CI - Soul Strike Viability Testing

Hi all. For the last 3 weeks, I have been playing a CI build for the purpose of testing if Soul Strike is capable of enabling the build, which has been very hard to keep alive since the VP nerf. If I could get it to work, my plan is to use it in the next league.

Basically, Soul Strike Severely reduces the time it takes for your ES to start recharging, at the cost of some of it's recharge speed. Most CI builds have their ES start to recharge at ~4.8 seconds of no damage taken. The standard base is 6 seconds, but a few reduction nodes naturally come with a few of the obvious ES nodes. With Soul Strike and some additional reduction nodes, I am at 1.84 seconds. To synergize with that, I built as many things as I could think of/ fit into the build that would reduce, delay, or temporarily stall me taking damage.

1.) Evasion/Ondar's and 2x Jade flasks
2.) Low level CWDT with Temp Chains and Decoy Totem
3.) Ice Attack
4.) Lightning Warp for Escapability
5.) Vall Discipline emergency button/

Since I need 2 Auras, Grace and Discipline, I elected CoC for offense since I think that gets you the most DPS when you don't have an offensive Aura at your disposal

Disclaimer: My gear sucks - I literally built it from stuff I owned; I didn't spend a single chaos. Proper gear would add at least 500-1000 ES to the total, and perform better offensively as well. And no 6th link for PCOC also hurts offense a ton.

Build at 83

Gear:


My conclusion is that it actually works. No Ghost Reaver even needed. Even with just 6500 ES I have hardly died. It's easy to retreat if needed, as the decoy totems go off so often, you Lightning Warp away, and fire more volleys. Sometimes against bosses you literally have to run away, and the come back for rounds 2, 3 and 4. But it's a pretty cool play style. For my own purposes, I am done testing - I am comfortable it will work in higher maps (I have done up to 73s) so I want to keep something new and exciting to me for the next league. Nothing too in depth here - just wanted to share as I haven't seen anyone post a CI build since the quiver was released. If you were considering it but worried it might not be effective - go for it. And COC not necessary it's just what I went with.

Hey man this is good stuff - thanks a lot for sharing. I am actually planning on trying a build based on CI-Soul Strike + Precaso's puncture build. Puncture style of play + Soul Strike would really work well together! It also works well on builds that don't really rely on attack speed from Blood Rage.

Would you mind posting a vid? I would like to see if the reduced rate of ES recharge is really a big deal as I think.

I checked prices on this thing - ~1ex. When it first came out prices were ~30ex, and that is why I love Standard.

Also - your gear looks pretty - the colors all go so well together, it's like a grayish gold theme xD.

Haha - yes, I am very grey! It was 1ex a few weeks ago when I got it, I don't think the 30ex tag lasted very long.

Per your request, a mapping video:

http://youtu.be/pM9jY40DX7Y

Offensively, it can be painful a bit as with 37% crit chance, it can occasionally go on an unlucky streak of not critting for a while...happens 2 or 3 times in the video. Build really needs PCOC, as +250% crit changes that dynamic greatly while also making spells crit more. Hmmm...I am an idiot, I probably could have just borrowed the bow from my crit ranger...slower attacks but 8.65% crit and 6 links...but I guess recoloring back and forth would be annoying...

But the interesting watch here is the ES, anyway.

Puncture's hit and run style would work perfectly with how this build has to play. Just need an AOE solution - Split arrow with no Hatred and no Drillneck would have me a bit nervous.

Oo. Sick. I cant wait to try this, I love it. You really don't need leech or ES regen. And you have so much ES. How many auras can you run? You try with Alpha?

To be honest, I didn't think it was going to work well. But as you can see, that ES shoots right back up. It's a sick defensive mechanism and really fun to play.

Right now, 2x 60s is it. I use mana, and I don't really want to give up helm ES - Alpha's would allow to add a 40%. But 6500 isn't really much ES - this is an easy 71 Map. I'd lose much bigger chunks of ES on a hard 78 map.

Also of note is that I am near 4 more 10% ES Delay Reduction nodes - so I can make it even quicker. But there are serious diminishing returns with the formula: 600/(100+R). So right now I am at 225, for 1.846 seconds. Going to 265 would bring it down to 1.643. Not sure if that would be worth it, as opposed to just getting more ES, or offense (crit multi circle would be huge for the spells).

Proj-spam CoC always makes me so sad to see :(. So much damage getting left on the table except in perfect situations.

Regardless, the ES mechanic portion looks really cool and effective; if you're looking for an AoE to supplement Puncture for that sort of playstyle, your best bet might be a proliferating Burning Arrow, since it'll also scale against your underlying phys damage and benefit from the same curses.

The only way I have ever seen Burning Arrow be able to actually do enough fire damage that the proliferated Ignites can actually kill stuff is with a perfect Blackgleam and Avatar of Fire.

The rest of the time, it's just a physical skill that does a tad of fire damage.

You are right in that CoC'd projectiles often don't hit anything. But how much damage do they miss isn't the important question, it's how much do they do on a normallish triger. The more efficient (in terms of landing) ranged spells like Arc and Cold Snap tend to do less damage and also have only 4% crit rates. So I think it's just a tradeoff. Not sure one way is better than the other - but to be honest I don't really have a preference. I could swap these to Ball Lightning and Arc and it would perform about the same I think.

Yeah, you're right. I run Cold Snap CoC and have found it tremendously effective (in particular because its effectiveness increases as packs get larger, since you get more overlapping Cold Snaps, rather than decreasing damage-per-target like Arc), but wearing Voll's is a big tradeoff, especially if you're looking for high ES.

One thing you might try, if you're willing to be more of a melee CoC archer (and assuming you do at least 1 fire damage with your attack), is Flame Surge.

Can't speak to Burning Arrow as I've never seriously played with. Good to know that it's less effective than I was thinking.

Important Note:

Vulnerability cannot be done as a map mod. That's a big oh crap for the build, as it's a pretty common mod.

I agree vuln is a pain, you need life leech gem but I have found that vulnerability mod is not that common.

I am trying this quiver and I am loving it. It is perfect for some puncture play - hit and run. You can focus on running grace and discipline since elemental auras don't affect physical bleed. You also don't need attack speed with puncture style, so less mana problems; and you can get frenzy charges and leech from blood rage.

I am using a shav with CI atm because I don't want to buy another 6l ES chest. I got all the ES delay nodes and Shav's gives another 10%. My resistances are messed up and i need to fix it, but my ES has soo very short delay before recharge i love it!

I think this is perfect for high ES builds like CI because you are essentially focused on amount of ES recharge per sec, and the delay before recharge. With say 6K ES and this quiver you get ~1200 ES/sec after 1.5sex!

Bosses are super easy. I just puncture bosses like Shrine Piety and let her bleed out while I run and recharge. im still working on my AOE, but i really like this style of play as it is super safe.