[2.1] Dual Apep's Chaos Crit - Stapling Chaos to a Level 1 Spell (Draft Spark Totem tree up)

@Hrishi

Oh, that is a bummer. Thanks for doing the hard work ;)

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Hrishi wrote:

Alright, some comments on initial testing of the Hungry Abyss jewel. Do note that the description is very vague, so it took all my currency and a good amount of testing to narrow down what the jewel actually did.

Basically, it converts different types of spell leech into chaos spell leech. This is very important, because what this means is that you cannot use stuff like Carnage Heart and Life leech mods on amulets/gloves with this jewel if you are using a spell, it will not work.

Now, some comments.

- The requirements of equipping 5 corrupted items is a lot harder than I originally thought, because it DOES NOT include gems. You have to wear corrupted gear on 5/10 of your slots.

- What are the options of spell leech? I can only think of corrupted mods on Wands and Amulets, Catarina's mod and Doryani's Invitation. Do we have other options?

- This is rather awkward to make use of, because we cannot use Catarina's mod if we want to keep using Apep's. We can hope for a lucky corruption on an Apep's Rage to give 1%, but outside of that we'd need a corrupted Amulet with 1% there and a Doryani's Invitation for 1%, totalling 3%. Is that enough to ignore a life leech gem?

I will do more testing as I can!

Does Hungry Abyss apply to a Life Leech gem when linked to your spell?

Gem combo could be Main Spell > Added Chaos > Spell Echo > Faster Casting > Life Leech > ICD

I think he was wondering if it makes the life leech gem not work with cold, for example. Does override mean replace?

Thanks for testing this BTW.

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Hrishi wrote:

Sure, but at that point your spell already has leech due to the life leech gem, so using Hungry Abyss is pointless.

of course.. lol my bad.

Thanks though.

@Hrishi

This is really helpful.

I think Hungry Abyss is probably still worth pursuing. The amount of damage that you can do with a build like this is kind of huge, so 3-4% leech is probably enough. I've run a similar build with Warlord's Mark as the only leech and it worked pretty well; just was a little unreliable for surprises in combat where the curse was too late. It would be also interesting to try seeing if Berek's Grip can help bridge the gap. Obviously, this would not be something I'm advocating you try to test in Beta, but it would bear looking into with a GC or especially Ice Spear spell base after release. I'll probably be actively corrupting Apep's in Standard to try this out; unfortunately I've never seen an Apep's with a leech corruption. However, the upside of getting two of those is that you have two corrupted items equipped already!

I really like Eldritch Knowledge and I think that it will be the new go-to damage gem for this build. Weight of Sin needs a big buff; it's drawback is not so bad if you are warping around, but it is not enough to justify the slot at all. Fevered Mind seems like it has dropped in usefulness a ton post-nerf. It still holds enough value that I could see it being okay, but I'll really need to see the final tree. I can't imagine going out of my way to use it, and the convenient slots will be mostly taken up with Eldritch Knowledges and one for Hungry Abyss. If jewels get spell life leech back, we'll need slots for that too to combo with HA.

If you can get them, something else I'd like to see tested for this build is Chill of Corruption and Vaal Sentencing:



With this build, you can set up a Vaal Storm Call linked to Added Chaos, Echo and Duration (or whatever) with Herald of Ice active. Two things I'd like to know: How reliable is the HoI shatter in maps considering that the VSC is shocking for sure and the rest of the build cranks the crit so high? Do you get extra Vaal souls from Vaal Sentencing when your allies shatter the corpses too?

Thanks for the note about Chill of Corruption. Even unconfirmed info is useful.

Something that I mentioned earlier in the thread: Flame Surge would be pretty awesome, especially with RF. Both RF and surge get bonuses from AoE in the tree, so there's that. Also, doing Three Dragons with FS might be great, but you'd need to use RF, Fire Trap, or a cold spell to ignite. Seems worth playing with. I just kinda hate FS AoE, like you said.

Ice Spear is a thing with this build, but I've talked extensively about that.

Tendrils is fine, but the AoE I think got nerfed and the spell factors like crit and effectiveness/cast are only okay.

Flame Totem seems sketchy. They did not nerf the damage effectiveness like they did for Incinerate, but the crit is only 4%. I'd say it's likey worse than tendrils, but the upside is that you could use two. I'm wary of even the 5% crit spells, so going down to 4% seems really weak. The biggest problem is that you'd have to level the gem due to totem life scaling; this makes it more like the old incinerate than the old FP build as there are no longer cheap costs.

A better totem idea would be to try crit spark totems. On the surface, spark is not great with a less than 1.0 effectiveness/cast time ratio (.5 effectiveness, .65 cast), but the duration on the sparks seems worth looking into, especially with the new pierce jewel and using pierce in the tree to potentially avoid the use of a gem. Not to mention the extra projectiles jewel; I think that the reduced damage is totally worth it. You need the spell totem gem, which is a huge downside, but I do really like that you can scale with totem damage in the tree. This build is hard to scale and that really helps. Doing low life would be much easier on a totem build too (once it hits the live servers).

Fireball?