[3.0] AFK Gone Cheap - AFK up to T16 guardians||Shaper killed || 3.0 balls video montage!

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are u forced to use VMS for Phoenix for example?

No, you can kill the Phoenix just fine with Fire Burst (see my post on page 107). In fact, VMS + Rat Cage doesn't work here at all as we don't trigger the loop of ignites.

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But, if fire burst is the main damage source, ignite immune bosses are very hard to kill? or BV is enough for them? or are u forced to use VMS for Phoenix for example?

Ty for your reply mate :)

Well, if you noticed the previous discussion, it looks like actually it's on the contrary. Phoenix is only guardian that we can reliably afk from the beginning to the end it seems (with culling strike). Another ignite immune boss is Argos and he can also be facetanked reliably. Basically, you can afk through both bosses. Literally afk.

So it's not as much about how hard they are to kill, rather than how long it takes to kill them.

It took me like 5 minutes to kill Argos in 2 man party. For each additional member (in Uber), his hp raises by 60%. That means in a solo run it would still 3 minutes or so.

This build indeed has quite low single target damage and in case of ignite immune bosses it's that much worse. But with that being said, it doesn't really matter. You don't want to actually run uber lab with this build preferably ever (after you get the ascendancy points). And Phoenix you could just afk through and cook something meanwhile or something. I dunno about how long it takes to kill Phoenix, but I would imagine it takes a long time. Sadly I can't find the hp of Argus to make some broad estimations.

EDIT: Also Atziri would probably be annoying too, especially because of her double pizzablast mechanic. But OTOH, this build would be very good build to make yourself familiar with Atziri mechanics. Nevertheless, Atziri will rip you with the double triple whatever pizzablast that she does, regardless of how much fire resistance you will have. So what it means is that you will have to be careful about it. And also split phase might be tad annoying, but I think you should be able to afk it through. Just stay close to the one with blue arm to make sure that you aren't hugging the mirror one. I'd still say that the mirror one might be scary if you fire burst it. Probably won't kill you, but still.

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functionality wrote:

Technically, the theory that there is "something else going on" can be, well, almost falsified.

Well, how else would you explain that I was sitting there for 20 minutes and he could not really hurt me at all (full AFK) and all of a sudden, when he's at 10% he is one-shotting me. I can't be the fact that my max fire resist was reduced by yet another percent. Before that my health pool has never been lower than 3.5k and the heaviest single strikes never took more than 4.5k at best.

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functionality wrote:

Unfortunately it's not really much of falsification, more like verification (if the problem is in 1% max res, you would notice problems before boss death and culling eliminates the last 10% with pretty high margin of accuracy).

Indeed, after being one-shot the second time I grabbed my Belly, spun up my BV, entered the arena and presto, dead Guardian of the Phoenix. ;)

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functionality wrote:

Speaking of which, how long did it take to kill it with this setup? 5 minutes? 10? 20?

Usually the fight lasts 4-5 minutes, semi-AFK, just pressing the mouse button to keep Blade Vortex spinning.

I just did the test with Kaom's to see if it is at all possible to kill him in full-AfK mode... and that was all fine if it wasn't for for the last 10%. Normally you don't want to spend more than 20 minutes to kill a boss anyway, the lack of the BV setup means a lot less hits and thus less Fire Burst procs, that'swhy it took soooo much longer with Kaom's.

Conclusion: do bring Culling Strike to the fight. ;)

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functionality wrote:

Text about VMS mechanics and VRF burn mechanics

First off, all 4 guardians have 40 ele res by default according to poedb:
http://poedb.tw/us/area.php?n=Forge+of+the+Phoenix
http://poedb.tw/us/area.php?n=Pit+of+the+Chimera
http://poedb.tw/us/area.php?n=Maze+of+the+Minotaur
http://poedb.tw/us/area.php?n=Lair+of+the+Hydra

Now in my calculations for VRF I have used the 40% curse effectiveness against bosses and also used the fact that the firepen only effects the initial hit, but not again on the burn, so no double dipping. I calculated with a double curse with Q20 blasphemy, q20lvl20 flammability and 10lvl10 ele weakness curse on hit from gloves. All the double dipping from elemental overload, berserker etc. were calculated for.

I tried it against minotaur which was the cause for not being able to get a nice activation. The tree is different from my initial bv tree and made for abberath's hooves to walk and kill without any active skill more than vaal haste and vaal rf/vaal molten shell on bosses.

Now, for the vaal molten shell. It is much worse than VRF on all bosses except those that deal an insane amount of damage. A perfect example of this is on minotaur fight and dark forrest during wolf barrage. Using it against bosses that hit you once every 2 seconds like gorge boss is utterly useless with any support. In the two scenarious I just mentioned, are you really sure that chance to ignite will put out more dps than concentrated effect just because it makes the looping up to 33% easier (number of ignites during 1 vms hit is 1 from the skill that ignited an enemy and made eye of innocence hit you and 0.5 for the 50% ignite chance on vms, which can reach 70% if q20. It goes up to 2 with chance to ignite gem.) My gut feeling says no.

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tomay wrote:

Text about getting one shot by phoenix.

Did you record the fight an analyse the video material? Are you sure you were one shot? All the minotaur deaths I have seen on my self for example have looked like one shots, but when looking frame by frame they are obvious 2-3 shots.

An also interesting thing would be what combo that kills you, if it is the self explosion or eg. his cyclone thingy. His cyclone whirl is capable to put out maybe 8k in several hits, if your CWDT setups are on cooldown when he does this and you at the same time get hit by a fire thingy by the enviourment, that is a death. The longer in the fight you are, the more fire things.

Also when restarting at a harder spot after have died with no CWDT gems up which takes some time to get to their full potetial, you are a lot more vulnerable which could have caused the second death.

So it is hard to speculate without in depth video analysis. My guess is that you didn't get one shot, but hit by several things at about the same time. Also I would assume that it had nothing to do with phoenix had 10% life left.

Crispie, I did not record the fight, my computer's processing power and graphics card do not allow for that. :(

But you can take my word for it, any setup with 8k HP, Rise of the Phoenix, Purity of Fire and AA should be able to do the "full-AFK" thingy until the Guardian of the Phoenix gets below 10% HP.

It was really weird, sitting there and watching him hammering me for more than 20 minutes not being able to kill me (never got below 3.5k with a total of 10.650 HP, and that wasn't a single strike but rather a succession of hits, best he could do with a single strike was like 4.5k) and all of a sudden the one-shotting starts.

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ChrispieD wrote:

About VRF, VMS etc

Okay, so no problems in calculations. Did you try out the IC & inc. dur. setup? Did it work for Minotaur?

Those hooves are pretty interesting, I've seen them and I did wonder myself whenever I could use them. Looks like completely another potential build to me. They might be useful even in VMS build though, since I think chance to ignite gem would also affect them and you could get very high ignite chance with them as well. Resulting that you could not only loop VMS but also proc it from walking. Obvious problems though:

1. no hp (still could be nice in some fights regardless with kaoms heart)
2. no res (this can be compensated, I have my resses far overcapped somehow anyway)
3. costs more than taming (kind of... their price didn't drop in std after breach migration it seems, but Taming did drop down to 4ex, might even stabilize at 3ex but I doubt it)
4. low MS

With all that being said, probably 10x better for farming T15-T16 maps. The other day I had issues with that t13 Rigwalds map. I couldn't oneshot Rigwald with VMS and since it had temp chains, I couldn't even do it. I dunno why but it looks like facetanking wolves doesn't seem realistic without Kaoms heart.

Regarding VMS and conc effect vs. chance to ignite, I think it's clearly lower DPS in most cases because you get hit and generally usually have firestorm stacks up with many bosses. But it's still much more consistent and doesn't actually fail per se to deal properly damage. Most ideally you would switch it only when necessary and use conc effect, but meh.

In most cases I run this test against full party Voll. Chance to ignite is much more consistent there without vaal cyclone, but with conc effect in almost all cases its more DPS, but in some rare occasions the chain breaks and suddenly it stops working properly anymore. And those can be very confusing.

Oh well, since new league is starting, I'll probably roll something with frost blades to start with and then see if I'm going to roll another afk toon once I can afford The Taming (shouldn't be that bad, they were pretty cheap in league while I was checking).

Btw, that video recording tip is interesting. I'll probably start doing that for proper analysis in near future. Can the recording software actually achieve higher FPS than 60? I usually have vsync enabled but I could take it out while performing analysis just in case I can achieve higher than 60 fps during bosses. Or is 60fps enough to screen for oneshots?

And people were saying that gaming makes us lazy, yet here we are actually talking about research methods... (actually I should be reading up on DSP and sound design rather than play games for qualifying exams, but that aside...)

Looks like 2.6 will be great news for afk build.

1. Rat Cage -max fire res is removed and changed into -50% fire res instead. What this means is that it's far less dangerous to run with it, especially vs. reflect.

2. Vaal Molten Shell effect has been changed for better performance. This is especially exciting news and I guess partially also comical, as it seems like they might have noticed this build somewhere else as well, not just here (i.e. I'm guessing they have streamlined the calculations to take this build into account and make it less heavy on their servers, they seemed to do similar changes for other builds as well)

Nothing else major for us. AoE-nerfs don't really affect us since we don't really use increased AoE in the first place. Personally I think those changes really suck, so all the more reason to gear up for afk build and ditch melee completely, apart from cyclone perhaps. It's sad that best use of marauder seems to be one of the weirdest caster build out there that doesn't deal any melee damage.

The max fire res thing is also great because my earlier thoughts for clearing Phoenix with VMS spam might still apply, even more so, with new Rat Cage. Personally, I think running with AA + PoF should be part of core setup if running with Rat Cage, as it will negate most of Rat Cage effect and in addition it will also help to deal better with ele reflect maps (or packs in some rare cases). If VMS changes prove to be effective, it could be actually very interesting to design a new build around this interaction that aims to maximize the efficiency through the use of 6l staff (easier for gems), with Abberaths Hooves. In Rat Cage you could focus on using enlighten with AA and purities. Dunno really.

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functionality wrote:

Looks like 2.6 will be great news for afk build.

1. Rat Cage -max fire res is removed and changed into -50% fire res instead. What this means is that it's far less dangerous to run with it, especially vs. reflect.

2. Vaal Molten Shell effect has been changed for better performance. This is especially exciting news and I guess partially also comical, as it seems like they might have noticed this build somewhere else as well, not just here (i.e. I'm guessing they have streamlined the calculations to take this build into account and make it less heavy on their servers, they seemed to do similar changes for other builds as well)

Nothing else major for us. AoE-nerfs don't really affect us since we don't really use increased AoE in the first place. Personally I think those changes really suck, so all the more reason to gear up for afk build and ditch melee completely, apart from cyclone perhaps. It's sad that best use of marauder seems to be one of the weirdest caster build out there that doesn't deal any melee damage.

The max fire res thing is also great because my earlier thoughts for clearing Phoenix with VMS spam might still apply, even more so, with new Rat Cage. Personally, I think running with AA + PoF should be part of core setup if running with Rat Cage, as it will negate most of Rat Cage effect and in addition it will also help to deal better with ele reflect maps (or packs in some rare cases). If VMS changes prove to be effective, it could be actually very interesting to design a new build around this interaction that aims to maximize the efficiency through the use of 6l staff (easier for gems), with Abberaths Hooves. In Rat Cage you could focus on using enlighten with AA and purities. Dunno really.

Yeah, the build is all alive :D

VMS could be used for trash clear if the performance increase is good enough, like increasing the frames by factor of 50 (if I know GGG right they will increase it by the factor of 1.0001). However, the duration and vaal skill investment it needs is insane, so I would still call for a boss killer.

As for earlier discussion about taming and the build, taming reduces trash clear due to much lower burn damage. With my abberath's walk and kill, most rares are 1 to 2 shots by fire burst even at T15. Taming don't put up more than a few burn stacks in that time, maybe increasing damage with 50% ish, which isn't so great. Even at many boss kills, the double dipping is enourmous without taming.

Now, there are some interesting new additions. The shocking helmet now applies shocking ground with 10% chance when we are hit and curses, might be interesting.

Blade vortex has greater area than before, even after the aoe nerfs.

Berek's respite spreads shock and burn when enemy dies.

Now it's time for me to 4B my abberath's, should take 700 chroms xD

How does 'You can now only have one instance of Blade Vortex active at once' affect things?