[2.4 Updated] EB Triple Curse Occultist Bladefall Miner [HC Atziri farmer+curse-bot]

FOR THE 2.3 UPDATE, SEE BOTTOM OF THE POST!


This is my take on Bobington's poison miner that he perfected in the 2w Perandus race.

I couldn't find a written guide on the forums, so I'm writing it up in case anyone else wants to give it a go.

As you can see in Bobington's video, you can make this an extremely cheap build, the only thing you'd need is the gems and a Tabula, Doedre's Damning and The Sorrow of the Divine.
Since I started building this character at the tail-end of the league, I decided to simply throw as much currency as I could at it.

Gear

Keep in mind that this is not the required gear. It's simply what I could get when hardly anyone was online to trade. Look for recommended gear further down the post.

Shield and main-hand weapon



Although you won't whirl as fast as a CoC character who invests in AS on the tree, you'll whirl at an acceptable speed. RP is a decent shield if you don't need resists. It has the necessary ES you need for placing a few mines. I would have swapped this with a rare with life and resists if anything was available. Even with a max-rolled spell block conversion roll I would hardly ever block because of the Acrobatics drawback.

The Divinarius dropped in a map I was running, I honestly hadn't even considered it. I tested Bino's as well, and as good as the DoT damage was, the AoE from Divinarius is nicer for both Bladefall and Blasphemy.

The dagger houses our movement and the shield houses the all-important Stone Golem.

Gloves, Boots and Helmet slot.


On my boots, I simply wanted life, resists and movement speed. I would prefer an evasion pair, but in this case it made it easy to roll the standard CWDT colors. I keep CWDT at a low level and instead focus on quality on Increased Duration.

I swapped out a pair of tri-res + life gloves with an evasion base to get these gloves. The 150 ES isn't a lot unless you're playing EB, which this build does. It's also a slot where you can fill out attributes. The strength is only added for it's life-bonus, though.

This item houses Vaal Lightning Trap, which is really a big helper on the double Vaal boss fight. Concentrated Effect is a swap-gem. Swap out Minefield for bosses.


Helmet, again is just a life/resist piece. I got lucky and found one with high evasion and acceptable life roll.
This piece houses my 3 curses as well as my Blasphemy gem. Heretic's Veil is of course an ok substitute, but none of it's stats really makes it's worth it's 6 EX+ price tag in my opinion. At best it would save me 2 points on the tree.

Jewelry and belt


Life/resist piece.



This is the first unique that I consider required. It saves 6 points on the passive tree and doesn't cost anything. Vaaling it cannot grant a single good implicit, so prices are kept low compared to something like Asenath's Gentle Touch which is vaaled in bulk to gain Elemental Weakness on hit.



Never mind this master-craft. I couldn't really craft anything I needed on it, so this is basically a 10% mana roll that got nailed on the head. You could get something like a corrupted amulet that gives you an additional curse, which opens up the possibility of using for example Ming's Heart, having Shavronne's Revelation on your right hand to get 3% ES regen per second. You don't need mana regeneration anyway. Ventor's Gamble or just a good defensive ring also becomes an option.



On my belt I simply wanted strength, life and a resists to fill out one that wasn't ele-weakness capped.

Chest

I just didn't want to wear a Tabula, to be honest, not to say that a Tabula wouldn't work.


Flasks


I've done 5 or 6 Atziri runs on this character in PHC, and I completely forgot that I'm supposed to have a Topaz Flask for her Storm Calls.

These slots are also a personal preference thing. I know a lot of people like Seething Divine flasks, 1 of Staunching and 1 either of Heat, Warding or Grounding, but I'm completely happy to roll with Bubbling Eternal flasks. I always run Staunching, Warding and Heat.

The Sorrow of the Divine is the second unique that I consider absolutely necessary for this build. This is also where the all-important Stone Golem. comes in. The flask gives you Zealot's Oath when it's active, so life regeneration turns into Energy Shield regeneration, which we use to place our mines and use movement skills. Keep in mind that this is all Bobington's idea, all credit to him, again. I'm really impressed at how well this works to farm Atziri in an HC league.



Links

You can play this in a 5L, but you'd need to drop Trap&Mine Damage. Controlled Destruction's multiplier is bigger and doesn't have the drawback of reduced mine placement speed.

Bladefall
Remote Mine
Minefield
Trap&Mine Damage
Controlled Destruction
Poison

Other links I use are as following:
Stone Golem - Minion Life - a third optional gem. Bobington uses Minion Speed, but notes that Minion and Totem Elemental Resistance will probably work well. I toyed with the idea of purchasing a level 4 Empower simply to get it above 20K life.

Whirling Blades - Faster Attacks - Fortify
I don't really take full advantage of Fortify. I find it a lot nicer to not whirl into and through packs, I'd rather go around their edges, placing mines and killing them that way.

CWDT - Immortal Call - Increased Duration - Vaal Grace.

Blasphemy - Temporal Chains - Enfeeble - Vulnerability
This reserves almost 100% of our mana, which is where Eldritch Battery comes in the clutch.

Vaal Lightning Trap - GMP - Increased Duration - Concentrated Effect.
You don't really need GMP, I just happened to have a green socket I thought I should use. As I've said previously you can also use Cluster Traps or Multitraps. Chain or Fork would also benefit the projectiles, but Increased Duration is really the king, making the ground stay shocking for a lot longer. Concentrated Effect is there to swap for Minefield for the boss fights.


Atziri

When it comes to farming Atziri, I found it surprisingly easy. The reason for this is all the curse-effectiveness from the tree, the radius Blasphemy reaches with the combination of Leadership and Hex Master, as well as the curse effectiveness of Skittering Runes and miscellaneous pieces of curse effectiveness and quality bonuses. Almost the entire screen is cursed at all times, and thanks to Minefield and Void Beacon the DoT is really nice.

This is also some of the only places in the game where it's even useful to use Vaal Lightning Trap. If you look at my gloves, you can also see that a lot can be done differently. Greater Multiple Projectiles is not a bad support for it, but I suspect Cluster Traps would be even better. The reason I picked GMP over CT is that it triggers more reliably since this tree doesn't get any trap trigger radius. Increased Duration is really nice on it, though.

The Double Vaal Fight

For ALL 3 boss fights in The Apex of Sacrifice, I swap out Minefield with Concentrated Effect. This is simply a Single Target setup that works extremely well.

When you enter the room, use whirling blades to get to the middle, this will trigger both Vaal Oversouls to emerge at the same time, instead of 1 spawning before the other and being enraged when the first is already dead.

When the smoke starts pouring out, or a little bit before if you don't whirl or run very fast, place 3 mines at the base of one of the Oversouls, and 2 at the other. With 1 more point on the tree you could place 6 mines at ones, but I've only had 1 botched Vaal fight, and it was not due to the lack of mines. When you run back to the middle after placing the mines, throw a VLT each on the spawn locations. Wait until VLT procs before you detonate your mines. The kill time is less than 6 seconds.


Vaal Worst Case Scenario
The worst thing that can happen on this fight is one of the Oversouls instantly going underground, giving the finger to your mines. When this happens it's important to keep cool and predict it's movements. It doesn't take long to kill, but this is one of the instances where I realized I didn't have a Topaz Flask. 2 - 3 mines is still more enough damage to kill it within 4 - 5 seconds of uptime, so keep dodging and god-speed-


The Trio
First off, use Vaal Grace and keep your head cool. It does NOT matter which boss you kill first or last, but it's preferable to kill K'aj A'alai first. This is the spike-rain lady that always starts in the middle. The second and third kills does not matter in the slightest.


Atziri
Swap to Concentrated Effect again, head into the fight and immediately rush her down to place 3 to 4 mines that you detonate at once. Do your best to evade her spells until she switches forms. This is where it's absolutely needed to be good at managing your flasks. If you run out of your Sulphur Flask in the split phase, I suggest logging out or having a portal opened in case your ES can't regenerate.

Other than this the fight is easy. For the split phase, simply place mines where you know a clone will appear. Mine damage cannot be reflected, so it doesn't matter if it's the mirror-clone.

It's not necessary to swap out Concentrated Effect for Minefield in her bubble-phase. Your Temporal Chains will ensure that the minions slow to a crawl, approaching their queen.

My only frustration is that her life pool goes down to 0 often without killing her because you've done too much damage. Not really something worth complaining about, it's just how good this build is at it's purpose.





Cons

- This build isn't made to face-roll maps really fast, but the clearspeed was surprisingly nice. Flask management goes a long way. The only things you absolutely shouldn't try to run is Curse Immune maps and No Regen maps. I've ran several 40% less regen maps and I hardly noticed.

- Kind of depending on either a Tabula or a 6L in general.

- Bino's life regeneration didn't work with mines for some reason. The DoT seemed to work (I could be wrong), but my defense tab showed no regeneration, and the poison didn't seem to proliferate. I've seen it working with Traps, Pohx made it look easy.

- Less than 6K life. I reached 5.2 at level 85. This was however with 3 nodes remaining in the Scion life wheel and without Melding, as well as sub-optimal jewels.

- Not CoC.

- Hard to measure numerical damage values. With Concentrated Effect I had over 12K DPS, which seems low. However I faceroll through the entirety of the Apex of Sacrifice.



Pros

- Reflect immune.

- Can be cheap and expanded upon as a league-long project.

- Extremely reliable Atziri farmer.

- It's really easy to find parties to get free maps from when you're triple curse.

- Spell damage daggers without crit is what you're looking for, which often costs nothing at all. You can also run a Wand or Scepter.




Lastly I'll make a list of other unique items you could incorporate into this build. This is just for fun and is mostly an "oh shit why didn't I do that?" list.
Uniques

Doedre's Tenure Cast speed does nothing at all for this build, but Spell Damage does a lot. Win win.
Doedre's Scorn. This would be a budget version of Heretic's Veil. +1 all curse gems as well as up to 20% increased damage per curse on enemies is a damage bonus that could really take the damage to the next level.
Heretic's Veil. With this you still want a Blasphemy gem simply because the quality is too good to pass up. Level 22 curses is really strong, though, and 200 ES is good enough to where you can swap out your shield for one with higher spell damage.
Lightbane. Chaos Conversion is about to get gutted, thats really too bad, cause this would really make Void Beacon shine like the star it is.
Geofri's Sanctuary gives you permanent Zealot's Oath, life and All Resist as well as up to 340 ES. It would also make it totally possible to run another damage flask like Atziri's Promise. The reason I don't do that personally is that 3 life flasks is where I'm most comfortable. The leech from Atziri's Promise doesn't help you when you're using mines which is why I ultimately didn't run it at all.
Belly of the Beast. Tons of life. Would be hard to color, though.
Lightning Coil. I actually had a 6L coil in PHC, but decided to vaal it. It had 3B2G1R as it's colors, and 2 of the blue sockets turned white. I sold it to fund a lot of the gear I'm using now. It's definitely a solid option, BiS for Acro characters.
Daresso's Defiance. This would grant you a ton of Endurance Charges, prolonging the time of Immortal Call and give a modest amount of additional Dodge. Onslaught however would just affect your movement speed. Cast speed doesn't do jack shit for you since Mine Placement Speed is a totally separate stat.
Atziri's Step. Tons of Evasion, decent life and up to 16% additional Spell Dodge is really a bonus worth shuffling other gear for.
Alpha's Howl. This would save 2 points on the tree. I needed the 4% reduced mana reservation node under Hex Master to run 3 curses on Blasphemy.
Saffel's Frame. 4% all res is really nice when fighting Atziri. Not blocking isn't much of a drawback with Acro anyway, and the spell damage is a nice bonus. Certainly a more defensive and cheap option.
Obliteration. The reason it's on this list is because of the stat "Gain (13 to 15)% of Physical Damage as Extra Chaos Damage", however I do not now if it affects spells. If it does, it might be worth looking into.
Heartbreaker. Spell Damage, flat ES, Culling Strike and faster start of ES recharge. Definitely a cool option.
Taste of Hate. Mini-coil in a bottle with a hefty damage bonus.
Lavianga's Wisdom. More AoE and AoE damage. No spell damage though. Cannot whirl, Leap Slap could work. Sub-optimal, but could be fun to use just to see how much AoE you can squeeze into your spec.
Singularity. I don't know how large this "nearby" radius is, but it could be a solid choice since the increased damage goes up to 80%.



Thanks for reading, I'll reply to any questions you might have.



2.3 Update.
Spoiler

For Prophecy I tried a trapper version of this build, but pretty much landed back on Mines as a safer and more reliable version.

I swapped out the rare boots for Atziri's Step for even more dodge, and swapped out Divinarius with a rare dagger with high spell damage to balance out the budget. I've made roughly 300c from farming Atziri thus far, and since everyone prefers Uber Lab, sets are cheap and easy to trade for.

For your last 2 Ascendancy points, go for Wicked Ward BEFORE Void Beacon. I'm currently sitting pretty just south of 500 ES and 140 mES per placement. With Stone Golem up the ES regen sits at 131 per second. It doesn't stop when you place mines, it just keeps going, which as always is thanks to Sorrow of the Divine.

This is the gear that I use to farm. I got lucky and got a deal on a chest with life and the colors I needed to swap out my Tabula, but Tabula is still absolutely viable in HC.






















Last edited by OlaSarcasm on Nov 14, 2016, 12:59:12 PM
Last bumped on Jan 3, 2017, 12:24:39 PM
I'm doing this build again, so I'll start updating the thread with possible gear and tree changes. With EB there is definitely precedence for taking Growth and Decay instead of something else on the tree, or simply go for it in the 85+ level span.

Right now I'm using a Tabula to level with, I swapped straight into BF mines when BF was a quest reward. Dual curse for leveling until I can get enough ES on gear to run triple curses, but as it stands now it's not necessary at all.

As always feel free to post questions and I'll answer them to the best of my ability.
Hiya, very nice guide.

I am following this, and wondering when do you switch into EB and the 3rd curse?

Merci/Maps?

Curse effectiveness for mapping as well?

Thanks.
"
havenrl wrote:
Hiya, very nice guide.

I am following this, and wondering when do you switch into EB and the 3rd curse?

Merci/Maps?

Curse effectiveness for mapping as well?

Thanks.


Right now my character is lvl 46, I cleared most of a2c and am still rocking dual curses. I'm using Enfeeble and Vuln for now.

I plan to swap to EB once I get like 200+ ES after the Acro conversion, to get that I'll either need some hybrid pieces etc.

But yeah, around the time you get to merc and up until maps I'd try to get to the level where you can actually wear that ES gear so speccing into EB is a smooth transition. Remember to get your Sorrow of the Divine flask first and give it quality. It's dirt cheap, I bought a 14q one for 1 c in PHC yesterday.

Curse effectiveness is the biggest bulk of your defense, so yes, effectiveness all the way. Doedre's Scorn is great for leveling with in that regard. 10/20 inc damage per curse double dips, so I got 24% now, and the increased damage double dips with the phys from BF as well as the poison it applies.
Thanks for the reply.

I am lvl 64 and into merci dried lake, to get ready for mapping.

Does bino's dagger prolif work with mines as it does with traps?
"
havenrl wrote:
Thanks for the reply.

I am lvl 64 and into merci dried lake, to get ready for mapping.

Does bino's dagger prolif work with mines as it does with traps?


I tried it myself in Perandus, and I gotta say I didn't notice the prolif at all. Instead of Bino's, I simply bought a spell-damage dagger for 5 chaos. Since you don't need crit, daggers are real cheap.

Besides WB why do you go a dagger over Obliteration?
"
ObsceneDream wrote:
Besides WB why do you go a dagger over Obliteration?


No reason other than WB and Fortify, as well as the price. Also, as I wrote in the Uniques part (bottom of the OP) I wasn't sure at the time if the physical/chaos conversion worked on spells. In addition the spell damage bonus is much lower, and the explosions that can proc doesn't benefit you when farming bosses, it mostly benefits wanders and casters clearing maps.

I expected Obliteration to go way up in price, but looking at PHC now it's less than 1 chaos anyway, so you can definitely take advantage of it if you're running a 5L and feel the need for some chaos explosions, no matter how unnecessary they'll be for your clear speed.
Ok.

I thought the spell damage wasn't as a great sorce of damage. As in what bob did I though was used conc effect (Making the blades over lap so more vollies hit) and how it was affeting poision.

Also thought that Controlled destruction didn't double dip for poision, but conc effect did.

I don't think the explosions cause by the wand are going to give you much help, how every the fifteen percent of physical as chaos it going to be massive as the way I understand it's a more multiplier.
Last edited by ObsceneDream on Jun 25, 2016, 12:09:36 AM
"
ObsceneDream wrote:
Ok.

I thought the spell damage wasn't as a great sorce of damage. As in what bob did I though was used conc effect (Making the blades over lap so more vollies hit) and how it was affeting poision. So the Controlled destruction didn't double dip for poision, but conc effect did.


This could definitely be the case, I swap out Minefield personally, but I've tried both options and they're both valid. My personal kill speed was higher than Bob's, but it's so fast that it really doesn't matter at all. Area Damage does double dip as well, you're right, so it's not a bad idea to look for jewels with life and area damage.

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