Poisonquake Juggernaut Prophecy Updated, Beginner friendly, cheap to start, Uber Atziri/Core

"

Kumbo wrote:

I am going to be running this build again in Prophecy with a few changes:

First, I am going to drop the golem setup in favor of a Leap Slam 4L with Fortify and see how I like that. With the extra gem slot on EQ I will experiment with Faster Attacks and Rapid Decay. My planned helm/glove/boot setups will be as follows:

Leap Slam - Faster Attacks - Blood Magic - Fortify

Enfeeble - Vulnerability - Blasphemy - Arctic Armour

Enduring Cry - Blood Rage - Vaal Haste - Increased Duration.


With the addition of two more ascendancy points I will be taking Unbreakable (double chest armour, stun immunity) assuming none of the Juggernaut nodes get changed much.

That sounds like a nice setup. Similar to what I'm doing right now for the 2 week race. The main difference is I run warlord's mark instead of enfeeble and rallying cry instead of enduring cry.

I'll be trying to stay top 25 this weekend on my character EarthyMcEarthquake... Rank 14 as of now but I'm sitting at work and watching everyone catch up. :(

BUILD CERTIFIED!

SuperSmash April Lvl 100
Rank in psc flashback : #34
Rank Juggernaut: #2


RIPS above 90 = 2

I wanted to say though bearers will get u killed without leapslam. I HAD to use it after second rip there was no choice. Also i found that solo dmg was excellent, in party play id put fort on leap slam and rapid decay in for future though..

For those of you wondering, about my gear, i got lucky with 6l disfavour in 200 jew and 75 fuse. Kaoms is cheap, and the rest of the gear was trash, jewels all self crafted. ended up around 7 k life.

I wanted to give you a very big thank you and a huge shoutout, any way that i can! My goal was to see if this build could makeme my first 100 as a melee as id always wanted and its capable as im not that great a player.

Great for new intermediate or advanced players.

plz feel free to add me as a friend in game as ign: Supersmashapril
id love to further discuss this build for future and some other build ideas :)

Thanks again!

Congratulations man! I got to 99% of the way through 85 in hardcore before a hilarious death to Bameth, Haast, and Ephiji in Mao Kun. I tried to run away to heal up and Bameth crit me from offscreen since he wasn't in range of my Enfeeble anymore. Just goes to show that running away from anything ever is always the wrong decision with this build, just keep smashing until everything is dead! As for bearers, I never had an issue but I always keep a Quicksilver Flask of Adrenaline on me.

With the buffs to the Fortify ascendancy node I will now be taking that node over the double armour node for my last two points. I will also be altering my passive tree slightly to pick up the cluster of nodes that affect Fortify in the duelist area, along with the Jewel slot right next to said nodes. The overall effect should be a little bit less life, a little bit more damage, and an extra 8% damage reduction from buffed Fortify. I am not sure if the new text on the Unstoppable node is an actual change or just clarifying what the node already did. The change to Unrelenting shouldn't have a huge effect on this build since I don't use Immortal Call, but it could allow me to drop Enduring Cry if the passive Endurance Charge generation is enough to keep me at max.

Would you say Juggernaut is actually the ideal pick for this build, or was it just for the demi?

Also, thoughts on using Snakebites and swapping Poison out for Rapid Decay? Thoughts on running Temp Chains in place of AA? (Obv will need some mana reduction, and either have to path up to witch or get +1 curse ammy, or drop ming's for another doedre)


Thinking I'll try this in a tri-curse setup (Enfeeble/Vulnerability/Temp Chains) as a Slayer. Definitely a huge fan of the concept, love the idea of getting away from the Hatred + Herald of Ash melee character. And, well, the added defense of Enfeeble + Temp Chains is just amazing.

"

Ismaell wrote:

Would you say Juggernaut is actually the ideal pick for this build, or was it just for the demi?

Also, thoughts on using Snakebites and swapping Poison out for Rapid Decay? Thoughts on running Temp Chains in place of AA? (Obv will need some mana reduction, and either have to path up to witch or get +1 curse ammy, or drop ming's for another doedre)


Thinking I'll try this in a tri-curse setup (Enfeeble/Vulnerability/Temp Chains) as a Slayer. Definitely a huge fan of the concept, love the idea of getting away from the Hatred + Herald of Ash melee character. And, well, the added defense of Enfeeble + Temp Chains is just amazing.

I think Juggernaut is the best because it gives the most amount of defense. Earthquake already does a huge amount of damage, so you don't need much investment in your passive tree (I think I had 24 passive points spent on purely dps nodes). Depending on how the new Unrelenting ascendancy node works, it might be possible to achieve 100% uptime on Immortal Call, which would allow me to take out some of the nodes I have that give armour and get more life.

As far as Snakebites go, I think they are fine to use early on when you are gearing up, but eventually you will want a pair of rare gloves with high stats, life, and phys dmg + attack speed. The reason is there aren't actually that many support gems that work well with a physical/poison melee setup. I would consider EQ - Melee Phys - Less Duration - Inc Aoe/Conc Effect to be the mandatory 4L setup you start from, so for your last 2 links you would choose from the following:
Poison
Fortify
Faster Attacks
Rapid Decay

In perandus I ran Poison and Fortify as my last 2, but I am going to try dropping Fortify and moving it to a Leap Slam setup in Prophecy, so if you wanted to use Snakebite you would only be choosing between Rapid Decay and Faster Attacks. I don't think Rapid Decay is that good for this build unless it actually lowers your Aftershock duration enough to bring it into a 1:1 ratio with your attacks per second. Obviously whether or not it does that will depend on your gear, but for my character in Perandus it did not, so it was a support gem that only buffed the Poison damage which I think is less efficient than buffing your physical dps, since physical dps scales poison, bleed, and of course physical dps on bosses.

I experimented with tri-curse a little in Perandus and it didn't really work out for me. I was giving up too much survivability to get an extra curse from the tree, and too much clearspeed by equipping either a second Doedre's or Windscream. I don't think Temporal chains will be as effective as Enfeeble - the build kills so quickly that most enemies will only have the chance the hit you once anyway, so the only danger is from 1-shot type attacks which Temporal chains won't help much against due to the reduced effectiveness curses have on bosses. Enfeeble, however, is still useful on trash for basically removing the ability for large packs of ranged mobs to all crit you at once, thus removing a possible source of death in high-level maps which will have large packsizes. If you did want to try out Temp Chains though, I would suggest swapping out Enfeeble, since you do actually need Vulnerability to make your Poison do good damage. You could also run Temp Chains + Enfeeble while you are gearing up in early maps before you have a 5L, which might be something HC players want to consider.

Any notable changes in 2.3 ?

Depending on how the new Endurance Charge when hit talent works a perma-IC setup may be possible, which would lead to some minor changes in the passive tree allowing for more life. Other than that, unless a really powerful unique gets revealed, this build just gets a straight buff to tankiness and some damage due to the 2 extra Ascendancy nodes.

"

Kumbo wrote:

Depending on how the new Endurance Charge when hit talent works a perma-IC setup may be possible, which would lead to some minor changes in the passive tree allowing for more life. Other than that, unless a really powerful unique gets revealed, this build just gets a straight buff to tankiness and some damage due to the 2 extra Ascendancy nodes.

The new Unrelenting node puts you on maximum endurance charges every time, instead of just a random amount if that's what you were wondering. It was confirmed by Qarl.


Undeniable seems like a very strong node aswell and definitely is something you should consider for the build. Axe-based Marauders have access to an easy 160-188% increased Accuracy, with the base 1K from the node, 900 between Gloves/One ring/Amulet and 380 base at level 90 with 100 Dex, that'd give us 6,500 Accuracy (which should put us well past 95% accuracy) which translates out to 65% attack speed. 5700/57% with Ming's Heart instead of a 300 Acc. ring. Probably beats unstoppable? (Edit: Forgot about Helmets, they can get acc too)

Juggernaut is looking SUPER strong for 2.3

Unless Unstoppable gets nerfed I am never not going to take it because it is probably the biggest qol passive in the game. I'll test out the accuracy node instead of the new fortify node, but considering how much damage the build already does I am leaning towards more survivability, but either one should be valid depending on playstyle. The great thing about Juggy is all of the passives are good but not necessarily build defining (although I suspect there will be some silly scold's vms discharge build with the new Unrelenting), so you can pick the ones that you personally like the most.

Edit - okay so you got me thinking a bit about the Undeniable node instead of Unyielding and after tinkering with my skill tree a little here is what I came up with. Assuming perma-IC, I can drop all the nodes that were just giving armour/phys mitigation and pick up some of the accuracy nodes. I can also swap out Stone Golem for Ice Golem, and since I am going to move my Fortify gem to Leap Slam I was also trying to decide what to use as my 6th link on EQ so check this out - a 20/20 Additional Accuracy gem gives a whopping 1000 accuracy and 20% increased accuracy. Assuming high accuracy rolls on gloves/helmet/amulet, I should be able to break 10k accuracy, which translates to 100% increased attack speed. Not only is that a massive dps increase, it would also greatly increase clear speed by making Leap Slam go much faster as well. I think that is probably worth giving up a little bit of damage reduction and life regen, so thanks for bringing that node to my attention.