[3.0] Another Crit Dark Pact but "SAFER & FUNNIER", In-depth. Now with "Speed/Nuke Weapon Swap Ver."

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Flapdrol wrote:

And even if you were right, the fact that you get less money for your drops is nothing to worry about, since the items that you want to buy also become cheaper.

Here's the problem. What you say here is actually only partly true.

Take a bino's, for example, when blade flurry was king; or a ROTP in a RF-heavy meta. In the first week of the league they're worth the total GDP of a small country. By week 4 you can get them for a fusing.

However, a 6L carcass jack goes for 500c in the first week and is still worth 500c now - because demand out-strips supply so significantly. Meanwhile, casual players getting to maps later sell the 'more valuable' rares that drop for 1-2c, rather than the 10-20c the same rares would go for 3 weeks earlier.

Yes, I agree that a casual player will never achieve the greatness of a dedicated gamer without the demands of toddlers, work, bills et cetera. That is a given. Such a casual player measures greatness in other ways - such as whether or not they got their partner to change that pooey nappy instead.

There's no way of changing this, it is just the facts...but it does mean that to get the kind of wealth that allows for end-game shaper farming as a casual player requires an amazing amount of luck. We continue to chance Sorcerer Boots but we know that, in all probability, we will never see the grandeur that is the MTX of the 36th achievement.

Visit my hide out sometime...I'll show you the stumpy totem poles that are the pathetic showing of my last half-dozen leagues. I can, however, say with pride, that once I too got killed by Chimera.

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Altissimus wrote:

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Flapdrol wrote:

And even if you were right, the fact that you get less money for your drops is nothing to worry about, since the items that you want to buy also become cheaper.

Take a bino's, for example, when blade flurry was king; or a ROTP in a RF-heavy meta. In the first week of the league they're worth the total GDP of a small country. By week 4 you can get them for a fusing.

However, a 6L carcass jack goes for 500c in the first week and is still worth 500c now - because demand out-strips supply so significantly. Meanwhile, casual players getting to maps later sell the 'more valuable' rares that drop for 1-2c, rather than the 10-20c the same rares would go for 3 weeks earlier.

Admittedly, it is easier at the start, but it is still very possible now to do serious farming. 500c is not *that* much. And Carcass Jack is absolutely not necessary: only the 50% Area Damage (translating to about 15% extra damage) is nice: the 20% extra AOE is almost unnoticeable. You can get a decent 6L for under 100c with more life and better resists.

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Altissimus wrote:

Yes, I agree that a casual player will never achieve the greatness of a dedicated gamer without the demands of toddlers, work, bills et cetera. That is a given. Such a casual player measures greatness in other ways - such as whether or not they got their partner to change that pooey nappy instead.

There's no way of changing this, it is just the facts...but it does mean that to get the kind of wealth that allows for end-game shaper farming as a casual player requires an amazing amount of luck. We continue to chance Sorcerer Boots but we know that, in all probability, we will never see the grandeur that is the MTX of the 36th achievement.

Suppose it was easy for casuals to farm Shaper. Then either all the non-casuals would leave (no challenge) or GGG would add an UberShaper for them to enjoy. You can't win.

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Altissimus wrote:

Visit my hide out sometime...I'll show you the stumpy totem poles that are the pathetic showing of my last half-dozen leagues. I can, however, say with pride, that once I too got killed by Chimera.

My screen drips coffee as I am typing this. Do not drink and laugh at the same time.

I have managed to kill the Guardians (not Shaper) with my Golem build this league, mostly by exploiting the fact that if you die, your golems fight on. I'm not proud of that :(

How do people survive with DP??? I built mine a variety of ways testing crit, noncrit, and a plethora of defense options including those you introduce here. Even with 8k life I found it super rippy. I am about to liquid ate all of my DP gear out of shear frustration. I really do not see how this build survives bosses.

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How do people survive with DP??? I built mine a variety of ways testing crit, noncrit, and a plethora of defense options including those you introduce here. Even with 8k life I found it super rippy. I am about to liquid ate all of my DP gear out of shear frustration. I really do not see how this build survives bosses.

What maps are you running, to give us an idea of where you're at. Can you link your current POB?

Regarding bosses - and non-trash fights in general - you need to be aware of:

- DOTs - use bleeding and burning flasks
- spamming DP when you're not hitting anything - fast cast speed here can cause a lot of problems before you realise your target has moved off
- Make sure fortify (if you're using it) is up.
- Try switching to Enfeeble.

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How do people survive with DP??? I built mine a variety of ways testing crit, noncrit, and a plethora of defense options including those you introduce here. Even with 8k life I found it super rippy. I am about to liquid ate all of my DP gear out of shear frustration. I really do not see how this build survives bosses.

Im quoting myself

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diabloyd wrote:

-You won't die unless you get one shot.

nonetheless, you have 8K life and you shouldn't get one shot by any bosses besides Guardians with some damage mods and shaper (or some other very obvious need-to-dodge skills, example, lightning slam from the boss of Palace).

Unless you're dealing with pure DoT encounters

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How do people survive with DP??? I built mine a variety of ways testing crit, noncrit, and a plethora of defense options including those you introduce here. Even with 8k life I found it super rippy. I am about to liquid ate all of my DP gear out of shear frustration. I really do not see how this build survives bosses.

I had the same problems, dying mostly to carelessness and stupidity. So I made the following changes:
- move to a big evasion build with Starkonja's Head
- replaced Assassins Mark with Enfeeble (which synchronises *really* well with Evasion
- replaced Kaom's Root with Desth's Door and that has solved Bleed and Corrupting Blood for me
- add Orb of Stroms / PCoC, but removed the three power charge nodes as I no longer have charges up all the time (again: carelessness and lazyness)

In big fights, I cast Wither Totem, Orb of Storms and hit Jade and Diamond. With the Jade flask my evasion is 15K. On low-life Starkonja kicks in for a lot more. Enfeeble halves their accuracy. Good luck hitting me. The hit to dps is there, but manageable with Diamond Flask.

The build is now *really* tanky. Hard to hit, no bleed, high life and leeches like hell.

Key items:

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Flapdrol wrote:

I had the same problems, dying mostly to carelessness and stupidity. So I made the following changes:
- move to a big evasion build with Starkonja's Head
- replaced Assassins Mark with Enfeeble (which synchronises *really* well with Evasion
- replaced Kaom's Root with Desth's Door and that has solved Bleed and Corrupting Blood for me
- add Orb of Stroms / PCoC, but removed the three power charge nodes as I no longer have charges up all the time (again: carelessness and lazyness)

In big fights, I cast Wither Totem, Orb of Storms and hit Jade and Diamond. With the Jade flask my evasion is 15K. On low-life Starkonja kicks in for a lot more. Enfeeble halves their accuracy. Good luck hitting me. The hit to dps is there, but manageable with Diamond Flask.

The build is now *really* tanky. Hard to hit, no bleed, high life and leeches like hell.

Key items:

Seems like a nice idea to replace Kaom's root. Starkonja's seems nice, I might get one.

But the others might not fit in my play style.
Death's door has a bleed immune, which is basically useless to me....I'm almost always on the quicksilver flask with bleed immune...
Imma just get a good-ol rare boots instead to make up with the life loss from replacing Kaom's root. I might still hit 8000~8300 life like this.
Instead of using Orb of Storms to get Power charges, and since we have the extra 4 slots from the boots, here's my thought:
1, the previous CWDT setup, replace the bladevortex with lightning golem (in an proper level that can be casted by CWDT) or Inc.Duration.
Get another CWDT in the shield, linked with bladevortex-PCoC.
2, Put the auras in the new boots. I'll still get Assassin's Mark though. and I can swap off the unset ring to a Diamond ring for more crits.

This way, it can swap the weapon to Brightbeak and use shield charge with culling strike on it when speedclearing or culling striking shaper/guardians without losing the auras.

Good inspiration I got from you, thanks! I like this already, gonna try it as soon as I get home.

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diabloyd wrote:

Death's door has a bleed immune, which is basically useless to me....I'm almost always on the quicksilver flask with bleed immune...

I'm also almost always on quicksilver. But I'm too careless for "almost" being good enough for me. Once you hit 93 or so, dying sets you back a few hours.

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diabloyd wrote:

Instead of using Orb of Storms to get Power charges, and since we have the extra 4 slots from the boots, here's my thought:
1, the previous CWDT setup, replace the bladevortex with lightning golem (in an proper level that can be casted by CWDT) or Inc.Duration.
Get another CWDT in the shield, linked with bladevortex-PCoC.
2, Put the auras in the new boots. I'll still get Assassin's Mark though. and I can swap off the unset ring to a Diamond ring for more crits.

YES! That should work *much* better than my clunky manually casted Orb, and solve this continous golem-casting as well. I think I should use a CWDT level 1 for the Vortex, so it goes off as often as possible, while a high-level golem offers only minimal benefits over a low level one, right?

For the diamond ring, try to find one with an open prefix so Elreon can craft evasion% on it. I have an expensive one: because I'm shortish on resists, but with rare boots you can get a ring with less resists for a lot less.

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diabloyd wrote:

This way, it can swap the weapon to Brightbeak and use shield charge with culling strike on it when speedclearing or culling striking shaper/guardians without losing the auras.

I'm not good enough to handle two different movement styles, so I will just use an Arc-Culling Strike-Rarity for the Guardians.

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diabloyd wrote:

Good inspiration I got from you, thanks! I like this already, gonna try it as soon as I get home.

Thank you thank you. The inspiration goes both ways. It's a really amazing build.

Also did some lookup with this old table: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kCeAy43G3LiL0NMFVEgrLy0Uf1DXMjuyx_-7hRq47y4/edit#gid=17

A level 82 monster has an extrapolated accuracy of 650. Enfeeble 20/20 with a bonus from Blasphemy Q20 halves this, so it goes to 325. This gives me a 48% to evade as is, and a 70% to evade with Jade Flask. Even more on low-life when Starkonja kicks in. And then a 33% less damage modifier is applied (plus crit reduction). All in all it is really noticeable: the Bladefall goes off way less often than it used to.

In my tree, I have removed the three power charge nodes (they may come back later) and added three nodes between Coldhearted Calculation and Fangs of the Viper (all the way on the right). That means I can delete the dex node below Fangs of the Viper. 2 nodes for a total of 35% evasion, 5% life, 8% ele-res (very useful with all these uniques) and 20%ES (not that useful)

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Flapdrol wrote:

YES! That should work *much* better

Hi! I'm back and with some feedback about the build's variation.

Unfortunately, the build without Kaom's Heart that we have discussed didn't work for me.....

The stun, even with the pantheon, is just the total opposite of Quality of Life. and damage is nice, and we have some evades, BUT, I'll only have 7900 life with this one. And this is not enough to face-tank Guardians/Shaper.

I died a few times trying to face-tank Minotaurs, but it was not the attacks of aoe that killed me, it was the frikin stun.

So I switched back to the "Clearing/Nuke, weapon swap ver." i wrote in the original post, and then I reached 8400 + life. Which makes me basically face-tanking everything without losing any advantages of Damage, SpeedClearing and BossNuking.

Again, STUN is the only and biggest problem (well the life is lower, but we got evade so that's not a problem), And getting stunned is literally destroying the QoL of the game.

However..with the "Clearing/Nuke, weapon swap ver.", the performance is much better that I expected (I didn't play the game for a week, so I didn't have the chance to actually try for it)

You should try it yourself really, strongly recommended :)

I have recorded some videos killing shaper and guardians.....I can upload it to Youtube but I think it's not that necessary to do that anymore since ppl already know what this build looks like (or maybe not)

PS: i used orb of storms + PCoC to kill shaper, However the efficiency of gaining Power Charges was not that good, worse than I expected.....

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diabloyd wrote:

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Flapdrol wrote:

YES! That should work *much* better

Hi! I'm back and with some feedback about the build's variation.

Unfortunately, the build without Kaom's Heart that we have discussed didn't work for me.....

The stun, even with the pantheon, is just the total opposite of Quality of Life. and damage is nice, and we have some evades, BUT, I'll only have 7900 life with this one. And this is not enough to face-tank Guardians/Shaper.

I died a few times trying to face-tank Minotaurs, but it was not the attacks of aoe that killed me, it was the frikin stun.

So I switched back to the "Clearing/Nuke, weapon swap ver." i wrote in the original post, and then I reached 8400 + life. Which makes me basically face-tanking everything without losing any advantages of Damage, SpeedClearing and BossNuking.

Again, STUN is the only and biggest problem (well the life is lower, but we got evade so that's not a problem), And getting stunned is literally destroying the QoL of the game.

However..with the "Clearing/Nuke, weapon swap ver.", the performance is much better that I expected (I didn't play the game for a week, so I didn't have the chance to actually try for it)

You should try it yourself really, strongly recommended :)

I have recorded some videos killing shaper and guardians.....I can upload it to Youtube but I think it's not that necessary to do that anymore since ppl already know what this build looks like (or maybe not)

PS: i used orb of storms + PCoC to kill shaper, However the efficiency of gaining Power Charges was not that good, worse than I expected.....

Thanks for looking on this!

I'm one level away from attempting Guardians. Upgrading all my jewels etc. I'm not really being stunned at all even on T15 maps. Is it only the Guardians that are stunning you?

For the Guardians, I think I will probably have to heed your advice, unless......this baby works
when I swap into it for the Guardians.
It gives me exactly 100% stun recovery. According to the formulas on the wiki, this means zero duration stuns. We will see .....