[3.0] VP DP OP - Dark Pact Berserker - New Minotaur Facetank Video

Hey thanks so much for the build. I started as a frostbolt char this league to farm some currency. After farming up quite a horde I wanted to play something new and heard great things about DP.

I bought everything I need except acuity atm. Those are pretty expensive but gives me a final goal of something to farm for. I got a max stat 5l pledge (gonna work on 6l myself) and koams. I'm at the end of powerleveling my zerker now. Just hit act 10 and got cloaked. I just made the switch to dark pact.

My question - Now that I switched to DP, I love it, the explosion is massive and satisfying. My only problem is sustaining it on 1-3 targets. Anything more and I notice nothing happening, but anything less and i'm chugging pots to keep up. Should I be running blasphemy > warlords mark or swapping a gem in my 6l for a life leech gem for now? At what point (if any) do you 100% sustain on 1 target.

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coaa wrote:

Hey thanks so much for the build. I started as a frostbolt char this league to farm some currency. After farming up quite a horde I wanted to play something new and heard great things about DP.

I bought everything I need except acuity atm. Those are pretty expensive but gives me a final goal of something to farm for. I got a max stat 5l pledge (gonna work on 6l myself) and koams. I'm at the end of powerleveling my zerker now. Just hit act 10 and got cloaked. I just made the switch to dark pact.

My question - Now that I switched to DP, I love it, the explosion is massive and satisfying. My only problem is sustaining it on 1-3 targets. Anything more and I notice nothing happening, but anything less and i'm chugging pots to keep up. Should I be running blasphemy > warlords mark or swapping a gem in my 6l for a life leech gem for now? At what point (if any) do you 100% sustain on 1 target.

Yes, you should run WM until you are not struggling to sustain on 3 without it. After that, for 2 and 1 generally they die in one cast, so I just walk around with slightly less than full heath until I get to the next pack.

I just now started getting net health against one target after hitting level 88. But this isn't necessary for you to stop chugging pots. I haven't noticed a problem with health since picking up a 4L pledge at 68, when I turned off WM and switched to Assassin's.

I never used life leech support, but if it makes you feel safer I won't tell you not to.

Glad you like the build. I worked pretty hard to make it feel great to play. (You should have seen when it ran leap slam and a clunky golem arcane surge self cast. There's a video on my youtube channel.)

What's the difference between Bladefall, Blade Vortex, Vortex, and Essence Drain for CWDT? Essence Drain be better since it's Chaos damage so it scales with our Increase Chaos Damage %?

Also, why do we use a Wither Totem for bosses instead putting Wither with CWDT? I feel like CWDT + Lightning Golem (for Attack/Cast Speed) + Wither + {damage skill} would be good.

Atziri's Acuity vs a decent Finglerless Silk Glove? I feel like it's 1.25%-1.75% Crit Chance, armor, and 3 Skill Points vs Spell Damage and Resistances. Acuity relies on crit which could be a risk. I know the crit chance is still pretty high, but it's not 100%. What are your thoughts (excluding pricing).

Belt of the Deceiver vs decent Leather Belt? This one is tough. Deceiver gives 10% damage through intimidate and good resistances; the reduced crit damage taken is nice too. But it only gives so low HP. With a Leather Belt with high Strength and HP explicits, you can get over 100 HP more than the Deceiver and have Resistances to match; HP is also damage. What are your thoughts?

MoM vs pure Life? I really do like MoM, but I haven't done enough research to see how much offense or defense I'm gaining or losing by needing to go through Mana nodes. With MoM, I can't be stacking multiple Auras. And also, stacking more life means more damage as well. If the eHP is the same, taking a Savage Hit would require the same damage so it's not a big deal in that aspect. If you can achieve the same eHP going either route, I don't see a point in MoM. An advantage to having MoM would be that you can potion both Life and Mana at the same time which adds an extra layer of protection, but in this case, the leech is instant so that doesn't help here. Have you done any comparisons with MoM vs Life?

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What's the difference between Bladefall, Blade Vortex, Vortex, and Essence Drain for CWDT? Essence Drain be better since it's Chaos damage so it scales with our Increase Chaos Damage %?

Also, why do we use a Wither Totem for bosses instead putting Wither with CWDT? I feel like CWDT + Lightning Golem (for Attack/Cast Speed) + Wither + {damage skill} would be good.

Atziri's Acuity vs a decent Finglerless Silk Glove? I feel like it's 1.25%-1.75% Crit Chance, armor, and 3 Skill Points vs Spell Damage and Resistances. Acuity relies on crit which could be a risk. I know the crit chance is still pretty high, but it's not 100%. What are your thoughts (excluding pricing).

Belt of the Deceiver vs decent Leather Belt? This one is tough. Deceiver gives 10% damage through intimidate and good resistances; the reduced crit damage taken is nice too. But it only gives so low HP. With a Leather Belt with high Strength and HP explicits, you can get over 100 HP more than the Deceiver and have Resistances to match; HP is also damage. What are your thoughts?

MoM vs pure Life? I really do like MoM, but I haven't done enough research to see how much offense or defense I'm gaining or losing by needing to go through Mana nodes. With MoM, I can't be stacking multiple Auras. And also, stacking more life means more damage as well. If the eHP is the same, taking a Savage Hit would require the same damage so it's not a big deal in that aspect. If you can achieve the same eHP going either route, I don't see a point in MoM. An advantage to having MoM would be that you can potion both Life and Mana at the same time which adds an extra layer of protection, but in this case, the leech is instant so that doesn't help here. Have you done any comparisons with MoM vs Life?

The CWDT setup isn't for extra DPS. It serves two defensive purposes. The first, it provides emergency leech if you're stunned or otherwise for some reason would die to two big hits in a row. Any high damage spell would accomplish this goal. The second, it chills, which is a pretty good defensive debuff. This is why we choose Vortex over other options.

Wither is on a totem and not CWDT because a single wither does almost nothing. It is only strong as it stacks. Perhaps in a long enough fight that damages us often enough, it would stack up to 20 on a cwdt without falling off between casts, but I haven't been in a fight that lasts long enough yet. To be honest, this isn't really something I considered, so I may try it out at some point. Maybe it will surprise me.

Acuity isn't to save three skill points, it's to get instant mana leech, which makes MoM a lot better. Getting three points and our health regen back is just icing. I expect our crit and cast speed to be high enough to be fine, but again this is something I may be surprised by when I actually test it. In any case, I made this build specifically to take advantage of synergies like MoM and Acuity. I hope it works, because if it doesn't this build becomes inelegant and boring to me. If you play Magic, you might recognize me as a Johnny.

I've had a few people ask about deceiver. It's possible I'm overvaluing the 30% less extra crit damage, but it sounds really goddamn strong to me. The fact that it gives more than 0 health and resistances is a bonus. Intimidate is also nice, but not the thing that jumped out at me. I suspect the Intimidate makes up for the missing damage from health (most of the damage of DP comes from the spell scaling, not the health scaling, anyway). And as for having less health for survivability purposes, I think taking less damage is pretty survivable. Especially when big hits are pretty much the only thing that threaten us. Crits are the biggest hits.

Berserker takes 110% normal damage. With MoM, 77% goes to life and 33% goes to mana. This feels much more manageable to me than taking 10% more damage from things that are intended to one shot us normally. I really like MoM when we have the mana to use it, and I decided I didn't have anything important to reserve mana for before I decided to take MoM while theory crafting. I also really like the synergy it represents in this build. Even if it's not optimal, that's what this build is. There are other DP builds out there, this is the MoM Acuity Pledge one.

Maybe I mislead people with the flashy numbers in the title, but this was never meant to be the strongest possible build this patch (even if it might wind up being a contender for all-around utility). It's a Johnny brew, something that satisfies my OCD and feels elegant to me. It's a build that feels sharp and fluid to play, doesn't require a ton of janky shit that feels like it should flow better, uses every part of the animal, and is still strong as hell.

If we had a bunch of mana and didn't use MoM, it would feel like wasted potential to me. If we run MoM but try to use Apep's, it seems like a travesty, even if some of our numbers go higher. If I came up with an elegant single solution to 4 or 5 simultaneous problems that involves Kaom's and streamlining our gem setup, and then I don't wind up actually using Kaom's because I need a 6L chest because I'm using a spell dagger now, that feels like failure to me. I might was well not have a build up, any of the other DP builds will do.

This is art to me, and I feel like I made something beautiful.

I'm taking suggestions on certain things left and right, pulling improvements from other threads as I see interesting ideas. But I don't think I'm going to change Acuity, MoM, Pledge or Kaom's.

Made this build to try out in STD where I have Kaoms and Atziri gloves. It does deal a lot of damage, but the amount of damage I take is insane aswell. I even have legacy "surgeon" flasks for virtually infinite granite flask and still. I have 5800 life only and I don't think I could get better gear on a temp league.

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Schn1tt3r wrote:

Made this build to try out in STD where I have Kaoms and Atziri gloves. It does deal a lot of damage, but the amount of damage I take is insane aswell. I even have legacy "surgeon" flasks for virtually infinite granite flask and still. I have 5800 life only and I don't think I could get better gear on a temp league.

That's weird. I'm sitting at a solid 5500 life and I don't have Kaom's yet. I've spent about 100C on my gear (including The Jeweller's Touch and Lav's Spirit, which together were 70C and give no health), my rolls are nowhere near perfect. Some of my life prefixes are a third of what's possible.

With all that, just the 400 extra base life from Kaom's puts me over your 5800, and that's without factoring in the 200%+ increased life I get from the tree. I should wind up hitting 6700+ just adding Kaom's to my current setup. In Harbinger.

I'm not sure what it is that you're doing wrong, but your life is not very high for this build.

Has anyone done Shaper with this build?

I just loaded your build up in PoB. You're missing a lot of life from the tree. You didn't finish any of the life clusters. You didn't even take any of Quick Recovery cluster. You're not as far into the life wheel as I am. I think you went after Throatseeker and Serpent Stance too soon. Throatseeker should probably be the last three nodes you take.

Your amulet also doesn't have any life on it. Your ring life rolls seem pretty low, and none of your gear has the new life/defense hybrid prefix.

You could get a lot more life out of your character here, without investing all that much money. "Impossible in a temp league" is a huge overstatement.

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outofmilk wrote:

Has anyone done Shaper with this build?

I recall a few people saying they had or were about to, but I haven't gotten there yet and no one's given me proof. I'm not going to claim it's done shaper without knowing for sure.

I'm currently saving up for a Kaom's, then I'll try to push more content.

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