Help Needed: 3.13 Curse Occultist (newbie's first build, in progress)

Hello all!!

I've been playing for a while, but have never actually made my own build, so I wanted to try this league.

First of all, before you say it: yes, I know this is not the easiest build, but it's one I've always wanted to play, so I decided to try.



So far I got this (pob community fork):
https://pastebin.com/i5fGnNJ1



My idea is to have a life based occultist with a few blasphemy curses (as many as I can while still being able to cast stuff with the unreserved mana), and then if needed self cast some extra curses -one myself, and any extras by the Vixen's Entrapment gloves-. Mostly as a support character for my friend.


I am playing with a friend who is playing a bleed bow gladiator, so I decided to use:

Enfeeble
Temporal Chains
Vulnerability
Despair

Possibly also Poacher's or Sniper's Mark against bosses or difficult enemies. Poacher's for damage, or Sniper's for flask sustain (although I'm not 100% sure if my friend would benefit from it too). Not sure which one is the best choice, if I should use one at all.



As for damage, I know I'm probably not going to have the greatest, but I still want to be able to kill the trash mobs that come my way or corner me if possible. However, I don't know which one would be the best choice here. I was considering:

A/Bane setup, scaling chaos damage. Not getting any benefit from vulnerability.

B/Hexblast + Ignites setup. Again, no benefit from vulnerability, and will probably need flammability and elemental weakness, so possibly difficult to fit everything.

C/Cold DOT setup. Same as before: no benefit from vulnerability, possibly needs frostbite and elemental weakness. As a bonus, more crowd control with chills and freeze, which is a big plus in my book.

D/Poison attacks (Cobra lash, pestilent strike, venom gyre, viper strike). This would benefit from all the curses that I currently have, but would be difficult to scale properly without going far into the shadow/ranger area of the passive tree.




So, here are my questions:

1- What should I do to further improve my curse area and effectiveness?

2- What damaging skill would you recommend I use and why?

Or in general, what changes would you recommend I do to improve my build? Low budget for now, but future changes I could look out for are more than welcome.



Thanks in advance!!

Red Tesseract

Hey,

I found this post trying to find out more info about curses. I am currently testing a build very similar to yours, but using minions and curses to poison.

https://pastebin.com/TvHSzm54

I also found wrecker of days (who uses curses a lot) using curses with animate guardian occultist. Perhaps he can help you more.

"

grimlock9999 wrote:

Hey,

I found this post trying to find out more info about curses. I am currently testing a build very similar to yours, but using minions and curses to poison.

https://pastebin.com/TvHSzm54

I also found wrecker of days (who uses curses a lot) using curses with animate guardian occultist. Perhaps he can help you more.

It's funny how similar the builds are!!
I honestly didn't even consider using minions as my DPS. I'll give it a thought, though it makes a lot of sense as they would also benefit from the curses.

And thank you for the recommendation, I'll make sure to watch some of his videos.

I've now fully geared the minion occultist and it is working surprisingly well. I'm still levelling to get some more life and higher level gems, but by the time you get all your items, the AOE of the defensive curses mean that enemies find it hard to reach you, and they are popping a decent way away from you.

Minions (fully defensive linked) and myself still die to terrain and all that crap that you cannot curse, but the offense from full wither stacks, chaos damage, and chaos damage on death is superb for the crazy mob density these days. Hopefully once I get a bit of life it'll be worthy of red maps.