[3.0] AFK Gone Cheap - AFK up to T16 guardians||Shaper killed || 3.0 balls video montage!

Has anyone tried Scold's Bridle with this setup? I can't tell by speculation if it would add too much damage to heal through, and the possibility of +100% spell damage is attractive :D

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Elhajhaj wrote:

Has anyone tried Scold's Bridle with this setup? I can't tell by speculation if it would add too much damage to heal through, and the possibility of +100% spell damage is attractive :D

Just try it out. You'll lose the 50% chance to ignite on your CWDT's in helmet, but it's still an alternative I'd guess. I could try it sometime myself too, especially if I'd try to set up vaal molten shell spam. That way, "oneshotting" hydra might be realistic goal, although you'd really want to have 100% chance to ignite on your VMS (which you can do by linking it with a chance to ignite gem, even if you lack 3% chance to ignite jewels).

Personally I got 29 life roll + 2 resists from my hysteria so I really want to keep the helmet for the small extra hp vs. scolds (even if scolds did work out).

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functionality wrote:

Ignite chance is important for VMS.
The one shot thing is interesting.

VMS looped much easier before when blade vortex hit 20 times a second. For now, some more ignite chance might be the thing that gets it looping for you. But mostly, you need a boss that delivers a lot of damage to activate your CWDT setups, when they are on their hights, that's the time to pop vms for max looping.

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As for the one shots, I am trying out 5L VRF. My excel calculations showed 4 million burn dps on 7.5k hp, which means 16 million dmg per use on bosses with 40 ele res. When testing this in practice, it does not seem to be close to that and the calculations still seem solid when having a second look at them.

Since this build can take so much damage there is a risk that when we activate the skill, we are in our low life spectrum, which would make the initial hit very weak. It will need som further testing anyways.

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tomay wrote:

As it so happens, with my regular gear plus Kaom's I get 9.8k HP which should be more than enough. Phoenix hardly ever got me below 25%, not a single near death experience during the fight.

So when overcapped with fire res, his self explosion doesn't hit for more than 2.5k hp if I understand it correctly? This would mean that his self explosion has a base damage of 10k, interesting.

With every 10% of the Guardian's life gone the player's maximum fire resistance will be reduced by 1%. In this fight i had 10k HP and 80% maximum fire resistance (1% from Barbarism, 4% from Purity of Fire), total fire res well in excess of 200. So all his debuffs didn't really hurt all that much and his tornadoes and the barrage from his Phoenixes didn't do very much damage at all.

I might do another run later with Kaom's Heart and RotP and see how full AFK (sans BV w Culling Strike) goes with 11k HP and 88% fire resistance but I expect the result to be similar as long as I don't move so I get the 13% fire damage reduction from Arctic Armour. I had no Granite/Basalt flask or Fortify so his physical damage is no problem.

Edit: now this was interesting... it all went well full AFK with Kaom's Heart, Life jewelry, Rise of the Phoenix and Purity of Fire... until he was below 10%, then I died, twice! So I grabbed the Belly and culled him. It took well over 20 minutes to bring him down (compared to 4-5 minutes as usual with BV) and never did a single strike take more than 4.5k HP, the lowest he ever got me was maybe 3.5k (down from 10,650), all very comfy but once he was below 10% it all failed, so there must be something more sinister at work than just that final 1% reduced maximum fire resistance. Oh well, back with my Chieftain now to open the unique barrel and do the t16 Zana mishun in that map. ;)

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ChrispieD wrote:

As for the one shots, I am trying out 5L VRF. My excel calculations showed 4 million burn dps on 7.5k hp, which means 16 million dmg per use on bosses with 40 ele res. When testing this in practice, it does not seem to be close to that and the calculations still seem solid when having a second look at them.

Since this build can take so much damage there is a risk that when we activate the skill, we are in our low life spectrum, which would make the initial hit very weak. It will need som further testing anyways.

It sounds to me like you're doing your testing on Minotaur, because out of the three (that aren't immune to ignites), he is the only one that deals consistently damage (and gets you constantly to low hp). With Chimera and Hydra this should not be as much of a problem. If my suspicions are true, you should consider trying out high level IC & increased duration setup, which you will activate to get a small window of opportunity to leech your life full vs. phys damage.

Out of curiosity: for this VRF setup, do you change the skilltree? I suspect that you do not. If so, thats good news, because I'd rather have both VMS and VRF setups and only change the gear (unless I get very comfortable with VRF).

Also, I'd be cautious about it before 2.6 patch notes. Many builds use it and it's very powerful gem in general. I suspect nerf.

Another thing: I've read reports from people using VRF builds that it takes actually some time to get used to VRF and then reliably use it. They haven't (from what I read) specified reasons for their struggles, but it might just be that they activate it lower hp than what they should.

With Hydra and Chimera, VRF doesn't really seem like a problem in my opinion.

Another thing to note is that, as I've understood it, fire pen mechanics work bit differently with burn damage. As in, if you happen to use fire pen gem (instead of curse), it won't effectively lower their resistance against burn damage. Only way for burn damage to penetrate fire res is to effectively lower the boss resistance through a curse.

Sad news is, that curses lose 60% of their effect vs. bosses. So in case of flammability curse, the best possible setup would be lvl4 empower + lvl21 flammability which provides 48% reduced fire resistance. Sadly that would mean effectively 19% reduced fire resistance. All other fire penetration is not taken into account.

But since you did not specify where you came up with 40% figure, this is speculation. Just a possible answer.

EDIT: Chance to ignite gem has been going well. I'll need to do more testing, but it feels far more consistent. I still recommend using it with vaal cyclone, unless for whatever reason you're doing this in HC. In SC, I recommend not to use it if you have good chunk of exp bar. Or use it only when you are 100% sure it's safe to use (for example, I have never died to Volcano bosses while using it, nor Sulphur Waste bosses when I'm using it, but I have never tried using it in Overgrown Ruins so I would not risk the combo if I was about to level).

I think you might want to update your build guide with the chance to ignite gem. I would say that at minimum you want a link in your rats cage with inc duration (red), vaal molten shell (red) and chance to ignite (blue), instead of conc effect. Although I find that conc effect is often much better, I also find that it's very anti-climatic to use VMS and not get it up. In all cases, except perhaps Guardians, the result will still be a dead boss, with ignite gem. In some cases, the result might be that your VMS fails to proc consistently and the window of opportunity fades away before the boss is dead. It must be pointed out, that the damage ramps up. If you are not proccing it consistently, you will go behind in the damage.

You might also want to add a bit about Vaal Cyclone. In multiple bosses, it helps a lot. But due to some bosses, players should never do a boss they are not familiar with if they risk the loss of significant amount of exp. For example, in Racecourse, one of the bosses leaves desecrated grounds behind. If you have increased duration in your Vaal Cyclone, it will be very dangerous unless you have a hp flask to counter it. And I would advise to avoid using it to pull large packs in a normal map, because you might bring in flamebearers or something and it's going to be a huge problem when packs are dead, orbs are about to explode and you can do nothing but watch your spinning demise.

So basically the first source of damage is Blade Vortex?

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So basically the first source of damage is Blade Vortex?

First source of damage is Fire Burst that you get using essence of hysteria in a sceptre with preferably 40% elemental damage. Blade Vortex is secondary source of damage (and in my opinion it's optional, as I prefer to either run with Rat's Cage VMS setup or Kaoms, depending on how safe I want to play it).

What BV does however is that it helps you a lot with some rare mobs that for one reason or another are alone and don't hit you often. It can be very slow to take them down with Fire Burst as you don't get many CWDT procs. BV in 4-6l will do some decent damage (relative term) and also add up to the chance of proccing Fire Burst.

And in some cases, BV can help you out in some bosses with just extra bit of damage.

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functionality wrote:

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So basically the first source of damage is Blade Vortex?

First source of damage is Fire Burst that you get using essence of hysteria in a sceptre with preferably 40% elemental damage. Blade Vortex is secondary source of damage (and in my opinion it's optional, as I prefer to either run with Rat's Cage VMS setup or Kaoms, depending on how safe I want to play it).

What BV does however is that it helps you a lot with some rare mobs that for one reason or another are alone and don't hit you often. It can be very slow to take them down with Fire Burst as you don't get many CWDT procs. BV in 4-6l will do some decent damage (relative term) and also add up to the chance of proccing Fire Burst.

And in some cases, BV can help you out in some bosses with just extra bit of damage.

But, if fire burst is the main damage source, ignite immune bosses are very hard to kill? or BV is enough for them? or are u forced to use VMS for Phoenix for example?

Ty for your reply mate :)

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tomay wrote:

Edit: now this was interesting... it all went well full AFK with Kaom's Heart, Life jewelry, Rise of the Phoenix and Purity of Fire... until he was below 10%, then I died, twice! So I grabbed the Belly and culled him. It took well over 20 minutes to bring him down (compared to 4-5 minutes as usual with BV) and never did a single strike take more than 4.5k HP, the lowest he ever got me was maybe 3.5k (down from 10,650), all very comfy but once he was below 10% it all failed, so there must be something more sinister at work than just that final 1% reduced maximum fire resistance. Oh well, back with my Chieftain now to open the unique barrel and do the t16 Zana mishun in that map. ;)

Technically, the theory that there is "something else going on" can be, well, almost falsified. Take out the barbarism and set up a culling strike gem on CWDT. If your suspicions are true, then you should be getting problems before you actually kill it with inevitable culling strike on CWDT.

Unfortunately it's not really much of falsification, more like verification (if the problem is in 1% max res, you would notice problems before boss death and culling eliminates the last 10% with pretty high margin of accuracy). But the sample size (given how slowly you're going to kill it) should be very large so it's a good experiment for verification.

Speaking of which, how long did it take to kill it with this setup? 5 minutes? 10? 20?

Nevertheless, I think this is generally good news with one exception: Barbarism is not ideal in my opinion for the final build. But it might be very ideal from lvl 92 to lvl 99, after which I would personally switch to blood magic (and that less crit node), which would be finished 100lvl tree.