Essence drain/Contagion witch build Q&A
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I'm here again with my report.
So after opting out of poison I finally managed to 5L another Atziri's Splendour. ( I bought a bunch of them from a guy who was selling them for 30 C a pop.) They're all the hybrid (Armour,Eva and ES) kind and each of them are above "300% increased" in that department. So my ES got increased back to the value where it was with my "first" chest piece. I was unable to score 4 blue sockets on it, so I had to drop the added chaos damage. I replaced it with void manipulation and I have to say that it seems to work even better. I'm tempted to also try comtrolled destruction. The only thing that worries me is the -100% crit chance, because I might not be able to opt in more crit if I want to survive on high tier maps. I'm almost 81, so I only have 20 passive points left which I will spend on getting more life and chaos damage and chaos resist. I might have to give up some projectile nodes too, so it will be the song of the future. I hardly ever run out of mana thanks to the Atziri's (which are my go to chest for ranged and caster chars since before the Awakening), so I might go for that second Apep before Ascendancy. I might wait it out though. Don't want to deal with some nasty surprise like last time when Awakening hit last year. |
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Only the initial hit is able to crit, so crit is a wasted stat for ED/Contagion.
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ya, heres the thing with essence drains damage. It has 2 separate damages, the first is a simple initial hit of chaos damage, as if you had a chaos bow like voltaxic and fired a pure chaos arrow into a monster. The second damage that essence drain does is a chaos damage over time effect, thats the drain you see ticking down the monsters life after the hit. Now that part is totally separate and you have to dig a little to even see what the dps of that degen is. The degen is almost all the damage that matters, that initial hit is not worth scaling unless you are using it like freeze pulse or arc where you just spam projectiles over and over.
grabbed this image off google..  the dps at the top is showing 6,097. now the second line from the bottom is 3045-4560 chaos damage, thats the initial hit damage of the projectile. The 6,097 dps shown at the top of the skill tooltip is what damage you will do per second with that initial hit if you just spam it into a mob. But those numbers are sort of irrelevant to the skill when used with contagion as a damage over time build. The stat you want to be looking at is second from the top, deals 13,032 chaos damage per second. This isnt scaled by echo, cast speed, crit chance, crit multi, none of those things effect it, it doesnt stack if you hit the mob twice etc. The gem setup I was using all scale that chaos damage per second stat so you just shoot 1 drain and then contagion spreads it. If you want to use a totem then you can add in a wither totem to further ramp the degen. |
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Well, my ED is a single projectile, since I didn't want to decrease the initial chaos damage dealt by using LMP or GMP. Maybe I later rethink that also, but unless I get my hands on a 6 link I doubt I ever go for it. Plus if I change the Atziri's splendour to a rare 6 link I loose the 100 mana&Life on kill which is the main support of my mana regen.
Here is my ED Witch at my HO: http://postimg.org/image/ulvrjnbxv For some reason the picture did not want to show up here. The link works fine though. Well you can clearly see that my damage over time is half of yours, but the overall damage is almost 9,5 K and goes above 10K when I am at full frenzy charge (I use a blasphemy+Poachers mark to give me a curse aura). Normally I would use a herald beside my purity of elements aura, but since there is no Chaos herald and the other heralds are kind of useless with chaos damage I chose the blasphemy+pacher's. Also my chaos elemental is a great help making enemies die even more faster. The average mobs die almost instantly. The blue and yellow ones take a couple of seconds, but not that much. I also have a 12% quality proj. weakness linked with a level 1 CWDT, so when I get hit by Devourers and those nasty "Drop-bears" they also suffer the consequences, "till death do us part" :) I can spam ED like hell, it's almost like a continous beam. I'll give a chance for the controlled destruction gem then. I think I'll put it in the place of spell echo and try it out both on lvl 67 Dried lake so I can get the best comparison. Maps wouldn't do a good comparison because they're so different, even if they're the exact same level and kind. I'll definitely keep faster casting though. Wither is a good thing and I did use it early in the build. Not that much though because this witch was a respec from power siphon and "she" was alrady level 45 when I changed to ED. It was an on the spot decision: They announced the change to poison and the next week an Apep's Rage dropped from a mob on a blue map. I still kind of bummed that the poison part didn't worked out that well. I also decided to respec one of my shadows to ED when Ascendancy comes out. Then I'll somehow get my hands on both Bino's and the Consuming dark. I already have the Mark of the Doubting Knife, but that only poisons on crit and since crit does not play a big part in an ED build (as you pointed it out) I wouldn't have much use of it. Maybe I'll give it to my trapper guy. Funny you mention Voltaxic Rift cause when poison got buffed I immediately purchased a good roll before it's price skyrocketed. Then 5L-d the shit out of it. :) I recommend you guys try it with herald of ice. It has a sick clear speed with it. Last edited by Peterking72 on Feb 22, 2016, 9:42:18 AM
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Note: Winds of Change is still in Talisman League so the damage has not added to ED yet. I am running a low life build, haven't really run any high end stuff my goal is to make her kill normal Atziri. Hopefully get it done before they nerf poison.  I think your DPS looks high only because of echo but I don't think Essence Drain actually stacks so Faster Casting is better. Any of you know a better weapon for me to use? Not every problem in the world belongs to you alone, let others have their share. Last edited by TofuandSoySauce on Feb 22, 2016, 10:18:36 AM
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" well thats not a pic of my essence drain, thats just a random image off google so I could show where the stats to look at are. My chaos degen figure is something like 18,500 chaos damage per sec, Ive seen shavs versions getting 28,000+. lmp/gmp are bad for this, you dont want to be spamming mass projectiles with reduced damage on each one. You dont want echo, you dont want crit, you dont want faster casting. What you want is to fire 1 single projectile that destroys all the monsters on its own by being spread through contagion. The dps figure at the top basically means nothing, anything that isnt making the chaos damage per second figure higher or making its duration longer might as well be a melee physical damage gem for all its doing, in fact melee physical damage would be a better gem for essence drain than echo or lmp/gmp because those gems reduce the damage over time figure, theyre actually making it worse. Here watch the first 2 minutes of this video, this isnt me its nerdbro, Im not in game atm to record myself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdNYq8wZVnY the build bits and his defenses etc are irrelevant, just watch the way it plays and what gem links hes using for essence drain and contagion in the first 2 minutes. Contagion the mobs, fire one essence drain, done, next pack. Thats how it should be working, you shouldnt have to fire multiple projectiles either in the form of lmp/gmp or in the form of echo/faster casting. Contagion gives it aoe and it doesnt stack so multiple hits of it with a lower chaos damage over time are doing less actual dps than 1 hit with a massive damage over time. I would get cast speed on your weapon simply to lower the time of the animation lock your character has when casting a single shot. But in the links you want only gems that scale the chaos dot figure. |
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@Snorkle_uk
No, I don't use LMP or GMP. I know the're not good for this build. I only brought them up because I saw someone using LMP with ED on youtube (to get more hit chance I guess). I also saw an other guy using it with poison and GMP and no contagion.(Wasn't very effective) By the way I implemented controlled destruction. It works like a charm. My ED now looks like this: I'm planning on getting a 2nd Apep's also, for cast speed if I'm to drop the faster casting in the near future. I just don't know what to change it for? Maybe I'll put back the added chaos damage. That would hopefully work out best for my build. How did you pump up your chaos damage/second so high? What gear and passives you have? My only caster build who reached that high level of DPS is my lvl 90 EK scion. She does 36 509 DPS at the moment and not even focused on max DPS. @TofuandSoySauce: They going to NERF poison? Wut? When did this happen? They just buffed it a few months ago. Well, if that's true I'm maybe getting second thoughts about Bino's and The Consuming Dark. BTW: Are they nerfing it via passives or gear(uniques)? See you guys after Ascendancy hits. I hope I wont have to QQ after this expansion. :) |
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I think there may be a disconnect here. It's like if you could get 20 lbs of brie cheese or 10 lbs of Swiss cheese. It's obvious which one gets you more cheese but some people like Swiss but can't stand brie. What I see here is Snorkle trying to tell you how to get 20 lbs of cheese and you talking about how Swiss your cheese is and wondering why you are only getting 10 lbs.
To clarify, I am a hipster so I love strange builds even if they can't reach top tier damage. So I wouldn't tell you what you should or should not do in general. However if you want to achieve the best non-Poison damage with ED then it makes zero sense to stack cast speed. Like Snorkle_UK implied, optimal ED playstyle is more one shot one kill type. Meta builds use Contagion to spread ED for crowd clearing, I believe. You can stack ED degen damage by using all 3 of the previous mentioned gems (I think now you are only missing Rapid Decay?), increased projectile damage, increased chaos damage, increased spell damage, increased DoT, and generic increased damage. The more of those you get, the closer you get to the 18k-28k figures Snorkle was mentioning. Need game info? Check out the Wiki at: https://www.poewiki.net/ Contact support@grindinggear.com for account issues. Check out How to Report Bugs + Post Images at: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/18347 Last edited by adghar on Feb 25, 2016, 8:12:58 PM
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I know I said I'll come back after Ascendancy released, but I just couldn't stand waiting and not answering to the people who try to help me out. Besides I have made some improvements on my build.
SO: @adghar: I try to both increase the initial hit damage in sync with the chaos degen damage/second now. I only stack cast speed to reduce the time spent standing in one place casting the spell, OR as Snorkle_uk said: " I implemented rapid decay too, which was a good choice, even though I had to drop mana leech. The Atziri's Splendour is still able to cover most of my mana expenditure if there is enough mob to kill. I have to watch it with boss monsters though, because without mana leech I only can rely on my mana regen, which is OK, but still could use some tune. I wish I could 6L an Atziri's Splendour right now. So unless I decide to drop Rapid decay(which is not likely because it's awesome) I have to forget about using a 2nd Apeps's Rage. QQ :) I added back the added chaos damage support gem too and it proved to be better than spell echo. Now both my tooltip damage and the chaos degen is 11K DPS. On max frenzy charges (3 frenzy charges at the moment) I can raise it above 12,5K. Your cheese analog is nice. BTW I like both types, but I like mozzarella the most. I respecced some projectile damage passives to chaos and it's worth it. I relized that unless ED somehow gained physical damage attributes, (which is not likely, ever) it is not very practical to spec deep into projectile damage, even though ED is a projectile. My gems are very near to level 20 now, so it's time to get some quality on them. My ED already has 18% quality thanks to me finding it in a Dried lake run. I also found a 5% quality ED gem yesterday (also Dried lake) which I plan to use in my totem after I level it up. That's all for now. |
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Just popping in to tell that I got my hands on the new hot wand for ED users.
Obliteration. It's uber awesome. It's practicly a replacement for abyssal cry, only even better, because you don't have to go near any enemy. The only "bad" thing is that my ED's DPS and chaos DOT suffers a bit. Initial hit DPS went down from over 12K (over 14K on full frenzy charges) to just below 10K. Chaos DOT went from over 12K (also over 14K on full frenzy charges) to barely above 11K. So I still kept my "old wand" too. I also kept the Apep's Rage. The other bad thing is since the "hot fixes" to Ascendancy my instances keeps crashing back to the login screen every 3-5 minutes. Only when I'm in an instance with monsters. I'm safe in towns, so it's weird. Hope they fix it soon. PS: Re-installing didn't work. Tried that at on my friends PC. He has the same problem. It didn't work. |
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