[3.7 Legion] MF Essence Drain/Contagion Monolith Farming Trickster (SC/MF)

I got up to T15s fineish with a little help and was finally able to fund this (switch over from regular ED+Contagion) to this build and PoB is telling me I should be doing ~150k dps with this and my last build was doing about 100-125k according to ED tool tip and I had 100mf but now I'm squishy as hell have significantly less mf and am doing 63k dps on ED tool tip.

What did I mess up https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/DuskMS/characters/SuckTheMarrowOut I must be missing something major or I just done goofed the whole build, not sure.

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DuskMS wrote:

I got up to T15s fineish with a little help and was finally able to fund this (switch over from regular ED+Contagion) to this build and PoB is telling me I should be doing ~150k dps with this and my last build was doing about 100-125k according to ED tool tip and I had 100mf but now I'm squishy as hell have significantly less mf and am doing 63k dps on ED tool tip.

What did I mess up https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/DuskMS/characters/SuckTheMarrowOut I must be missing something major or I just done goofed the whole build, not sure.

I think you should revisit the skill section again, because there's so many things you're doing wrong.

It's not the gear, as those pieces are decent, (I might go for a rare quant amulet instead of biscos tho, to help balance res)

You are not running a 4L Contagion setup, which severely reduces the AoE of which your dot spreads, you are not running and optimized ED setup, as your gems are not level 20 or even qualitied. You only have a lvl 2 empower, you're running Discipline instead of Malevolence. You're also running 2 stibnite flasks for some reason (1 magic and 1 unique), these don't stack and you will be better off with a bismuth flask to help with resistances.
You also don't have uber lab done, which means you haven't picked Swift Killer, which means you lose out on a lot of dmg as well.

This is a spell build, which means that our damage scales a lot from gem levels, so that is where you should focus. You can get cheap 20/20 corrupted gems at this point of the league, so no excuse for not having them.

Also, you're only lvl 82, which means you're missing some survivability points on the tree, they will come later tho.

I tried importing your character to PoB, and as it is right now, you ahve roughly 87k ED dps
I then optimized the gems, tree and auras and the dps went to 210k on ED, with more room for improvement, this was just a quick look at your character.

So yea, I'd suggest you follow the guide more closely to get expected results.

Thank you so much for taking the time to break everything down and respond without flaming me I really appreciate it <3

I swapped out Malevolence while a friend was helping me get Elder Orb for atlas and I just swapped out biscos neck for a rare IIQ neck with some res, swapped thief's torment for a white socket pariah and a BEEFY res ring (which I'll probably swap for another pariah and a bismuth flask when I can afford) so I went from having almost no res to soft cap. I didn't realize faster casting would proliferate contagion faster I thought it would literally just make me cast it faster which seemed dumb considering I was only casting it once per encounter/pack. I just broke the bank on those gear upgrades so first priority is uberlab for ascendacy then replacing gems.

When you say you optimized tree do you mean you accounted for me being a higher level or taking different nodes?

Thank you again so much for taking the time to reply, I just picked up PoE again on it seems at the tail end of the league and this is the farthest I've ever gotten progression wise which relatively is pitiful but I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

Edit: I'm wondering if it's worth it to exchange my The Pariah and my beefy res ring for 2 ventors gamble's or not. It seems like I would need top tier ones to make up for the res' and IIQ. I think gearwise the only thing left is to get a better necklace maybe? Btw replaced all gems with 20/20 ones and holy cow I'm flying now, 2 pure ex drops in < 50 maps already.

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DuskMS wrote:

When you say you optimized tree do you mean you accounted for me being a higher level or taking different nodes?

I was just talking about taking EB for 100% mana reservation and getting Swift Killer really.

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DuskMS wrote:

Edit: I'm wondering if it's worth it to exchange my The Pariah and my beefy res ring for 2 ventors gamble's or not. It seems like I would need top tier ones to make up for the res' and IIQ. I think gearwise the only thing left is to get a better necklace maybe?

You're right, in order for it to be worth replacing rings with Ventors, you need 10-15 ex ones if you want to balance resistances, so I'd wait with that till you got everything else sorted out. You could for sure get a better necklace, you could even go for a rare shaped multicrafted one like I used, they are not that expensive to make besides the multicraft really.

On a side note, you could put in your grace in your pariah for more levels on that instead of Portal.

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DuskMS wrote:

Thank you again so much for taking the time to reply, I just picked up PoE again on it seems at the tail end of the league and this is the farthest I've ever gotten progression wise which relatively is pitiful but I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

No worries, I made this guide to help, so I'm happy you enjoy it :)

I got a 21 Vaal Grace in the pariah now for that thicc evasion ty for that idk why I didn't think of it, I would like to multicraft a neck but I'm not sure how to target that veiled mod/farm syndicate mechanics. All that's left is that and swift killer and I should be able to single clear the frozen monoliths, I've got the strat down for full map spread but I need just a liiiitle bit more damage to finish off some of the bigger bois on the ends (not the generals).

Just wanted to update, this build is awesome, exilence said I was making 200c an a hour not sure how accurate that was felt like much more and I think I've got the items to the point where they are perfect I'm just wondering if I can upgrade main hand weapon. Non-legion mobs in glacier dropped me a ~9ex ventors and I had enough to get the other so that worked out nicely.

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DuskMS wrote:

I'm just wondering if I can upgrade main hand weapon. Non-legion mobs in glacier dropped me a ~9ex ventors and I had enough to get the other so that worked out nicely.

You could go for a multicrafted wand as I mentioned in the guide.
most important affix is the chaos multiplier. You can also go for an Essence Drain dmg enchant on Helmet for more damage.

Lvl 21 gems also does a lot for ED, so that could be the next step.

@retarjoe

Just wondering if there is anything that you would change on this for 3.9 ? I've been looking at rolling a monolith & blight map farmer, and EDC builds are what i'm most interested in (not a fan of cyclone, mines, or HH builds).

I've got plenty of currency to do whatever i want with it.

Would you still go with the wand/shield combo or would the multimod bow + quiver option be better?

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guardianXXXIII wrote:

Just wondering if there is anything that you would change on this for 3.9 ? I've been looking at rolling a monolith & blight map farmer, and EDC builds are what i'm most interested in (not a fan of cyclone, mines, or HH builds).

I've got plenty of currency to do whatever i want with it.

Would you still go with the wand/shield combo or would the multimod bow + quiver option be better?

Sorry for the late reply, I haven't paid much attention to the thread since Legion, as the build was made entirely for Pylon farming.

But, it depends entirely on what tier of maps you plan on farming.

The setup from Legion wouldn't be very strong in red blighted maps, and rolling legion on white maps is not very profitable these days.

So I would probably go with a regular ED/Con build for farming red legion maps.

The old setup is still perfectly viable for white blighted maps, however, it was build for speed, and since you don't really need that in blighted maps, I would go for more damage instead.

So yes, I would for sure go for a multimod bow and quiver with %dot for Blighted Maps, which is the only real consistent usage of this build these days in my opinion.

And if you were to farm blighted maps, there wouldn't be a reason to build for MF since the vast majority of the loot you get is from the chests, where IIQ doesn't matter.

The only reason I initially made the build around MF was for Legion, where IIQ mattered on the Legion mobs from the Pylon, not the chests you open. You do ofc still get the loot explosion at the end from Blighted Maps, so MF is not entirely wasted and still viable, but personally, I would just go for a high dmg/life build instead.

So to make it short, the build as is can still easily do white blighted map farming, but there are better alternatives that can also farm Legions in red maps.

If you were to build for Blighted Map farming, I would suggest getting a lot of damage and life as your first priority, and then get a lot of inc aoe as second priority to make it more smooth.

I could probably make a guide for a build that could be used for Blighted Map farming, but it would be very similar to the many other ED/Con builds out there, so I probably wouldn't bother to be honest.