[3.21] Aegis Incinerate Elementalist - Tank with over 10mil Shaper DPS!
" I will take a deeper look tonight but I just wanted to respond that I agreed with Puppy's take. My comment about the curses was specifically for soft core. You can never have too much defense for hard core IMO. I have always wanted to try a hard core build but even though your defensive numbers look fabulous, I don't think I would ever have the skill to level long enough to build up my defenses before dying. I hope you keep us updated if the 3.17 patch notes play nice. I would love to hear about your progress as a HC attempt with guardian. |
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" This is good advice Puppy! Elemental damage defense is linear, so the bigger hit number does not change the effectiveness but it has a big difference on armor which performs significantly worse the larger the hit. That being said, the numbers he is seeing with Guardian may allow him to tank even a meteor from Sirus, if he has all his defenses active. |
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" ohh, looks so good!!! Here are some comments to consider: * when leveling, note that many of us struggled in 3.16 to get enough crit chance to proc Elemental Overload, which is critical for clearing during leveling. If you find the same issue in 3.17, swap Controlled Deconstruction out for something else while leveling. You will have to see if the Power Charges are enough to help proc EO but I don't think you will see good up time with Controlled Destruction. Play this by ear as you level and keep your eye on EO. It made a ton of difference for me in 3.16 to ditch CD for a while. Having near 100% up time on EO is impossible to replace. * Reckoning is consider an attack. It procs a lot for us since we are constantly blocking. As such, I think the 10% attack block damage in Bastion of Hope will activate almost always which should smooth out the times when the other attack block part of Bastion is not active. Instead of dropping to 50% block chance when Bastion is inactive, I think you will be more likely to be at 60% chance. * Your notes are excellent! I just want to reiterate what Puppy advised. Your last note talks about 90% phy reduction cap. Please be aware this is one of the biggest myths in the game. Both POB and the tool tip in game default the incoming damage to be the equivalent of a small hit. Armor works exceptionally well on small average hits, which is why 90% cap is so commonly seen. Armor's effectiveness drops off as the incoming hit increases. For example, you you change your POB Hit Damage to be 10k, and watch your phy reduction drops to 74% and that is with Molten Shell and Flask active. If molten shell and flask are not active, your phy reduction falls to 66%. The lesson here is that it is extremely hard to get to a real phy cap of 90% so never worry about adding too much armor. Not only does it help against big bops, our shield also benefits from it. fabulous work. I am very excited to watch your progress on this and I hope you keep the thread updated with any tests you do and let us know about lessons learned. Last edited by AndyLovesHisBge#5265 on Dec 14, 2021, 8:48:23 PM
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Andy> swap Controlled Deconstruction out for something else while leveling
We (elementalist) used concentrated effect since we get 60% AOE from our ascendency. You can use a max arcane surge instead (which I swapped to when I got enough damage, just for the super AOE fun) |
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"  Thanks Puppy and Andy for the advice so far! Only level 73 and using mediocre rares, but already facetanking everything and 0 deaths to get here. Character is CanUKillMe. Will probably only play to until 85-90 since league is almost over and this was just to test it out. Don't want to waste too much time on this since for all we know the patch notes will nerf Aegis or something else the build needs. So far though, I'm happy with it and will league start hopefully. Last edited by stoudtlr#5310 on Dec 15, 2021, 6:02:11 PM
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" When you get some free time, take a look at this video and POB. This guy pretty much AFK's the feared (takes forever to kill them but he never looks in danger). I looked at his POB (listed in the youtube description) and I don't see his defenses being any better than yours in the Guardian (some differences but over all I think you are as good or better). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzK3_JcPaS8 Let me know what you think about the defensive comparison. |
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" Wow! His defenses are definitely better. With flasks up, minus the ruby flask since it would kill his RF, he's sitting at 5,700 net life regen. NET! Defenses look great in my build, but it's still subject to RNG. I could get unlucky and have 3 attacks in a row that don't get blocked. Regen is one of the areas that POB is lacking in for calculating defenses IMO. My total EHP numbers might be higher for every damage type, more than twice as high in some categories, but above scenario happens to me and I'm dead. It happens to him and he will survive due to that ungodly regen completely refilling his life and ES in between hits. Gear cost for his build is quite high. There's only two Vermillian rings listed right now with 70+ life and 70+ life regen. One is listed for 15ex and the other is 45ex. His Malevolence/Vitality watcher's eye is ~150ex. Malevolence version of Aul's is ~30ex. Just those three and we're over 200ex. The rest of his gear isn't too bad though. Quick search for each slot with T1 life and T1 %increased life regen has a bunch listed for around 1ex or under. Body armour is a bit tricky since one of the desired mods is a prefix and the other is a suffix. Can't fossil craft either since one of them is a temple mod. Can find armour with both of those for under an exalt, but you'd need to get lucky with anulments to get the 2 open suffix and 1 prefix needed for final craft without deleting one of those mods you do want. I'm really impressed with this one! I've been playing since 2.0 and RF has always been a tanky build due to the regen, but this one is on a level of it's own I think. From the prices I found, I think you could make a build with 90% of the regen for about 60ex just by going with a slightly worse ring and a watcher's eye with %life regen vitality mod instead of dual recovery rate. Those two small changes and still had over 5K combined regen. |
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" He said he completed the build at around only 70ex but he may have crafted much of it himself saving a ton of currency. |
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" Wow. He must have sniped his watcher's eye extremely cheap because I just checked again and right now the cheapest is 70ex. |
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Andy, update on the guardian version. I did play it long enough to hit level 90 to get an idea of how it might perform as my league starter next month. To be honest, I'm not that impressed. It is tanky, but not as tanky as the POB numbers make it seem. The biggest issue IMO is ES regen. Since Guardian doesn't have ES regen like Inquisitor does you're relying on only gaining ES thru Aegis Aura on block and when Bastion of Hope isn't active block chance is only 50%. That led to quite a few times of seeing ES completely gone due to multiple hits in a row not being blocked and a couple of deaths as well due to several large hits not being blocked that depleted both ES and life.
A solution would be to drop Bastion of Hope and go back to Glancing Blows on the tree to be at permanent 75/75 block. However, at that point the defenses are close enough to Inquisitor that the little extra you get is not worth the almost 50% reduced DPS as compared to Crit Inquisitor IMO. I would stick with Inquisitor for this build. |
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