Highly experimental build: Elder Vampire

I've always admired and envied people who came up with extremely weird, interesting, mind-bending builds. I've always played extremely strange stuff, and my character list is a train wreck of strange experiments, but I've never been confident I've found the build I really really want to call "mine".

Till now. I am brewing a build so experimental that I doubt it even works. It is so messed up that I really need your help before I set it in motion. It involves a metric ton of synergies, interactions, specific item choices, and plays in a way that is just out of this world. Note I'm not bragging about how complex it is: before I do so, I have to make sure it even works. However, I have a strong feeling it does and I absolutely adore the concept, specially because it's really flavourful. The item and abilities seem hand-picked to fill a theme, the theme of a powerful vampire magician.

So what I ask from you is, if you have some time, to check out the build and tell me if you think it would work, what could be done to improve it, and any feedback you have, as I plan to make it a long term personal project. If the concept is sound this thread is also an open invitation to build the character. There's nothing I'd like as much as seeing people try the idea out and having fun with it!

Sorry for posting this here instead of a specific class build: The reason is that it can be done from both the Witch and Shadow starting points so I didn't know where to put it and I didn't want to spam both sections.

So without further ado...

Elder Vampire

Click for the Skill Tree

Gear:

Main weapon set:


Alt weapon set:


Key Uniques:


Spells (assuming perfect links):

-On a (6link) Covenant:
Freezing Pulse + Life Leech + Life Gain on Hit + Cold Penetration or Critical Damage + LMP + Reduced Mana
(+15 Chaos Damage thanks to Covenant)

On a more realistic 5link I wouldn't have the Cold Pen or Crit Dmg

-On the Rime Gaze:
Arctic Breath + Reduced Mana + Increased Crit Damage + Cold Penetration (+conc effect from the Gaze)

Other skills:

Righteous fire + Life Leech (Not so sure on this interaction, but Righteous Fire is essential to the build anyway)

Purity + Discipline + Haste + Reduced Mana Cost.

Explanation to all of this mess:

At this point you're likely wondering... What the hell is wrong with this guy? I just vomited a lot of seemingly unrelated skills on the table which probably don't make any sense at this point. I swear in my head they do, and I'll try my best to convey it, and see whether or not it's workable. So here are the main strategies of the build:

First and foremost, it is important to understand it is a Low HP build. This is why it sports Pain Attunement and dual Redbeaks as main weapon choice, which totals an awesome of 200% INC and 30% "more" (multiplicative) spell damage on such state. It is meant to play at low HP and depend on Energy Shield to survive.

Other low HP builds function differently. They normally make use of the Blood Magic gem to hack away at their own life with a single aura and use mana for their usual spellcasting. This build is different in that it actually uses The Covenant as a source of BM so that life is permanently used as a resource. This means the aura reservation is much more efficient, and it is possible to get to perma low HP through Haste and Purity, doing the fine grain adjustments with Discipline until it sits just below 35%.

You might wonder... Okay, genius, you're using Life as a resource. Then how do you avoid killing yourself? I use Energy Shield as my defense, however in principle I could kill myself simply through casting. Here comes the "Life gain on Hit" gem that is linked to both attack spells in the build. I chose Freezing Pulse as a main attack for several purposes. First, with huge critical chance and damage, it is a great source of crowd control. Second, it hits multiple times (aoe + LMP). This is important because it must sustain our own health pool! I carefully calculated it so by hitting at least three times (which is guaranteed even against single targets) it will give back double the life that it takes away from casting. Therefore it should remain a net gain.

Now, the craziness keeps piling up. When I say this is a low HP build, I mean it. You might have realized that I'm running two Uniques that reduce max HP by 20% each, so my final HP pool should be extremely low. This is completely intentional. Why? Because the build is meant to run stable Righteous Fire (Holy crap that gets us to 200% INC and 100% "more" damage). Thus the Purity Aura and Shaffel's Frame on alt, to keep the fire damage at minimum while traveling. Fire damage is calculated from HP so it should be as low as humanly possible, and applied on my extremely high ES buffer (I picked up almost every ES node ever). You might say "That's cool, but that's not stable". Here's the thing: That's what Ghost Reaver is for. If you go back to the skill choices you'll see that aside from life gain on hit, the main spell also has Life Leech. That's meant to be boosted by Ghost Reaver and leech directly to ES. Some number crunching led me to believe that through the insane amounts of damage this build deals, it should be possible to keep bumping up the ES without needing to disable RF (although I will obviously carry flasks with Dousing, and thanks to the cooldown bonus from Rime Gaze it should be possible to get your ES back to full in record time).

So yes, hilarious as it may sound, every cast of Freezing Pulse should leech both life and ES in parallel, thanks to LGOH not being actual leech. This would keep us alive (life) and combat RF and damage (normal leech from a metric ton of spell damage). EDIT: First issue spotted by feedback. Apparently Life Gain on Hit doesn't apply to spells, oh damn :( That's unfortunate. We can still disable Ghost Reaver and sustain ourselves through pure life leech, although I find it kind of scary.

By the way, I linked RF with Life Leech because if I understand game mechanics properly, self-damage counts as damage, which means I can leech at myself and recover 6% of the lost ES, which isn't much but still better than any other support I can stick to RF.


A few more thoughts to wrap it up: You might be worried about this build's vulnerability to stun, having such low life. Thankfully, Eye of Chayula is there to remedy it, by making you completely immune to it while maintaining the synergy. Other status effects aren't much of a worry except for Freeze, which we can handle with a Dream Fragments in case we go to a freeze-heavy map or similar.

However, the elephant on the room is neither of those... It's Chaos. Yep, I know, this build is terribly, glaringly vulnerable to Chaos damage. I did all my best to avoid it (getting all Chaos resistance nodes, having Shaffel's Frame on offhand to block all spells that involve chaos, using Amethyst flasks, choosing Cold as a damage type to keep mobs under control) but the reality is that chaos is going to destroy us sooner or later. Any ideas to fix this hole are welcome.

That was all folks. Sorry for the long write. It's something I've been working hard on, but I need some expert opinion before I embark on it, as my mechanics knowledge may be a bit shabby in some points and this isn't precisely an "obvious" build. Thank you!

Nice build! Makes me want to level an alt ^^

Life Gain on Hit doesn't work on spells.

Other than that, it seems interesting if difficult to pull off, you'd need some sick resistance jewelry alongside your 3 pretty rare uniques.

"

0nin wrote:

Life Gain on Hit doesn't work on spells and doesn't work with Ghost Reaver.

Other than that, it seems interesting if difficult to pull off, you'd need some sick resistance jewelry alongside your 3 pretty rare uniques.

Crap, there goes my build I guess :(

I assumed Life Gain on Hit applied to spells, knowing that Life Leech does. That's unfortunate.

Oh well, I can still take out Ghost Reaver and use the Life Leech directly on HP, but the build would be much less awesome that way. Any ideas?

You could find a way to make it work with melee attacks instead. Then you could use your leech/lgoh combo properly.

>Shaffel...

Anyways, I don't know if you want to go the other route, but if you have a reasonable amount of life regen + zealots oath if should way more than make up for the eshield loss due to RF.

I'm not actually familiar with any SPELLS that do chaos damage. Pretty much every source of chaos damage is a ranged ATTACK which the frame will not block.

If you wanted to try the zealots oath approach I might go with something like this.



Also, instead of using blood magic for everything, you can blood magic + reduced mana cost + purity to be on low life. You should probably invest in a cannot be frozen piece of equipment as well.

"

0nin wrote:

You could find a way to make it work with melee attacks instead. Then you could use your leech/lgoh combo properly.

But then all benefits from being low on life would go down the drain. Righteous Fire, Pain Attunement, the dual Redbeaks... All that is spell damage, so it wouldn't make much sense to be low on HP then. I guess I could modify the build to be melee based but that would require significant changes and a different approach.

Thankfully Life Leech does work on spells, so not all hope is lost.

Dual Redbeaks + Chaos Damage from Covenant + Added Lightning + Double Strike is probably gonna be pretty competitive damage.

Then, how about filling your Rime Gaze with a Spell Totem+LMP+FP+CP?

"

Saffell wrote:

>Shaffel...

Anyways, I don't know if you want to go the other route, but if you have a reasonable amount of life regen + zealots oath if should way more than make up for the eshield loss due to RF.

I'm not actually familiar with any SPELLS that do chaos damage. Pretty much every source of chaos damage is a ranged ATTACK which the frame will not block.

If you wanted to try the zealots oath approach I might go with something like this.

Spoiler

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgUBBVuLjJ_fPAXvfOFz7SBG14M4nYDdBX1TYG05ihBpMJeCmylP7Dg62E3YjHZ8uySLPQ_E9ift890UTQSzAnGFfRZAZp5xTZrPQ2O3MVj1ncT60vfB5CIabJ2upwjYJDbFNtjxbOxVHwKcLYdlBAeXlVJTPV9Msy0fbRnB8_F2axci9BzcSTp_xqKjwcXsGMNtj_p71zvh4venK9vnRwZfaot6u9YRUE-_HdlDVK-3SRs=.

Thanks! That looks pretty cool. I didn't think of the Templar route. However, why increased Fire damage?

Anyway, my issue is not so much keeping ES stable, but rather not killing myself through regular spellcasting. I use Blood Magic and I simply don't have any HP, which means I'm very, very likely to just murder myself. No matter how much I increase my ES gain, blood magic straight bypasses it, I could try and keep it up through surgeon health potions, but that sounds like an awful lot of micromanagement. So far pure HP leech seems to be my only option.

"

0nin wrote:

Dual Redbeaks + Chaos Damage from Covenant + Added Lightning + Double Strike is probably gonna be pretty competitive damage.

Then, how about filling your Rime Gaze with a Spell Totem+LMP+FP+CP?

Actually, this sounds fun. I hadn't thought of keeping the redbeaks because of the shitty base damage, but you're absolutely right in that it doesnt matter. I'll look into that right now.