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

"

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.

"

zoinkjr wrote:

Can't believe the luck I had with this helmet. Did one lab with twice enchanted...was trying to get a reservation enchant so I can add another aura, but got this and now I'm not sure what I'm going to do. Also bought the thing for crazy cheap...figured the guy was gonna realize he listed it wrong, but guess not.

Anyways I'm going to pass along some of my good luck. If anyone who is starting up this build wants some of my gear I've replaced send me a message ingame, I've got that already anointed leadership's price with only one -1 res, a ring or two, and a high str/life/res belt I can give you.