[3.0] Cast on weapon swap

Hey

Little guide cause it seems there are some people interested and the 2.6 owner didn't seem to want to keep it going. Still props to raynquist for finding the build idea.

Been playing it for a few month, tweaking for a long time, so I thought I could share what's working after seeing so many in depth questions "3.0 good?"...



This build can farm guardians (with deaths to be expected), map very fast (maybe not top tier but close). And I also did shaper, and uber atziri not easy but feasible. Also did a chayula, didn't record it though, but was a piece of cake really not much to see there, deathless, boss deleted almost.

This build shines at deleting trash mobs, for example in beachhead. Also it shines by the amount of fireworks it does.

Vids


2mn25 atoll
Probably worth it to skip the boss to go faster, also 2 harbingers kinda slow it down.

Beachhead

Guardians:

Forge of the phoenix
Lair of the hydra
Pit of the chimera
Maze of the minotaur

All deathless except mino where I screwed up a little.

Shaper
Some avoidable deaths, kinda hard fight cause he has many degens.

All doable with a little practice.


For atziri, best is to change a bit the setup with only 1 heartbound loop:

With yugul, this setup becomes reflect proof for mapping too, but has a bit less dps.

Atziri run

Uber atziri with a few deaths
(forgot to record up to vaal, but whatever)


Uber isn't a piece of cake, hard to keep flask charges, go through the shitload of phases, do enough damage to sustain without many cloak of savagery procs. On a crit even regular stormcalls seems to be able to go through the 9k ehp. Still feasible with deaths. Might be feasible deathless with trips back to hideout, but I do not have too much experience with it.


Pros and cons

+ good clearspeed
+ can do all bosses, not all on easy mode, but feasible
+ fun, different
+ can do almost all map mods
+ lots of small stuff can be modified as you can use basically all spells in the game
+ good for trolling parties

- requires investment for endgame
- bit laggy if you don't have a decent pc

Compared to other cast when damage taken build, namely hiltless, scolds and eye of innocence builds.

+ requires only ring slots, also some weapon slots but you can craft good weapon, my wands give me 80% spell damage, 55% spell crit, 15 damage to spells, so not really a blank slot. Scold requires basically no slot (helmet gives tons of spell damage), but lots of jewels and some way to get mana back. Hiltless requires a 2h weapon. Eye of innocence usually 2 rings, 1 amulet an 1 weapon even if some have spell damage. All in all, this build is in a good spot with only 2 rings.

+ requires no gem slot, no need for flicker cyclone or whatever to trigger the start, so you can slot the maximum of spells. I think it even works when frozen or stun (not 100% sure). You just need to run. Eye of innocence 3.0 version uses a 6l magma orb. Hiltless usually a 6l attack and scold most recent ones a 6l flicker.

- more expensive than most of the other builds if you want to push it high. Only 1c slot are the rings and even there corruption would be nice.

Dps wise, this build seem to be in the middle, more triggers than innocence or hiltless who hit themselves for numerous small hits, less than scolds pushed to the max, but which seems a bit suicidal.

This build can in theory get more dps with 4 essence weapon, but it will be more risky, so i'm fine as is right now. Might try it later.




I'll start with my version, which is a high budget version, the other options are in the next posts.


Gear
+ writhing jar for some bosses


Stats

Unbuffed in hideout.


Nothing very interesting on defense side, 80% all res, ~45% movespeed goes up to 140ish buffed.


Pastebin for path of building



The main mechanic of the build is to swap to get 3 spirits out, who die when you reswap. When they die it triggers the heartbound loops, which triggers cast when damage taken. The spells leech enough to compensate the damage taken.

So the goal is to find enough ehp to make it fluid and enough dps to make the leech good enough.

To find enough hp we use:
- belly of the beast, as little armor as possible
- MoM, for 2k hp more. This forces us into acuities, otherwise the damage taken is too high to be managed via regen. The price tag is bad but otherwise those gloves have crit and life, which fit fine in the build.

To find enough dps we use:
- wise oak with all regen equal, to get the double bonus on all kind of res
- void batteries + crafted wands. Can be replaced by crafted dagger or scepter + doryani or divinarius for like 10/15% less dps.
- tempest binding which gives free frenzy charges, a free 6 link, decent hp, some resists, and also some free chill and shock
- one clear mind jewel, and other jewel with as much spell damage and multi as possible, always with life if possible.


Spell choices

The spells chosen are mostly projectiles, cause we don't get aoe, so if you don't wanna hug the boss, something like ice nova would do 0 damage, while projectiles always hit.

We can use physical spells as we take only spell damage and very little elemental damage.

Ice spear and blade vortex + power charge on crit to generate power charges. Vs trash even ice spear without gmp is enough as we cast it 2 or 3 times per second.

Bladefall, vortex and firestorm, cause vortex has strong damage, and the 2 other are targeted directly on the mobs, so they always hit and do good aoe damage.

GMP spells: arctic breath, magma orb, fireball, frost bolt, ball lightning, 3 of them supported by elemental focus in body armor. Preferably keeping frost ones for helmet cause we need some chill. Swap slower proj for hard bosses.

The weapon spells: arc with culling strike, glacial cascade, freeze pulse, spark, cold snap. Basically anything that can auto target is good. 2 curses, enfeeble, to avoid one shots, and elemental weakness to boost damage. Can also use projectile weakness.

I put in a level 12 phase run for regular maps, which goes in place of blade vortex which goes in place of bladefall which is swapped out. Allows a perma 45% movespeed boost, but eats frenzy charges, so it's swapped out vs hard bosses.

A particular attention needs to be taken when choosing the spell levels.
With my setup, no quality on armor pieces, I can cast level 12 on each swap, which is the level of my weapon spells and utility spells. Anything higher would be suboptimal for utility and as cwdt counter resets on swap, wouldn't work at all for weapons.

The other ones are at 18, 19, 20, to have a constant flux of spells while being hit by mob (for self hits 20 all would be enough but I prefer 18/19/20 cause mob don't always hit for 1200).


Lab enchants

Good news, that one part that's not really gonna be expensive.

Helmet enchant is a bit whatever, you will get like 40% damage on 1 out of 13 spells you're using, meaning 3% increase damage. So basically stop on the first you find, not worth the time, I might change mine some day cause I have spark and it's one of my secondary spells.

Gloves enchants, also whatever. Any spell will do, will be tiny compared to your tons of regular spells. Do not get the minion ones they will die and hurt you at totally random times, you don't want that. The reflection one can be decent, but a bit unreliable, for big bosses why not, for the rest you don't really care about being hit so...

Boots enchants are more interesting. I'd go either for leech, or cold damage when hit. When hit is guaranteed with this build (I think), better than when you have killed, or when you have not killed. Leech is a bit overkill when you already have 3%-100% and added spell damage is nice on level 12 spells, so it's not as black and white as for other builds. Matter of preference i'd say. As I now have 0.5% leech, i'll have to try cold damage someday, then i'll get 0.6% leech if it's not that good.


Tree

Level 99:
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAABAECAAQHBUIHHgj0DdEOSA_EES0RlhQgFkAWbxbpGGobyBzcHRQgbiGQJDckqiUnJpUo-ioLLJwtHzWSNj026TlSOlg64Tt8PC1Bh0GWRKtFnUlPSVFMs03jUDBQR1NSVUtVrlXGWAddSV3yXypfP1_QYeJirGNDZJ1mnmebakNsjHBSe4x8g3_GghCCx4Nfg8yD24UyidOMNo5kjxqPRo-mj_qVIJUuly2YV5rgm6GdqqKjplenCK4-rrO2-rc-uJO4yrmTvKq86r8IwfPDCcauz93QH9D12L3bXt-w42rjhORR6hDr5Ovu6_XvDu_r8NXxivId8kX3pvhf-ej60v4K_o8=?accountName=Squirrel_of_doom&characterName=Funnnnnnnn

First points to take are the life nodes.
Then travel all the way to shadow area as all the best crit nodes are there.
Then take all crit and crit multi nodes.
Then 2nd curse.
Finish with north west part with the remaining crit nodes, life and the power charge.

If you have godly jewels, some 3 points jewels might be better than a 3 point power charge for example, check for yourself in pob. There are one near scion, one near the curse cluster and one near conduit.


Ascendencies are straightforward, berserker, start with pain reaver, cloaked in savagery, then go get the 40% more.

We do not self trigger cloaked in savagery, cause that would mean staying around less than 5k hp. I prefer to having a big pool, with 6.4k hp and 2.2k mana for MoM. Pain reaver is enough to leech as long as it isn't single target with no add for more than 4s, in that case, worm pot.

I did not calculate my dps completely, but I have like 5 to 20k shaper damage per spell, so let's say average 10k to be conservative, let's count 2 casts average per second (some spell require 2 swaps, max is 4 cast per second). We use 15 spells, so probably something like at least 300kdps with gmp, not counting overlapping explosions. All in all, this build has no dps issue except for T16+. Only issues are leech related.


Map mods

Everything except cannot leech is feasible (well could be done adding regen in tree, maybe changing a few items, but not worth it, just reroll it).

For reflect physical, just remove the few physical spells that are there. If your damage is in a certain range and you do not one shot yourself, could be even feasible with the spells in, but risky.

For reflect elemental, it's doable with sybil in the place of the second loop, and 4 essence crafted wands instead of 2. You can also try to do it with regular setup, sometimes work if it procs cloak you will just autocast without even swapping. But it's unreliable, sometimes cloak just doesn't proc cause hits are too small and without it the leech is not enough to compensate easily the reflected damage.

Can't be overcapped with the amount of uniques I use, so ele weakness is not free, but I'll be capped if my wise oak is up. Technically you could be overcapped with triple res amulet, but I prefer dext and dps.

Vulnerability screws up the swaps a bit increasing the damage so it's not in the best ranges for cwdt but nothing scary.

Temp chains is a minor issue given the speed we have, and it doubles pots duration so...

Ele resistances slows you down a little bit but nothing major. Same for hexproof.

The rest are inconsequential, twin bosses is even a buff. Just be careful not to get into one shot zone for T16.

Still be careful if you hit those mods as a bad combination with mean mobs can lead to a quick death.

In general while mapping what kills you are proximity shields and bearers, anything you cannot leech from.


Build is not potato friendly, although still playable, I started playing it on a 3 years old laptop. Laggy but you don't die during lags cause you could afk half the maps. Still far more enjoyable now that I have my new rig, no lag at all.
Last edited by Squirrel_of_doom on Nov 21, 2017, 1:40:00 PM
Last bumped on Jan 12, 2018, 8:58:07 AM
Options

Tree
MoM: very cost effective. Cost me 5 points for 2.3k buffer. Requires acuity.

Blood magic: Good alternative, allows to use clear mind too, but a bit far. Doesn't require any specific gear. Costs like 15 points for 65% life.

Auras: if you're not using mom or blood magic. It's a possibility, i'd probably choose anger and herald of ice, can add another herald with some mana reservation. Used this for my assassin in legacy. Downside: uses slots. Can use weapon slots, as long as you put the same aura in the same place in offhand.



Gear


You have limited margin, some slots are required to cover your resistances and both rings and weapon slots are already used.

Helmets:
Bis: tempest binding.
Nothing stands out, except maybe scold for damage boost and mind of the council for mana gain. I'd use a rare helmet with life and resists, essence craft for 30% more ele damage also decent if you have it from another build.

Gloves:
Bis: acuities.
Voidbringer and shadow and dust are decent, otherwise rare with life resist and spell damage.

Belt:
I prefer to use that slot for resistances.
Soul tether is a good option if you gear into some ES. Give you a good buffer in combat and doesn't prevent savage hits from self hits when ES is down.
Belt of the deceiver is always a decent option for close range damage boost and crit mitigation.

Amulet:
I use a rare with crit multi, life, and to cover my dex requirements.
Could slot in bisco by taking some dex in tree and limiting all the green gems levels.
No particular synergy in that slot

Armor:
Could go with anything, belly gives decent res and lots of life.
Beast fur shawl is decent if you use self hits, to trigger higher cwdt (doesn't improve ehp though)

If you can get mana gained on rings, it's better than any other implicit, didn't get lucky with corruptions so far, corrupted like 50, best I got is chaos res. Impossible to find already corrupted ones.


Spells

Flame dash if you want some flicker sensation.

Discharge is kinda bad, good dps but eats all the charges so reduces the dps of all spells

Ethereal knives is ok, but I removed it cause it's not small hits and with no physical mitigation i was one shotting myself in phys reflect maps.

Didn't try dark pact, would screw up a bit the damage taken calculation.

Flame surge is ok, but tiny aoe, makes it almost melee range. Same for ice nova and shock nova.

Molten shell is not good as it gives armor and we don't want that.

Righteous fire could be possible cause we leech farm more than rf degen, triggered by the swaps, running with a dousing flask probably, just for bosses, seems risky though. I tried it, it's nice dps boost, but it's hard to stop it properly with a flask 100% of the time so I sometimes died swapping on too low hp. Also it seems the bonus is not applied when rf is swapped out, so you need to use a real slot or 2 half slots on weapons.

Nothing particularly good in vaal skills. Vaal breach is nice but is slow without quality and doesn't help a ton cause all the hard bosses have phases. Also vaal skills cannot be triggered.



Leech vs regen

It's in theory possible to make that build work with regen.

However, if you count at least 3 swaps per second, it requires like 5k hp regen. And it doesn't scale with mob number like leech does.

So I feel like leech can go a bit farther in the endgame, but I know there are people using regen versions maybe cheaper ones too, so feel free to try it if you want.


movement skill

You can go whirling blade if you go dagger, or leap slam if you go scepters.

You could also go shield for shield charge, but at best you get 2 good dps affix on shield and to not screw up resistances, you need identical res in both swaps, which is hard. So I prefer to just keep dps in swaps and dual wield.

For any movement skill you will lose 2 half slots (weapon ones) or 1 slot somewhere else, and if you want it smooth with faster attacks for example, it will require 1 more slot. So basically you lose a weapon in each swap, and i'm not sure what you do with the 3rd slot (cwdt one) and we do not want fortify, maybe arcane surge could be a good candidate.

I'm running at 145% movespeed with pots up thanks to phase run, so I didn't feel the need to use any movement skill, so I went wands for more dps.


crit vs non crit

Both are possible. Obviously with acuities, crit is mandatory.

Non crit you'd take more life with the saved nodes. But Mom is not an option anymore without instant leech (maybe with lots of mana gained on hit).

But as you then need to go to vaal pact (not an option for leech builds), through spell damage areas, you're kinda close to crit already.

Also elemental overload is good, but elemental equilibrium is kinda unknown, you have tons of spells with different travel speed, a bit more cold spells than the rest, I really can't say if it goes fire-cold-lightning-fire-cold-lightning or fire-fire-cold-cold-cold-lightning, hard to say the resulting dps on a given range. So you will only have half the usual boosts from non crit builds.

So in the end crit seems a little bit superior, but feel free to experiment with non crit if you want to.
Last edited by Squirrel_of_doom on Nov 21, 2017, 1:41:45 PM
Budget version

Worked better on budget before ES nerf but is still feasible.

Now I would try to first keep the cloak of savagery self proc to always stay at 100% life leech. For that you need each hit to hit you for 15% (each spirit hits separately, so 700 with 2 rings, 770 with aspect of carnage, modified by your armor).

Buy 2 rings and 2 essences first.

For offhand divinarius is the cheapest, and gives ok dps. Doryani next.
Problem is if you want to end up with void batteries you need to craft an opal wand, not a scepter or dagger.

You should be able to do T11 at that point with decent spell level.

Example my mayhem gear



Armor was done with the ethereal card + 1 alc (lucky one!). Still you should get something decent with less than 50c. Wands are self found. Essence wand are 1st try on bought level 84 bases. Current jewels are kinda shit. I can find easy upgrade for half the gear, but I'm capped and close to the 5133 life cloak threshold, so not much to be gained besides overcapping for ele weakness

Total cost was like 200c:
- 55c for an ethereal set + 1 alc, expect maybe 50c chaos spam, you can totally use a 5l with decent stats
- 40c per essence
- 1c per ring
- 10c per atziri flask although I farmed it myself

And it does ok in T10-15 shaped with breaches, invasion, exiles or whatever, just avoid double beyond, ehp is too low.



Say goodbye to self proc for cloak of savagery.
Take all the hp nodes as you can.
Get a cheap belly, 5l is enough, the last link only adds 1 spell or 50% damage to 3 of your 15 spells. If you hit 6-7k ehp you can do T15.


Then I would work towards acuities to be able to use MoM. Can provide up to 9k ehp (maybe more with soul tether but didn't try it I have tons of res on my belt).


Last step is to pump up dps for guardians and shaper.
Get tempest binding, equal resistances for wise oak, good jewels (generic life spell damage crit multi). Void batteries if you don't have them yet.


Do not focus on ES gear without soul tether, it will just stay at 0 while you swap and give no benefit. Use to work before with essentia sanguis, not in 3.0.
Last edited by Squirrel_of_doom on Nov 29, 2017, 8:15:12 AM
Neat
livejamie
Added all the guardians videos.
Hey there, Thanks for all the info.
Roughly what lvl do you think i can switch to the build? I dont mind dying a couple times or if it feels rough af. What would you say are the minimum requirements? Im also going Pathfinder just to be hipster :D
IGN: NemDoesMinesAgain
Last edited by NemasisPOE on Oct 1, 2017, 7:16:42 PM
Around 70 probably should be feasible. Start with 1 ring and see by yourself to add the 2nd when you're confortable.

You're probably gonna need at least 2 vinktars, boot enchant if possible, and master surgeon + nature's boon, cause you need some leech at all times.

Never did pathfinder, I had 3 vinktars on my assassin.

Skip bosses won't don't have many adds if you're having trouble until you get some levels.

Good news is that vinktar 20% is very strong compared to pain reaver.
Last edited by Squirrel_of_doom on Oct 2, 2017, 4:52:41 AM
Thanks again for the info. Just hit 70 and the build is amazing, a few issues with cwdt lvls but ill smooth that out with more hp. For now im leaving my self shocked with vinktars so i can proc a slightly higher cwdt because im only using 1 ring but not sure if thats such a great idea later on.
I have a few cwdt's at lvl 7 and 8 so my doss damage isnt the best right now but still feels pretty good!
IGN: NemDoesMinesAgain
No, getting shocked is not a good idea. Just means that your effective hp is cut by 33%, which is a serious problem for high tier maps. But this issue should be solved by pathfinder as soon as you get uber lab and master alchemist.


Please share how it goes at higher levels, i'm curious to see if vinktar is easily sustainable on pathfinder even on bosses.


Phase 1 of my masterplan achieved

personnal checklist, do not read!

1) Convert 1 player to cows
2) Convert 1 million players to cows
3) craft mirror worthy essence wand, thanks to donations from fans and poetreon.
4) profit... and world domination

3 phases to go! Easy game.


Added shaper vid.
Last edited by Squirrel_of_doom on Oct 6, 2017, 4:33:37 PM
Hey just a quick question, how are you reaching the lvl 20 cwdt threshold? Im currently at lvl 13 and not sure if i can push it any higher without switching weps and not casting any spells.

Currently lvl 80 and the build is soo much smoother with 2 rings. Alot less deaths and better dmg so i can actuallly sustain on bosses with vinktars but im worried about harder bosses where i might run out of flask charges.

Still have a few things missing before i try to push higher maps but i managed to buy a 3% damage gained as mana ring and 0.5 leech on boots so im messing around with MoM atm and it kiinda works but not very efficient.
IGN: NemDoesMinesAgain

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