[3.10] Complete Cobra Lash Assassin Guide | >10m Shaper DPS | All content | Noob Friendly | Video

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Eldwyn wrote:

Hello, this is a really cool build, thanks for sharing.

This is my profile https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Eldwyn/characters I have been playing venom gyre but PoB says Cobra Lash dmg is a bit better so I gave a try. My problem is dmg on bosses. Spent tons of exalts for this build.

I got several questions here...

1) I crafted my own claws..stil not sure about physical dps is necessary here ?
2) Should I use skitterbots instead malevolence ?
3) What do u think about Asenath's Gentle Touch ?
4) And ascendancy ? Why you have Unstable infusion instead of Opprtunistic to kill bosses faster?

Not sure how much you have read or looked into it, but Venom Gyre is only good with heavy investment into Pierce nodes/mods, which takes away from other available noteables / passives if you just used CL.

1)Phys affecting poison is probably the most confusing ailment IMO. I don't have an answer personally other than, craft in POB and see what affects your POISON damage / poison dps. For instance, According to POB, this claw

gives me only 677k+ total dps inc poison if i add %chaos dmg. If i add %phys, 695k. If i do max roll %phys + blind, 650k but 20% chance to blind... so a 20% chance for the enemy's hit chance to hit 50% during 4 seconds. Confusing, i know.




2)Skitterbots if you want to apply shock or chill at 19% at lvl 20, I'd use them only if you have mana issues with malevolence.

3)They're meh. If you really want temporal chains, you'd be better off with a solstice vigil ammy IMO.

4) Unstable was from previous layout I believe. He did change it to ambush and assassinate. Reason: culling strike, crit on full life and low life gauranteed = 10% hp taken away on bosses basically. A lot can happen if youre slow to kill bosses in 10% hp. Unstable infusion grants the most raw dmg from power charges. Opportunistic is dependent upon your playstyle. Id rather do that or ambush.

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Stràt wrote:

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MoosGames wrote:

Yeah, I'd think I'd try to annul one of the useless mods off the claw. The Delve poison mod, the flat chaos and the faster poison mods are great. The accuracy is something we usually don't want on a claw...but if you aren't 100% hit capped yet, it's useful. Mana and/or Int must go. So if you hit the annul right, the claw is quite decent. Not perfect, but good enough.

Faster Poisons is a very good mod. The Poison Duration actually stays the same as far as I know, but you deal more damage in the same timeframe. I need to try to find a source for that though.

I found a reddit post about faster poison mod and that was what i thought. It's a nice mod for short fights like mapping (mob die faster and less damage gets lost when they die), but for long fights like bosses it's kinda useless because poisons can be stacked indefinitely.

I was not lucky on the annul but i managed to craft a better one in a few attempts, the attack speed and faster poison feel nice for mapping.

Yes, the guy on reddit is right. I consulted my source who previously said that the duration stays the same and he said he was wrong. So it's still a useful stat but not very important. It's not a bad thing to get bosses to the next phase slightly faster though.

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Eldwyn wrote:

Hello, this is a really cool build, thanks for sharing.

This is my profile https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Eldwyn/characters I have been playing venom gyre but PoB says Cobra Lash dmg is a bit better so I gave a try. My problem is dmg on bosses. Spent tons of exalts for this build.

I got several questions here...

1) I crafted my own claws..stil not sure about physical dps is necessary here ?
2) Should I use skitterbots instead malevolence ?
3) What do u think about Asenath's Gentle Touch ?
4) And ascendancy ? Why you have Unstable infusion instead of Opprtunistic to kill bosses faster?

1) Physical Damage is not necessary. Poison Damage comes from the combined damage of your physical and chaos damage. Since we scale chaos damage, but don't scale physical damage, we want/need the flat chaos damage mod on the claws. Physical damage on them isn't bad (if it's a good roll), but not as important as chaos damage (and the delve poison mod).
2) You can use them. It's an alternative arua setup. Depends on your preference, gear and setup. Use PoB to make an intelligent decision here.
3) I don't like them very much.
4) For the Crit Chance from the Power Charges. You can also use Opportunistic or if you want the Culling Strike for Bosses you can use Ambush and Assassinate. The build is quite flexible and when using PoB you can go in many directions to suit your needs/preference and it will still work as well as my direction does. :)

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Hex Remix wrote:

Moos,

I might make a small suggestion (from my own issues), and strongly recommend only Hunter influence on the claw. I understand from the rolls, Elder and Hunter are fairly similar, however, In my search on xbox with limited resources, getting a Hunter inf at i83+ has been a pain. I settled for Elders (knowing i want hunter), and have had a PITA trying to craft my second claw. The first one is "eh" at best -

which i have yet to POB / see what mod will end up best. However, the reason for that argument is stricly this:
The weighting on Elder suffixes rolls the Chance to poison, and worse so socketed gems are supported by # poison, is a terrible waste of space / weighting. It has the SAME weight as the normal roll of chance to poison / inc dmg with poison on basic rolls.

As you can see.. I keep getting left with trash like:

Hunter influence cannot roll this the gem mod.. which in my mind at the weighted rolls for claws, on poedb, with aberrant, corroded, and metalic fossils selected, is a complete waste of a chance at hitting one of the hunter weighted rolls, or any roll (in fact its caused me to use 15 resonators on 1 claw, getting it near 80% of the time, linked claw took 2(rng i know)).

If we have only Hunter inf on a claw, we can roll faster poisons, which yes isn't the greatest roll in the world - but it sure as hell beats having socketed gems from elder 80% of the time. Also - we'd be removing another roll for poison chance, which by the tree alone, without wasps, im at 120-130%. I'd much prefer the poison DMG alone from hunter than chance/inc dmg.

On xbox Hunter inf imp claws at i83+ were going for 1ex before i realised the rolls and missed out on the early ones. Elder i83 bases are about 5-10c (if you find like minded players not price gouging or thinking some rando elder base on xbox is 5ex..lol)

/rant (sorry in advance from a frustrated crafter that cant find more corroded fossils)

Thanks for the extensive analysis, supported by the images. :)
I'm not sure though, if I understand your point exactly (sorry). If I get you right, then you say you prefer Hunter Bases over Elder Bases, because of some of the unwanted Elder mods and their weighting? I can agree with that. Although you also say, that Hunter bases are much more expensive, which in turn would allow for more crafts on the Elder bases. Elder also has some nice exclusive mods, that we aren't aiming for, but don't mind either. You can also totally craft on a non-influenced base. I think it's pretty much up to personal preference of the mods and hassle to roll more often (which you likely will need to, when using influenced bases) vs the joy of the gamble to roll an even better then usual claw. I think it's ok if I keep recommending all three version (non-influence, elder, hunter) and the player makes their choice.

The claw rant was more out of frustration lol.

But for this, would you rather craft %phys or %chaos? both are near neck and neck as far as "Total dps inc poison" is concerned in PoB. However, will the %chaos stack or get more bang for buck from the other claw, more so, than %phys would get?

Maybe thats confusing; to be more exact, why does %phys (crafted 100-129%) give my total dps inc poison on PoB, more damage, than %chaos? %phys is giving more damage per poison, which confuses me greatly when such a low value is pulled from phys.




Last question is in regards to the passive tree. With crafted claws, I believe im sitting at 175% chance to poison. Idealy.. we would want to be closer to 100% to free up some passives for more damage yes? If we do this, which nodes do we take? Or are the nodes with chance to poison, also the nodes with the most damage gained from poison?

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Hex Remix wrote:

The claw rant was more out of frustration lol.

But for this, would you rather craft %phys or %chaos? both are near neck and neck as far as "Total dps inc poison" is concerned in PoB. However, will the %chaos stack or get more bang for buck from the other claw, more so, than %phys would get?

Maybe thats confusing; to be more exact, why does %phys (crafted 100-129%) give my total dps inc poison on PoB, more damage, than %chaos? %phys is giving more damage per poison, which confuses me greatly when such a low value is pulled from phys.

I would completely leave it up to PoB and your preference (if you want Blind for example, which is quite helpful). The %Phys that you get is much higher then the %chaos and for %chaos you get diminishing returns whereas the %phys pretty much acts like a %more modifier, since it's the only %phys increase that you use (I assume). That's my 2-cents about it. Take into account, that even though I made this guide, I also don't know it all and am using the wiki, PoB and other sources aswell as guidance. :)

Edit: Very nice claw btw. :)

Edit:
I gave this some more thought and what I said is not entirely true, since we have many mods that increase the physical damage aswell as other damage, for example all "inc. damage while dual wielding, etc" mods. BUT increasing the phys damage locally on the weapon still has a mich greater boost, since this mod is applied before all the other increases are calculated. But still, you must use PoB to find out if you benefit more from inc. phys or inc. chaos damage mods on the weapons, it can't be said in general.

Hello,

Thanks for the build it's very cool and I enjoy it a lot.
The clear speed is amazing and I love the way it's played since you have to spam a lot of keys to perform well.

However there's something I must be missing since I feel like I'm a bit squishy this league compared to previous... You sound like you are able to clear all content but I keep struggling after T14+ even if I have invested quite a bit in this character. I did not expect to have an extremely high survability with this build but I often get one-shot by some atlas bosses or map bosses.

I have just over 5k HP, all rez capped and 4M DPS including poison according to Path of Building.

Here is my character page (hope this works) if you can take a look at it I'm totally up for advice:
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/s3v3n7777/characters

Thanks!

Edit: I still can't run Maloveance since I don't have my Enlighten Support gem at level 3, don't know if this makes such a difference but I wanted to mention it.

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s3v3n7777 wrote:

Hello,

Thanks for the build it's very cool and I enjoy it a lot.
The clear speed is amazing and I love the way it's played since you have to spam a lot of keys to perform well.

However there's something I must be missing since I feel like I'm a bit squishy this league compared to previous... You sound like you are able to clear all content but I keep struggling after T14+ even if I have invested quite a bit in this character. I did not expect to have an extremely high survability with this build but I often get one-shot by some atlas bosses or map bosses.

I have just over 5k HP, all rez capped and 4M DPS including poison according to Path of Building.

Here is my character page (hope this works) if you can take a look at it I'm totally up for advice:
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/s3v3n7777/characters

Thanks!

Edit: I still can't run Maloveance since I don't have my Enlighten Support gem at level 3, don't know if this makes such a difference but I wanted to mention it.

I know this isn't my post but the more I try and help answer the more im learning by research so it helps. Moos has an excellent guide - all of this below was derived from his information and texts.


As far as survivability goes this build is squishy, and relies heavily on dodge and evasion. Dont sit still, know the limits and boundaries of plague bearer, utilize wither totems for distraction, etc. Placement is key. Give a few hits, rotate, etc. We are not really a stand still tank it all build especially this one-shot-league.

You have cold and chaos res on one claw. You don't need this if youre 27% over cap on cold, unless you want it. Could squeeze more dmg out this way. 20% crafted AS would net ~520k poison dps before the following changes.


You cannot run malevolence due to a -151 mana deficit. You could run it, with precision at lvl 1 as of right now. Your PoB is also wrong. It has malevolence ticked, yet if its not on, youre not getting the dmg from it.. so your 4m DMG isn't true, but theres room for improvement.

I have edited your PoB, one claw (removed res and added crafted AS), just changed the ring affix to illustrate Cobra lash should cost 0 mana (took out the "Non-channeling" text). I have moved some passive nodes around that were not helping you, but now they will. (I've squeezed almost 3 million more dps out for you, WITHOUT malevolence. Be aware vicious proj 20/0 is ticked vs a GMP 20/20, so single target dmg. You gotta level your gems, GCP recipe them, relevel them, and should be good. One claw is missing flat chaos dmg - boost right there if you got currency to reroll it. 8m+ dps with malevolence ticked.

Have a look: https://pastebin.com/et6Jijb2

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s3v3n7777 wrote:

Hello,

Thanks for the build it's very cool and I enjoy it a lot.
The clear speed is amazing and I love the way it's played since you have to spam a lot of keys to perform well.

However there's something I must be missing since I feel like I'm a bit squishy this league compared to previous... You sound like you are able to clear all content but I keep struggling after T14+ even if I have invested quite a bit in this character. I did not expect to have an extremely high survability with this build but I often get one-shot by some atlas bosses or map bosses.

I have just over 5k HP, all rez capped and 4M DPS including poison according to Path of Building.

Here is my character page (hope this works) if you can take a look at it I'm totally up for advice:
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/s3v3n7777/characters

Thanks!

Edit: I still can't run Maloveance since I don't have my Enlighten Support gem at level 3, don't know if this makes such a difference but I wanted to mention it.

Hi :)
Link your Whirling Blades with Fortify and Level your IC to Level 3.
Cast Withering Steps whenever it comes off cooldown.
If you are still struggling, then spec out of some damage nodes on the passive tree and use more life nodes. You will not see a large decrease in damage (use PoB to check which nodes you want to get out/into) and getting above 5.5k life makes a big difference. With every further level you gain, you will become more tankier if you chose life/defense nodes. I also felt rather squishy below level 90 and used more life nodes. Then I started to level faster, because I died less and in the end I could use more life and damage nodes then before (think I leveled up to level 97).

Hello Hex Remix & MoosGames thanks a lot for your answers I'll try that shortly and get back to you!

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Hex Remix wrote:

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s3v3n7777 wrote:

Hello,

Thanks for the build it's very cool and I enjoy it a lot.
The clear speed is amazing and I love the way it's played since you have to spam a lot of keys to perform well.

However there's something I must be missing since I feel like I'm a bit squishy this league compared to previous... You sound like you are able to clear all content but I keep struggling after T14+ even if I have invested quite a bit in this character. I did not expect to have an extremely high survability with this build but I often get one-shot by some atlas bosses or map bosses.

I have just over 5k HP, all rez capped and 4M DPS including poison according to Path of Building.

Here is my character page (hope this works) if you can take a look at it I'm totally up for advice:
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/s3v3n7777/characters

Thanks!

Edit: I still can't run Maloveance since I don't have my Enlighten Support gem at level 3, don't know if this makes such a difference but I wanted to mention it.

I know this isn't my post but the more I try and help answer the more im learning by research so it helps. Moos has an excellent guide - all of this below was derived from his information and texts.


As far as survivability goes this build is squishy, and relies heavily on dodge and evasion. Dont sit still, know the limits and boundaries of plague bearer, utilize wither totems for distraction, etc. Placement is key. Give a few hits, rotate, etc. We are not really a stand still tank it all build especially this one-shot-league.

You have cold and chaos res on one claw. You don't need this if youre 27% over cap on cold, unless you want it. Could squeeze more dmg out this way. 20% crafted AS would net ~520k poison dps before the following changes.


You cannot run malevolence due to a -151 mana deficit. You could run it, with precision at lvl 1 as of right now. Your PoB is also wrong. It has malevolence ticked, yet if its not on, youre not getting the dmg from it.. so your 4m DMG isn't true, but theres room for improvement.

I have edited your PoB, one claw (removed res and added crafted AS), just changed the ring affix to illustrate Cobra lash should cost 0 mana (took out the "Non-channeling" text). I have moved some passive nodes around that were not helping you, but now they will. (I've squeezed almost 3 million more dps out for you, WITHOUT malevolence. Be aware vicious proj 20/0 is ticked vs a GMP 20/20, so single target dmg. You gotta level your gems, GCP recipe them, relevel them, and should be good. One claw is missing flat chaos dmg - boost right there if you got currency to reroll it. 8m+ dps with malevolence ticked.

Have a look: https://pastebin.com/et6Jijb2

I really appreciate your help! :)
Answering all these question and replying to whispers in game (even though I ask people to not contact me in game...) takes up a lot of time, so it's great to get some help here. Thanks! :)

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MoosGames wrote:

I really appreciate your help! :)
Answering all these question and replying to whispers in game (even though I ask people to not contact me in game...) takes up a lot of time, so it's great to get some help here. Thanks! :)

Of course!

I also rolled %phys/%blind on the claw and 1st try was 102%/19%. TBH Its a wise move imo since you don't get too much more from the extra 20% for a whole exalt more for the mod of %phys only.




Trying to learn more myself so it helps. I do have one question for you though.. You explain only to add 60% more poison damage as long as both claws have the 60% chance for 100% poisons etc mod. Why both? What if only one claw has the mod? (theres a post under shadow above yours for a venom gyre build, where he only has 1 claw with it, yet still adds the mod... seems.. either he's inflating his true dps, or theres more going on?

If theres anything i hate its lying to myself about what is actually going on / what the build is capable of. (Also getting the Elreon ring rolls on console this league has been a pain sicne we can't search for Elreon's veiled lol)