Essence drain/Contagion witch build Q&A

I am an old player and I just respecced a power siphon witch to an essence drain/Contagion build. Almost at endgame now (just hit lvl 74).

My question is, since Essence drain is also a projectile: Can it benefit from the Fatal toxins notable keystone and the two nodes-Chance to poison and poison damage?

Thank you, that's all for now.

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Peterking72 wrote:

My question is, since Essence drain is also a projectile: Can it benefit from the Fatal toxins notable keystone and the two nodes-Chance to poison and poison damage?

posion is chaos damage over time inflicted by "chance to poison" mechanics. Essence drain is "only" chaos damage over time. it has no relation to poison. they are different sources of chaos DoT. projectile or not is not relevant

edit: but those passives would affect poison that can be caused by essence drain initial hit. But it could be worth it only in case you would use it as a spam skill

Thanks for the info.

I usually cast a contagion with increased AoE into the crowd, then I summon a spell totem with essence drain and then start spamming essence drain myself from afar.
I don't use any GMP or LMP since that wouldn't fit into my 5L build if I want to support my Apep's Rage mana cost.

Later I plan to use dual Apep's Rage which I would support with a 5L Atziri's Splendour.
Since Atziri's Splendour only gives the 100 mana boost if the enemy is dead I need a way to pawn them even faster than I do now.

Plus the boss fights put another spin on that equation, since I would only get mana from leech which could hardly support a dual Apep's Rage by itself.
That is if the boss by it's lone some, c=because if it has minion's there is no problem.

So yes, as long as I can support the mana cost I can spam it like there is no tomorrow.

Any way I'll give it a shot. It's near the increased projectile damage nodes which I plan to pick up also.

My only concern is that Essence Drain doesn't have any physical damage, only chaos damage and some fire damage which I get from a wand. Would it be able to inflict the poison/Chaos DoT without dealing any physical damage?

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Peterking72 wrote:

My only concern is that Essence Drain doesn't have any physical damage, only chaos damage and some fire damage which I get from a wand. Would it be able to inflict the poison/Chaos DoT without dealing any physical damage?

Yes but it won't be a large amount, it'll only really increase single target damage by a little bit.
The poison would only scale from the inital hit, not from the DoT.

The posts above are quite discouraging, even if accurate in terms of mechanics. The turth is, Poison is absolutely great support for Essence Drain.

It's true it only scales from initial hit, which deals about 1/3 damage of 1 second of DoT.

But it scales with absolutely every other support gem/passive node/gear property you look for. Sometimes twice (for instance + %chaos damage increase initial hit damage and poision component, effectively double dipping)

It's massive boost to your AoE damage. You begin doing AoE only when first target dies. The sooner he dies, the sooner you AoE. Poison makes first target die much sooner.

It's massive boost to your boss killing capability. It allows you to spam your ED for extra damage from Poison.

Get Poison - either through support gem, or Consuming Dark unique. You won't regret ;)

I think ud only go poison if your drain was absolute overkill against everything other than the boss or you had a binos to spread it. If I was doing it Id use the dagger, I wouldnt even humor dropping a damage multiplier from the gem linkup. Youre losing what? 50% increased spell D from a wand? Vs 40% more spell D from a gem thats nothing basically. I dont think the apeps wand is really doing much tbh, I dont think the flat spell chaos does anything for the dot.

@Snorkle_uk:

I mostly use Apep's for the cast speed really. There is no other wand which gives you that much cast speed. Yes, it's limiting my build a bit that I need to support it's huge mana cost, but it's more than worth it.

The other thing is that unless I sell some shit I can't really afford Bino's right now.
I have a lvl 89 Scion which could farm it. I even have an IIQ gem which I obtained a few years ago around the time it went legacy and an IIR gem but still no luck finding a Bino's.

If only there was a wand that could also spread poison like Bino's then I would be more sure about opting for poison.

Too bad that we can't use a wand and a dagger/knife together or I would be tempted to use Bino's or The consuming Dark.

@Turbodevil: Yes it would kill single target much faster, but I would be more happy if it was an AoE. I guess the devs thought that would be too OP and would make Bino's less appealing.

BTW My setup in my 5 link chest is: Essence drainD-Faster casting-Spell echo-Added Chaos Damage-Mana leech.

Thanks again for the info guys.

You should rethink your supports. Not saying they are all bad, but keep that in mind:

- The cool part of Essence Drain is its DoT part. The DoT slowly kills tough enemies. The DoT is spread through Contagion. If it wasn't for DoT, all the other spells would be better (like, 3x better).
- You can have only one DoT on enemy, no matter how fast you attack
- None of your supports raise DoT damage.

You can literally tripple your damage if you link Void Manipulation, Controlled Destruction and Rapid Decay. It won't be seen as DPS in tooltip, but as 'Deals xxx damage per second'.

yeah, this is my essence drain links in talisman



if I could 6 link my other chest Id use increased duration I think.


Im not using a damage wand either tbh I have this



just for the blind, I like it and Ive not needed any more damage so far. But its just a muck around budget char atm, Id get a proper wand if I was gonna be serious and take it into the 90s. Id want a linked chest too though and I dont have the patience to farm any more fusing in that league tbh.

Well, I'm back and I have tested the poison passives and all I have to say is that I decided not to use them.

While poison helped me occasionally to kill single enemy targets faster, without the ability to spread it (uniques), it wasn't all that effective. Also without those 2 uniques there is only a 10% chance to poison enemies when you using those passives.

@Turbodevil: I have increased damage over time from passives plus my essence drain has a 17% quality on it (a lucky find with my lvl 89 Scion :) which gives 17% increased chaos damage.

That 5 link gives me 8,76K total chaos damage/2 projectile ->(spell echo)

My contagion is supported by increased AoE and void manipulation and currently has 1100 total damage over 5 seconds. Plus I have my ED totem with a 3K total damage.

Currently I'm lvl 76 and I'm planning to pick up more chaos DoT on the tree plus all the projectile support I possibly can and also some more life/ES.

@Snorkle_uk: I also have an Eclipse solaris though haven't used it yet. If my build doesn't work out I might try out your 5 link setup and change to daggers. I have a Tabula Rasa also which I found 6 months ago. My only concern is that with the Tabula I'd loose too much ES, Armour and resistance.
I have a chaos golem but that is simply not enough damage reduction without the chest.

I also started mapping and I've to say that despite that I'm relatively low level I have a decent clear speed.

Thanks again for the info. I will keep posting updates on my observations.