Shadow - MoldyDwarf's 2.5 Poison Blade Flurry - Forum

This is my second blade flurry build in 2.5. I first did an Inquisitor build, but it wasn't scaling up as well as I wanted, so I rerolled to a poison build. This build is based on Unchained's Best BladeFlurry build. Several people have asked about my build, so here it is.

Shaper Gear

Here's the gear I use for Shaper farming. The idea is to max out DPS to end his phases as quickly as possible.

Caveat: normally I use a silver instead of quicksilver for shaper, but sometimes I forget to swap it out. Doesn't really matter much.

Mapping Gear Swaps

For mapping, I replace the helmet, belt, and rings to get more ES.

I usually use a quicksilver flask instead of a silver one for mapping with groups. Mana sustain is bad on this character if I'm not hitting things, so I need the extra run speed when I can't whirl anymore.

Passive Tree

level 94 tree
This differs from Unchained's build in a few ways.

No Unnatural Calm: I can get more ES by swapping those nodes for others. If I had a few more levels, it might be worth taking that branch again.
Minion Damage by Lord of the Dead: the 15% damage double dips with Scourge
Scion ES: at my level, it's more efficient to take the ES nodes just above the Scion start than to travel to Unnatural Calm.
Harrier: I get a nice DPS and mobility boost by taking Harrier, at the cost of losing 10% ES or some raw damage. In mapping mode, I have 9.4k ES and pushing it to 10.5k ES or so wouldn't make much of a difference. In Shaper mode, I have 7.4k ES, and that's enough to farm him.
No shadow power charge: prior to respeccing, I had 91% crit chance with 6 power charges. I always needed 2 blue flasks for anti-bleed and anti-freeze, so in practice one of them was always a diamond flask. With the crit node changes and dropping a power charge, I still have 84% crit chance with 5 charges. If I wanted to spend 10-20ex more on the build, I'd consider getting crit capped and replacing the diamond flask with a basalt.
Claw wheel: I dropped the physical damage nodes in favor of the crit multiplier nodes in the big claw wheel to the right of the shadow start. Gives more DPS.
Alchemist: I took the Alchemist cluster above the witch start area. When flasks are up, it provides much more DPS than taking raw DPS nodes. As a speed-killer build, my DPS is high enough that I don't have to worry that much about flask uptime, even on bosses.

Screenshots: maybe later. In tooltip warrior mode, I think I have about 92k tooltip dmg/hit, and that's pretty close to Unchained's 113k claim (his gear is quite nice).

FAQ

Q: Why don't you use Taste of Hate?
A: It adds a lot of tooltip DPS, but I need a real anti-freeze flask. Taste of Hate leaves me frequently perma frozen in hard content like shaper. DPS when frozen = 0.
Q: Why did you take the Alchemist cluster? It's not like you can sustain flasks without Pathfinder.
A: The DPS boost is pretty significant from the Alchemist cluster. My DPS is high enough that I almost need to be careful to not kill the Shaper too fast and loose opportunities to carry people. I've done a fair amount of testing and find I prefer the burst damage from Alchemist over the steady but lower damage of other nodes. I have enough ES with a 788 ES chest.
Q: Do you really need Skyforth?
A: It's very helpful for reliably farming hard content like Uber Atziri and Shaper. There are ways to work around it (hint: valyrium + an automatic pcoc setup + drop herald of ash), but Skyforth is really great.
Q: Why don't you use a Vessel of Vintkar?
A: No room for an anti-shock flask, and other ones are better. Atziri's promise works great for poison builds and has better uptime. Sin's Rebirth and Lion's Roar are really good.
Q: Can you do Uber Atziri?
A: Yes, but I only did one run for fun. Went quite well. I'm not farming Uber Atziri because the frags cost too much for my taste and I lost a lot of currency last league on her due to a bad RNG streak.
Q:
A:

2.6 BLS Berserker budget shaper farmer build guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1882710

Last edited by MoldyDwarf#0844 on Feb 26, 2017, 3:52:26 PM

Last bumped on Feb 4, 2017, 3:47:29 PM

Posted by
MoldyDwarf#0844
on Jan 23, 2017, 9:28:54 PM

Quote this Post

nice build...but 90k tooltip is beyond my understanding.
I have pretty solid gear and im at 22k tooltip with all buffs up including flasks.

i dont use abyssus atm because im still in leveling mode (level 85 atm)
is that helm really givin me so much extra dps? to crank it up from 22k to 80-100k ?

IGN: IceIceLady