[3.13 UPDATED] gr0bbs | Poison Blade Vortex | Budget Viable | Endgame 50Mil+ DPS | Video Guide

Pretty sure i'll be going poison BV for league start. it seems super safe so far and can push into endgame pretty easily. only concern would be the survivability without diadem.

why without diadem?
Did I miss something and it will be changed?

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Phlegmatiker wrote:

why without diadem?
Did I miss something and it will be changed?

Patch notes, CTRL-F, diadem = 0 results. I would guess he commented on the availability of the diadem on the first days.

At a quick glance, just updating Pob, there seem to be 3 changes:

-Buff effect from circle of nostalgia reduced, so maybe poison gem gets better to reach 100% chance to poison?

-BV duration drops from 11-ish to 7 seconds (duration stuff gone from cluster jewels), so some QoL loss,

-some instances of "deal damage faster" are gone from cluster jewels.

My PoB suggests a change in endgame dps from 44 to 43 million dps.

There probably are still some other changes, but overall build seems to be more than fine. Keep in mind that we might get some nice new crafting options from Harvest which might (or might not) offset some of these changes.

Barring gr0bbs saying this build got nerfed hard, and it looks like it didn't, I plan to build it right from the start.

How do you guys level your poison bv? I think I tried CA last time and it didn't feel great after the first several levels.

I think I will start with Mines.
Will skill some points for them (max 15 I think) and then I will skill for BV and switch to BV as soon I have 100% chane to poison on hit.
Then I can start to spec the points from Mines.

I guess with Unleash it should start to feel a bit smoother.

Still getting to 92% effective crit chance.
Chance to poison is now on other nodes, like the fatal toxins. We can easily reach 100% chance to poison without nostalgia ring and without poison support.

We lose some seconds on our bv duration because of circling oblivion. Im getting 9 seconds instead of 11.

Overall it seem fine to me.

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dor961 wrote:

...
Chance to poison is now on other nodes, like the fatal toxins. We can easily reach 100% chance to poison without nostalgia ring and without poison support.

...

Damn, you're right, I didn't even see the small passives @Fatal Toxins. Well, that's even better then!

Yeah the new serpentine spellslinger is also awesome. Capping our poison chance and 5% less resistance to enemies is amazing.

could be interesting to improve the leveling topic.
Got some survavibility difficulties at some point (until i got the diadem). It was a nightmare on BV Elemental. But maybe i got the wrong stuff

I did a leveling experiment to get a feeling of the character (through all acts to start of maps) and I did Elemental Heralds + BV from level 12 on, which actually wasn't great, but once I got Unleash (at 40ish, in Act 4) I went with (Lesser ?) Poison Support and a HoAg, which felt pretty fine. But I do admit that I didn't optimize for speedrunning through A1 to A4.

Starting at 40ish with a 100% poison BV with Unleash felt smooth, it didn't feel like I swapped too early.

Last league, my league starter was a TR/CA trickster which I leveled with TR and HoAg for some time and with CA for some other time. For CA, the usage of mirage archer felt pretty important. But I can't say at which point I pivoted from TR to CA. Unfortunately, our DoT scaling is specific to poison so we won't be able to scale those non-poison chaos DPS.

There's a video series on a fast, build-agnostic leveling guide for Shadow (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V35rt19EoDg), but I am actually not sold on that - I'd rather lose a few hours on a suboptimal leveling setup I enjoy than delving into a certain setup I need to use to get through.