[3.4] 0 ES CI 500% MS Fast Fossil Farmer Pathfinder

THIS BUILD IS DEAD, 3.5 MURDERED IT
The reason behind that is the addition of flat damage to the Darkness debuff, and even without that, the reduction of Phase Run's "reduced visibility" would make it impossible to not get hit. It's been great guys, hope another way of cheesing the game that hard comes out eventually.



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What's the point of this build?

As many of you probably already know, farming the darkness is very profitable, and if done right, can be even more so than mapping (not 6-man party MF mapping, though).

The point of this build is to get fossils, quickly, and in relative safety, which is done through reducing the enemies detection radius, slowing them down, being immune to darkness damage, and being really, really speedy.

There are many "budget" fossil farmers. While mine does work well on a budget, I have decided to invest more currency in it than most people are willing to do on a build that has no defence nor offence.

On top of that, walking in town isn't as painful, with over 200% MS.

Screenshots
No flasks/phase run:
Flasks + Phase Run:
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Bandits, PoB, Tree, Pantheon, Videos
•Bandits: Kill all.
•PoB: https://pastebin.com/9uqzB9SN
•Tree: click here
•Pantheon: Major = Soul of Lunaris, upgraded with Thraxia. Minor = Soul of Garukhan, upgraded. They both grant Movement Speed. Lunaris gives you some more survivability, too.
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Pros and Cons

Pros
• 500% Movement Speed is reachable quite easily
• Immune to Darkness
• Mobs can't see you
• High chance to evade, and can dodge
• Can be made on a low budget

Cons
• Flask piano can be painful after a while
• Die in 1 hit
• Requires you to be aware of your surroundings
• No offense. At all. Can't kill a single level 1 mob if I wanted
• Bumping into walls is giving me bruises
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Gearing
(Ignore gems in items, they may have changed since then. Check the "Gem Links" section for up to date links)

REQUIRED
Spoiler

Just Extra
Spoiler

Flasks
Spoiler

Complete Gear

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Gear Discussions and Options

I believe the options I have chosen to be optimal, though there is some room for change, in case of lower budgets. No matter what, do NOT get any Energy Shield on your gear. This will only make you take more damage from the Darkness Debuff.

Spoiler
Helmet

Devoto's is just uncontestable for this slot. It grants 20% Movement Speed, the highest of any helmet, and has a decent bit of Evasion for reaching your 45k easily. Which can be done with only QoTF and a Stibnite Flask of Reflexes on this build anyway.
The 30% Temporal Chains Curse Effect helmet enchant is an extra layer of "ways to avoid the eventual oneshot"

Weapons

Dual Wielding Ichimonjis is our best option here. It increases the speed we get from Haste, the Evasion we get from Grace, and the speed we get from our Quicksilver Flask.
On top of this, it allows us to run Haste, Grace, and a Blasphemy Temporal Chains with only the nodes we have on the tree.
Furthermore, Ichimonjis buff our Phase Run, making us even quicker when we have it, and increasing the "Reduced Visibility to Enemies" buff it grants, giving us a total of 96% Reduced Visibility. You can easily stand in a pack spamming Phase Run and have them not notice you with that.


If you don't care that much about dying a lot and just want pure speed, you can run dual Allures for an extra 30% movement speed.

Amulet

Not much to say here. Karui Ward, Karui Charge, it's the same for us. We just want that 10% Increased Movement Speed. The corruption is not needed, but is optimal.

Body Armour

Absolutely mandatory Unique. Allows us to run fast according to our Evasion, which is capped at 100% or 45000 Evasion. This is the single biggest Movement Speed Increase Unique in the game.

Rings

Mandatory uniques. Luckily, they're cheap rings. Double your level, that's your flat Life Regen per Second. We only need 25 flat to be able to tank 5000 Darkness stacks at 75% Darkness Resistance. Those rings alone give me 180 flat at level 90, so I can tank 5000 stacks of Darkness at -80% Darkness Res with just them equipped. Crazy good.

Gloves

Anything rare with Evasion for easier QotF capping and maybe some life regen, so you can tank 5k stacks with even less resistance will do the trick. Even not wearing gloves is fine, to be honest.

Belt

Not mandatory, but really good for the price. 15% Increased Movement Speed and 60% Increased Flask Duration at the cost of 30% Reduced Flask Charges Gained is a net positive, and a very big one.

You could get (8–12)% increased Movement Speed during any Flask Effect as a corruption for it, I've personally have had no luck so far.


I've seen a lot of players rocking an Immortal Flesh. This is complete overkill. See the Darkness Resistance spoiler a bit further below for why that is. The only good stat on the belt is, in my opinion, the -X Physical Damage Taken from Attacks, which might allow us to tank some phys attacks at very low depths.

Boots

Not required, but definitely best in slot. Get the cheapest 35% Increased Movement Speed boots you find if you can't afford those.

Jewels

•Conqueror's Potency makes our flasks better, and therefore makes us faster. It's cheap, get it. It also makes our Temporal Chains slightly stronger, which is always good.
•Assassin's Haste is just 4% Movement Speed. It's also cheap, take it as well.
•Pure Talent grants us a juicy 7% Increased Movement Speed, as we are connected to the Ranger starting location by default.
•Watcher's Eye with Grace mod: The most expensive jewel here, but it's up to 15% Increased Movement Speed. How could I not take that.
•Transcendent Spirit is the second most expensive one. It grants 10% increased movement speed when placed here:

Flasks

The core of any Pathfinder build.
I use two Overflowing Chalices to have better flask sustain. One is used when the other is empty. It works pretty well.
The other three flasks are pretty self explanatory. Stibnite of Reflexes for Evasion (and Blind, that can be of use too), Silver for Onslaught, AKA more Movement Speed, and an Alchemist's Quicksilver Flask of Adrenaline just to be faster.
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Gem Links

5L:

Enhance is not needed, it just makes you faster by adding quality to the Phase Run gem.

4L:

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Ascendancy Choices



You only really need Normal Lab for this build to work, the rest is just extra Movement Speed.
Nature's Boon provides us with flask charges, so combined with the tree's %Increased Flask Charges Gained and the Overflowing Chalices, we have 100% uptime on our flasks.
Nature's Adrenaline gives an extra 15% Increased Movement Speed, so that's good.
All of the other Major Ascendancy nodes grant us nothing, as they're either defensive or offensive nodes. We have 0 offence an exactly 1 defence. So if you ascend past Cruel, pick up the minor nodes for flask duration, effect, and charges gained.
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Misc.

Optimal Fossil Running

For Fossil farming, you can either run in the dark close to where you've been with the Crawler, or you can abuse the fact that resetting instances also resets fossils.
What you really want to do is find a nice, long (but not too long) Delve with a lot of space around it, in the Biome you want to farm. For example, here is my Magma Fissure biome Delve:


Note that the path looks like it's lit up, but I have NEVER ran this Delve with the Crawler. I simply connected the two nodes to different paths, which lit up the way of that Delve, but didn't delete the loots. This allows me to start it at one end, run to the other, and TP back to the start by clicking the Crawler.

To avoid as many deaths as possible, I suggest spamming the ever-living fuck out of your Phase Run. With a 20/20 Increased Duration and a Level 7 Efficacy, mine lasts 4.97s. It's on a 4s cooldown, so you have .97s of downtime per cast, which should be long enough of a delay to accommodate your spam.

You should avoid any area that has the "Monsters Cannot be Slowed Down Below Base Speed" modifier. It makes it a fair bit more dangerous, especially if coupled with other speed related mods, as if a monster detects you, it will be very quick to oneshot you.

On top of that, I suggest running with the minimap open and zoomed out, using that to direct yourself. The build is too fast for just looking at where you're going.

Darkness Mechanics
Darkness is a debuff that applies at a rate of 4 per second to your character while you're far from light in the Azurite Mines. At 75% Darkness Resistance, each stack will deal 0.5% of your total life and energy shield combined as DoT damage to your character, for a maximum of 2500% eHP per second at 5000 stacks.
From simple maths, we can conclude that the Darkness debuff deals 10000% eHP per second at 0% Darkness Resistance, adding another 100% per each negative Darkness Resistance percent.

We have exactly 1 HP.

Conclusion: to tank 5000 Darkness stacks, you need 25 flat Life Regen per Second at 75% Darkness Resistance, 100 at 0% Darkness resistance, and an additional 1 per each negative percent Darkness Resistance.

Leveling
This build cannot be leveled as is for obvious reasons, so I suggest going a different build and respec a character over to this build.

Special Thanks
Thanks to Ghudda for discovering and sharing with the PoE community his mighty ways of abusing the Darkness.
Also thanks to Rhaegar_G for sharing some item choices and discussing the general Fossil farming build concepts with me. Made me remember that The Retch exists.

Q&A
Q: Why are you min-maxing a build that can be done with a 15c budget?
A: Because I can.


Last edited by ClKhrom on Dec 5, 2018, 4:45:00 AM
Last bumped on Dec 13, 2018, 4:37:07 PM
"
For Fossil farming, you can either run in the dark close to where you've been with the Crawler, or you can abuse the fact that resetting instances also resets fossils.


you do know this is an exploit and will be punished, right? i think GGG has stated so on reddit or something. definitely hasn't said anything on their official forums though. fuck that.
"
xMustard wrote:
"
For Fossil farming, you can either run in the dark close to where you've been with the Crawler, or you can abuse the fact that resetting instances also resets fossils.


you do know this is an exploit and will be punished, right? i think GGG has stated so on reddit or something. definitely hasn't said anything on their official forums though. fuck that.


Not so sure about that one.
Last edited by ClKhrom on Sep 28, 2018, 8:33:17 PM
typical mixed messages about this shit without any fucking official word on their god damn forums

https://imgur.com/a/riGq71y

this was linked in the discussion you posted
"
xMustard wrote:
typical mixed messages about this shit without any fucking official word on their god damn forums

https://imgur.com/a/riGq71y

this was linked in the discussion you posted


Look further below. Bex's answer is to an answer to that comment (whew, word logic made me retype that a few times). I'd rather take an official message posted by Bex on the subreddit than a chat log, which could easily be tempered.
i dunno i can't fucking stand reading reddit. its why i don't.

knowing this i'll do it until i get an official word about it on these forums.
How often do you die? Is it feasible to do this on HC?
"
Blitzeratops wrote:
How often do you die? Is it feasible to do this on HC?

I would 100% not recommend this on HC. I don't die very often, probably twice today and I've been running delves with this build for around 8 hours, but deaths are unavoidable.

If a mob manages to detect you and you happen to have bad luck with what mob it is (Hellions, big mines guys, bats), you're almost guaranteed a death. On top of that, the totem mobs from the fire area are a massive pain. Their Lightning Warp can snipe you with pretty good accuracy if you're running below a certain speed, and they can use the same damaging thing as Pulseblood Bloodlines. That will make you go down with no chance of moving away. Or with a bit of luck, your spelldodge will proc and you'll dodge it, but I wouldn't count on that to make a HC character survive.
I have a neat variation where I was close enough to 45000 evasion(for qotf 100%ms) to rely on a single stibnite flask and 2 quicksilver.

Changes are mostly on gear:

-The Tactician for +50% flask charges gained, which works with the passive generation.

-Rare ring with life regen, flat EV, and craft %EV(Elrion 7)

-Atziri's step.

-Doedre's ring for enfeeble instead of haste.

Its a lot slower, but its cheap as hell and is safer until you get to that ridiculous speeds with the exalt gear. As long as you get about 10-20 regen on that ring, you can last for like 10 minutes in the dark. So its not dark immune, but if you need more than 10 minute to clear an area at 300+ms, then your doing something wrong.

A stibnite of reflexes lasts long enough for nature's boon to restore it. Its even easier with a 20%q and/or experimenter's-, but not required. Two quicksilvers are needed for 100% uptime(or 3-4 for alchemist's-).

With enfeeble, you can drop one sword and the mana res nodes. I went for curse effect nodes to further slow/evade enemies.

Its a nice middle ground from the bare minimum gear req and the 6-7 exalt gear
"
EbonRogue wrote:
I have a neat variation where I was close enough to 45000 evasion(for qotf 100%ms) to rely on a single stibnite flask and 2 quicksilver.

Changes are mostly on gear:

-The Tactician for +50% flask charges gained, which works with the passive generation.

-Rare ring with life regen, flat EV, and craft %EV(Elrion 7)

-Atziri's step.

-Doedre's ring for enfeeble instead of haste.

Its a lot slower, but its cheap as hell and is safer until you get to that ridiculous speeds with the exalt gear. As long as you get about 10-20 regen on that ring, you can last for like 10 minutes in the dark. So its not dark immune, but if you need more than 10 minute to clear an area at 300+ms, then your doing something wrong.

A stibnite of reflexes lasts long enough for nature's boon to restore it. Its even easier with a 20%q and/or experimenter's-, but not required. Two quicksilvers are needed for 100% uptime(or 3-4 for alchemist's-).

With enfeeble, you can drop one sword and the mana res nodes. I went for curse effect nodes to further slow/evade enemies.

Its a nice middle ground from the bare minimum gear req and the 6-7 exalt gear


That does seem pretty nice, but The Retch is just too good to pass up on. It's a free 15% movespeed. The 50% charge gained allow you to be a bit more fatfingered on your flasks, but with decent management, 100% uptime is easily achieved.
Last edited by ClKhrom on Oct 3, 2018, 4:50:50 AM

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