Dancing Dervish Review

The weapon itself is a cool idea but really it is just that, a cool idea. A Dancing Dervish, lets short this to 'DD', build is the mix of this minion sword and facebreakers.

My Approach

My approach was simple, take the few generic phys damage nodes, stack a ton of life, and get almost all of the minion nodes. With a lack of shield and not taking any other defenses out of the passive tree I went champion for the perma fortify and the 6% damage reduction.

With so many minion damage nodes I decided it would be a good idea to support with extra minions. Naturally a stone golem for the life regen and extra taunt. I then added zombies at first. Running 6 zombies was nice, they did decent work and cleaned up the trash mobs very nicely. The problem with the zombies is they died often, even with fortify and lots of minion life. Next I tried a spectre. I ran a horror from Act 4 with GMP to apply bleed and allow for the bloodlust gem on both cyclone and the DD. The horror can take a beating and proved to be a better choice.

My weapon of choice obviously was facebreakers. I went with cyclone as it is not only good offensively but defensively as well. Without a shield this seemed like a pretty solid choice and it proved to be a wise one as I went through maps and merc lab.

Auras I went with hatred as it works for both me and the minions and Herald of Ash. I did try to incorporate haste but I felt the passive tree was sacrificing to much to be able to reach the mana reserve nodes to be able to keep running on mana. Running it on blood magic just felt sloppy and noticeably weaker as far as defenses. Haste was very nice as more then anything the movement speed got the sword closing the gaps more easily.

Lastly was CWDT level 1 w/ Flesh Offering. Again not so much for the attack speed but the movement speed. This lets me attack constantly and which in return keeps my alive through leech. Flesh offering stays up quite often and provides a noticeable difference with how the DD performs.

Since the summon minion is built into the sword you only need to socket the weapon and not link it. I ran minion damage, melee phys, bloodlust (cause of the horror spectre), faster attacks, multistrike, and melee splash.

The Dancing Dervish Minion

Well this guy can pack a small punch when he is up. In maps and open world zones he is up very often. Most of the time the little guy as trying to play catch up with the clear speed of a facebreaker character. He will help clear up the remaining trash that are low life and helps a lot in keeping rampage stacks running. Its not hard to hit 800+ rampage in dried lakes or open maps that don't have any terrain blocking your pathing.

I do notice the weapon versus bosses but it really isn't anything to brag about. Nothing one extra second of cycloning couldn't handle. For bosses that were not in the open world I found myself having to un-equip the weapon and just run facebreakers since rampage would not be up using the sword is far worse then running facebreakers.

Flesh offering helps and is up quite often with it being linked to CWDT. The weapon attacks very quickly and is able to move between mobs more fluidly. Still it does not fix the problem with the minion struggling to keep up at times.

The DD minion himself takes 0 damage it seems. I don't think there was a single time he dropped below full life. Voll was slamming down on him and the little dude pressed on like it was nothing.

My character

As mentioned before I grabbed the few generic physical nodes in the tree and stacked life and minion damage. With facebreakers scaling very hard with flat physical damage I went with Meginord's Belt and a Bringer of Rain. The Bringer of Rain is not my first choice but rather my budget choice since Abyssus are about 2ex. My accessories were aiming for flat phys, life, and resistances. My boots were life, resistances, and movement speed.

My character himself felt like he was doing 95% of the work. More often then not I found myself with an equipped DD weapon rather then a summon minion when facing bosses that you would really want to see your little buddy slice up. I would un-equip my DD weapon so I could run facebreakers versus bosses, like Izaro, many times. I would wonder why I did not have a Great old ones ward or something set in my second weapon slot so I could just swap to that and have more defenses and damage. I knew if I had that option I would find myself just to tempted to use that over DD.

Overall my character found himself looking over his should most of the time wondering where his companion had gone off too.

Conclusion

The Dancing Dervish is just a concept. Pretty much you are using him to have a floating MTX sword running around behind you. He brings a fun play style of having rampage with facebreakers but that is about it. As far as a damage support he offers vert little. All he is good for is killing stragglers and helping keep your rampage stacks up. You will find yourself un-equipping the sword versus large bosses like Izaro or those bosses who have their own separate rooms in maps. Your facebreakers do almost all of the work and actually a horror spectre or a pack of zombies with no real support gems does more work then the sword will.

Suggestive changes

Make more of them summon at once. I like this suggestion the most as it honestly feels on par with a single zombie. Have a new one every rampage tier would make the build very fun as it would provide a huge incentive to keep the rampage going. It still wouldn't be viable vs a lot of the harder map bosses, Izaro, and Atziri though so it seems fair.

OR

Make hit hit a lot harder, attack faster, and move quicker

TLDR

The sword just feels like an MTX buddy pet leaving you weaker then if you were a true facebreaker or a true summoner. You will complete a lot of content but it won't be your top tier map clearing character.

There is a massive difference between
1. This build can do t9's Slowly

2. This build can do t15's Easily

and
3. One of the fastest builds t15 EZ PZ Clears


Theres no video context of the build or showing us how much damage it really does.

take one zombie, 6L it, take all the minion nodes and go to dried lakes. That is the damage it does.

pathetic for such a huge investment.

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Kartikdon wrote:

take one zombie, 6L it, take all the minion nodes and go to dried lakes. That is the damage it does.

It's a flying minion so that makes it a bit better than a single zombie everything considered, and you don't have to link the sword so that's one more plus on its side. But, like I said in the other thread, devs overrated the linking as usual.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1675717#p13352514

I wouldn't really like the multiple copies solution, if the weapon just moved faster and used only Cyclone I think we'd be getting somewhere.

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raics wrote:

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Kartikdon wrote:

take one zombie, 6L it, take all the minion nodes and go to dried lakes. That is the damage it does.

It's a flying minion so that makes it a bit better than a single zombie everything considered, and you don't have to link the sword so that's one more plus on its side. But, like I said in the other thread, devs overrated the linking as usual.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1675717#p13352514

I wouldn't really like the multiple copies solution, if the weapon just moved faster and used only Cyclone I think we'd be getting somewhere.

Yeah someone didn't get the memo that you didn't need to 6 link it, so he sold it to me pretty cheap.


I'm thinking about doing a raider build with it with facebreaker or finding something else interesting to do with it. But I still need to figure some things out, like do only minion damage scale the weapon or does all "generic" phys scale the weapon\unarmed as well?



The art on the weapon is pretty darn sick, paired with many of the weapon effects it enhances the outcome as well.

As for having it move faster, could you use minion speed with it to achieve the faster movement speed, while also benefiting from the attackspeed?

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goetzjam wrote:

As for having it move faster, could you use minion speed with it to achieve the faster movement speed, while also benefiting from the attackspeed?

Yeah, I could socket it instead of FA, I suppose. Unfortunately, increasing move speed would also have the downside of finishing its Cyclone spurts sooner but they're short anyway and aren't used often so no big harm done.

And only minion damage scales it, it would probably work much better if it was a clone like VaalDS.

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raics wrote:

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goetzjam wrote:

As for having it move faster, could you use minion speed with it to achieve the faster movement speed, while also benefiting from the attackspeed?

Yeah, I could socket it instead of FA, I suppose. Unfortunately, increasing move speed would also have the downside of finishing its Cyclone spurts sooner but they're short anyway and aren't used often so no big harm done.

And only minion damage scales it, it would probably work much better if it was a clone like VaalDS.

Like how do you even make a tree for a build like this, I guess go necro witch somehow as it can benefit both you and it?

If not I don't see how playing a traditional melee build or even a facebreaker one can work that well with it. That or you just allow for it to be kinda basically an animated weapon that gives you rampage and ignore basically everything else about it :(


I guess the other thing is you can use vaal haste to give it movement speed\attack speed as well, but I guess the largest issue now with using this weapon and being unarmed is the lack of movement skills and the inability to use shield charge then.

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goetzjam wrote:

Like how do you even make a tree for a build like this, I guess go necro witch somehow as it can benefit both you and it?

It's in the post I linked. You'd probably get a stronger char if you just slap the sword on a decent Facebreaker build, but if the goal is to utilize Dervish to its fullest only a summon hybrid will work.

The way I see it there are three general directions you can go
1. Facebreaker - which might be tricky because they need a lot of support from other gear and using summons too might narrow your choices too much. I went for a Champion because he does have some summoner potential and I wanted a Duelist summoner hybrid too, I've probably made one with all other classes except Ranger.
2. Dory fist - which would probably be the best choice as everything you need to deal good damage with both summons and spells is fairly concentrated. Obviously enough, this one would be built as a Necro, though elementalist would work too if you want to use golems instead of classic minions.
3. Weapon swap - with it you'd just need to use the sword until you start the rampage, then you could swap to your true weapon and use anything you want. Haven't tried this one but I think we were told by devs that it will work.

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raics wrote:

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goetzjam wrote:

Like how do you even make a tree for a build like this, I guess go necro witch somehow as it can benefit both you and it?

It's in the post I linked. You'd probably get a stronger char if you just slap the sword on a decent Facebreaker build, but if the goal is to utilize Dervish to its fullest only a summon hybrid will work.

The way I see it there are three general directions you can go
1. Facebreaker - which might be tricky because they need a lot of support from other gear and using summons too might narrow your choices too much. I went for a Champion because he does have some summoner potential and I wanted a Duelist summoner hybrid too, I've probably made one with all other classes except Ranger.
2. Dory fist - which would probably be the best choice as everything you need to deal good damage with both summons and spells is fairly concentrated. Obviously enough, this one would be built as a Necro, though elementalist would work too if you want to use golems instead of classic minions.
3. Weapon swap - with it you'd just need to use the sword until you start the rampage, then you could swap to your true weapon and use anything you want. Haven't tried this one but I think we were told by devs that it will work.

I'm 99% sure the weapon swap thing doesn't work.


Will have to think some more on stuff...