[3.26] Bella's Dancing Dervish Occultist | The Fastest Minion Mapper Is Back!

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Welcome Exile!

This is a pretty comprehensive guide to playing the Dancing Dervish Occultist, a build I've one-tricked over the past 7 years. It's one of the fastest and carefree minion builds around and over the years has managed to weather everything GGG has thrown at us. It can farm some ubers when geared up, does well in T16.5's and T17's at pretty low budgets and really shines at a medium budget. The guide is currently incomplete, but leads you to endgame.



So what is the Dancing Dervish? Or as some older players might remember it as, Dancing Duo; It's a unique two-handed sword that does several things.
The first thing it does is give your character the Rampage buff, which is not to be confused with Rampage, a set of effects that can trigger when you have Rampage. Thanks game ;)




While you have Rampage, you have a for now invisible kill counter that decays over 4 seconds. If you keep killing this timer resets, and upon reaching 15 kills with the Rampage buff, you trigger the first Rampage. For other builds and items with Rampage, you simply keep killing and trigger another rampage effect based on your kill count. With Dancing Dervish you not only build up the kill counter with kills, but from any hit with the sword, and once you hit 15 hits, the Manifest Dancing Dervishes skill is triggered.



Once the Manifest Dancing Dervishes skill is triggered, several things happen. You gain a debuff that disables your weapon slots but in exchange you gain onslaught and a pair of animated swords are summoned. Hold on, you might think this sounds like it would be great for an unarmed build, and you'd be right! But that's an archetype we're not focusing on today. Today, we're making those animated swords the star of the show.

So about those two swords, what makes them so special? The Dancing Dervishes are animated weapons which exclusively use cyclone as their primary attack. They're practically immortal with 95% damage reduction and have the ultimate aggressive AI of the game. They're built for speed. Remember that Rampage buff? Well it has a stacking movespeed buff that exceeds a quicksilver Mageblood flask. Starting at potentially level 59, we'll be zooming through the game faster than a Mageblooder. And at the high end? We add a Mageblood on top! This, and the interactions with Profane Bloom are why I've played this build for 1000's of hours. It's fast and comfortable and scales with most of the mapping content in the game.
I've mentioned Profane Bloom, so I should explain what it is, how it works, and why it's the other core feature of the build.

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Profane Bloom is an Occultist ascendancy, which causes cursed enemies you or your minions kill, to have a 50% chance to explode for 25% of their health in damage. By base, Profane Bloom is one of the stronger explode on death abilities in the game, but when we're through with it we'll be putting Hinekora to shame with dotcap damage against 100% delirious Kosis and Omniphobia. What is dotcap damage and who are those two? We'll get around to that later. We'll first explain how Profane Bloom interacts with the Spiritual Aid notable on the passive tree. Spiritual Aid is a notable that allows increases and decreased to Minion Damage to also affect you. In the final form of this build, that's 700% increased and 200% more minion damage which suddenly brings that profane bloom to over 300% in health damage! This kills the rares in the middle of packs and allows this build to scale along with the content GGG throws at us so well.





We've established some core pillars of the build, we can run fast, we have a mean explosion, and have swords constantly attacking in an AoE which means they're quite responsive. We're on occultist, so we have easy access to an extra curse, and some access to chaos damage buffs. That's gonna push us into making a choice between chaos crit and chaos poison, and with the tools available to us in the game poison is an easy choice here. Some of you may remember the old build that went chaos crit, and this is in fact still a viable build! It is however quite expensive to get going with the minion crit changes a few years back, and honestly had too many buttons to press to be a relaxing build.

So, going chaos damage with poison leans into us using Despair and Temporal Chains as curses as they both synergise with poison, the Despair's -res increases the damage, and Temporal Chains makes it last longer, ultimately with the effect of having more poisons stacked at once. So how are we going to apply these curses? Well our swords do attack instantly, and we have to respond in kind with putting these curses in as curse auras.

We've got some basics of the offense of the build down, how about the defenses? Well, movement speed is the best defensive stat in the game, but we're not perfect and we're going to need some more layers to help us when we can't just dodge. Having good phys resistance in the game is generally advisable, and I prefer to use Determination along with some items to get a good base-level resistance against general mob damage in maps. Some of the biggest killers in PoE are elemental ailments, with Shock, Scorch and Brittle being particularly nasty, so I tend to solve this by using a Purity of Elements - this alleviates some pressure on gearing and full elemental ailment immunity allows you to already ignore a lot of the nastier things in the game.

Since we have a lot of movespeed and will be running a lot, chances are we're not going to get hit by a lot of attacks, but we're not going to fully avoid being clipped by spells here and there. That's why I've chosen suppression as another layer of defense for the build, it's one of the strongest defensive layers in the game and the build synergises with it very well.

So while we're ideally only occasionally getting clipped by damage, we need a way to recover our health. In the past, we'd rely on ES and our recharge to replenish us in the gaps between taking damage, but with suppression being a high priority, we're life based, and recovery is not so "free". Or is it? Well recoup is perfect for the kind of damage we're expected to take, and we can generate plenty of potion charges in areas of the skill tree where we're getting suppression. This allows us to use The Writhing Jar, also known as worm flasks, to independently keep up the rampage buff, but nowadays that's "solved" with a Squirming Terror ring on the mercenary. We do keep the worm flask though because it makes for a good panic button when things get rough. At higher investment, this build swaps out the recoup for some Bone Barrier Forbidden Jewels in order to get access to leech via minions (very strong on the high hit-rate dervish).

So we've got the basics down. We're health based with suppression and recoup. We've got curse and defensive auras and want to amplify our minion’s poison damage.

Well then, let's get to the very basic version of the build and how to play it!

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https://pobb.in/u/bellabong%232948/9oyZiDpJPeUC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXXLzc9Scm0


This is usually how I enter maps, we're just trying to cap our resistances here and get the beginnings of some suppression going. With mercenary gear, you can usually cobble together enough to get your resistances capped. That, getting a 1 curse Impresence to alleviate some mana reservation pressure and getting the Dervish 6 socketed with the right colours are a priority. Before we have access to a Dervish with the Resolute Technique implicits (which allows us to not worry about accuracy, a poison minion build doesn't scale with crit anyway) we're going to be running a Precision aura on the side. The passive tree focuses on grabbing all the utility we can to set us up to try and cap our suppression and get all the mana reservation and potion charge generating points we need.


We're also going to have to stock up on some jewellers since we'll be using the crafting bench to try and get the right colours and sockets on the dervish. It's a STR/DEX sword so it primarily rolls green and red sockets when a chromatic orb is used. In the early days this isn't bad, as we'll be making use of chance to poison and withering touch but we want to try and get as many blue sockets as possible, as those gems are a bit more optimal. Added Chaos and (for pretty cheaply) Awakened Added Chaos Damage gems are best gems for now, along with Minion Damage, Damage on Full Life and Minion Speed for some utility. For now Chance to Poison is a great all around gem for its chance to poison and flat added damage. Withering Touch is a high priority as well as wither stacks are one of the major damage amplifiers of the build.


I will stress that getting at least 3 blue sockets takes priority over 6 socketing the sword. The most cost-effective method is to use the crafting bench to force the sword down to 2 or 3 sockets depending on whether you have enough chromatics to force 2 or 3 blue sockets. (let's pretend you're at 3 for ease of language). You then use the crafting bench to craft a 4th socket, if it doesn't hit blue you force it back down to 3 with the bench, and redo until you hit 4 blue in total. It's then far less of a gamble to then hit the red and green socket for the 5th and 6th socket. I recommend red as the 5th socket as the sword has the highest chance of rolling green sockets, so you want to reserve that for the final socket you craft.


The flasks we run are there to help with getting some armour going, as well as some zoomies and phasing of course. Playing fast and aggressively should keep these up all the time, especially once they're well rolled.

So how do we actually play this build? Since we gain rampage stacks with hits with the sword equipped, I've linked Cyclone in a Cast while Channeling set-up to trigger Desecrate and Flesh Offering for a damage boost. We can use this cyclone to get the swords summoned extremely quickly, then occasionally cyclone to keep up the flesh offering. We want to be aggressive, don't be afraid to movement skill into the middle of the pack while pressing Convocate, the combination of the instant application of damage from the dervishes cyclone and profane bloom gives monsters no time to even react. This build rewards playing aggressively, but can be played conservatively in a pinch due to the aggro range of the swords. We essentially want to get our curse aura up on as many mobs as possible for the Profane Bloom pop, and we later scale curse aoe and get a curse on hit to augment this effect.
And that's it, it's a simple build to play at its core, you convocate the swords for some optimal profane bloom explosions, and occasionally spin to buff, or to use the cyclone's phasing to pass through packs when needed.
On to the next tier of the build, where we really start to see how everything starts to fit together, and what we can get with the loot from early mapping.




https://pobb.in/u/bellabong%232948/Z7IqkilkkXuZ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR72Swfcafo

So, we've mapped for a bit, we're in the mid-80's and farmed a decent amount of chaos orbs. The main priorities for getting the fundamentals of the build in place, are obtaining a Dancing Dervish with Resolute Technique so we can drop the precision aura, a grasping mail with Chayula's ‘Minions have 60% chance to poison enemies on hit’ and some passable stats along with suppression. The rest of the gear is generally prioritised to cap our suppression, with a note of getting at least a +1 to minions skills on the helm, to help us start working towards obtaining a 4th spectre. More details on spectres and the animated guardian in a later section along with the Mercenary. For now, we just have to worry about getting a Cruel Mistress with Envy, as that's by far the best Mercenary companion for the build. Other things to look out for are Soulrend with Greater Multiple Projectiles and Chain or Pierce, and Wither on hit links on her skills. Zealotry is a nice bonus that helps keep our supports alive.

As for the skill tree we've gotten the basic skeleton which has the potion charge generation, recoup, suppression, mana reservation and jewel slots we need, and we can start putting points into a 12 point minion damage cluster jewel to get some useful stats and damage, and obtain even more jewel sockets! For now we'll just have various Ghastly Eye jewels to make sure our poison chance is 100%.

At this point we should be feeling pretty good and comfortable, and ready to start scaling and tackling higher tier content, and get some real income going!



The goal for now this this PoB:

https://pobb.in/u/bellabong%232948/Nael4bnj8onA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmgxNj4Efnk

It's at this point where the build really comes into its own, and you can decide for yourself whether you want to min max further than this. Upgrading beyond this is going to have massively diminishing returns and should only be done if you really enjoy the build. I can at least recommend the switch-up later on to using the Bone Barrier forbidden jewels.
Let's get back to basics and go through the core concepts of the build.

We have a nigh-immortal minion that requires us to hit enemies 15 times in order to summon it; after that we require kills to keep the swords summoned. We do this by using a Cyclone with a Cast-while-Channeling support linked to Desecrate and Flesh Offering in order to buff the swords with a single button. For extreme one-button comfort we can throw the Predator/signal prey we need for the swords as well as Convocation as a six link in the chest and we've got everything we need behind one button! I personally prefer to still manually convocate in order to time it better, but feel free to turn this build into a full one button build. One of the strengths of this build is that you don't need a six link so this is more of an accessibility option.

We keep the desecrate level 1 to keep the mana cost low, but by base the build should be able to fit in Purity of Elements, Haste and Determination (or Grace) as well as the two curse auras once we get the double-curse Impresence. It's an Uber Uber Elder drop, but not that popular and is the first of the more expensive items we'll obtain for the build. Primarily because it allows us to get the full aura setup going. The curses go with Blasphemy in the helmet, and if you're feeling particularly brave, you can drop the Flame Dash and use Arrogance to augment the curses a good amount - they have no reservation because of the amulet and as such it's a free boost to their effect. Purity is just a comfy aura when it comes to gearing and solving immunities and the choice between haste or malevolence will probably come down to your choice of watchers eye and how much you value the QoL of haste vs. the slightly more damage of Malevolence. If you're feeling particularly exotic, if you manage to get your hands on a grasping mail with envy, suppression and poison chance, you can run with the Malevolence/Grace Toxicologist merc for a solid set of auras and good baseline defenses. This direction is a bit of a dead end though, as crafting options are then very limited for the chest.
A very efficient expense will be Amanamu's Gaze, it's going to be pricy early league, but it's going to be worth it as it's simply put a 30% more damage jewel.

Support minions will be handled in depth later on, but for now we're going to assume the "cheapest" setup of Carnage chieftain, Wild Bristle Matron, and Pale Seraphim. For the Animated Guardian the only notable thing is that it is very worth it to invest into a Kingmaker early since it doesn't permanently die. It's a great rarity boost and the culling strike and fortification are incredible boosts to have.

https://pobb.in/u/bellabong%232948/gZ7RAItIoGb1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92Lp3ftO2gE

Woah, that's quite the jump from our previous PoB. Don't be too intimidated, let me break it down on a per equipment slot basis, as well as some crafting options to make your own gear.


We'll start with the cluster jewel, as the kind of cluster jewel we obtain will determine the requirements of the rest of our gear. We of course want increased effect and minion attack speed as affixes, a 2/25 will last for long time so we don't need to go too hard on the cluster jewel just yet. I usually start with a self-made 2/25 with a useful attribute or resistance, then upgrade later into a "final" cluster jewel. We want life, attack speed and increased effect. The 4th stat determines how we end up min-maxing our gear. An all attribute cluster is the ultimate option for min-maxing with tattoos later on, but it does put a lot of pressure on resistance affixes on gear. I'd recommend a chaos res or all res cluster. A good chaos resistance cluster will cap our chaos resistance when combined with our Ascendancy and the Impresence, and will give you the most flexibility in gearing and crafting gear.



As seen in the previous PoB, an early purchase is going to be a Watchers Eye, the main priority here is physical resistance from Determination and/or crit reduction from Determination. As we tighten up the jewel slots by filling them out with unique jewels, we start to get some specific requirements for the ghastly eyeballs we're going to use so it's good to keep these in mind. With a stygian vise we will have 6 jewels sockets left, and with a Mageblood things get even tighter with 5. In these jewel slots, we want to get around 65% bleed avoidance, and corrupting blood immunity. Another thing to note is the ultimate pob of the build drops yet another ghastly with having to fit those stats into 4, but those are only concerns if you want these concerns. Before we have the Forbidden Jewel setup with leech, cobalt jewels with recoup, life% and minion damage are a great addition to the recoup on the build.


The amulet is one of the most efficient parts of the build. The double Imprescence frees up 72% of mana reservation in total and even a low chaos resistance roll will cap our resistance. The anointment of choice is going to be Beacon of Hope as that synergises with one of our core features. A good alternative is Leadership, as that will help ease pressure on the helmet to have a Mana reservation suffix, but ultimately we want to be able to use Beacon of Hope.


When it comes to the other jewelry we have two requirements that need to be fulfilled. We will want to have a curse on hit, preferably Despair, so our Profane Bloom can have some rudimentary chaining and isn't limited to line of sight, and a single unset ring, since we are pretty socket pressured. If you obtain some really juicy rings we can consider dropping the Carrion Golem/Holy Relic linked to Feeding Frenzy, but I personally haven't delved too deep into ring min-maxing. My preference is having a bone ring with a %health synth implicit, as that's within my usual budget to craft on, and a hunter or delve ring with a curse on hit and spammed on with Essence of Fear. Before the Forbidden Jewel switch-up, we're going to want some recoup, but after switching to leech, this isn't a priority anymore and frees up some suffix pressure. There's plenty of flexibility here, the only things to keep in mind are getting that curse on hit as well as deciding between an unset ring or a different ring that justifies dropping the minion proccing feeding frenzy.


The first crafting project of the league will be the chest armour. Initially, we're going to just grab a grasping mail with a fractured minions have chance to poison mod. These drop naturally from Flawless Breachstone bosses and are considered a "failed" fracture in other processes, so these are extremely cheap to pick up. I then tend to roll these with the harvest life craft. What we're looking for is a high tier of suppression, along with a decent life roll, as building up to high tier suppression mods on our gear will allow us to save points on the tree and start squeezing the most out of our passive tree.


One of the early breakpoints we need to reach in the build is having a level 25 Raise Spectre gem so we can fit in a 4th spectre as there are a rich assortment of spectres to choose from to support this build. That brings us to the second crafting project. To help us in this we'll want a boot or glove with a fractured delve mod that has +2 to socketed minion gems. With a basic lvl 3 Empower and a lvl 21 spectre gem, this brings us to that level requirement. The easier and cheaper option is using a boot, as getting some passable stats with some harvest spam is pretty cheap, but I recommend going for a glove instead, and spending a decent amount on Essences of Fear to get a good glove you're going to be happy with, because this will be the "final" glove on the build. What suffixes you really want are going to be dependent on the cluster jewel of the build, but as with the body armour, T1 or T2 suppression is the main goal.


The main goal for the belt is to provide a whole bunch of useful stats for us, not the minions. This is why we don't go with the double-eyeball belt, but feel free to use one if you prefer. A Thicc Stygian can give this build 800 HP and free up a lot of affix pressure, and Mageblood is well, Mageblood. I recommend going for a Stygian that has equivalent attribute stats to a Mageblood, so that when gearing the rest of your character, you don't have to recraft a bunch of items in order to fit it in.


As for the helmet, what happens here depends on whether you're running Leader of the Pack as an anoint, or have seen how great Beacon of Hope feels and want to keep it while trying to fit in Aspect of the Spider into the build. If you're not yet trying to fit in Aspect of the Spider, you can try obtaining a helmet with fractured suppression and harvest crafting until you hit something you're happy with. In order to fit Aspect of the Spider into the build whilst being able to keep our cast while channeling setup up, we will need at least another 19% of increased mana reservation, so taking that same base, we can use Essences of Loathing along with the Eater of Worlds eldritch implicit to hit that point. Do note that we lose the ability to resummon the Carrion Golem without turning off an aura, but the mana cost for Holy Relic is still manageable.


Recoup and our flask charge generation for the worm flask is excellent sustain for our health pool, but it's a lot of investment on the passive tree. With this setup you can react to losing health quickly, and you should generally be topped off and be protected from slow shotgunning effects. Since we have a lot of notables allocated near a jewel socket, we can think about Brutal Restraint Timeless Jewels. These are timless jewels which add extra stats to notables around it, based on its seed number. It's in this setup that Brutal Restraint 685 really shines. If dedicated to Balbala we can grab the keystone for flask charge generation to our utility flasks if we drop a flask. All the potential nodes we take around Brutal Restraint 685 offer a bonus to our minion damage and minion speed, even after switching to leech so it's a great jewel to have. It's a "known" one though, and it can be pretty pricy for what it ultimately offers to us.


We do want to save more points on the passive tree though, so we tighten up our ghastly jewels and really want to get Bone Barrier forbidden jewels, and swap around some points on the passive tree. Because of the way Dervish is, with two cyclones hitting at near tick-rate, it gets insane benefits from using Bone Barrier and instant leech. It also "automates" our recovery fully, and we can start thinking about more luxurious options as our active flask. Bottled Faith is nice for the regen consecrated ground adds to our support minions, but ultimately, Progenesis is the real goal. Both of these are a complete luxury though and not "required". One can keep the worm flask, but keep in mind we've dropped a lot of charge generation points in the switch to leech, so the flask won’t be as readily available to use in boss fights especially.

If you've got a build that's close to the PoB at the top of this section, you're at the stage where I recommend you switch out if you're just using this as a league starter. The next stage of the build involves a lot of investment and a lot of fine-tuning, for relatively little gain, compared to a more meta build.

https://pobb.in/u/bellabong%232948/UberDervish326
Uber Eater of Worlds

[Under Construction]



[Under Construction]
Descecratable Spectres that help the build:

Wild Bristle Matron - Massive action speed slow, tanky. Obtained from T3 Purple Harvest Plots. We'll always keep this spectre around. Be aware of how strong the slow is against bosses and how much it slows down some of their animations. I'll usually be in global 6666 to hand these out.

Pale Seraphim - it has a decent action speed slow and a small increased damage taken buff. Obtained from Scourge's Beidat faction. Can be obtained from Kalguur events with the caveat of it not being desecratable if obtained from Kalguur events and not Scourge/Beyond itself. Gets replaced by the Perfect Forest Warrior who provides onslaught. I tend to skip straight to the Forest Warrior, but there are plenty of other summoners who run this spectre and can share it in global 6666.

Carnage/Stygian/Aboriginal Chieftain. - Generates Frenzy Charges and can be obtained from Act 7 Ashen Fields. The Aboriginal Chieftain is a larger version with more HP that can be obtained from Untainted Paradise but does not enter the desecrate pool.

Ritual Corpse Spectres that help the build:

Perfect Warlord - generates endurance charges for us and our support minions with a small vitality aura. High priority. Shouldn't die if you've got meatshield levelled and the spectre gem up to level 25.

Perfect Forest Warrior - Has an onslaught aura, even though we automatically get onslaught, the swords don't. He also has culling strike and should definately obtained if you don't plan on getting Kingmaker on the AG for a while.

Hulking Miscreation - Provides a very strong periodic (Every 10 seconds for 5 seconds) buff to friendly constructs, which the Dancing Dervishes are. Also summons some more minions that can act as real meat shields. Very handy, I usually don't run it because I favour defensiveness.

Perfect Primal Thunderbird - Because of how our skill tree is, we actually have good inherent boost to evasion, so the grace aura gives us a very strong boost to our evasion. It has a channeling attack which leaves it vulnerable though, and its inherent squishiness makes it difficult to keep alive. If you fancy upgrading your evasion from 40% to 75% and then to the mid 80's with a flask, it's an excellent defensive layer to add.

Perfect Guardian Turtle
A great budget option that can stand in for the Perfect Warlord, doesn't synergise well with the build though, considering how fast we are.

Perfect Forest Tiger (Untested in grossly juiced maps)
I'm not going to expand too much on the Forest Tiger. It's expensive, extremely squishy and vulnerable to phys reflect, a map mod we don't initially care about. Great for pumping PoB numbers if you use its Haste and switch your own third aura from Haste to Malevolence.
I wont recommend you even try it out, unless you can get your Spectre gem to the level 30 max that the build allows for.

Wild Card Spectres:
(These can have some limited usefulness in the build)

Ancient Suffering - A spectre that applies temp chains on hit which ignores curse limit. Can be handy if you've only got one depair aura going and don't want to apply temp chains yourself. It's the Rare that shows up at the end of the Haunted Remains node in Delve.

Ancient Wraith - The add that joins in on the aforementioned Delve event. This one applies enfeeble on hit, ignoring curse limit and can stand in for the defensiveness Perfect Warlord provides.

Perfect Druidic Alchemist - Generates flask charges for us.

Perfect Naval Officer - Nerfed and doesn't provide Fortify anymore, but reduced cold damage taken helps against Maven and Shaper and the precision aura can be handy if you haven't gotten an RT Dervish yet.

Perfect Dancing Sword - If you want to be thematic. Doesn't provide anything to this build. It's the spectre of the Steel Soul boss of Arsenal map, which is based on Dancing Dervish.

Nerfed Spectres that can help the build:
(these are more SSF friendly suggestions but be aware these aren't really worth having a spectre gem in the build for)

They of Tul - Can be obtained from Tul breaches, has a small aura that provides 15% chance to avoid attacks and spells. Used to give actual damage reduction but has been nerfed.

Arena Master - Basically 50% uptime onslaught. Unimpressive when compared to what other spectres can offer.

Reserved.

Youtube playlist of most recent league:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSbr7mfHEYfSm03iAeb5ZuLi38TSEzeNL

Stage 2 and 3 PoB crashed the program for me, when i tried to import it right after the other. Interesting bug. If i go from 2 to 3.. crash... 3 to 2.. crash... but close program.. load individually.. no issue.

POB Issue was on my end. The build looks great... I am going to attempt this, this league :)

Very interesting bug indeed - I can't seem to replicate it on my end? I've had pobb.in open PoB for me from the links provided and don't come across any issues. Copying the string also works fine, perhaps your PoB needs an update?

Damn bro great guide!
Keep up the good work :D

If nothing too big happes ill probably be rocking this build next league as a starter and see where it goes. Hope you keep this updated and thanks for your work.

I tried league starting with my own Dervish build this league, but felt it did not have the clear I was expecting from it, so seeing your build focuses on clearing maps much more efficiently makes me excited to try it out :D