The Scourge in the post-double-dipping world

Right now, The Scourge is primarily used for double-dipping since it provides % increased damage, which is a generic damage modifier. You basically just taking any standard DoT build and use The Scourge instead of whatever weapon you would otherwise use and voila! you just get a build with less up-front damage but more overall damage via poison/ignite.

Has anybody thought of interesting and effective ways of utilizing The Scourge in a non-double-dipping regime? I think it's pretty clear that any such ways won't be quite as powerful as a DoT strategy, but maybe there are interesting ideas that involve using the wolves, or a minion/spell hybrid, etc. Any builds people have already tried?

I was looking for a lot of ways to make melee Necro viable, and sadly, double dipping poison is the only (and best) way of utilizing it.

If you go for any kind of attack build, even as a Necromancer getting over 100+% increased damage from ascendancy on top of Scourge's +70%, you would rather lose that 100% increased damage and pick another weapon with higher crit/pdps.

You can't scale Wolves effectively since:
- you can only use them in a 4 link (Wolf+3 sockets)
- you need to actually kill to spawn them (and its ALWAYS more efficient to scale minion damage or your own damage, not both at the same time)

It would be a decent claw for melee necromancer if it was changed to:
"increases and reductions to minion damage also affect you at twice the effectiveness"
"35% increased minion damage if you hit recently".
Otherwise, it becomes another trash tier unique, sadly.

The only idea I had, was using Scourge on a Necromancer, using CwC Essence Drain with poison - the idea died with 3.0 nerfs announcements. Again, with double dipping gone, it will probably be far inferior to Occultist ED or other dedicated ED class. I don't believe new passive nodes or buffs will be enough to compensate and make such a build viable.

Would CwC Blade Flurry Skeletons or some such nonsense be at all good? Lets the same support gems apply to both Flurry and skeles.

Alternatively, you can just summon spectres and/or golems and then use your own damage output to augment your minions'. Don't need to do much maintenance on your minions, just cast an Offering and jump in.

Lol, you realize double-dipping will more or less still exist with the new system, right? I mean, it won't have the exponential results, but mechs that scale both hit and DoT (which minion damage still will do) will be the best choices for poison and bleed, which means Scourge is still pretty much the best poison/bleed weapon.


Remember, GGG's garbage rework doesn't get rid of the current disparity between double-dipping and non-double-dipping, it just effectively cuts down everyone's poison/bleed/ignite damage across the board. Aside from projectile and area damage, anything that exploited double-dipping before will still be the best at using those DoTs.

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Shppy wrote:

Lol, you realize double-dipping will more or less still exist with the new system, right? I mean, it won't have the exponential results

That's pretty much the definition of double-dipping, what happens now if you want to continue the dip analogy is you get "the full dip" instead of "just the tip" I mean the hit.

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anything that exploited double-dipping before will still be the best at using those DoTs.

Yes

Except for delivery-based amplifiers, like Projectile, Trap(?) and Area damage.

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Shppy wrote:

Lol, you realize double-dipping will more or less still exist with the new system, right?

I would not call the new system double-dipping. It only affects your damage once. Sure, that affects both hit and DoT, but ultimately The Scourge will provide exactly 70% increased overall damage, so whether or not you're a DoT build or a non-DoT build becomes irrelevant.

I'd do some dominating blow stuff with a necromancer and fail horribly. That's pretty much how every build of mine ends up - being useless.

I'm a new player this league so I don't know much about the above, but I'm using this build that uses The Scourge on a Firestorm Necromancer (scroll down past the first build). The skill tree grabs all of the minion damage nodes it can to boost my damage. Path of Building shows at the moment that I'm getting a total of 595% increased and 38% more damage on Firestorm, for an average hit of 7315 or around 146k dps. Being so new to the game, I don't know if this is "viable" but it seems pretty good to me for a newbie with no budget. I'm completing rare corrupted T13 maps on the first try, often without dying.

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evilsofa wrote:

I'm a new player this league so I don't know much about the above, but I'm using this build that uses The Scourge on a Firestorm Necromancer (scroll down past the first build). The skill tree grabs all of the minion damage nodes it can to boost my damage. Path of Building shows at the moment that I'm getting a total of 595% increased and 38% more damage on Firestorm, for an average hit of 7315 or around 146k dps. Being so new to the game, I don't know if this is "viable" but it seems pretty good to me for a newbie with no budget. I'm completing rare corrupted T13 maps on the first try, often without dying.

Not bad! Using minions to tank for you while you're stationary and casting Firestorm seems like a solid strategy. Also, very impressive progress for a first-time player! As for your stats, I would say that 146k dps is a little low for tackling the toughest bosses, but not bad.