[3.4] Occultist Herald of Agony Brainstorming

Having here a hybrid tree. This one seems pretty solid.
Aiming for calamity
On the edge for resolute technique

would appreciate a look over it.

https://pastebin.com/bhGZwT0D

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Kaldolol wrote:

I haven't taken a look at your PoB yet but a few thoughts:
- Tornado Shot is a nice idea but I think that you'll have to use LMP/GMP. My biggest fear is that we won't be able to maintain enough Virulence stacks to have a significant HoAg DPS.

You'd be sacrificing DPS but I'm not sure that it will be relevant at the end since you're already sacrificing 3 links for the CoH setup in your Tornado Shot, even with the minion damage applied to us.

If you go that way you don't have to reach 300 Dex for the Dendrobate bonus. You can still use Dendrobate as a 7link: Tornado Shot/GMP/Poison/Curse on Hit/2 Curses and you now have 100% chance to poison without having to spend any points in the tree or use a flask.

I was truly going for a hybrid build around my character doing damage/buffing Scorp and added damage of Scorp. I like your idea, so that I don't have to worry about my actual poison dealing damage, just applying poison and debuffs.

I'll try to rework my tree to test these changes.

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Kaldolol wrote:

- Not using Calamity means that your 6L Herald of Agony will most likely reserve more than 100% of your Mana. You may have to settle for a 5L or invest in Mana reservation reduction.

I'm not too familiar with aura reservation multipliers, but using Mikelat's Calculator, they explained local multiplier as (115% + 150% = 165%). Following that I would be at 205% local multiplier for the listed links, putting the HoAg at 51% mana reservation. Am I missing this and it is larger?

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Kaldolol wrote:

- I don't think that Added Chaos or Pierce are the best choices in your Herald of Agony since:
¤ Virulence stacks already provide a huge amount of base damage
¤ Profane Bloom coupled with the scorpion's AoE will most likely deal well enough with packs.

Any suggestions on additional support gems?

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EmptyPalms wrote:

Any suggestions on additional support gems?

PoB was updated so I'm using that to check how much Herald of Agony will reserve.

The Core 4 link for me is:
- Herald of Agony
- Damage on Full Life (if it works
- Minion Damage
- Vicious Projectiles

this pusts HoA at 50% mana reservation.

Adding GMP (which I don't think is necessary) puts it a 83%, using Slower Projectiles instead puts it a 70%. In Both cases you're a bit short on Mana to use Discipline for example, unless you invest on Mana Reservation reduction in the tree but I feel like we'll be point-starved seeing as there are so many good stuff for us. It looks like it would be difficult to find a good setup that would put HoA at less than 70% (enough to add Discipline), hence Calamity.

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Kaldolol wrote:

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EmptyPalms wrote:

Any suggestions on additional support gems?

PoB was updated so I'm using that to check how much Herald of Agony will reserve.

The Core 4 link for me is:
- Herald of Agony
- Damage on Full Life (if it works
- Minion Damage
- Vicious Projectiles

this pusts HoA at 50% mana reservation.

Adding GMP (which I don't think is necessary) puts it a 83%, using Slower Projectiles instead puts it a 70%. In Both cases you're a bit short on Mana to use Discipline for example, unless you invest on Mana Reservation reduction in the tree but I feel like we'll be point-starved seeing as there are so many good stuff for us. It looks like it would be difficult to find a good setup that would put HoA at less than 70% (enough to add Discipline), hence Calamity.

Indeed I was left with 1% mana reserved, which would be a problem. I dropped some self pierce nodes (since you pointed out lack of necessity due to profane bloom) to take 4 aura nodes in the Templar area and 1 node under CI to give me some breathing room.

I think that I'm going to try stay with the Hybrid Damage tree (where my poisons do damage) since I couldn't figure much else to invest into my tree. If it doesn't go well I'll try your route before scrapping the character.

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OhneFlachs wrote:

The benefits from necro aren't as huge.

The scorpi gets 400% increased dmg on full stacks.
compared to necro and the other minion nodes thats HUGE.

the benefit from minion movespeed, and attack speed are great tho, and you still can have a secondary minion setup for more dmg and survivability as counting only on 1 minion to deal dmg without having a meatshield to protect you may be dangerous, i think that overall necro might be far better early on, later on bow ci build can mitigate a lot of dmg while having very good sustain, corpse explosion become handy in lategame (especially for deep delve) and curses become great very usefull, but until you got a high es with fast recharge start and good enough as and poison chance to make HoAg a reliable minion it will be clunky, definitly isn't a good league starter as for me, anyway in late game respecking isn't that big of a deal

I think that avoiding the coming calamity to use atziri's disfavour or IH might be a huge tankyness boost. If you invest into some mana reservation to squeeze a discipline in.
then you'll need a curse setup, toxic rain might be great as it hits a large area and slows, you support this with CoH/2curses, miror archer and aoe/faster attack or poison chance allowing you to curse everything around without having to reserve mana.
finally you can use tornado shot/barrage with poison chance, withering touch and gmp on a 4 link(5link gloves with attack speed if you want to make it better) to help sustain the virulence and debuffing bosses chaos res.
you had the 5 or 6L herald depending on how much mana reserved you have and you still got helmet and boots sockets for discipline, blink arrow and a cwdt setup.
taking coming calamity save you some passive tree points or allows you to use 1 blasphemy (you can get rid of 1 curse gem on your toxic rain or get rid of the whole curse on hit setup if your ok having just one in action, or invest into a third curse) not sure what will be the best i guess their's a lot of testing