[2.1.1]Contagious Combustion: The Beginner's Secret to Infinite Mana [HC/SC]

So everyone's all hyped about the new skills and all, but everyone's been building them differently, especially as Contagion, essence drain and wither have fallen by the wayside in favour of fakner 2.1 and bladefall being bonkers. Today, I'm going to be telling you about the absolutely ridiculous interactions between Essence Drain, Abyssal Cry, Eldritch Battery and Mind Over Matter.

I'm going to try and keep this beginner friendly, so if it's a bit slow going in places, forgive me. On that note however, a Glossary:
PoE Terms for Dummies

AA: Arctic Armor (reservation skillgem)

AC: Abyssal Cry (active skillgem)

Adds: Additional monsters spawned, usually during a boss fight. (for more difficulty and as a way to regain flask charges. We use them as a damage source because of Abyssal Cry.)

DoT/degen: Damage over Time/ Degeneration (same thing, different names)

EB: Eldritch Battery (Keystone: Converts energy sheild from protecting life to protecting mana)

ED: Essence Drain (Active skillgem)

ES: Energy Shield (like life, but not)

FD: Flame Dash (Active skillgem: our get-over-walls/Oh-Shit movement skill)

Inc AOE: Increased Area of Effect (Support gem, does what it says on the tin)

Inc Dur: Increased Duration (Support gem, also does what it says on the tin)

MOM: Mind Over Matter (Keystone: 30% of non-degen damage is taken from mana before life)

Multiproj: Lesser/Greater Multiple Projectiles. (2 different support gems, adding 2 and 4 projectiles respectively)

OOM: Out of Mana (A time when great sadness ensues, sometimes followed by death)

ZO: Zealot's Oath (Keystone: Life Regeneration is converted to Energy Sheild Regeneration)


"Lol, scrub build 0/10" Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but really, hear me out. I have been clearing some of the rippiest maps I've had access to. Twinned orchard with turbo and vulnerability with one death only because I dun fucked up, Residence dom with boss turbo and enfeeble. Jungle valley in literally a second. The damage is nuts, even if the clearspeed is no shatterchuck. More on mapping later...

I have garbage gear! Not even a stack of chaos invested into this character, I bought only one talisman that had 30% increased chaos damage on it with not-garbage stats for like, 3c and that's it. I've been leveling and even mid-high mapping entirely selffound and I only had one real "oh shit! Ohshitohshitohshitohshit" moment and that was when I got surprise buttsexed by abaxoth in a zana seawitch map. I wanna try a poorjoys for the shits and giggles, but I haven't found anyone actually selling it yet given the challenges in talisman league atm. More on gearing later...

Make no mistake, I am on softcore right now, but this build is definitely hardcore viable IMO, and only needs a very minor leveling adjustment to pick up the life nodes earlier. Endgame tree will look mostly the same. More on that later...

Unlike every other poison build out there (yes, we do use 1 poison gem), we are not going to run Binos. You could for the giggles, but it's not necessary, and it saves us 2 exalts (and hopefully from the impending nerf)

Enough of the introduction though, let's get to it. We mentioned skills last, let's look at them.

Skill Gems

For our purposes, we shall limit ourselves to 4 links to keep this budget, as that is all I have atm, and I'm still shreking shit.

Essence Drain: ED/Rapid Decay/Controlled Destruction/Void Manipulation.

No surprises here hopefully. 5th and 6th links would probably be slower proj and inc duration, but I'm not using either of them, so damned if I know what actually is best. I'm still operating in a 4 link.

Some of you might notice that we are not using multiproj, nor spell echo, despite this being our primary damage dealer. Due to the interactions of the skills, covered later, multiproj is just a damage decrease with no real benefit, and spell echo directly decreases our clearspeed and safety by forcing us to stand still. We cast each skill once and then move on. None of this "cast till it's dead" crap. That is for 'normal' spellcasters.

Contagion: Contagion/inc AOE/Faster Casting/Inc Dur

Hopefully no surprises there either. Contagion's only purpose is for utility to spread Essence Drain around. Inc Aoe to hit as many as possible, inc duration (duh) and faster casting to decrease our animation downtime. Technically this could be run in a 3 link, as inc dur isn't really necessary in the long run, but we have infinite mana and sockets to spare, so no harm in a bit of bonus utility. I however found is slightly more expedient to replace inc dur with flame dash (our movement skill of choice) as FS benefits from the faster casting and isn't affected by inc-aoe. Just a little bit of efficiency to consider.

Wither: Wither/Spell totem/Faster Casting/Inc Dur

Of course we run wither, and why would you use any other link setup than this? Maybe inc aoe, but for wither's purpose in this build, it doesn't really make sense. We don't wither to kill normal packs, we wither for targets who have too much HP to die easily and begin our chain reaction, like bosses, big rares or magic bears with more life.

Abyssal Cry: Abyssal Cry/Inc AOE/Void Manipulation/Poison.

This is where the magic happens. This is what covers all of our shortfalls. The ace in the hole, the gimmick we are built around. I actually had considered running this in a 5 or 6 link with inc duration and item rarity/rapid decay/added chaos respectively.
Yes, you heard me. Abyssal Cry. In a 6 link. Here's why...

The Rotation: you can skip this if you aren't a newbie
This build is about abusing the rediculous amount of chaos and damage over time effects in the tree to cause essence drain to degen as hard as we can, and then using Contagion to spread it from each slain enemy to as many nearby enemies as possible and watch entire packs, even entire screens just dissolve. Because we are running ZO/EB/MOM (with good reason, mind you), it is important as to what you are doing as to the order you cast these, because we forsake much cast speed in the tree and in our links for the other utility we can get to make a single cast do as much as possible, but we run the risk of running OOM (OOes?) if we are taking damage and MoM depletes our reserve before the infini-mana effect kicks in.

Just Mindless Pack Clearing:
Contagion->Essence Drain

The go-to rotation. Nothing special, nothing fancy. This ensures that you debuff as many enemies as possible BEFORE the unlucky carrier gets an ED to the face to ensure that squishier mobs don't die to ED before you have time to cast contagion (yes, small mobs like beetles and spiders die that fast in high level maps).

Rhoa Rotation: Essence Drain->Contagion

If you are faced against mobs that you know are going to deal damage to you as you try and rotate, or are fast moving like charging rhoas, it is important to get ED onto your initiation target as soon as possible so the debuff starts recharging your mana for when MOM kicks in.

HOLD UP, ED's degen heals you though! Doesn't work on Mana!
To which I refer you to the precise wording on the gem...

"Regenerate 0.5% of Debuff Damage as Life"

"Regenerate"

And now to ZO: "Life Regeneration applies to Energy Shield instead of Life"

Remember we have EB as well? Yes, that interaction works.


Anyways, as we have EB/MoM, we're going to be taking damage to our ES. The last thing we want is to run OOM halfway through our rotation and be left a sad panda, so we lead with the ED to ensure we are regenning a lot more ES than we normally would, allowing us between damage spikes to complete our rotation. There are alternative ways to build that fix this problem, but this is this build. :P

When to Wither: In standard clearning, neither of these skills will be used. I use wither primarily against uniform, high-health packs, like bears, or blue-packs, when I struggle to get that initial kill to start it all off. Wither makes that initial target take increased chaos damage and die much faster, starting the chain. It is also much more useful in high-level maps, when mob HP starts getting so high that ED on it's own feels a bit too slow for our purposes, and so wither helps speed it up again.

When to Cry: Abyssal cry on the other hand is for when you don't have trouble getting that initial kill, it's other follow up kills that are the problem, or when you just want to clear the screen of everything as fast as you can because you either A) are gonna die soon or B) need room to maneuver in tight spaces. This most often happens during bossfights, talisman monsters and strongbox openings. Because of our tree and our links, a lot can happen in the fraction of a second it can take to dissipate an entire boss-room in a cloud of purple smoke, so allow me to cover just what is going on...if you care for such things. If you just want to continue blowing shit up, feel free to skip by.

Abyssal Cry for Dummies
Abyssal cry afflicts nearby monsters with a long-duration debuff which applies an increasingly strong slow depending on how many monsters were affected and taunts them to attack you. We don't usually care about the slow component. We do however care about the other half of it: On death, afflicted monsters explode, dealing 8% of their maximum life as chaos damage to other monsters near to them.

Math of Exile
While 8% may not seem like a big deal, remember this is damage tagged with "chaos" and "aoe", so we have a grand total of 290% increased damage from our tree that applies to it. 290% of 8% is around 23%, which is FURTHER increased by our Void Manipulation support gem, which gives us at level 19 38% MORE chaos damage, resulting in 31.7% of their max health as chaos damage to all surrounding enemies. If one enemy has the same life as the one that just exploded, it just took 1/3rd of it's HP as chaos damage right to the face. ON TOP OF THAT, we link "poison", which deals 10% of that 31.7% of their max health per second for a base of 2 seconds (but is actually closer to 4 with our skill tree), which results in them taking a new base damage of 3.1% per second, which is again scaled by all of our chaos, damage over time, and poison damage nodes.

*sigh* So we have the 3.17%, which is modified by 240% chaos, 100% dot, and the 100+% from poison AND the 38% more damage from void manipulation, resulting in another 440% inc + 38% more resulting in a grand total of approximately 19% of the exploded monsters maximum health per second for the next 4 seconds, (closer to 5 or 6 because we're running temporal chains, and even more if we link inc dur, but please, simple steps), resulting in an initial hit of 31.7% maxHP as chaos followed by 75% of maxhp as chaos degen over the next 4 seconds, for a GRANDEST total of 106.7% of the maximum health of the exploded monster over the next 4 seconds, not accounting for the temporal chains curse or the increased duration support gem.

/math

Once the first thing dies, everything else in it's pack that it hits is gonna die too. And then everything they hit...you get the idea. This all takes place in a fraction of a second, so you may (read: will) experience some chugging of your computer during this time. Don't worry, it only lasts the second of the animation, and you needn't worry because if it slows down enough to be a problem, then you exploded enough shit to ensure that EVERYTHING'S DIES.


Suffice to say with all our chaos damage from the tree, and the poison support gem, if you blow up a pack of the guardian blue mobs next to the boss of whatever map you're in, that boss is going to if not evaporate in the initial explosion, then melt into a pool of slimey purple goop as the dozen or so stacks of poison from the mobs dumped onto it bleed it's remaining life away like they pulled the plug out of the left side of the healthbar.


Curse Setup:

In one of our 3-links, we stick Blastphemy/Temporal Chains/Enfeeble
We use blastphemy because it's the easiest way to apply curses for us. We only hit one target per rotation, we aren't running heralds, we rarely take damage if we're not being reckless...blastphemy is the best go-to. Just as a lovely bonus, we grab every aoe node in the tree, just for some bonus efficiency.

We use Temporal Chains because it's temporal chains. Defensively, it slows all nearby mobs down, allowing us to move out of the way and react more intelligently. Offensively, it extends the duration of both ED and the poison afflicted from Abyssal Cry's detonations. (We don't usually care about it extending abyssal cry's primary duration, nor contagion, as they both last over 10 seconds as is. Everything's gonna be long dead by then)

The second curse is a toss-up. We could run Vulnerability for buttones of damage. I run Enfeeble because it synergises nicely with the Evasion/MoM hybrid I've built, and my gear sucks ass so I can't really afford to forsake that extra defense for already-plentiful offense.

Auras: Zip.

Other Uti- Yes, I run no auras! What would you suggest? The heralds? 99.999% of our damage comes from various forms of chaos degens and purple explosions. The only thing in our kit that the heralds would apply to are the essence drain projectile. No, the heralds don't even apply to the abyssal cry explosion because it's a warcry and not a spell! AND elemental damage doesn't increase the strength of the poison that results from it. Haste? Movement speed is always nice, sure, but we don't need the cast speed aside from the minor bonus to animation rotation it gives us. It doesn't affect our damage application in any way, and I already determined that we are using our reserves to compliment our defenses!

Grace then? Well Grace was on the table for consideration, but I ultimately decided against it considering the +1 curse for enfeeble was easier to reach, and a cheaper mana reserve which made it easi-, look let's just continue!

Other Utilities:

Arctic Armor

AA is run almost exclusively because of the chilled ground effect it leaves and the synergy it has with temporal chains with reducing monster attack and movement speeds to act 1 levels of crawl. It also makes devouerers a joke. The % mitigation helps protect us a little when we actually stand still to rotate our spells, and offers a bit of consolation defenses in case we get stunned. Not a huge amount, but it helps. Also we have basically no other physical defense at all. I just stuck this in an unset ring, TBH. I happened to find a good one, so two chromes later, in it went.

Flame Dash

We're using a wand. We've stacked duration. We're running Flame Dash for movement. That's how it works.
Yes, we could theoretically use a dagger for the Whirling blades fortify combo, that would work as well with some very nice synergy, but finding high spell damage daggers is expensive, and I didn't want to bother trying to color my crap gear. Also whirling blades doesn't go through obstacles, which is mainly what I need it to do. "But Bino's!" No.

Don't believe me? 95% inc spell damage dagger, 4 exalts. 117% inc spell damage wand, 25 chaos. Just an example I found on my first poe trade searches...

Cast When Damage Taken

I don't actually run one yet, though I probably should. Colouring problems, honestly. What particular flavour of CWDT you prefer is up to you, we've got a lot of tools from our tree to make basically anything work. (just don't use curses, cause we've already got them checked out ;) )

Golem

Not Ice, Obviously. Otherwise pick your poison.

Vaal Skills

Defensive ones. Vaal Molten shell maybe? Vaal grace? Vaal discipline doesn't really help us a lot, because we already have infinimana. Vaal summon skeletons for a colossal meatsheild? Vaal cold snap for the freeze? Again, pick your poison.



Gear


Good stuff.

I'm serious. That's the best I've got. There are no special requirements for this build aside from Evasion/ES bases and a wand+Spell shield with spell damage. I run no uniques, no stats required to make it functional - you might want a bit of dex somewhere because we don't get quite enough in the tree, but beyond that, life, resistances, evasion, ES...item rarity? Chaos res is quite nice to have though, because we are an EB/MoM build, so chaos damage hurts a little more than normal, and I really don't want to run an amathyst flask. Atziri's Promise doesn't fit in this build for hopefully obvious reasons. We don't even need to get a huge amount of ES, only around 400+ or so - currently high end mapping with 600 for my 3800 life on MoM because of our infinimana gimmick, detailed earlier (though you might have figured it out by now.)

If you want my current gear, it's here (assuming the character still exists, it may not)

BringerofSmallpox

Uniques to Consider

Seeing as much of our damage comes from chaos damage, and most of our chaos damage comes from the tree, what we're holding in our main hand is pretty much irrelelvant aside from a spell damage roll. So, I eventually opted for a more defensive option. And considering we're running enfeeble, what better option than to hold a wand that has blastphemy blind? :D

Saffels Frame. With temp/enfeeble/AA operational, we're pretty set against attacks. The block chance from our sheild really doesn't do a huge amount for us, especially if we're running Eclipse Solaris with it's free blind. So, Saffels let's us convert that block chance into something more useful - spell block. We don't get any reasonable amount of block from the tree, but with those 3 points in the witch Sheild ring that pushes our spellblock to 26%, which is always helpful against those pesky spells without their accuracy check. Also who doesn't like Maxres?




Skill Tree

I honestly felt comfortable, if a little clunky at first, leveling with contagion/essence drain/Abyssal, just using whatever gear I found, speccing into the tree as I went around on my skillgrimage. We grab life, Chaos damage, Dot Damage, dual curse, increased AOE, and skill effect duration, picking up Eldritch Battery, Mind over Matter and Zealots Oath as we go. I didn't have any particular pathing, although I would suggest not grabbing the Method to the Madness and Atrophy wheels until much later in the build, as you need everything else before grabbing those big, high damage wheels. I picked them up at ~60 and ~80 respectively, filling out life nodes whenever I felt too squishy, but in hardcore you would want to grab those life nodes with priority. It just delays your damage spike is all, but that's always an acceptable trade-off in HC. The tree ultimately looks the same once you get into the 90s.

I haven't updated my internal calculator with act 4 skill nodes yet, so I don't know exactly what level you will get your tree to this point, but my full, imagined build looks something like this: 118 Skill Points



Bandits

Normal: Oak
Cruel: Kill
Merc: Kill

Pretty simple, right? Fairly standard.


The Infinimana Trick
We are talking about the unusual interaction between Zealots Oath, Eldritch Battery and Essence Drain. If those three componants are enough for you to figure out how it works, congrats, you can close this tab and move on.

There are 3 componants to this that you must understand:

Eldritch Battery: Energy Shield protects Mana instead of Life. Spend Energy Shield before Mana for Skill Costs

Zealots Oath: Life Regeneration applies to Energy Shield instead of Life

Essence Drain: Fires a projectile that applies a damage over time debuff when it hits. You are healed for a portion of the debuff damage. The debuff is spread by Contagion. -> Regenerate 0.5% of Debuff Damage as Life

When you hit a target with essence drain you begin regenning 1/200th of that DoT damage as life. With my high-level-but-poorly-geared essence drain in a 4-link, I get pretty close to 11,000 damage per second on the dot. 0.5% of that is around 55. 55 life regen per second isn't a massive amount. However, this is per target. When you start dealing with larger packs like cannibals, and beetles, you can hit upwards of 15-20 - sometimes over 30 targets at a time with contagion spreading the ED debuff around. This puny little 55 suddenly starts healing us for around 800 to upwards of 1500 life for as long as the debuff lasts/monsters remain alive. The highest I ever saw was around 2.1k and a bit, a not-insignificant number.

However, because this is a regen, it is applied to our energy sheild. A realistic average of 500-1000 in light combat ES regen is pretty significant. But wait, there's more. We're running EB, which means this is technically faux-mana-regen. 500-1000 mana regen is nigh-unheard of, even in times of old. In heavy combat, with dozens of mobs around, we can hit 2k, 3k mana regen, fortunately in the situations when you're going to need it the most: Large pack sizes.

There are no situations in game that I can think of where 3k mana regen per second is not enough to solve any mana-related problems you might have. By that point, you may as well have infinite mana regen for all intents and purposes.

"But Kavi, why do we need all this mana regen? You said yourself we only cast our skills once, and surely 55 'mana' per second would be enough for that!" You're right. And it is. But we're running Mind Over Matter, and that's where infiniregen comes in handy. When you consider that 30% of damage taken to life is first taken from the mana, which is protected FIRST by the energy sheild because of EB, which in heavy combat can be regenning at well over 2k/s because of ZO, we basically have a flat 30% mitigation on any attack (or short sequence of attacks) that does not do more than ~5.4k mitigated damage (our life pool the 30% diverted off to our ES pool). If you figure we have infinite mana, with regards to all non-chaos damage, mind over matter gives us a flat, 30% damage mitigation. This is permanent fortify. This is 50% better than permanent fortify! And all you need to do to ensure that you have this infinimana-perma-MoM setup is to be killing targets with ED and contagion and letting it spread around the packs. It's that buggery simple.


Mapping

Mapping is pretty easy with this build. I'm able to run any map that does not have either Haemomancy or curse immune as is.

Haemomancy is far too dangerous because we rely on our curses and AA for defense and utility. It's extremely risky to give those up in the teir of map when you most need them. Theoretically you could do it if you unspecced out of ZO and just let the ED life regen affect you directly for a bit of buffer, but you would still need to play the map like your balls are tied in a bag full of broken glass: Slowly and gingerly.

Curse immune is dangerous for the same reason. Curses are 30% of our offence and 70% of our defense. Having 1 mob or even 1 pack curse immune isn't the end of the world. But the entire map? Enfeeble/Temp chains are doing a lot of work keeping us safe from the worst of the incoming damage. Lose those and that bag full of broken glass comes back.

No Regen is another sketchy one, because we lose access to our infinimana gimmick, but we're still running our curses and AA, and we do still have mom with a small buffer pool, so it's not the end of the world. Just be very careful and lead with your wither totem to check for surprises around corners. None of this running into the middle of packs to abyssal cry them all from the inside.

Everything else is laughable. Want me to go through the list?

Enfeeble? We do so much overkill damage it barely slows up down.
Temp chains? Annoying at worst. Bit nasty when paired with turbo, but we're running AA and temp chains ourselves, so really at close range the game is running at normal speed with longer debuffs.
Vulnerability? Ha! Barely get hit in the first place. Just don't give Rankangos kisses and you'll be mostly fine. Only get's dangerous when paired with venom (poison on hit) for the most part..
Eleweakness curses? We need so few stats on our gear that we should be horrendously overcapped on resistances.
-max? Same deal. Spells get a bit scary, but with that massive damage penalty on Enfeeble, we shouldn't get bursted down too quickly if we don't facecheck things.
Added elemental damages are a joke because we're rarely scathed.
Generic inc damage can be a little worrysome when coupled with mobs that deal fast chaos damage like those spine serpents because that goes right through our MoMed ES and hits our 5% unreserved mana pool, so we take full damage which hurts, but hasn't killed me outright yet. Niche situation, really.
Same deal with turbo - they don't hit me, faster?
Any monster resistances are laughable because there is no chaos resist that can roll on maps.
Status ailment immunity and EE are non-issues.
Only burning and desecrated ground are really annoying because we have no life regen (it's all on our ES), and MoM doesn't mitigate degen damage anyways, so we have to keep potting to keep our health up. Wouldn't be such a huge deal, but I only run one life flask currently. (probably should run 2... >.>)
Increased crit does basically nothing because enfeeble is enfeeble.
Beyond just means more monsters to kill.
Fracture actually HELPS us, because bigger packs mean a wider contagion proliferation spread.
Reduced regen...meh? Whether we're regenning 600 es/s or 1000es/s really doesn't make a difference compared to 0es/s.
Increased monster life does slow us down a little bit, but more liberal use of Abyssal cry puts our screen-clearing potential still in the top bracket.
Cannot leech does nothing to us because Essence Drain is not a leech.
Cannot be stunned: We don't stun.
All of the Boss modifiers just makes the boss slightly scarier. If the boss still explodes with his blue pack because abyssal cry with poison is a little silly right now, then whoopdeedoo!
Even Twinned is self-countering. Blow up one boss with abyssal next to the other and laugh as the second boss degens to death entirely from the poisonous explosion from the first.

Like...everything's a joke! Haemomancy, curse immune and a few select combinations are reroll-worthy, and even then they can be played around. This build is EXTREMELY SAFE for mapping. The only map I won't run is Haemomancy, and that's just because I have shite gear. I've run some ultra-rippy maps that I wouldn't even touch with any other character and I don't have a care in the world on this guy with a bit of careful play. It makes mapping *really* cheap, and really accessable to inexperienced players. I haven't pushed this deep into maps since I rolled an IW/RF incinerator in 2.0, which for all who do not remember was residentsleeper EZ-mode. With this one, at least it never gets old to make an entire screenwide strongbox explode instantly in purple smoke.


Pro's and Con's


Pro's

1) Needs very little currency to be competitive.
1.5) Great starter character for a new league because of it.

2) Reasonably fast clear time. Covers weaknesses between screenwide explosions and single-target problems.

3) Not especially complicated to play. Rewards player skill with survivability, doesn't punish DPS output too badly.

4) Almost certainly Atziri viable, not skilled enough personally to confirm it. Not sure about Uubers. Maybe Mathil could do it...

5) Can run almost any combination of map mods.

6) Defensible enough for those "Yolo" moments and let's you get away without hating yourself.

7) Who doesn't like making their computer chug to render all the explosions without the fear of being raped while your GPU cries in the corner until it catches up?

8) It's a shadow! Who doesn't love that guy's writing and VO?

9) I have tried to make this relatively imminent-nerf-proof by avoiding mechanics that are obviously going to be changed, something something, kitchen knife?



Con's

1) Inexperience and poor decisions can land you in situations where you hate yourself when you least expect it. When you walk into the middle of the pack and abyssal cry, but then don't have enough ES left to Essence Drain because you got slapped by mobs so much - feels bad man...

2) Zealots Oath + EB means you have no life regen, and we don't leech. You are entirely reliant on health potions and maybe some life on kill for maintaining your health pool. While we are very resistant to spike damage, degens of every kind make us sad, and ground-effect degens make us the saddest of all.

3) EB + Mom being our primary defensive mechanic results in spiky chaos damage making us very sad pandas indeed, with powerful crits undying alchemists in multiproj maps making us almost unfathomably sad pandas.

4) Expediant bosskilling relies on either the bluepack killing it with the explosion+poison stacking, or adds to achieve same. We can use essence drain and wither totems easily enough to just bleed them down while we run in circles, but it feels bad when we just carved our way through the whole map in a cloud of purple dust only to come to a screeching halt and start making loops while we wait for the healthbar to empty.
4.5) If the boss runs out of range when the bluepack explodes...feels REALLY bad man...

5) Evasion based character with no acro/phase acro. I dunno - some people hate the very thought of it.

6) It's a shadow, so the skill tree pathing in his zone makes you hate your life while leveling till you get contagion + ED running. At least we have almost no wasted points in his starting zone, so it doesn't feel too bad after level 12.

7) Probably going to get caught in the blast of the impending bino's/poison nerf.


All in all, it's a very underrated build. There have been low life varients, poison varients, sans-contagion varients, even a few misguided sans-ED varients, Righteous fire, Iron will, even a CI version...but this, I think, is how GGG wanted the skills to be played. And oh boy does it feel good to watch one explosion proliferate from one set of mobs to the next, to the next, until nothing is left but purple smoke, a whole lot of loot, and you.

Stay frosty fellows. I'll try and keep this up to date as patches come out. I'll also try and get some images to break up this collossal wall of text.
"But we still had a lot of fun, please don't think this comes from hate.
We bitch because we like you and we want you to be great!" ~Miracle of Sound
Last edited by LostKavi on Jan 16, 2016, 12:19:33 PM
Nice writeup, sounds fun. I'm gonna try it.
Well I'm glad someone liked it. :P This is my first build guide, so any clarity and improvement suggestions are welcome.
"But we still had a lot of fun, please don't think this comes from hate.
We bitch because we like you and we want you to be great!" ~Miracle of Sound
Currently in A1C, no problems. Increased AOE on Contagion helps A LOT. That's when the purple magic starts happening.
When you say flame surge, do you mean Flame Dash?
I tested ED w/ Zealots and it didn't work.
"
DefyLogik wrote:
I tested ED w/ Zealots and it didn't work.


It does. I can see my ES regen peak significantly when ED props via contagion.
"
When you say flame surge, do you mean Flame Dash?


*sheepish yes*

I think I got them all, if you find any flamesurges left, point them out. >.<

"
DefyLogik wrote:
I tested ED w/ Zealots and it didn't work.


It definitely does work, the entire build is based around it. :/ One stack of essence drain isn't going to be that noticeable, but 20 stacks will fill your ES pool faster than if you popped vaal discipline. It works.
"But we still had a lot of fun, please don't think this comes from hate.
We bitch because we like you and we want you to be great!" ~Miracle of Sound
Last edited by LostKavi on Jan 10, 2016, 7:44:27 AM
Suppose I should also mention, if people have any ideas for what unique items should be considered, drop a mention.
"But we still had a lot of fun, please don't think this comes from hate.
We bitch because we like you and we want you to be great!" ~Miracle of Sound
Ok I have been running with this build and some things I think that would really make it shine.

Mutewind Pennant like I mentioned before. Get that +1 level to abyssal cry and gain onslaught for 2 seconds when ataunted enemy dies. You can get it RGB slotted and drop poison.
The reason I suggest dropping poison is for Consuming Dark. Your Abyssal Cry and Essence Drain will both poison on hit, allowing you to take Inc Area of Effect.

I also helped kraityn for a Frenzy charge in merc and rolled with a Blood Dance sharkskin boots for all the bonuses from Frenzy charges and the chance for frenzy charge on kill.
I would also spend points 119 and 120 once those are reached into one more frenzy charge for a total of 5.

Alternately, you can still drop Inc AoE from Abyssal Cry and stick with poison and use a Divinarius Imperial Dagger instead if you like. Higher spell damage roll 10% inc AoE and then life and mana on kill.

Those would be my suggestions.
Last edited by DexterMorganBHB on Jan 24, 2016, 11:07:17 PM

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