Support (aura, curses, charges+conduit, status)

Hello everyone, let me know what you think about my idea.

I would like to make a support character. I want a character that is mainly built for party play but can be converted into a solo char when necessary without too much effort (no regret orbs or major gear changes). I have already fleshed out a few ideas and would like some feedback.

Lightning Arrow build
(note: this build is probably suboptimal, let me know what you think)

This build would use the following special items:

Quill Rain (bow) or choice, Voltaxic Rift is pretty good but conductivity and ele weakness won't increase your damage
Doedre's Damning (ring, +1 curse)
Victario's Acuity (amulet, charges on kill)
Windscream (boots, +1 curse and elemental damage)
Alpha's Howl (helm, for auras)
Thunderfist (gloves, for shocking)
Belt, body armor and 2nd ring are choice! Suggested belt: Auxium. Suggest armor: Cloak of Defiance. Suggested ring: The Taming.
And the following links:

BOW

1. Lightning Arrow (15)
2. Added Lightning Damage (140%)
3. Elemental Proliferation (140%)
4. Greater/Lesser Multiple Projectiles (200%/150%)
5. Faster Attacks/Blind (pretty good!)/Choice (115%), Added Chaos Damage if Voltaxic Rift (150%)
6. Weapon Elemental Damage (150%)


BODY_ARMOR
1. Lightning Arrow (15)
2. Curse on Hit
3. Conductivity
4. Warlord's Mark
5. Elemental Weakness
6. Greater/Lesser Multiple Projectiles (200%/150%)


GLOVES
1. Frenzy
2. Curse on Hit
3. Enfeeble
4. Temporal Chains
(from unique gloves) 5. lvl 18 Added Lightning Damage


HELM
1. Anger
2. Wrath
3. Choice
4. Reduced Mana


BOOTS
1. Clarity
2. Haste
3. Choice
4. Reduced Mana


Shock support
With a lvl 22 Wrath aura and quality on added lightning damage/lightning arrow/conductivity/elemental weakness it will be very easy to shock stack the entire screen, amplified by shocking blows, thunderfist and if needed temporal chains. Elemental proliferation will spread it, thanks to quill rain everything will be perma stacked with shock.

Curse support
Can apply a large number of high effect curses (max level plus 10% more effective with a 20% quality Curse on Hit gem) almost immediately. Could even apply 4 curses if you'd wish: just toss on an extra Doedre's Damning and swap around your gems a bit. Boss? No problem, Frenzy links from gloves will enfeeble and temporal him. You can swap around curses too: these curses I have in my links are not set in stone.

Charge support
With conduit and frenzy, you will have a full frenzy charge distribution to your entire team. A 20% quality Warlord's Mark will give you the endurance charges to spread through conduit as well as give your party members individual endurance charges, ensuring they are always maxed out. Power charges are the trickiest to spread: you only have 10% chance of getting one on an enemy kill. To partially solve this we can use the unique flask, Doedre's Elixer. The idea is to, when you finally get a power charge, drink Doedre's at the last second of it expiring to give you another power charge and reset the timer. With some luck you can have a reasonable up time of your power charges this way, especially due to the extra flask refills you get from warlord's mark.

Aura support
Three (3) 60% auras in Alpha's Howl, linked with a level 20 reduced mana support gem, will reserve 58.788% of your total mana pool, giving you 41.212% of your mana left. Reserving an aura outside of Alpha's Howl, but with reduced mana, will cost you the following:
60% aura: 23.004%
2*40% (80%) auras: 30.672%
60+40% (100%) aura: 38.34%
Keep in mind that you need to reserve clarity as well, it will take up 312 mana at level 20 with a level 20 reduced mana gem.

Of course you can choose the auras, although I would always recommend running anger and wrath in your Alpha's Howl. The rest is up to you: you can go nuts on resists and get all the purities or you could get both grace and determination; iron reflex characters will love you for it. For reference, these are the stats you gain if you were to, theoretically, run all the 13 auras at lvl 20 (pretty sure you can't though, not even with prism guardian). The bonus for allies will be slightly lower because they may not have inner force or the 'holy strength' node that also grants 3% increased buffs. Some numbers may be lower because all these bonuses are calculated from lvl 20 auras, the auras in Alpha's Howl will be level 22.

AURAS
133% all resist
+8% max resist
+103% armour
+4072 evasion
+642 energy shield
+36-569 lightning damage
+72% cold damage
+189-315 fire damage
+3.3% life regen
+18% movement speed
+32% attack speed
+32% cast speed
+49.69 mana regen per second


------

Wait... Quill Rain attacks so quickly and those are some pretty heavy mana cost multipliers you got there... how the hell are you going to sustain that mana expenditure; especially with so much of your mana caught up in aura reservation?!

Maths time!

You will have 436 base mana at lvl 100 (you start with 40 mana and gain 4 per level). Assuming level 85 that makes 436-(15*4) mana, or 376 base mana. We get +160 to that from all the intelligence from our skill tree (note: the skill tree has 106 points which makes you level 86 if you were to kill the bandits on every single difficulty. For the purpose of this calculation it matters little, however), putting us at (376+160) 536 mana after skills.

From gear:
Doedre's Damning: +30 mana
Victario's Acuity: +12 mana
Thunderfist: +30 mana

(536+30+30+12) = 608 mana if all other items you had equipped would not give you mana, energy shield or intelligence (unlikely) and you had not taken the +40 mana from helping Alira on normal. We have 96% increased maximum mana from our skill tree, resulting in (608*1.96) 1192 mana (in reality you'll get a little bit more because intelligence gives you a percentage more ES as well, but I can't be bothered to add this to my calculations). You regenerate 1.75% of your maximum mana every second, or (1192*0.0175) 20.86 mana per second. If we add Clarity to that we get (20.86+49.69) 70.55 mana regenerated per second. We have 120% increased mana regeneration from our skill tree, giving us (70.55*1.2) 84.66 mana regen per second as our final number.

How much is reserved?
Alpha's Howl reserves 58.788% of 1192 mana, leaving you with 491 mana. Not really enough to support clarity + your skill. But remember: this was our worst case scenario. Another item with a bonus to your mana and a nice ES piece and you should be able to easily get to 3k mana (which would also substantially increase your base mana regen, as it is 1.75% of your total max mana per second). With that, we will have 924 mana left after the auras in Alpha's Howl and clarity, plenty to run more auras and use your skills and perhaps even Arctic Armor!

How much does my main skill use?
The links in my bow as posted above - without Faster Attacks and using GMP instead of LMP - take up 88 mana per cast. With faster attacks this becomes 101 and with a 0% quality reduced mana in place of faster attacks this becomes 63, which can get even lower if you have a quality reduced mana. If you use LMP instead of GMP you get 66 mana in 5L, 76 mana with faster attacks and 47 mana with no quality reduced mana.

CLOSING WORDS ON MANA
You will not have mana issues (and if you magically do you can easily compensate by using a slower bow, running 1 aura less and/or using a reduced mana gem). Don't forget that you will leech some mana from mobs as well thanks to warlord's mark. You could also just use flasks, they will replenish fast thanks to warlord's mark. Despite that, I would look for the following in your choice gear (second ring, armor and belt are all free):
1. A high ES piece
2. Any mana modifier (+% max mana, flat mana/es, mana on kill/on hit which Doedre's Damning already gives)
3. Mana regen

The 'Auxium' belt would be a really nice piece, it gives a maximum of 145 mana and +20% ele damage with weapons as well as mana leech per power charge.

Finally, if you are really desperate, you can skill around mana regen in your passive tree. The highlighted nodes in the picture below each give you 20% increased mana regen:




Let me know what you think about my idea!

--------------



POWER SIPHON

Power Siphon is very interesting as it has culling strike and automatically grants you power charges, a current weakness in this build. It also allows you to use Prism Guardian, giving you extra auras that you can run off life for nearly no cost. Sadly I have been unable to make a satisfactory build for power siphon, but I am very open to suggestions and ideas! Let me know what you think!
Beyond league.
Last edited by SEXYSUPERSATAN on Dec 2, 2013, 11:23:19 PM
up
Beyond league.

Report Forum Post

Report Account:

Report Type

Additional Info