[3.9] Blade Vortex Max Block Poison Assassin - Very tanky running simulator

Hello and welcome to my Blade Vortex poison build guide. Poison is one of my favorite mechanics in this game and after I tried bunch of other poison skills I decided to give BV a spin (hehe). And after I fleshed out the survivability issue it turned out to be really good so here it is.

So, how do we actually survive?.
First, we try to not die from one shots and for this the build is utilizing respectable health pool (around 5.5k-6k life), Fortify what reduces the incoming damage from hits by 20%, Mind over Matter what makes 30% of damage to be redirected to mana, Eldritch Battery what makes Energy Shield protect mana and so MoM damage is redirected to Energy Shield and Silent Steps what reduces the incoming damage by another 5%. With all this we end up at really high effective HP. But this is just EHP + mitigation, we use 2 more defensive layers on top of this. First one is dodge and evasion. We blind everything with Flesh & Stone what means every second attack that is directed by us simply misses and on top of that we use dodge and spell dodge with Elusive and Phase Acrobatics what adds another layer of avoidance. And on top of this we also cap both spell and attack block with Kiloava jewel, Reckless Defense and some shield nodes. Kiloava jewel gives us Glancing Blows what doubles our block chance but also makes us take half of the damage from blocked hits what do not sounds that great but we also utilize shield with mod Recover 5% of life when you Block what makes this jewel absolutely amazing because this means we have huge life recovery when stuff is hitting us. And for another layer of recovery we get Feast of Flesh from Devouring Diadem what basically recovers full HP and ES every 5 seconds (as long as there are corpses around, and with CWDT + Desecrate we make sure that is always true).

And now, how do we actually kill stuff?
This part is a lot simpler, we just use Vaal/Blade Vortex, Plague Bearer, Wither totems and we run around bosses and they die (eventually). For clear, Blade Vortex, Plague Bearer + explody chest (or Bino/Asenaths) allows us to just run through maps, killing everything around.

Changelog



Pro's & Con's

+ Decent single target. The build can reach around 4.5M single target DPS with current setup (what has a lot of room for DPS upgrades) and additional 3M burst with Vaal Blade Vortex
+ Really good clear speed (because of very high movement speed, explody chest and Plague Bearer)
+ 230% increased movement speed
+ 8.3K+ EHP (5.9k life with 30% MoM)
+ 93% melee avoid chance, 93% projectile avoid chance, 94% spell avoid chance
+ Fortify (20% less damage taken from hits) + Silent Steps (5% reduced damage taken)
+ Can do all map mods
+ Can do all content (except Hall of Grandmasters)

- Requires some uniques for all defensive layers to build up and also for maximum clear speed
- Damage is not as high as on more offensive BV variations
- Enemies do not die instantly so sometimes we can take some dangerous hits (we combat this with our high defenses)
- Life sustain can be troublesome before getting either Maw of Conquest, Devouring Diadem or enough block chance together with life gained on block shield

Content Done

- All guardians
- All conquerors
- Atziri
- Uber Atziri
- Shaper
- Elder
- Cortex
- Sirus
- Delve depth 370+

My characters using this build

- Metamorph character

Path of Building

Path of Building is tool for PoE to plan gear, skill tree and calculate effective damage. It also contains Bandits and Pantheon choice. You can download it here. The guide is tailored for modified version of PoB with some additional features so after you download regular PoB head here for installation instructions for modified version. After that simply import below Pastebin URL into PoB:

Pastebin




Pantheon

For your major god Soul of Lunaris is good pick as we are block/dodge build and extra dodge is always helpful. For bosses Soul of Solaris is very effective as well.

For your minor god soul of Ryslatha is great pick for extra charges for life flask and extra life recovery from it what helps a lot with single target sustain.

Ascendancy

Get Noxious Strike first. Then get Mistwalker and Toxic Delivery for some damage and mobility and finally get Opportunistic from Uber Lab.

Leveling and gearing






Media

Mapping
Shore Lvl 88
Courthouse Lvl 88

Bossing
Elder Lvl 88
Shaper Lvl 92
A8 T16 Baran Lvl 90
A8 T16 Drox Lvl 92


Delve
Delve Depth 376 Lvl 88

Small update:

Added Increased Area of Effect to leveling section at level 38 and changed Plague Bearer + Despair + Withering Step to 4 link at that point.

Another small build update:

- Level 70 tree now takes also Eldritch Battery and Mind over Matter as it assumes league start scenario without Devouring Diadem
- Starter setup is now using Cold Iron Point and Bino's Kitchen Knife as it assumes no Kiloava so we care less about block

This makes the tree pathing a lot more league start viable, at around level 80 the tree is switching to block + diadem setup (of course if you have currency and/or items earlier, it is possible to switch sooner). Same thing goes for bino + cold iron vs bino + leper arms, without Kiloava and Life on block shield its probably better to just run double daggers to get more DPS before switching to defensive setup.

Main post is already updated with new pastebin and core setup changes.

Another small update:

- Added end-game optimization section

This section is mostly for gear upgrades after you acquire some currency, but also for gear alternatives.

Added new gameplay video:

A8 T16 Drox Lvl 92

Surprisingly quick kill

i imagine not many ppl are commenting because there are a couple of poison blade vortex assassin threads, but yeah i was going to league start this build next league and this is more the way i was going to go about it as well.

i really like that double block chance take half damage from blocked attacks modifier

"

xMustard wrote:

i imagine not many ppl are commenting because there are a couple of poison blade vortex assassin threads, but yeah i was going to league start this build next league and this is more the way i was going to go about it as well.

i really like that double block chance take half damage from blocked attacks modifier

Hmm you are right, there is quite a few. I was mostly looking at grubbs one when deciding if I want to make the guide or not and eventually I decided that I do because I wanted to make guide for poison BV that is actually tanky as that was my one and only issue with poison BV before I started to tinker with life on block and max block. For me that single shield mod basically completely solves the sustain part of the build what is amazing, having Kiloava and max block on top is just nice bonus :d

So I grabbed this one:



Do we have phasing already? If not - any way to get Haste in?


NVM: Withering Step. I'm stupid.

"

clozzer wrote:

So I grabbed this one:

Do we have phasing already? If not - any way to get Haste in?


NVM: Withering Step. I'm stupid.

Withering step and quartz flask, but withering step is not really enough mainly for delve, so if you do not have quartz for some reason, the phasing on kill works from abyss jewel.

Haste is not very good aura for this build as BV do not scales from attack/cast speed, but the extra MS is nice (but that would mean losing malevolence what would be retty big loss).

POB says awakened added chaos damage for vile toxins is 20% DPS increase. It's my first poison build so not sure if that's true or not.

Anyway, great guide and it's really fun to play. Charge in and everything explodes. :D