Fen's Volatile Dead Chieftain 3.1
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INTRODUCTION
My cat says this build is terrible. I hope someone else will validate me. This utilizes the new skill Volatile Dead. The focus of the build is high survival with a good balance of trash and boss damage. In other words, it's a really safe play style that clears fairly quickly, but can still hold its own against higher Tier bosses without needing to swap gear or gems. The damage is pretty straightforward; we're gonna stack up what we can on Volatile Dead and let it rip. The survival is a bit more complicated. We build lots of Life Regen, then use Soul of Arakaali. After you capture Arachnoxia, Soul of Arakaali gains the ability to increase your life regen by 50% after you stop taking a DoT. Using Blood Rage and Immortal call with CWDT, you can keep that 50% going for as long as you need it, jumping up your sustain to fantastic levels. Once the build is underway, you can regen around 25% of your health every second without doing anything. This is bolstered by a high amount of damage reduction and Life, making a lot of ohko mechanics not quite enough to take you out. It isn't perfect by any means, but what in this game is? So far, I can run T15 maps without much trouble, and I've cleared Yellow Elder, and normal Atziri (Albeit, it was hard. I used Shield charge and desecrate to kill her. Detonate Dead would be an ideal substitute). I'm slow at these things, but as I progress further I'll let people know. I have a lot of confidence where this is headed! OVERVIEW Pros: + Map clearing is fairly quick. Not the best, but definitely not the worse. + Many mechanics are negligible. Don't like Bleeding and Corrupted Blood? Come on over! + Bosses that do sustained damage instead of burst damage can be face tanked. + Gear scales well. You can build for cheap, get awesome for expensive. + Lab doesn't know you. Cons: - Can't run maps with Elemental Reflect or No Regeneration. - Boss kill speed is low. Reliable, but low. - Will cook you breakfast and wash your windows, but the breakfast will be bad and the windows streaked. - Can be mana hungry at higher levels. SKILL TREE Passives Ascendancy Points: We take Ngamahu first, Hinekora second, Ramako third, and Tawhoa last. Bandits: Go with the skill points. If you're REALLY high level (perhaps mid 90's) Oak may actually come out ahead. If you're that far, I trust you to have good enough judgement on what you need. Pantheon: This is important! We use Soul of Arakaali AFTER we capture Arachnoxia. Before we do that, use Solaris. Or Lunaris. Whatever. Capture Arachnoxia! Once you do, your life recovery skyrockets. It is important to note that there is no tooltip showing you what your ultimate life recovery is, so you won't see this gain on your character sheet; no need to submit a bug report. Trust me, it's there. It matters. Extrapolating on that, the way it works is this: You take a small amount of damage, and your CWDT procs Blood Rage and Immortal Call (It is important to have them in that order! Blood Rage needs to occur BEFORE IC in your link). When IC procs, it stops the Blood Rage DoT for a moment, which triggers Soul of Arakaali. Even though you're taking 4% damage from Blood Rage every second (which also invalidates any ES you have), the amount of life recovery you gain VASTLY outweighs it. For the minor Deity, use Tukohama. This will stack with Arakaali, as well as give you greater face tanking power. Even when you're in situations where you can't hold still, it will buff you up while you cast, giving you breathing room on what would have otherwise been a one hit KO. LEVELING Starting out, you'll need damage. Your path on this tree is going to take you through many survival nodes, so focus on reaching all of the damage nodes first. Once you do that, flesh it out with survival and mana nodes as required, based on the gear you have. SKILL TREE EXPLANATION We take one major keystone, Elemental Overload. Since we aren't building into crit, this provides us a reliable boost to damage (bearing in mind our crit chance is going to be around 5-10% depending on gear, and we hit around 40-60 times over 8 seconds, giving us ample opportunity to keep the buff active. Outside of that, we need Life and Regen. That will keep us alive. You can't kill anything if you're dead. JEWELS In Abyss League, there are 4 types of Abyss Jewels. The boots we use get better the more of those we have, up to a 40% Increased Damage. Therefore, we want to make sure we have one of each type equipped. Those jewels can all have Maximum Life, and they should! Outside of that, look for bonuses to either fire damage, elemental resists, or regen while moving. It isn't necessary early on, but end game you'll want a standard Jewel with 5% mana cost reduction. Make it an awesome Jewel. The build is mana hungry and this will offset that. GEAR EXPLANATION
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Overview On our rares we need Life. It is crucial to have high life for this build. Resists are always crucial, though the high level we pick up on our Passive tree makes it less of a focus. Life Regen got a huge buff in 3.1,and it plays well into this build; we don't need it, but don't ignore it. It will do you good. Finally, our build is low in Dex, but requires it. You WILL need pieces to supplement that. Weapon We use Doryani's Catalyst. It gives us a boost to our cast speed for VD, Attack Speed for Shield Charge, tons of damage for VD, and a tiny bit of elemental leech which doesn't hurt. The Elemental Proliferation will go to waste, which is sad, but still worth it. Off-Hand Rare Shield with lots of Spell Damage. Though the corpse explosion from VD doesn't benefit from Spell Damage, most of our damage comes from the second part, which does. Helm Hrimnor's Resolve. This Helmet will up our damage, while also giving us the ability to be immune to chills and freezes. That means we don't need a flask on our bar for that, which is cool. There are a number of enchants that are useful for this space. While the obvious one is VD having 4 explosions instead of 3, consider that there are other useful alternatives that may also cost less: Specifically, Stone Golem increasing Regen, and Flammability having more effect. That being said, I'm sure there are better choices out there, including rares. It's still a very cheap starter that will serve you well into end game. Chest Look for a 6L Rare with high Life. You will probably need something that has ES so you can socket it properly, even though ES is useless to us (Blood Rage will make it literally meaningless). Don't bother with a 6: until you have your 4th Ascendancy. The mana cost will eat you alive, otherwise. Gloves Look for a rare with stats you need! There is one enchant we need, and it's relatively important. You can map without it, but it's the only enchant that matters, and it matters a lot. Anything ending in 'of Light'. This will drop Consecrated Ground when you take a critical strike, which will make you regenerate an extra 13.5% of your health a second while you stand on it because of Arakaali. Boots Early game we'll use Gang's Momentum. It's cheap and stacks well with Ignite. Later on when we're using Elemental Focus and can't Ignite, we'll want Bubonic Trail. It will do about the same damage, but without the Ignite requirement, as well as giving us an Abyss Jewel socket. The enchant we want here gives us 2% Regen if we've been hit recently. A good substitute is 80% stun avoid if we've killed recently. Amulet Look for Spell Damage, Fire Damage, and Life. I haven't yet tested this, but Impresence seems like a great end game piece. Rings Rares with Fire Damage and Life Belt Abyss league is hungry for Stygian Vises. Flasks Uniques consist of Rumi's Concotion and Overflowing Chalice. Overflowing Chalice plays well into this build; You're almost invulnerable while you use it, because it basically gives you 13.5% Life regen on top of what you already have, Coming in somewhere shy of 40% a second. There is very little (Not nothing!) in the game that can pierce through the 5 seconds of having both of those flasks up. Run 2 health flasks, one with remove bleeding. While Bleeding is not a huge threat, sometimes corrupted blood at 20 stacks at the end of a fight can be... Annoying. I have been running a Basalt flask for the last slot. I'm not sold on that being the best choice and would love to hear opinions. LINKS AND GEMS
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Armor On your armor: Volatile Dead -> Spell Cascade -> Fire Penetration -> Concentrated Effect -> Elemental Focus -> Controlled Destruction Elemental Focus comes later in the build due to Gang's Momentum and the Chieftain ascendancies that give damage bonuses to enemies that are Ignited. Helmet CWDT -> Blood Rage -> Immortal Call -> Increased Duration Support It's important to note, don't put Blood Rage on until AFTER you have captured Arachnoxia for Soul of Arakaali. If you do, you're gonna have a bad time. Keep these gems low level, specifically CWDT 1, Blood Rage 7, and IC 3. Theory: With Impresence, switch Increased Duration with Anger. Shoes Shield Charge -> Faster Attacks -> Fortify Support We'll be using Bubonic Trail, so the 4th slot goes to an Abyss Jewel. When you're using Gang's Momentum, you can... Do... Something else. It's probably not that significant. Weapon Anger -> Flammability -> Increased Duration Anger gives us a bit of extra DPS, which we need for boss fights. I think. I'd love to hear thoughts on this, I haven't tested much outside of it. Theory: with Impresence, we would do Flammability -> Blasphemy -> Increased Area of Effect. Shield CWDT -> Stone Golem -> Arctic Armour Make the CWDT and Stone Golem level 20. The golem may not be up during trash fights, but it will be there when it counts most. Arctic Amour helps us ignore mechanics when fighting bosses. There are a lot of bosses where this makes the difference between having to get out of the way, and being able to face tank. Gloves Desecrate -> Spell Cascade-> Faster Casting -> Arcane Surge Descrate and Spell Cascade make 15 corpses, which is the maximum Desecrate can have at a time. If you have Arcane Surge at level 5, it will proc every time. This gives your VD a universal buff. Desecrate Vs. Unearth
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I have play tested Desecrate with Spell Cascade against Unearth as a totem, and my thoughts are this: Desecrate is an easy winner. Desecrate lets you spring into action faster. You immediately get 15 corpses, and can immediately cast VD twice. Compared to Unearth on a totem, you have a slower build up time. You may eventually reach a saturation point where it is similar to the corpse generation a single cast of Desecrate has, but that requires some fairly extended battles that don't have AoE which destroys your totems. Ultimately, Desecrate wins out as an easier and faster, more consistent corpse generator. Considering both together, the DPS gained from having an unearth totem isn't worth sacrificing anything else you can gain from those gem slots. It just simply isn't. Spell Cascade Vs. Spell Echo
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I ran these sets of numbers against each other;With Spell Cascade, with Spell Echo, and with Both removing Elemental Focus. My numbers may be bad, I invite correction, HOWEVER what I found is that: 1) Spell Echo had the highest DPS. It also has a longer cast, despite the cast speed increase, which makes it less survivable. In addition it is not as good at utilizing corpses as Spell Cascade. 2) Spell Cascade, which had a slightly smaller DPS, but was better at utilizing the corpses on the board to full potential. This ultimately had better damage output than 1 and 3. 3) Both. The less modifiers wreck this, despite getting off 3 casts to the 2 of Spell Echo and Cacade. It falls behind by a large margin. RANDOM THOUGHTS This build originated as theory crafting when Volatile Dead was announced. It did not go as planned. The original idea was to make use of Chieftain's Totem abilities for Unearth; along the way, it became apparent that Unearth was not ideal, and that other areas were lacking. Chieftain had a lot of survival that I wasn't seeing in other builds. Eventually we came to this place. I'm pretty slow when it comes to the meta, usually lagging behind, but I'm fairly satisfied when I see myself keeping up with end game content. I'd love to hear feedback on how I can make this better! Last bumped on May 3, 2018, 4:46:02 PM
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Hey nice Idea, I know is a little late, but do you think there is a way to integrate cremation to the build for single target (maybe a elder/shaper helm), interested to do it in SSFHC in the race.
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