[Archived] Moosseolini's Holy Relics Guardian

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Moosseolini wrote:

I had a quick look to see if I can cook something up for 3.24. Here's a Necro PoB.

Link: https://pobb.in/eyFtHSvA2pOR

Build still operates on the same principles after many patches.
To scale damage: stack gem levels, increased minion damage, and increased cooldown recovery speed (once again possible with new transfigured gem).
To scale defense: stack armour, block, and plentiful amounts of life.

The new transfigured gem is very nice, especially with the extra relic that it gives compared to the old Divergent gem. Nowadays, Ashes of the Stars scales this particular gem very well. Hitting 52% increased cooldown recovery speed is a good goal to aim for, as that allows us to hit the breakpoint for a nova cooldown of 0.198s. Scaling the cooldown beyond this amount is possible but the investment required starts to become too great. This does require double-corrupting the transfigured gem, unless another source of gem quality on top of Ashes is used. Instead of crafting minion damage on the staff, we could craft '% to quality of socketed gems' instead to reach the breakpoint if we want to avoid double-corrupting.

Necromancer nowadays seems to scale damage better while having comparable defenses and recovery to Guardian, which is why its the ascendancy of choice this time around. We can now have the relics leech life to us, which makes our recovery on Necro much better than before. Guardian also lost its increased minion area of effect modifier a while back, however Necro still has hers, which helps with clear. With extra Bone Offering effect, we can now cap our block chance at 75%, which gives a huge defensive boost. The relics are also tankier too with the defensive stats from the Necro ascendancy and with Bone Offering applied to them.

A drawback is that the Cyclone setup used to automatically cast Desecrate + Bone Offering costs a lot of mana, so we need to sort out our mana costs and mana regeneration to play comfortably.

A rare body armour with eldritch implicits is a reasonable option if a support setup is desired (example item in PoB). We can gets lots of aura effect from the implicits while improving mitigation against physical damage, although we do lose a lot of life. Divine Flesh helps against all non-physical damage, and scaling maximum chaos resistance helps make it more effective, although I haven't found any room to do so.

Other notes:
- Unfortunately, going Unwavering Crusade on Guardian doesn't enable us to deal more damage compared to like we used to do before, since we now have to take out the Brutality support to use it, which is a big chunk of our damage on the main link. It's likely that this notable is much better on another variant of the build, one that doesn't use Pride and invest into physical damage, but rather looks to convert the physical damage to elemental and penetrate elemental resistances instead.
- Unnatural Strength on Necro is a damage increase, but only if you can stack a large amount of wither stacks on the boss you're fighting, but with a wither duration of 2 seconds, this is very difficult to do with just the Unholy Might buff alone. With investment into applying wither, it's a good DPS option.
- The Dark Seer is probably a very good item at the early mapping stage. Depending on its rarity, it may be a good option.
- Dialla's is equivalent to the staff we're using in terms of damage granted to our main link. It may be a good choice if you wish to drop the staff and use other weapons (for example, dual wielding Dark Seer scepters).
- Utula's Hunger gives less life overall than our rare items with life + Kaom's Heart, but not much less, and it does have sockets. It can be a viable choice.

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Moosseolini wrote:

Unnatural Strength on Necro is a damage increase, but only if you can stack a large amount of wither stacks on the boss you're fighting, but with a wither duration of 2 seconds, this is very difficult to do with just the Unholy Might buff alone. With investment into applying wither, it's a good DPS option.

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Fire_Archer wrote:

"

Moosseolini wrote:

Unnatural Strength on Necro is a damage increase, but only if you can stack a large amount of wither stacks on the boss you're fighting, but with a wither duration of 2 seconds, this is very difficult to do with just the Unholy Might buff alone. With investment into applying wither, it's a good DPS option.

Each relic will have 25% chance to wither on hit with that node though. You will stack in no time. There is also a fun specter that amplifies chaos damage by 20%. Going for pure chaos hit is certainly an interestion option.

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Moosseolini wrote:

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Fire_Archer wrote:

"

Moosseolini wrote:

Unnatural Strength on Necro is a damage increase, but only if you can stack a large amount of wither stacks on the boss you're fighting, but with a wither duration of 2 seconds, this is very difficult to do with just the Unholy Might buff alone. With investment into applying wither, it's a good DPS option.

Each relic will have 25% chance to wither on hit with that node though. You will stack in no time. There is also a fun specter that amplifies chaos damage by 20%. Going for pure chaos hit is certainly an interestion option.

We can crunch some numbers to give us an estimate, and then go from there.

I am assuming 3 relics, a relic trigger rate of 0.198s, chance to apply wither at 25%, and wither duration of 2s.

In 2s, each relic will hit 10.1 times. With 3 relics, that's 30.3 hits every 2 seconds. Since we have a 25% chance to apply wither, we will have 7.575 wither stacks on average from our relics hitting.

Some of the things we could do to get the rest of the wither stacks:
- Use The Balance of Terror, manually cast despair, and hit the boss ourselves for an extra 10 wither stacks.
- Just use Withering Step every 3 seconds for an extra 12 wither stacks (thanks to Ashes).
- Wither + Spell Totem support setup
- Forbidden Flesh/Flame for Withering Presence from Occultist.

Unfortunately I couldn't actually get higher damage when using Unnatural Strength and putting in 15 Wither stacks on the main build. I think it's mostly because there's no great replacement I could find to Pride + War Banner to boost damage. Maybe the relics could be made to poison and Malevolence could be used?

"

Moosseolini wrote:

I had a quick look to see if I can cook something up for 3.24. Here's a Necro PoB.

Link: https://pobb.in/eyFtHSvA2pOR

Build still operates on the same principles after many patches.
To scale damage: stack gem levels, increased minion damage, and increased cooldown recovery speed (once again possible with new transfigured gem).
To scale defense: stack armour, block, and plentiful amounts of life.

The new transfigured gem is very nice, especially with the extra relic that it gives compared to the old Divergent gem. Nowadays, Ashes of the Stars scales this particular gem very well. Hitting 52% increased cooldown recovery speed is a good goal to aim for, as that allows us to hit the breakpoint for a nova cooldown of 0.198s. Scaling the cooldown beyond this amount is possible but the investment required starts to become too great. This does require double-corrupting the transfigured gem, unless another source of gem quality on top of Ashes is used. Instead of crafting minion damage on the staff, we could craft '% to quality of socketed gems' instead to reach the breakpoint if we want to avoid double-corrupting.

Necromancer nowadays seems to scale damage better while having comparable defenses and recovery to Guardian, which is why its the ascendancy of choice this time around. We can now have the relics leech life to us, which makes our recovery on Necro much better than before. Guardian also lost its increased minion area of effect modifier a while back, however Necro still has hers, which helps with clear. With extra Bone Offering effect, we can now cap our block chance at 75%, which gives a huge defensive boost. The relics are also tankier too with the defensive stats from the Necro ascendancy and with Bone Offering applied to them.

A drawback is that the Cyclone setup used to automatically cast Desecrate + Bone Offering costs a lot of mana, so we need to sort out our mana costs and mana regeneration to play comfortably.

A rare body armour with eldritch implicits is a reasonable option if a support setup is desired (example item in PoB). We can gets lots of aura effect from the implicits while improving mitigation against physical damage, although we do lose a lot of life. Divine Flesh helps against all non-physical damage, and scaling maximum chaos resistance helps make it more effective, although I haven't found any room to do so.

Other notes:
- Unfortunately, going Unwavering Crusade on Guardian doesn't enable us to deal more damage compared to like we used to do before, since we now have to take out the Brutality support to use it, which is a big chunk of our damage on the main link. It's likely that this notable is much better on another variant of the build, one that doesn't use Pride and invest into physical damage, but rather looks to convert the physical damage to elemental and penetrate elemental resistances instead.
- Unnatural Strength on Necro is a damage increase, but only if you can stack a large amount of wither stacks on the boss you're fighting, but with a wither duration of 2 seconds, this is very difficult to do with just the Unholy Might buff alone. With investment into applying wither, it's a good DPS option.
- The Dark Seer is probably a very good item at the early mapping stage. Depending on its rarity, it may be a good option.
- Dialla's is equivalent to the staff we're using in terms of damage granted to our main link. It may be a good choice if you wish to drop the staff and use other weapons (for example, dual wielding Dark Seer scepters).
- Utula's Hunger gives less life overall than our rare items with life + Kaom's Heart, but not much less, and it does have sockets. It can be a viable choice.