Hipster Uber Lab farmer
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Introducing: A Scion Uber-Lab Farmer.
Pastbin: https://pastebin.com/vjGYX9RL I designed this character because I don't have a lot of time to farm lots of currency and I don't have good gamer reflexes. I like to be able to facetank because I'm not great at manually dodging things, and I've been known to play the game with a beer in one hand. This build lets me comfortably do full-key runs of the uber lab at a satisfying pace on a relatively low budget. Basic idea of the build: Make everything depend on strength, then get tons of it. Exploit some mechanics which give good returns on low investment. Core uniques: The Baron close Helmet, The shapers touch, and geoffri's sanctuary. The main skill of this build is raise zombie. Why not necromancer then, right?
Spoiler
Being able to auto-hit with non-stop zombie slams gives way better DPS, doesn't it? Yes. Yes it does. I'm not facing down the shaper, though. This just has to be able to beat up Izaro. I've played a lot of Summoners since 2013, since before minions had resists and regen on the passive tree, since before ascendancies, or jewels. Since before persistent spectres and auras. Minions have gotten a lot of buffs over the years, and frankly, the weak link isn't the minions anymore. It's the summoner.
Previously I ran a necromancer that used empowered bone offering in a +2 minion helm to keep block & spell block capped and recover almost 800 life on block. It was great (although still vulnerable to DOTs). I still wanted a way to feel incredibly tanky though, so I had to look elsewhere.
Spoiler
While Juggernaut is very popular these days for farming lab, as it has some obvious advantages, such as easy endurance charge maintainence for stellar defense against traps (and izaro himself for that matter) it takes a lot of investment to be able to truly face-tank a fully buffed uber izaro and the builds tend to work really well as melee characters, which has never been my thing.
What I was looking for was a way to be passively, effortlessly tanky, while not having to have great reflexes or timing to avoid traps or izaro slams. What I came up with was a Baron zombie summoner, which uniquely allows you to gain leech from your zombies hits, and the slayers over-leech mechanic, which allows you to save up a big leech pool before you charge through a bunch of traps or recover almost instantly after tanking a big hit. There are of course two ways to get slayer over leech: #1) Play a slayer, which is on the opposite side of the tree from most of the summoner stuff, and offers very little else of value to us, or . . . #2) play a scion. This will largely handle our sustain. The other two pieces of the tankiness pie are Buffer and mitigation. In depth discussion of ZO/EB/MoM and slyer over leech vs just a big life pool:
Spoiler
I went with the latter, especially since I had a lvl 77 scion with a respec laying around on standard. I initially grabbed cheiftan as the other ascedancy to get 10% increased strength to make it a little easier to hit that all-important 1000 str mark, to activate the Baron. https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/The_Baron I considered grabbing a belly of the beast to just have a huge HP pool and grabbing some Meginord's Vise gauntlets and calling it a day, but the labyrinth traps still do a number on you, regardless of how big your HP pool is. Like I said, I wanted to be able to just sort of ignore them. What I came up with was Shaper's touch and geoffri's sanctuary. I had the idea a while back and it never seemed all that good. Both items received a buff making the Str --> ES scaling better, and now I had an excuse to try it out. I grabbed Eldritch battery and MoM and tried it out. It. . . .actually works way better than expected. Eldritch Battery costs a ton of points just to get to (in my case 5) and Zealot's Oath (which you get free on Geoffri's sanctuary) is usually a bad deal unless you're going CI or LL. If you have say, 6K life and 3K ES, and you regen 10% of your life pool, you get 600 regen per sec, but only after you've lost all of your ES and start taking HP damage. If you take ZO, then you lose your 600 life regen / sec, but instead gain 300 ES regen per second. This means you straight-up lose 300 life regen. This sucks. Yes it has some advantages, such as it working way sooner, and in the case of flat regen, such as from a stone golem, there is no loss, but it still feels bad to lose out on all that regen and it leaves even more vulnerable to chaos damage. . . . Unless you have slayer overleech. Then you're already basically at leech cap all the time, so you effectively have 20% regen active most of the time. This now gives you a great way to have lots of recovery for both pools. It's the only way I've seen so far to make hybrid life / ES feel good so far. Usually you have to invest in one or the other, and it's worse than zero-sum, as there are economies of scale to investing heavily in one or the other. Because we're getting a ton of life, flat ES, and ES % scaling just from stacking strength with this build, it feels really good. I ran the numbers, too. If I switch those 6 points I had invested in EB, MOM, and ZO into life nodes, and swapped to a belly of the beast, I would actually have a smaller effective life pool, by at least 1000. The best thing to protect you against the dreaded one-shot, is a big stack of HP. My build currently has about 8.5K EHP. The other advantage to this play style is the way it interacts with traps. Most traps deal 100% of your life pool to you as physical damage per second. That's pretty sketchy if you aren't prepared for it. The way it's calculated, though, means that ES over your mana pool isn't counted, and MoM is almost like taking 42% less damage from traps. Hugely helpful. Next up, an ample basalt flask rolled to get you 2 sips will help quite a bit as well. The fact that we are still essentially life-based means a good old fashioned life pot helps smooth over my many misplays as well. Lastly, if you time your monster slaughtering well, you can basically just charge into traps with impunity and lean on your massive leech pool to carry you. As long as you don't dawdle, the traps become largely irrelevant. Alright. so we've covered pool and sustain, that leaves mitigation. I use two primary means of mitigation. #1) fortify. It's an incredibly powerful defensive mechanic, that requires almost no investment. Put it on your movement skill. 'nuff said. #2) Saffel's frame. I think this shield is highly unre-rated. The down-side is that it removes your attack block chance, which can certainly be scary if you don't compenstate for it, but it gives you +4% max fire, cold, and lightning res. . . which is AMAZING. It means you go from taking 25% of ele damage (assuming capped res) to taking 21%. This is like taking 16% less damage from elemental sources. It's basically a second fortify. It's almost as good as having a resist flask of each type up all the time. Awesome. What about the whole, no-blocking thing? Well, there's a couple answers to that. One is that with a summoner build, you're not the only target, which helps a lot, and the other is that I use a flame totem linked to blind, to ensure that any high-threat targets immediately lose half of their hit chance. Basically, I don't miss the block chance, and I love the mitigation. Other little features of the build. #1) CwDT convocation. This is what truly idiot-proofs the build. I charge into packs, and basically as soon as I take any damage all of my zombies teleport to the enemies, beat them to death, and instantly leech back all of my lost life. It's great. I cannot overstate the defensive (and offensive) power of this skill set up. It practically makes the build an afk build. #2) Shield charge - CoH - Vulnerability - Fortify. This is the set up that makes the build playable with one hand, except during really tense moments. Sure it's slower than if I had faster attacks in there, but it means I maintain defenses, direct minions, move, and curse all with one button. It does everything for me. It also means that I can direct nearly all of my attention to positioning, which is of great value in a heart-pounding fight like fully buffed uber izaro. It's hard to quantify this value, but I haven't died once to uber izaro since I got this and the CwDT Convocation set ups online, despite my low player skill and penchant for tossing one or two back while I farm. #3) Elemental equilibrium. I use a generous hatred aura to grant my minions a crap-ton of extra cold damage. Then I lower enemy cold res with my flame totem. This is nice for a couple reasons. Since I'm ZO, MoM, EB, I don't have to worry about aura reservation nodes cus I dont need mana. Because I'm using generosity, I don't need to invest in aura effect either, it's plenty strong with just that one link, and it couldn't benefit from EE if it affected me. Elemental equilibrium is great too, since unlike curses, it has full effect against bosses, which is really the only time you bother dropping the totem anyway. #4) I picked up ruthless support for my zombro's because it has positive interactions with freeze, stun and bleed, even though it's slightly less overall DPS than melee phys dmg. #5) The vulnerability curse scales really well for the zombies. It gives them a chance to cause bleeds, and even though it's a small chance (made smaller by boss curse resistance), they hit a lot of times and eventually get the bleed on there, and then it does full damage, not reduced in any way due to the target being a boss. Similarly, the curse gives a chance to cause maim, which is an independent effect from the actual curse, so once again, it bypasses boss curse resistance and makes them take more phys dmg. #6) ruthlessness and Multistrike work well with bleeds, since multistrike only diminishies the hit damage, not the bleed, and ruthlessness means that once the target is bleeding, it's not a waste to keep on trying to apply another bigger bleed that does double damage. Ruthlessness also means that you can stun or freeze rares with occasional spike damage, whereas more consistent hits might fail. Stunned / frozen monsters can't hurt you. This is good.
Spoiler
Also, multistrike interacts with Zombie slams very well, repeating a cool down ability several times instead of hitting hard once, then doing regular attacks thereafter. Due to my two violent dead jewels, my zombies rarely attack with anything other than slams. (Yes, I know necromancer does this part better, giving you LITERALLY 100% uptime on slams, and making the slams unevadable, resulting in massively more dps, but I'm already thrashing izaro on a 4-link and I value the defensiveness more)
Everything else is just sorta whatever. I grabbed purity of elements to make capping resistances easier and provide some protection for my zombies, totems and specters / golems / gaurdians. There's definitely room for improvement. I'm still set up for an animated guardian, but he kept dying to traps and I haven't wanted to invest in a replacement yet. The spectre seems to be more trouble than he's worth (again, due to traps) although I like Chrome-touched chimerals from act 8, as they can go with the flame totem to apply blind with their barrges and they have a unique debuff: Suppressing fire, which slows monster attack and cast speed with a less multiplier. It's pretty strong if you can be bothered to keep the chimeral alive. My links are totally unoptimized at the moment, and I'm actually still running my zombies in my 4-linked chest armor . . . But it doesn't seem to matter - they wreck izaro. Eventually I'll try to refine my links, upraged my rares, get another 10 or 15 levels, and 6-link my armor . . . but for now . . .it works, and it works great . . .even with low player skill and a low budget. I'm really enjoying the build and having a lot of fun playing it, which is why I wanted to share it with all of you! Sorry for ranting so long, I hope you enjoy the build, or are inspired to make other non-traditional build/class choices. The best part of this game is the creativity you can use when designing your builds to do what you want them to do! P.S. I switched from cheiftan to pathfinder for my second ascendancy and it's made the build sooooo much faster and let me play so much more sloppily without being punished. It's terrific! I considered heirophant for the extra 8% damage taken to mana before life, as I currently have about 1000 more ES than I need (in terms of one-shot protection) but frankly I don't think it's necessary. I already feel really tanky, and going faster and having zero flask management effort just feels better. Have fun exiles! Last bumped on Jul 23, 2018, 3:26:15 PM
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