[3.23] [Leaguestarter] Exsanguinate Ascendant - a great all-rounder

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H3avyM3tal wrote:

I do use pride though 🤔

Am I supposed to see the icon up in the buff area? I want to also try and get a the cluster jewel near the suppress area, and throw in a 50% aura reserve efficiency to see if I can squeeze in flesh and stone or war banner in there.

I'll let you know if it's working, thanks for looking 👍

Okay, I assumed you run Grace because i saw four 50% auras, my bad.

The unique thing about pride is - it is an aura that affect your enemies, not you. Therefore, you won't see the icon on the buff list above, because there is no buff to be received from Pride.

If you want to fit another Aura, you may also go for Champion of the Cause, but obviously the cluster also works. You may also go for Herald of Purity instead of Flesh and Stone if you want a simpler playstyle.

Just started one of these last night in Standard, passing time before the ExileCon PoE2 dump. Looking forward to the endgame experience, always love a chance to play the Scion properly, but I gotta ask - how does leveling usually work for the build? Even following the leveling trees/tips and loaded up with Standard league starter swag, Exsanguinate is hard to feed in the early and mid levels. It clears white packs easily enough, but pounding the skill against bosses or rare targets has you wheezing red flasks like an alcoholic just to keep up with Exsanguinate's life cost. Each new link you add to the skill makes it noticeably worse. I've been getting through it, haven't died yet, but there's been a few times I've run my two life flasks dry during a boss fight and had to run around letting Vitality patch me up over time and waiting for add spawns to get flask charges back. I know the lategame build easily handles it with regen, but how does the build pay for Exsanguinate on a 4L or 5L between levels 12 to ~60, before you get significant regen in place? Or is it simply a matter of skipping anything blue or yellow and just enduring bosses as best you can?

Hello!

I have been trying your build and really enjoying it!

Unfortunately I do not find a way to reach your DPS!

Can you guide me through the next upgrades please?


https://pobb.in/lQjwnOk1US1M

Any good Ideas as to what passives I should anoint my neck with, since I usually do charisma on aura characters and this build takes charisma directly I was just wondering what I would do instead.

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Tawney_Owl wrote:

Any good Ideas as to what passives I should anoint my neck with, since I usually do charisma on aura characters and this build takes charisma directly I was just wondering what I would do instead.

The guide recommends Cannibalistic Rite, and after some playtime with the build and getting over the mid-campaign hump I can concur. Health-on-kill is a powerful recovery mechanic for blasting through huge endgame packs; I actually forewent the Dynamo cluster and its extra mana reservation to snag Hired Killer for more health and double the Health-Back-On-Kill (4%, when combined with Cannibalistic Rite), since I can't afford the stupidly expensive Reservation Efficiency helmets in Standard. When you're struggling to hit the regen mark that lets you maintain Righteous Fire, health-on-kill can supplement it. Plus Cannibalistic Rite is also a nice little chunk of extra damage since every skill the build uses always spends life.

Hey there!

Sorry for the really late response, I had a long break due to my exams.

I've seen your PoB, and from what I've seen, you have compiled a good version of the build. From now on, you can try to get some small upgrades that will ad up eventually:

1. Next levels will allow you to get Jewel Sockets, these will be big for you in terms of damage.

2. You can upgrade your gems to Exsanguinate level 21 and Empower (preferably level 4, even though it is expensive) instead of Efficacy. You can also swap Chains to Swift Affliction for more DPS on single target.
Side note: you can also swap your Exsanguinate to (Vaal) Reap for single-target - it is slightly less damage, but it's much easier to keep the damage up, as you need to maintain only one debuff instead of three.

3. I see that you have enough Life Regen to sustain RF. I don't know if you are running your maps with RF enabled, but you would probably be fine.

4. You can replace one of your rings to Circle of Guilt with two solid damage mods.

5. Note that our culling from The Eternal Struggle has a condition - the Searing Exarch modifier has to be stronger. Also, PoB doesn't intrinsically calculate this culling strike properly due to the wording of the modifier - you need to insert this yourself.

6. If you feel like letting go of some of the defenses, you can switch some points around to gain more DPS.

Good to see you back, Pawelos. Thanks for the build, it's been a lot of fun.

Have you experimented with Hex Bloom at all? The Arcanist Brand > Vulnerability bit felt very clunky and slow to spool up to me given that you had to throw the brand, the brand had to attach, and then the brand had to start casting. Lots of steps between Click and Boom, often found myself disappearing packs before the brand could get a hex off.

I switched early on to simply hard-casting Vulnerability. Had it linked to Inc. AoE for a while, would dose big packs or bosses with it. All the cast speed the build gets to make Exsanguinate feel smooth also means pretty effortless hard-cast curses. Recently switched to Hex Bloom over Inc. AoE and have seen some real upsides in stuff like Ritual other other constant-stream-of-monsters situations, or in situations where packs overlap and I can dose three screens of critters at once.

Hey there!

The difference is - I never bothered to apply a Curse on standard monster packs. I only applied it on rare or unique enemies. Therefore I didn't even think about Hex Bloom, but you are right, it may solve applying Vulnerability while mapping. I will try to find a place in gem sockets for it in the newer iteration.

You can also go with Vuln on hit ring (but it's much weaker) or for Mark of Submission (but then you need to trade your ring slot for it.

Yeah, I don't generally dose ordinary monster packs with Vulnerability either, but I also tend to do a lot of Ritual and Blight content. All the skill duration we get to make Exsanguinate feel smooth also means Vuln duration is close to half a minute, offsetting the main 'weakness' of hex Bloom i.e. never refreshing its duration. When doing dense stream-of-critters content like Ritual or Blight, you can throw a curse once and then watch dozens and dozens of little Vulnerability marks pop up endlessly on critters as they spawn in and catch the Herp from previous critters as they die. It's honestly super satisfying to watch, heh.

Levelling this build now, Where do we get Onslaught from? Just raider ascendancy? What's the Uptime like on frenzy, and will you only have onslaught during rares/bosses or should I be running a Silver flask? Good stuff.