[3.10 HC] Apep's Darkpact Totems are BACK (original build 3.1-3.3)

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IANF1 wrote:

i have yet to 6 link my soul mantle but a covenant just dropped for me out of nowhere. Not sure exactly what i should do.

I'm not sure if the random curses will affect my totems and I'm pretty confident is my ability to keep big boys are arms length with decoy so i *think* soul mantle would be more dps because it increases totem life, which increases dark pact damage.

Also I'm thinking, when i use soul mantle are 5 totems worthwhile in any way? Will 5 DP totems be more DPS than 4 given how the heirophant ascendency makes all my totems do less the more I have? I'm considering dropping ancestral bonds if this happens to keep my cap at 4 because i'd rather not be juggling trying to keep only 4 on the field for efficiency when i have a cap of 5.

Also I'm considering getting eldritch battery after my last ascendancy depending on how much ES i have, then reserving mana for auras/curses. I'm not sure what to run though. I know that MoM will damage the ES over the mana bar so the ES will still be effective health just in a bit of a different way, It would also let me reserve mana and still have a 2k+ pool for MoM to draw from.

That's a good question about the 4vs5 totems, and unfortunately I really don't have an answer, maybe one of the more mathy players can shed light on it. Right now, I'm generally running with the full amount for bosses. I drop two decoys, either on opposing sides, or front and behind, and the other three are DP. I find having more than one Decoy adds a strategic value that another DP totem wouldn't, since the two decoy totems are basically sharing the damage and hate. I imagine you could do the same thing with a 4 totem setup, but whether that would be more damage or less, I really don't know.

As for the curses from Soul Mantle, they are more an annoyance than anything else. The only ones that are truly dangerous are Vulnerability and Temp Chains. The curse issue is quickly rectified by using a flask with the curse immunity/remove curses on use mod. When I run maps, I basically just cruise through using two Quicksilver flasks with curse removal. You'll be killing mobs fast enough that you can easily maintain charges to boost your move speed, while removing temp chains when you see yourself slow down.

Yesterday, after reaching level 90, i decided to give some of the more dangerous bosses a try. l bought every map already corrupted and most of them had terrifying mods on it. Anyway, here are my thoughts about the build in endgame:

I am at about 5.3k life, 3.4k mana and 1.5k ES. Tooltip hideout dps is about 25k. Unfortunately none of my gems has quality and/or is level20. Here is my gear:



BTW: How can i link my jewels?

Tier15 maps are all relatively easy. For example double core and double Overgrown Ruin. When it comes to the Guardians i need to say that the single target damage really sucks balls. While Hydra and Phoenix are not that hard (Hydra deathless and 1 death at Phoenix) it takes a while to get them down. Mostly because the totems are dying to fast and we need to constantly resummon them. Minotaur was more dangerous, i died 3 or 4 times. Chimera seems to be nearly unkillable for me. I died 6 times and only got him to about 70% life. Well, the map was really dangerous with 60% less regen and i guess 2 damage mods and some other stuff. But more of a problem seems to be that this boss is so annoying because of never standing still. I needed to jump around all the time and my totems werent able to damage him. Also the smokephase is really really dangerous. Selfcasting wither is also not a really good option in this fight. So has someone tips especially for fighting chimera? How can i improve my single target dps? Is Vaal Skellies a good option? But even if that is the case, in a chimera fight ist seems to be hard to fill charges for vaal skills.

However, i guess that shaper is not that hard as chimera. Because shaper is not that mobile. I think i will give him a try

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Sollkomol wrote:

... While Hydra and Phoenix are not that hard (Hydra deathless and 1 death at Phoenix) ... Chimera seems to be nearly unkillable for me. I died 6 times and only got him to about 70% life. Well, the map was really dangerous with 60% less regen and i guess 2 damage mods and some other stuff.

That is super weird. For me it is the other way around. Chimera is total walk in the park and Hydra is nightmarish.

Chimera: you might be doing something wrong here. Solo phase just keep him absolutely constantly decoy totemed. Totems will take him down no prob (altough make sure to use conc effect to make it faster)
Smoke phase you just pop quicksilver and quickly dash through. It is his most dangerous move but with little luck you should survive.
Add phase: Maybe a little bit harder than the boss but not horrible. Just never stop moving and put totems everywhere. Make sure to decoy mini-boss as soon as it spawns.
Basically if you suffer in this fight i am 90% sure you dont use decoy totem nearly often enough.

Hydra: How the hack you do this easy? My totems live about 2 seconds and he never stands in them + ignores my decoys. It is by far the worst guardian for me. Suggestions?


Both fights: seriously anybody is succesfully using wither against any guardians? I mean I just cant stand in one place long enough to build a siginificant amount of stacks (and wither totem dies too fast to be a good alternative to self casting). Suggestions?

edit: removed accidental double post, sry.

Maybe it all comes down to the map mods? As i said, i bought my maps already rolled and corrupted. If i remember correctly chimera was rolled with two damage mods and 60% less regen (as i already said). So i dont know why i was struggling that much at chimera (btw, i also used decoy totem most of the time to distract him) while bringing down hydra relatively easy with a bit of patience. The good thing about hydra is that this boss isnt that mobile as some of the others.

However, it sounds good to me that you think chimera is one easier guardians. So i should give him another try with a better rolled map.

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2. 1 slot on one jewel needs at least 9 totem ele res to cap them for upper tier content

So just 1 jewel with atleast 9% totem elemental resistance right? And rest of them, life/mana. I dont even know how to check totem resistances. By the way I have 5k life 2k shield and 3k mana is this bad?

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whiskeyjoel wrote:

That's a good question about the 4vs5 totems, and unfortunately I really don't have an answer, maybe one of the more mathy players can shed light on it. Right now, I'm generally running with the full amount for bosses. I drop two decoys, either on opposing sides, or front and behind, and the other three are DP. I find having more than one Decoy adds a strategic value that another DP totem wouldn't, since the two decoy totems are basically sharing the damage and hate. I imagine you could do the same thing with a 4 totem setup, but whether that would be more damage or less, I really don't know.

As for the curses from Soul Mantle, they are more an annoyance than anything else. The only ones that are truly dangerous are Vulnerability and Temp Chains. The curse issue is quickly rectified by using a flask with the curse immunity/remove curses on use mod. When I run maps, I basically just cruise through using two Quicksilver flasks with curse removal. You'll be killing mobs fast enough that you can easily maintain charges to boost your move speed, while removing temp chains when you see yourself slow down.

Soul Mantle is probably the highest dps option we have (around a 13% increase over Covenant and Cherrubim's), but is by far the least tanky (plus, you have to deal with the inconvenience of the curses).

A perfectly rolled Cherrubim's is about a 3.5% dps and 100hp increase over Covenant and probably offers the most tankiness overall, but a good roll would likely be (a) fairly expensive, (b) really hard to get 4 blues if it doesn't have them already and (c) has a really high dex requirement.

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Shoxu wrote:

So just 1 jewel with atleast 9% totem elemental resistance right? And rest of them, life/mana. I dont even know how to check totem resistances. By the way I have 5k life 2k shield and 3k mana is this bad?

Per the wiki, "Totems have a standard 40% elemental resistance and 20% chaos resistance regardless of difficulty." We get an extra 26% from nodes on the tree (assuming you didn't grab Ironwood) - that leaves 9% to cap them at 75%.

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Lysithea wrote:

I think one path would be an insane rare armor with hp+hp/es+mana+trires on an esbase armor. That would increase ehp a bit more while freeing up the dex reqs. It also would then let me cap res more easily so I could focus on more dmg on other pieces and jewels which should be a netgain in both dmg and ehp. Other than that I don't really see other options.

A Vaal Regalia with perfect life and ES rolls represents a gain of roughly 160 life and 300ES (and whatever resists you gain) over a Covenant at the loss of about 6.7% dps in modeling, just FYI.

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Sollkomol wrote:

Maybe it all comes down to the map mods? As i said, i bought my maps already rolled and corrupted. If i remember correctly chimera was rolled with two damage mods and 60% less regen (as i already said). So i dont know why i was struggling that much at chimera (btw, i also used decoy totem most of the time to distract him) while bringing down hydra relatively easy with a bit of patience. The good thing about hydra is that this boss isnt that mobile as some of the others.

However, it sounds good to me that you think chimera is one easier guardians. So i should give him another try with a better rolled map.

Definitely try again. Took me like 3 runs to start doing it smoothly. (first one was in tabula though - that was fun :p )
Agree 60% less regen is one of the worst things.
I yet to figure out how to do easy-hydra with this build. Fight just keeps on going way too long. On my trapper last season it was a breeze. Maybe just practice.

I also agree map mods make a huge difference. I mostly hate the things that slow. Frozen ground/tc etc.

i fee obligated to post a recommendation for this build since I've been playing with Orion basically the entire league so far. The survivability and dps of this dark pact setup is genuinely very impressive.

While running higher tier maps on my (really well geared) SRS necro I have legitimately asked OP to carry me through sketchy maps when I was about 10 levels higher than him and equipped with gear worth roughly 4-5x the cost of his items.

I also recommend checking out OPs flame golem build and anything else this guy posts, he's definitely got some top-tier game knowledge and build sense.

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Heracleitus wrote:

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Lysithea wrote:

I think one path would be an insane rare armor with hp+hp/es+mana+trires on an esbase armor. That would increase ehp a bit more while freeing up the dex reqs. It also would then let me cap res more easily so I could focus on more dmg on other pieces and jewels which should be a netgain in both dmg and ehp. Other than that I don't really see other options.

A Vaal Regalia with perfect life and ES rolls represents a gain of roughly 160 life and 300ES (and whatever resists you gain) over a Covenant at the loss of about 6.7% dps in modeling, just FYI.

Haven't had time to look much into it myself yet, thanks a lot for crunching some numbers. Am I assuming correct that those dps calcs doesn't factor in new jewels? I'd imagine less dex req and +res on armor would free up quite many dpsmod slots on jewels. If that's the case it's definitely the way to go forward.

edit: Forgot I ran tempchains, if I don't want a sublvl20 tempchains I'd need to reach 100dex anyway. That'll be a decision for the future.