[2.0] Korgoth's Soul Drinker - An Ice Crash high sustain Soulthirst Ranger.

The Soul Taker unique is used offhand to benefit from its unique passive "Insufficient mana doesn't prevent melee attacks". This helps allows your mana pool to be kept low while mana flasks are running so you can take advantage of the Soul Eater buff.


The Soulthirst unique allows you to gain the Soul Eater buff while your flasks are in effect.

Those two combined and used properly, result in having the Soul Eater buff for more than 80% of the time you spend clearing a map.

Soul Eater is a buff that allows you to drain the souls of anything that dies in a radius, to empower your character. This gives you 5% physical damage reduction, attack speed, cast speed, elemental resistances and increased character size per soul "eaten".

While none of these are required for the build to work and they could actually be replaced by rares, these uniques work really well with my current spec.


Since I decided to go crit on this build, Abyssus was an obvious choice.
The great thing about Abyssus in conjuction with the Soul Eater buff is that we don't care about it's downside, which is extra physical damage taken, because we're physical immune most of the time (estimated 80-90% of the time while running a map).


Belly of the Beast provides us with a great amount of life and resists.
Since we're using Vaal Pact on the build, we're basically leeching instantly all the life pool should we take any damage when fighting packs.


Kaom's Roots gives us the very valuably unwavering stance that allows us to hit and leech even if we take a lot of damage somehow, along with a very decent amount of base life that works very well with Belly of the Beast.
For moving around we're using whirling blades and/or leap slam, so the downside of no movement speed on boots does not bother this build.


Shackles of the Wretched seems a weird choice at first. It allows us to be cursed with Temporal Chains when we shatter packs, which in turn extends the duration of flask and soul eater significantly, allowing for more souls to be harvested while the downside of the curse feels to be insignificant after a certain amount of souls.


Last but not least, we're using the Inspired Learning unique jewel to benefit from killing rares and having even more fun when crushing through hordes of enemies. Inspired learning is placed here:

Playing this build, you cannot have any amount of mana leech or mana gained on hit.
This includes gear, passive skill tree, jewels, or any curse that would result in mana on hit (Poacher's Aim), mana on kill (Assassin's Mark) or mana leech (Warlord's Mark).
Any amount of mana leech or mana on hit would conflict with the need to keep your mana lower than the maximum unreserved amount and would result in you losing your soul eater stacks, thus putting you in a very uncomfortable position.
I have not tested a very low mana leech like 0.1% or 0.2% but I am pretty sure it would make the playstyle of this build harder than it is.

Normal: Oak (40 base Health)
Cruel: Oak (18% increased Physical Damage)
Merciless: Eramir (Skill Point)

Level 60

Level 70

Level 80

Level 90

Level 100

I pop these two flasks together when drinking souls, and I benefit from a ~12 second (after reductions and increases) bleeding and freezing immunity, which pretty much lasts through the map. I thought of having a third one for curse immunity as well, but I realized it is really not needed. Physical immune and heavily overcapped resists by souls does not need curse immunity.

6L (Main Skill): Ice Crash - Melee Physical Damage - Weapon Elemental Damage - Life Leech - Increased Area of Effect/Concentrated Effect (Bosses like Atziri) - Melee Physical on Full Life/Faster Attacks/Fortify.

4L (Mobility): Leap Slam - Whirling Blades - Faster Attacks - Fortify.

4L (Curse Setup): Herald of Ice - Curse on Hit - Temporal Chains - Increased Duration.

3L: Hatred - Ice Golem - Minion Life.

3L: Cast When Damage Taken - Immortal Call - Increased Duration.

As I said, there are numerous ways to play with Soulthirst. Ice Crash uses the main hand weapon to attack, and felt like a good choice because I could get one more damage multiplier skill gem while keeping the life leech gem *and* it has a built-in pseudo-multistrike.
I could have gone with Reave and either stayed with the sword or switched to a Dagger (Claws would also be a choice if I would not get the mana leech claw node), but then I wouldn't have access to Vaal Reave.
I could pick up a mace and go Ground Slam, or pretty much anything that uses the main hand weapon while it ignores the offhand axe.

Using this sword (I will upgrade to a better weapon as soon as possible), this is the tooltip dps in my hideout with Auras on and Ice Golem up (5-link with life leech gem):


This is my tooltip dps with 48 Soul Eater stacks up:

This is my defence panel with 82 Soul Eater stacks up. Note that the "estimated" physical damage reduction is not accurate. At 20+ stacks the actual number is 100%, meaning you basically take no physical damage: