[3.16 - RETIRING BUILD] VD Brands: S-Tier Bosser, A-Tier Map! -- MURDERED BY GGG_INTERN SOMEWHERE--

For spectres, you don't have to PM people all the time, just go do Delve, you'll find a Primeval Ruins eventually once you start getting to like 150+ depth. You don't need to find a new node every time, just go back to the completed node and you can desecrate a few times and get your Stoneskin Flayer & Lithomancer back. Also a lvl 21 Raise Spectre gem helps a little with them surviving.

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Cryotron9000 wrote:

Also a lvl 21 Raise Spectre gem helps a little with them surviving.

Big +1 to all this.

If you're not a delver and don't plan to be you can reuse any existing character with a Queen's Decree to use as a specter bank, or give it half an hour to level another witch to do the job.

Probably worth adding that 95% of the time if I'm having specter survivability issues the problem is damage issues. Glancing at the comments the two nearly always appear to go hand in hand. Once the damage is fixed the specters survivability goes through the roof.

Outside of server/lag related misplays on Sirus I think the only thing that has killed my specters (gem still level 20) since the start of week 2 was a red beast, yellow beast, ritual pack, 200+ scourge and the cave boss that does the annoying tornados Maven'd all combined. Popped the scourge with all the rest just to see if it could survive (it did, surprisingly) for some limit testing, though sadly neither the Litho or the Stoneskin did (a lot of annoying volatile noises during it, but honestly no idea what might have killed them). My FPS also died, far less surprisingly.

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AzureLeMoon wrote:

would you be so kind to take a look and tell me whats wrong with my build.
https://pastebin.com/qJ9sH5R4 here is my pob

The 7 points for Self Control on the megalomaniac look a little inefficient, even if planning to take the whole wheel, compared to pathing over to Assassination/Blood Siphon. You'd be losing out on a little armour scaling, a hint of crit chance on taunted but gaining more crit against everything else, a chunk more crit multi and a big chunk of life (along with saving the two extra passives on the wheel).

You'd have a lot less mana to play with losing the efficiency there.... but that should resolve itself too.


At the moment the only thing I can imagine is causing the problems is OOMing, otherwise the gear looks solid.

Your desecrate costs with the low level inspiration (from the POB) are a lot higher than you'd like at 7. Though glancing at your profile it looks like you've swapped the divergent around, so the VD brand might be struggling now. Whichever way around they are you'll be burning through mana a lot faster at the minute compared to when you've got those leveled up. Obviously stick with leveling the divergent, for the other probably worth grabbing a failed corruption 20 to ease the mana strain right now (drops it from 7 to 4).

You can help it further with quickly recrafting both rings to -7. It's a few chaos a try, but with only two possible outcomes it's not the worst min maxing. That'd save you 2 mana a cast on each desecrate and VD. After that just push the levels on the inspirations asap and I'd expect to see you having far less issues.

As 2's said if you've a vid it'd tell a lot more about what's happening there.

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2222222222 wrote:

yoooooo poggies 😎

Jesus F Christ, that is a juicy one exile. Grats!!!!

Haha thanks Tsu, yer saving me a lot of energy this week :DDD appreciate it

Having played 3 builds this league prior to this one I have to say I am well impressed with how this one is going so far for me.

I have been following the guide and looking at your character a bit to try and see where to go next and it has worked pretty well.

Wonder if you could take a look at my current character and suggest what to do next?

https://pastebin.com/vLtZxVjQ

Thanks!

"

lillbrorsan wrote:

Wonder if you could take a look at my current character and suggest what to do next?

You've already dropped EO and switched to crit, so the next step is deffo dropping the dual wield and swapping to a staff so you can grab all the juicy staff nodes.

- There's quite a few Vaal Notables on your tree we can't see and haven't been filled in on the POB, so hard to know which of those should/might need to be kept. Somewhere from +0 to +5 nodes there from Essence Infusion and Fire Walker, or else some big juicy stats being added. Win either way.

- The two nodes at Practical Application are, I'd guess, trying to bump resistances up without taking the attributes from the notable there? Two passives for +6% all res is a fairly steep costs. The two stone ring can be blessed up for another +4% cold and lightning, the ruby can be blessed for an extra 10% fire and... the one I'd suggest... you could certainly look at upgrading either/both of those rings to cover the res needs and potentially claim those passives back (+0 to +2 nodes).

- Unless the Vaal Notable inside them is unbelievably good drop the crit chance for spells nodes at Annihilation. We're using the non spell Corpse Explosion part of VD for the majority of our damage so much more efficient nodes elsewhere that scale both parts or the more important part of our damage. (+4 nodes)

- Drop Blast Radius, we've more efficient nodes to grab for now. At any point you're happy with your damage and want to clear a bit faster scaling your Explosions you can always grab them back (+3 nodes)

- Drop Dark Arts (won't be dual wielding) (+4 nodes)

- Grab Counterweight (-7 nodes)

- Grab Serpent Stance (-4 nodes) and the mastery (-1 node) if you can afford that point (drop Glancing Blows if needed)

You should feel a lot better at that point assuming it's a decent staff (I'd imagine any Fire%/Cast Speed/relevant third mod Cane would be a nice upgrade). Losing the power of EO on the dual wield setup going crit without having all the crit buried behind the staff nodes is a significant dps loss without some gg global crit mods to make up for it.

After that deffo look at updating those flasks.

- You'd hope to be immune to freeze/chill shortly with the upgraded Brine King pantheon, so aim to ditch that suffix once the upgrade is in place.

- Personally I'm keen on the "instant when on low life" prefix for life flasks as it gives a life saving instant heal when needed without tanking the numbers. I'd certainly have some type of instant life prefix be it the conditional one or a lower volume always instant one.

- Attack speed suffix on the sulphur would be much nicer as a cast speed one (current one pretty much useless, cast speed one a huge boost). Big chunk of burst damage from that combo.

- I'd aim to drop the second life flask for a Taste of Hate/Granite/Jade/anything that would help you not need the life flasks.

Some quick wins available throwing quality on gems, vaaling gems and leveling gems but I'd imagine you can figure all those out and they'll happen in time. Feel free to shout if you've any questions on them.

Heya folks!

I started scourge with Jungroan's spellslinger inquisitor and it was a blast! The regen and big hybrid pool was definitely a fun mechanic to play around with. However, I'm looking to "pivot" this character to another style of play (preferably a safer one) and this looked like a good idea.

I have spent hours trying to theorycraft how I could transport the character's original strengths into a VD Brand playstyle, and I think I may have found some good options.

I know necromancer is the main choice here, but I still think that this offshoot shows promise. any chance you folks smarter than I could take a gander! Im curious how you guys think how well this would work.


https://pastebin.com/UTdZsbL1

The LINK contains my spellslinger guy, and then both a tree for wand/shield and staff.

(FYI the damage calcs are probably a little jacked because they are based on jungroan's POB, so I don't really know how to calculate what dps I actually would have!)

thanks!

"

TsuDhoNim wrote:

You've already dropped EO and switched to crit, so the next step is deffo dropping the dual wield and swapping to a staff so you can grab all the juicy staff nodes.

Thanks for checking my build and the in-depth suggestions on what to do next, I really appreciate it!


I remembered the whole Vaal node thing too late yesterday so sorry for that one;
The pathing to Essence Infusion has Energy Shield and Elemental Resist with the notable give 34% Increased Fire Damage and 10% of Physical Converted to Fire Damage.

The pathing to Fire Walker has avoiding ailments with the notable give 25% Increased Firee Damage and 10% of Physical Converted to Fire Damage.

As for the Annihilation notable; it gives 32% Increased Spell Damage and 38% Increased Crit for spells.


I've been wanting to change to a staff for a while so guess I will start doing it now and also look into other upgrades like you mentioned (to sort out resistances etc)

I have at least 3 points to spare when changing to a staff, question is where do I spend them? Should I try to go for the cluster jewel? Watchers eye?

"

lillbrorsan wrote:

As for the Annihilation notable; it gives 32% Increased Spell Damage and 38% Increased Crit for spells.

Yeah, drop that branch.

It looks good when you see VD had a 'spell' tag, but the damage comes in two parts. A non spell corpse explosion this does nothing for and the spell part, the balls, that this scales. The majority of our damage is the corpse explosions so we want to aim for scaling both parts of the damage (fire/ele scaling) or even just the explosions (corpse life) and seldom the spell part alone.

The other two sound great, sounds like a pretty nice seed on the Vanity. Be sure to compare the point efficiency of each versus what you might get from other nodes at various times, but at ~11% increased Fire per node on EI along with the ES and Res together with ~12% increased Fire per node on FW you shouldn't be too bad holding them. Can be hard to compare increased fire vs. more multipliers or crit chance/crit multi off the top of your head though, I certainly can't, so be sure to check in POB every now and then how they're doing (with a full config setup and all nodes correctly applied).

"

lillbrorsan wrote:

I have at least 3 points to spare when changing to a staff, question is where do I spend them? Should I try to go for the cluster jewel? Watchers eye?

The question there would be how does the build feel?

Watcher's Eye can free up boots and a belt affix making gearing much easier. Opens you up to options like Onslaught on kill and 30% MS which both feel great, along with going bossing setup with stuff like Prima's double damage on soul gain prevention for a Vaal Detonate Dead boss setup.

Various ways to improve sustain by pushing more block and dropping Glancing, pushing one shot protection scaling more life and mitigation or scaling more damage. No single 'right' option there and mostly comes down to your current gearing and even a little your playstyle.

If in doubt running over to Trickery, Assassination and Blood Siphon all offer a nice efficient cluster of points to grab.

"

TsuDhoNim wrote:

"

Cryotron9000 wrote:

Also a lvl 21 Raise Spectre gem helps a little with them surviving.

Big +1 to all this.

If you're not a delver and don't plan to be you can reuse any existing character with a Queen's Decree to use as a specter bank, or give it half an hour to level another witch to do the job.

Probably worth adding that 95% of the time if I'm having specter survivability issues the problem is damage issues. Glancing at the comments the two nearly always appear to go hand in hand. Once the damage is fixed the specters survivability goes through the roof.

Outside of server/lag related misplays on Sirus I think the only thing that has killed my specters (gem still level 20) since the start of week 2 was a red beast, yellow beast, ritual pack, 200+ scourge and the cave boss that does the annoying tornados Maven'd all combined. Popped the scourge with all the rest just to see if it could survive (it did, surprisingly) for some limit testing, though sadly neither the Litho or the Stoneskin did (a lot of annoying volatile noises during it, but honestly no idea what might have killed them). My FPS also died, far less surprisingly.

"

AzureLeMoon wrote:

would you be so kind to take a look and tell me whats wrong with my build.
https://pastebin.com/qJ9sH5R4 here is my pob

The 7 points for Self Control on the megalomaniac look a little inefficient, even if planning to take the whole wheel, compared to pathing over to Assassination/Blood Siphon. You'd be losing out on a little armour scaling, a hint of crit chance on taunted but gaining more crit against everything else, a chunk more crit multi and a big chunk of life (along with saving the two extra passives on the wheel).

You'd have a lot less mana to play with losing the efficiency there.... but that should resolve itself too.


At the moment the only thing I can imagine is causing the problems is OOMing, otherwise the gear looks solid.

Your desecrate costs with the low level inspiration (from the POB) are a lot higher than you'd like at 7. Though glancing at your profile it looks like you've swapped the divergent around, so the VD brand might be struggling now. Whichever way around they are you'll be burning through mana a lot faster at the minute compared to when you've got those leveled up. Obviously stick with leveling the divergent, for the other probably worth grabbing a failed corruption 20 to ease the mana strain right now (drops it from 7 to 4).

You can help it further with quickly recrafting both rings to -7. It's a few chaos a try, but with only two possible outcomes it's not the worst min maxing. That'd save you 2 mana a cast on each desecrate and VD. After that just push the levels on the inspirations asap and I'd expect to see you having far less issues.

As 2's said if you've a vid it'd tell a lot more about what's happening there.

hey thanks for the reply , i did look into it a bit more and the damage feels much better now. one other question i have is that even if my skills cost 0 mana , i will still get the crit chance and ele dmg from inspiration as long as i have inspiration charges right ?