(2.6) Saboteur EK Nova Cluster Trapper (aka the Pipebomber) {WIP}

T12 Shaped Mud Geyser with triple league stones:

- great for clearing trash/general mapping
- whole screen (and even further) damage, completely untouched by patch 2.6 aoe nerfs
- Actively do damage on the go; set your traps and keep moving and let the mobs damage themselves on your traps
- CI for more effective life pool
- Unleash your inner terroist without worries about the FBI showing up to your front door

- Single target kind of lacking (once I get at least a 5l chest piece going, I'll add bladefall traps for single target damage to counter this)
- Eats up mana quickly
- Trap cooldown can be annoying; not something you can constantly spam
- Traps can't leech, so you're stuck taking Zealot's Oath/regen to keep your health up
- Very unique dependent, not recommended as a starter build as you'll need to farm up a fair bit of currency to get it going depending on what prices are like at the time you make the build (still early in legacy, so everything is still insanely priced at the moment)

I wanna first give a shoutout to my buddy Pohx (yeah THE pohx, the guy that is the know it all when it comes to trap builds) for initially giving me the idea for this. I was hanging out on his twitch stream when GGG first announced the ring of blades threshold jewel, which allows EK to fire in a nova. His first thought was, "why not put this in a cluster trap?" Upon hearing that, I got super excited and completely made this build from the ground up. It's gone through several iterations as I've tried out various uniques and items to try and get it going. Originally I planned to just scale as much spell and physical damage as possible, then went with the idea of scaling poison. Currently I'm somewhere in the middle with the build until I can get some better gear going.

The way you play this build is that, first off, you have to realize that this is not a build you face tank things with, and this is also not a build that you spam a bunch. This is a build where you throw down a trap, then move. You kite and try to force mobs to walk onto your traps. So it's a build where you set, kite, kill stuff. Repeat until everything is dead. One massive downside to this is that if your damage is really lacking, you'll be going through mana very fast, even with a mana flask on hand. It's important to get some kind of single target damage on hand that is separate because even with this skill shotgunning thanks to the cluster traps and applying a lot of stacks of poison, it still doesn't quite have the oomph that bladefall traps do. So your single target is gonna be hit or miss depending on the boss you're fighting. One massive advantage that trap builds have is that you can put your traps down before opening a strongbox/fighting a boss like Izaro to prepare for the slaughter beforehand.

Bomb Specialist - Chain Reaction - Blinding Assault - Born in the Shadows

Also, while I don't have them yet, I would recommend having voidwalker boots, and an energy from within jewel to socket by the melding cluster on the right side of the tree. Both are at 100c at the time of my writing this guide, so they're a little bit out of reach for me at the moment. Voidwalker would allow me to drop all the pierce passives and drop pierce from my gem link, to be replaced with poison. Putting poison in my links would allow me to drop the coated shrapnel jewels for more cheap construction jewels or some nice rare jewels. Cheap construction allows you to have more traps out on the ground at one time, at the cost of less trap duration, which would be a form of dps boost because more traps = more projectiles hitting things = more stacks of poison being applied = more thing dying. With a lot of uniques being used, it does put a strain on getting resistance capped in merciless, so keep that in mind. I finally settled on using the Quill Rain as weapon of choice despite it not scaling spell or trap damage because of one major perk that it gives the build; that INSANE amount of projectile speed with makes the EK novas as massive as they currently are. Mine is pretty low rolled, but I'm spamming divine orbs on it to get the number higher. Quill rain can give you up to 100% increased projectile speed, which, when coupled from sniper on the passive tree and the faster projectiles gem, just obliterates everything up to 1 and 1/2 screens away. Only thing that would stop it is environmental objects, such as pillars, which obstruct EK's projectiles. And with 100% pierce chance, EK's projectiles just blow holes right through enemies and keep right on going. Open maps like Arid Lake are preferred for this build because of how fast you can clear through it due to how many enemies you can hit and poison with a single cast of cluster trap. And again, each one of those projectiles that hits applies a stack of poison.

Next I went with Soul Strike because my initial build idea was to have a dagger and ES shield to get my effective life pool up and scale spell damage. However, it became apparent to me that trying to color a Vaal Regalia chestpiece to have 5 green and 1 blue socket was something of a nightmare. Once I tried out the Quill Rain and enjoyed it and settled on using a bow for the build to handle the requirements (6s it in 10 jeweler's and 6l it in 80 something fuses might have helped sway my decision as well lol) I decided to go with Soul Strike to try and make up for some of that ES loss. I would say that a drillneck would be a good choice if you're not concerned about ES and want more damage. However, I find that the near instant ES recharge coupled with my vaal discipline gem did a lot for keeping me alive through tough fights. And getting a legacy soul strike with the 150% faster start of ES recharge would be a godsend for improving the defense of the build further.

Final 6l Setup

Current 6l setup:


for single targets


Cwdt setup:


Movement skill:


Vaal Skills:


Aura:

Kill All - Kill All (or oak if you want my phys dmg) - Kill All

Traps are pretty hard to level with in general, so I would recommend leveling as blade vortex with a couple lifesprigs, a pair of wanderlust boots, and a goldrim helm until at least after getting your Cruel ascendancy points. Chain Reaction is so build enabling (especially with that +40% trap recovery cooldown) that trying to level without it is pretty pointless. That said, if you absolutely HAVE to level as a trapper, then I'd say hold off at least until you rush for Clever Construction on the big traps node to the right of shadow start. This will keep your traps from being destroyed by enemies for up to five seconds. The cool thing here is that the ring of blades jewel doesn't have a level requirement, so leveling as a nova EK caster is also a good option and you'll be taking a jewel node very early on while trying to rush for clever construction anyways. I'd still recommend leveling as blade vortex for simplicity's sake though. If you go the self-cast EK-nova route, I'd recommend buying a Karui Ward amulet as it will give you a pretty good amount of strength early on, plus gives you stuff like movement speed, projectile speed, and projectile damage buffs.