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

Looking for input. You reckon 10% chance to explode is enough?

Not needing crusader influence on chest would be huge

Think my previous post might have gotten lost in all the bigger replies in the past day so if anyone could help out I would greatly appreciate it!

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lillbrorsan wrote:

Hello all!
I recently switched over to DD and the difference is insane, now I want to try and get that helmet enchant asap.

I would like some advice as to what to invest in next as I can get either or at the moment; a Watcher's Eye or a Megalomaniac jewel (Brand Loyalty, Self-Control and Doryani's Lesson)

I have two different trees in my PoB; Transition Staff Watchers and Transition Staff Cluster.
(If I go with the Cluster I can drop a passive point for reservation and use Skitterbots as well)

POB here https://pastebin.com/cHRvF5tw

Thanks!

"

falagar112 wrote:

Looking for input. You reckon 10% chance to explode is enough?

Not needing crusader influence on chest would be huge

For scourge map blasting on low investment maps and with Spell Cascade I'd say no... but maybe on Awakened Spell Cascade and higher investment juicing?

Losing the consistency of the spread/prolif/chaining (whatever the correct term is here) for clear feels pretty clunky when blasting maps. I tried a day with no skitters on my inpulsa and couldn't hack it. Picturing 1 in 10 of my kills still popping doesn't feel like it would have changed things enough to feel smooth.

The additional pops from Awakened SC and higher number of spell damage balls might be enough to make that bearable though, especially with 1 in 10 kills still popping and able to take out enough of the next pack from heavy juicing to keep it chaining.


For bossing? I'd imagine we should probably look to get it to 0%?

We'd do a lot less damage with an explodey pop of an invitation boss than we'd do with a proper DD pop. So for serious min maxing we probably want to completely remove any corpse removal mechanics for our bossing setups?

I shudder to think about having to swap my chest along with my VD/DD gems for bossing... but the potential damage loss of not DDing a Mino or a Shaper in an invitation is pretty scary.

"

lillbrorsan wrote:

Think my previous post might have gotten lost in all the bigger replies in the past day so if anyone could help out I would greatly appreciate it!

Neither of those are meaningful changes in isolation. They're both there to allow you change other bits of the build.

The Watcher's Eye allows you to replace your boots and potentially frees up a mod elsewhere and would allow you to change your aspect reservation for something else (Spider is still a solid choice even without the boots, so swings and roundabouts there). Getting mods like 30%ms, onslaught on kill, Tailwind/Elusive, or damage during soul gain prevention can all be super nice. None essential, depends how you'd like your version of the build to feel and whether you want to push clear speed, bossing or whichever combination of both you'd like to achieve.

(Personally of the two I'd grab the Wachers. Even without having the budget for gg boots at the minute it gives a lot of flexibility going forward)

The megalomaniac opens up a lot of reservation space with the Discipline efficiency, together with a little armour scaling, some strength, some mana regen, life leech and some damage scaling. What would that mana saving be used to achieve?

Without a specific need or plan for the mana the results you'd get just taking the nodes on the right of the tree come pretty close (pros and cons to both options) to the same impact without the cost of the jewel. If on the other hand you need that mana efficiency for something specific you'd like to achieve (bigger investment into auras, enlighten, efficiency and freeing gem slots to squeeze more in) it could be a fantastic option in the long term.

"

TsuDhoNim wrote:

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zoinkjr wrote:

Curious that in the video they show as max value, but with 40% increased effect those number should be higher...maybe it just doesn't display correctly.

Not a display bug.

The cap on Brittle, Scorch and Sap remains the cap (they'd be utterly op without it) the ailment effect just lets you hit that cap on bosses lowering the ailment thresholds, significantly.

Probably worth diving into the wiki on this. It's a relatively broad and widely applicable part of the game that's a bit non intuitive.

I had been wondering why someone would consider not picking up the effect mastery when it's clear they're not maxing out already, but it makes perfect sense as a question when viewed as a stat raising a limit you weren't hitting rather than the reality of letting you hit that limit.

It's a good wheel. Grab away :p

"

zoinkjr wrote:

Was recently, so desecrate was still 19, guess that will help getting it to 20. I have not been using specters recently, tried but they died too easily.

The specters aren't optional or nice to have, they're core. You're removing a huge damage multiplier without them. Once you bring them into a map it's not a big deal if they die, you just need to make sure you have them resummoned before entering the next map.

The ailments will be applied by your biggest hit. At the moment your biggest hit is likely to be a 300% flickershade crit. With a Lithomancer or Stoneskin Flayer that jumps to 800% hp scaling instantly ensuring your damage, and ailments, soar.

Desecrate is definitely holding you back in anything higher than level 81 as that's your current cap. Getting it to 20 will push it to the zone cap instead, which is scaling corpse life by a chunk in level 85 or 86 content. It could also help explain why you struggled keeping your specters alive. With the extra damage from a leveled desecrate (and eventually snowforged) they'll stop dying as everything else dies much faster.

This was helpful info, thanks.

"

TsuDhoNim wrote:

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falagar112 wrote:

Looking for input. You reckon 10% chance to explode is enough?

Not needing crusader influence on chest would be huge

For scourge map blasting on low investment maps and with Spell Cascade I'd say no... but maybe on Awakened Spell Cascade and higher investment juicing?

Losing the consistency of the spread/prolif/chaining (whatever the correct term is here) for clear feels pretty clunky when blasting maps. I tried a day with no skitters on my inpulsa and couldn't hack it. Picturing 1 in 10 of my kills still popping doesn't feel like it would have changed things enough to feel smooth.

The additional pops from Awakened SC and higher number of spell damage balls might be enough to make that bearable though, especially with 1 in 10 kills still popping and able to take out enough of the next pack from heavy juicing to keep it chaining.


For bossing? I'd imagine we should probably look to get it to 0%?

We'd do a lot less damage with an explodey pop of an invitation boss than we'd do with a proper DD pop. So for serious min maxing we probably want to completely remove any corpse removal mechanics for our bossing setups?

I shudder to think about having to swap my chest along with my VD/DD gems for bossing... but the potential damage loss of not DDing a Mino or a Shaper in an invitation is pretty scary.

"

lillbrorsan wrote:

Think my previous post might have gotten lost in all the bigger replies in the past day so if anyone could help out I would greatly appreciate it!

Neither of those are meaningful changes in isolation. They're both there to allow you change other bits of the build.

The Watcher's Eye allows you to replace your boots and potentially frees up a mod elsewhere and would allow you to change your aspect reservation for something else (Spider is still a solid choice even without the boots, so swings and roundabouts there). Getting mods like 30%ms, onslaught on kill, Tailwind/Elusive, or damage during soul gain prevention can all be super nice. None essential, depends how you'd like your version of the build to feel and whether you want to push clear speed, bossing or whichever combination of both you'd like to achieve.

(Personally of the two I'd grab the Wachers. Even without having the budget for gg boots at the minute it gives a lot of flexibility going forward)

The megalomaniac opens up a lot of reservation space with the Discipline efficiency, together with a little armour scaling, some strength, some mana regen, life leech and some damage scaling. What would that mana saving be used to achieve?

Without a specific need or plan for the mana the results you'd get just taking the nodes on the right of the tree come pretty close (pros and cons to both options) to the same impact without the cost of the jewel. If on the other hand you need that mana efficiency for something specific you'd like to achieve (bigger investment into auras, enlighten, efficiency and freeing gem slots to squeeze more in) it could be a fantastic option in the long term.

Right so I was thinking - having a megalomaniac with unspeakable gifts and another megalomaniac with wish for death to swap in for invitations/big bois

this frees up chest so you can use this:


which gives a lot more block, and +1 curse. And if you feel like throwing some currency at keep suffix+reforge caster until life+curse, you can even get a decent life roll on top.

if you get -reservation on the megalomaniac as well and have 40% non-damaging ailment effect on boots, you can also completely drop the right side of the tree.

Recommend having a live search up for leadership's price. Snagged this for 100c.



If anyone wants my old one I'll trade it to you for cost of a tainted oil, already enchanted :]

Really enjoying the build so far despite dumbass me switching over at 75 not 85. Once it got going cruising through the atlas on the intro build so far. Been trying to follow along as best I can but might have missed my questions so apologies if answered already. 1) has anyone made a build centric filter? 2) are the POBs on the first page the most up to date, especially the dual wand? Bout ready to spend a bunch of dough and want to make sure I don't waste it.

Hey all! If it's not too much to ask, may I request someone to peek at my PoB and see where/if I did anything wrong? The build feels solid and I'm enjoying it, have been burning through red maps on awakened 6 without much issue, however I keep dying. I've been stuck at 89 (Switched at 88) for almost a week. Is there something I did wrong that's hurting my survivability? If not, what should my top priorities be for upgrades to improve my survivability?
Thank you in advance to anyone who responds, I'm new and I have a decent understanding of things but sometimes something really seemingly useless to a newbie is actually crucial. I do have a leadership's price amulet, but can't switch to it quite yet.

"

falagar112 wrote:

Right so I was thinking - having a megalomaniac with unspeakable gifts and another megalomaniac with wish for death to swap in for invitations/big bois.

Sounding spicey for the bossing side of things.

I'd worry about how 10% chance to do a completely unscaled Chaos pop might feel, but it's one of those where without trying it I've no idea.

The bossing setup with no mini-pops for full DD dam and open for a double curse does sound amazing though.

I think personally I'd probably look to go full dual setup there rather than trying to confine it to the mego switch and suffering such a big dip on clear. The bossing setup already deletes so removing clear to push it even further feels a little questionable. Depends on the type of content you like though, I could definitely see some loving it.

I'd be looking to swap out VD for vDD, potentially swap helm enchant if you have dual (DD being the priority if going for a single enchant setup), swap explodey/frenzy chest for curse/frenzy chest and swap dual curse in on a pair of hands (or potentially a ring swap). Might end up with a single wasted phys conversion node, or could aim to get that onto temple mod gloves so it it's already built into the swap.

Really interested to hear how the mego approach works out if you do go that direction. Or whatever way you go about trying to incorporate the dual curse setup. Huge potential there to turn vDD into an absolute monster bosser.

"

Xirvar wrote:

Is there something I did wrong that's hurting my survivability?

Ironically enough, going Crit (usually a case of swapping survivability for giga dam) is a huge survivability boost here. The staff block nodes and defense boosts, together with allowing easier use of Determination, make the build much much tankier. So the big fix there is moving to the crit/staff setup. That combined with the extra damage and defense of Leadership moves it from a kill fast, move fast, don't get hit too often style of play into a tankier and far more forgiving style.

Without making the full staff transition you can still improve things a chunk:

- CWDT is too high. Drop that to somewhere in the lvl1 - lvl7 range. You want your BL regen and immortal call procs as frequent as possible.

- 3 of the mods on your Amethyst ring are attack based while 99% of what you should be doing is non-attack. Upgrade that, asap.

- Neither of the rings have the Shaped mod "life gain on spell hit". That's where we get our sustain from. One is essential, two is highly desirable. If you don't have the budget to upgrade those yet I'd probably drop Glancing Blows. You'll be more susceptible to one shots hitting you for 100%, but at the moment you're susceptible to everything and don't have the sustain to live with the constant chip damage.

- How's your mana? I have to imagine that without Divergent Inspiration for your VD, with a level 19 normal inspiration, even with the minus mana ring and ammy you'd be OOMing without an enduring mana flask? Divergent Inspiration a huge boost there, or swapping out the second life flask for a mana flask with the lower cost suffix would help fill that gap.

(Just spotted the level 19 Clarity... so you're possibly not OOMing, but you're losing out on something like Skitters/Herald of Ash or even Vitality in order to run that. I'd look to move to a non Clarity setup asap. The opportunity cost of having a high level is a bit nasty)

- Never have normal flasks. We still need protection against bleeding, poison, shock, ignite (freeze and chill if you haven't upgraded your pantheon yet), curses and still gain from cast speed, more armour, reduced cost of skills, movement speed so every flask should have both a prefix (help with more uptime) and a suffix (helping with one of the above). Eventually you want them all at +20% quality too, but never normal. If you have the alts grab high ilvl and alt spam into the higher level mods. If you're tight on currency the lower level beast craft mods still work fine.

- Swap the Brand Recall cooldown mastery for the Attach to a New Enemy one. Big clear increase. I'd also swap the 'covered in ash' fire mastery over to the phys conversion mastery so your explodey chest gains a big punch. It's a more mapping oriented setup, but that's where you'll level up and earn enough to do the bigger swaps so the priority for now.

- It's a really gem starved build. We can benefit from 5 more sockets if they were available to us and portal isn't helping you survive. Move Brand Recall to the unset so you have better control over it (otherwise you end up with major brand downtime on bosses or way more challenging playstyle on deciding when to debuff) and then either swap Bone Offering and inspiration to the chest so you limit your mana drain and free up your scepter for a chunk more damage or leave a trigger craft on the scepter and go with something like sigil of power in chest for a damage boost (Haven't played with Sigil personally, but on paper it should do well).

- The offhand scepter is only 62% ele/fire and 20% cast speed along with the trigger craft. The pen on weapon attacks is only relevant to our cyclone attacks, which don't do any damage and miss most of the time even if they did. Big upgrades possible there... though if you're close to making the staff swap you can probably ignore upgrading this.



From there you'd be looking at the usual upgrade paths. Making the switch over to Leadership with attribute balancing, a Doryani's Glorious Vanity (helps with the attribute balancing) together with either a Brawn or a big chunk of strength on gear and swapping over to a Cane and respeccing the tree. Personally I'd aim to do all of those in one larger swap, balancing attributes is pretty painful if you end up doing it multiple times at different times, but you can certainly add things like the Vanity in isolation if you wish.

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El_Cody wrote:

1) has anyone made a build centric filter? 2) are the POBs on the first page the most up to date, especially the dual wand? Bout ready to spend a bunch of dough and want to make sure I don't waste it.

1) For leveling I found Shak's Cold DOT for Everyone filter perfect. It already highlights ele weapons like wands and scepters and has specific highlighting for CI gear for his setup, which is great for our hybrid setup too. Way too lazy to have made my own. End game will be the usual base Neversink, uber or very strict depending on how deep you are with whatever personal tweaks you like (e.g. adding back in low oils/chancing bases/whatever else ya' fancy).

2) The dual wield setup in the OP is great. Haven't seen anyone do anything clever to iterate it, yet at least. If you're trade you can switch off it relatively quickly so no need and in ssf it can carry you to T16 farming and AW8 so no big need for changes.

Big caveat in that this isn't a build to close your eyes and follow a POB. There's a huge amount of tweaking to specific stats and how it's feeling, so be ready to switch nodes and tweak your specific setup depending on how your gearing is leaving it feeling for you.