a more multiplier, so boosting the effectiveness of that is pretty sweet.

So with my tree I initially tried flame surge, in wyrmsigns, which was ok, it did work, but I felt it could be better.

I figured since we're scaling all this chaos, poison, and DoT stuff, why not use a skill to actually take advantage of that. Essence drain.

So I swapped the wyrmsign for winds of change, cheap, about the same life roll, and a decent damage a quality of life boost to essence drain. Put on a carcass jack, life, all res, aoe, and I just happened to have a 6 link laying around.

essence drain - faster casting - void manip - controlled destruction - rapid decay - pierce
abyssal cry - less duration - void manip - inc aoe

It feels MUCH better with essence drain than it did with flame surge IMO. Basically just whirling blade into a pack, shout, ED, boom. It rarely takes more than 1 cast of ed to clear trash packs.

Even bosses that don't have good adds, you can drop wither totem and spam ed and they just melt. Highest map I've ran with it so far is t13, a couple with some pretty rippy mods and it felt fine, I have no doubts it can do higher, I just haven't done it yet.

Please don't think I'm in anyway bashing your build. I know I can come off as long winded and arrogant sometimes, it's not my intent. Your build is fantastic, and your guide was a great source of inspiration for me. This is all just because you said let you know how it goes.

If you want to check out the character, the name is self_flagellation, my profile is unlocked so you should be able to view it.

That's some awesome testing, fella. I've added a "variations" section to the guide and made yours the first, if that's alright with you.

I didn't even consider the dex requirement on cospri's, that's a good point too. Absolutely fair enough wanting to drop flame surge and use something more mainstream, a lot of people hate flame surge for its weird aoe shape. I don't know why but it feels really good to me and to be honest that's a big reason that I went with it for this build.

Taking those curse effect nodes might also have been a better choice. Personally, I feel much more comfortable with ~150% increased armour and plenty of life regen. Sometimes I won't even use blood rage just because having almost 10% life regen per second makes everything so relaxed. Your skill tree will likely appeal to more players, though.

I'm super glad you got back to me after your tests, I'd have replied sooner but things have been hectic this week. People will definitely appreciate your interpretation of this build and I'm glad you had a good time testing it out.

Completely ok with being a variation, read and enjoyed your synopsis of my version A+.

Regarding flame surge, I'm actually really fond of it, before they neutered CoC I used to love running the classic cyclone - coc - shock nova - ice nova - flame surge. I also love it as a "single target" skill for caster builds that focus on aoe, a 4L flame surge generally does more single target dps than a 6L "aoe" skill for a aoe caster build, crit templar ice nova, things like that.

I can definitely see preferring the +armour and life regen route, esp if you make it a point to get all armour pieces, I was using a mix of def types on my gear so it wouldn't have been much good for me, but the ability to tweak things to fit individuals available gear and play style preferences is one of the best parts of this game imo.

I liked abyssal cry so much though after this build that my current build in the new league, a max block gladiator, I've been using it there too, even though it's only a unlinked gem in an unset ring it's a great aoe clear speed boost for breaches. I've never made my own guide before, but I'm considering it for this build. Really enjoying it.

First of all, thx for the guide! Didn't play POE in ages but this build still carried me through to maps now in hardcore breach league.

One Questions though: Why take elemental overload when using controlled destruction for flame surge? Does Abyssal Strike crit?