[2.4] zSavage's Poison Hurricane (Crit Poison BV)[Budget Friendly][Assassin]

Intro:
My initial experiment with Blade Vortex in the temp league. This build melts most content up into the end of Merciless, at which point I began to invest into armor to get tankier, as the character is in melee range most of the time. This character double dips a lot with the Shadow's physical and chaos nodes, the poison support gem, and the lots of duration from passive tree and gems.

Now that Talisman is over, I've ascended that character to become an Assassin. He reached level 90 in Talisman, and I used him to farm Atziri.






I focus on AoE, crit, phys and chaos, cast speed, as well as life and armor.
I use Engerised Armor (Melding Cluster) and Anatomical Knowledge for jewels, currently.



I highly recommend Divinarius, or a good spell dagger. To get the armor total, you're going to need a high armor shield. I focus on using armor or armor/evasion gear where I can. Atziri's step is a great option for your boots if you have sufficient res on other pieces.



I've focused on armoring up. Current armor is nearly 10K pre granite flask. Combine this with three endurance charges from Warlord's mark, selfcast immortal call, and Fortify from Whirling/Flicker, our phys defense is OK.





I've done well into t9 maps with this character (lvl 89 atm), and will hit 90 for the achievement relatively soon.

Update 2/21: I've hit level 90 and done Atziri multiple times with this character. Everything is fairly easy. (100% viable with proper play). My only deaths on the first few runs were learning some mechanics for my build. I didn't even need to carry any res flasks.

Leave any questions, comments, or thoughts on the build. I appreciate any and all feedback.

Cheers!

-Savage

Is this build budget friendly?

Absolutely! The only things I've purchased for this character are the jewels and the shield. Everything else I either found myself or crafted (this is my first char in the new leagues).

I've spent less than 10 c total.

"

zSavage wrote:

Absolutely! The only things I've purchased for this character are the jewels and the shield. Everything else I either found myself or crafted (this is my first char in the new leagues).

I've spent less than 10 c total.

Im playing Blade Vortex+Poison, but instead of going crit im doing +chaos dmg, +phys dmg and +DoT and i can say that the build is doing really good, is fun to play and does well with the shitty gear i have, so... No complains.


I like your approach, but as i suck at skill tree building, i went with the crit less route, as it was easier to make.

Updated.

i think all blade vortex builds are pretty budget friendly, so its pretty great. crit is just so easily beneficial for BV its incredible. even with just one crit dagger, which is very easy to make yourself and very cheap.

crit isn't NECESSARY for BV by any means, but its just way more beneficial than i'd say most other spells. at the rate of which blade vortex hits, even with 20-30% crit rate, you'll crit ALL the time. it raises your damage so incredibly high its crazy. i don't see a reason to build a BV build without crit.

also the damage of BV per hit is very very low so if you don't scale it with crit, your poison damage becomes very....unimpressive.

my first BV build i tried to base it off cast speed, chaos/phys damage and poison. using two apep's rage and stuff but the poison damage ended up being horrible.

poison is a great addition to blade vortex, but your priority needs to remain blade vortex. plain and simple. you cannot scale your poison damage off of BV procs since the base damage is so low your poison damage will remain super low.

this is the problem with all DoT effects. being based off initial hit damage, this means your best bet is to grab up crit and crit multi so you can get higher DoT procs.
my blade vortex build is running off of ranger, which i think is great, because come patch with Pathfinder i can get free poison application while drinking flasks.

Playing an Acrobatics / Bladevortex + Poison / Crit char at lvl90 and up to t13 maps. Works like a charm and is tanky enough for SC with Lightning Coil and VP.

@xMustard
While your argument regarding the small initial hit is correct for burn DoTs - which can have only one instance active at the same time - it is not correct for poison which is not limited in instances.

10% of physical/chaos dmg every second for 2 seconds stays exactly this independent of the size of the initial hit

it is valid for poison, actually.

sure poison stacks, great, but multiple stacks of low damage is maybe slightly moderate damage. problem with any DoT but especially low damaging ones is it takes time.

in this game time is against you. the faster you can kill things the longer you're likely to survive, unless you build full out tank and stand there stacking poison until things die, you will get yours.

I've added a section that calculates the poison duration. Here's the bulk of what's under the spoiler:
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I currently have 136% increased damage that applies to poison from the tree. Current gem level provides 115% for a total of 251% increased poison damage.
All increases to skill duration also apply to poison. I have 90% duration from the tree, 20% from 20q poison gem, and 73% from increased duration for a total of 183% increased poison duration.

Therefore each poison stack does 10% * 3.51 = 35.1% of phys hit per second for a total of 2 * 2.83 = 5.66 seconds (35.1% of phys damage per second for 5.66 seconds total)

This means that this gem combined with other things works as (.351*5.66 = 1.9866) nearly 200% more damage from physical and chaos.

For instance, if each blade vortex hit did 100 combined physical and chaos damage, each poison stack would deal 35 damage per second for 5.66 seconds for a total of 198 damage from the poison alone.

This is a reason the skill crushes bosses and rares pretty fast. Most trash dies nearly instantly anyways.
->

@xMustard: The damage from the poison stacks is not small. A build like mine will apply 50 or more poison stacks in less than a second quite easily against tougher enemies. The DoT isn't needed to kill trash; the skill itself does that quite easily (though the DoT does a lot of damage relative to the skill; see above).

The big thing here is that the poison support is rather overpowered; I have no specific focus on damage over time or poison from the tree (just hybrid phys/chaos nodes that I would take even if I wasn't using BV). The gem is just that good.

"

zSavage wrote:

@xMustard: The damage from the poison stacks is not small. A build like mine will apply 50 or more poison stacks in less than a second quite easily against tougher enemies. The DoT isn't needed to kill trash; the skill itself does that quite easily (though the DoT does a lot of damage relative to the skill; see above).

The big thing here is that the poison support is rather overpowered; I have no specific focus on damage over time or poison from the tree (just hybrid phys/chaos nodes that I would take even if I wasn't using BV). The gem is just that good.

context. i was debating about NON crit poison with the person posting about their non crit poison build.
with crit the poison stacks are great. problem is with crit almost nothing lasts long enough for poison to really be effective. you do just as much damage as having another damage support gem rather than poison, such as crit multi, phys to lightning, added fire, or whatever.

with my build i've extensively tested poison vs all of those support gems. both mathematically and practically, i always end up ditching the poison support. it just doesn't feel as effective as it sounds on paper at all.

when whirling through a pack of mobs, if anything is left alive (which it normally isn't) they don't usually die from the poison anyway because the only reason why they're alive is my BV stacks didn't end up critting, thus they get a lower poison stack and it doesn't end up doing any damage/killing whats left over of their HP anyway.

mathematically when i figure it out the poison support gem will end up giving me about 3% more calculated DPS over a span of 4 seconds. that is basically nothing. it ends up being less damage up until 4 seconds.

i haven't faced off vs a boss yet that takes longer than 2 seconds to kill with 50 stacks of BV up, so technically any other damage support gem is better for my build than poison. however i will utilize poison when Pathfinder is released, since im a Ranger build.

poison is fine but it isn't always superior. its more whatever suits your fancy. on a non crit build though it is vastly inferior