3.2 - The ManaMancer - Indigon pure mana Hierophant - Full HP Shaper in two seconds.



This post will serve mostly as an outline of a concept rather than a maintained build guide. I have been planning a pure mana stacking build ever since I saw Indigon. I got a lucky Watcher's Eye drop from Uber Elder, and traded it for what I thought was the cornerstone of this build. It turns out the build is strong regardless, and the Watcher's Eye is just the icing on the cake (I have just over 7k ES without it). Keep in mind that this is still not a cheap build if you want to make it comfortable to play.

The performance of the build the way I built it is hardly surprising. I am currently using quad non-crit Glacial Cascade totems to deal massive amounts of damage. The base build can be played as pretty much anything, however. The layout of the tree makes it easily suitable to play as a caster as well as both crit or non-crit totems. In the following, I will discuss the general outline of what is needed and what makes the build work. I will then go on to show how my specific Glacial Cascade totems work.

Recordings, first time I tried either of these bosses on this character:
Maze of the Minotaur, full clear
Uber Elder, deathless

Arc version:
Uber Atziri + Uber Elder with Arc totems

How does it work?

This build abuses two things primarily. The Sanctuary of Thought Hierophant ascendancy node and this thing:

Indigon provides damage through mana spent, and Sanctuary of Thought provides energy shield from your total maximum mana. This enables us to focus solely on mana in our passive tree (and I get some totem life nodes as well to make the totems feel a bit better).

Now that we don't need anything else than mana and mana regeneration, let's look at what other items can increase our performance.

Since our aim is to stack loads of mana, flat mana regeneration is of little use to us. Baseline % increased mana regeneration on the other hand, is crazy strong. The 1% regeneration from Cloak of Defiance is first increased by the increased mana regeneration of our rare items, most notably from rings and weapon slots. Mana recovery rate from the Watcher's Eye and a shaper belt acts as a multiplier on top of all this.

We now have loads of energy shield, mana and mana regeneration, let's look at the items we want to make everything better.

Since the Sanctuary of Thought node makes skill cost 0 mana while on full energy shield, we need a Fevered Mind to enable Indigon to work at all. A few Healthy Minds will convert some of that useless life in the passive tree to mana. I would use at least two: One above Witch starting area, and one next to Quick Recovery. The socket next to Melding is also a strong option, but due to a large number of unique jewels in the build, this might be hard to fit.

Since we are running around with 1000-1500 health and no Shavronne's Wrappings, we want both stun immunity, something to deal with chaos damage and preferably something to manage chill/freeze with. Atziri's Foible is the nobrainer option for this build, providing a TON of mana and mana regeneration. I opt to use a Presence of Chayula instead to both mitigate some chaos damage and get stun immunity. The life flask and Coruscating Elixir combo is used during mapping to both keep us safe from the chaos damage we actually take, replenish our life pool to create a bit of a buffer, and to force low life against bosses where it is safe. Dream Fragments is nice for lazy players (or against Uber Elder) to get complete immunity to chill and freeze.

My current gear/links

EDIT: I finally got my enchant for the Indigon, so I am now using triple Grand Spectrums instead of GC thresholds.

I swap around some items still, especially my flask setup and rings. If you can live without stun immunity, get an Atziri's Foible instead. My current setup includes some strange and sub optimal links.

The blood magic link is there to force permanent low life if I don't care about chaos damage. This should be replaced by a CWDT setup.

The curse and orb of storms links are highly flexible. I am currently using Empower in my curse, even though Enhance is vastly superior. I just had the Empower available and never got as far as changing it.

The Arctic Armour totem (lol) is just there to have a high mana cost to get the Indigon damage going.





Bandits and other things will depend on what you choose to do with the framework. Hopefully this post can spark some ideas on how to abuse the pure mana stacking for Hierophants.
Last edited by Nedieth on Jul 15, 2018, 11:50:32 AM
Last bumped on Dec 2, 2018, 4:28:54 AM
Hideout tooltip cheesing:


With Elemental Overload and additional regen from boots, similar results should be possible in maps. Since I don't play either totems or GC a lot, I don't have much to compare this to. Stuff dies regardless.
Last edited by Nedieth on Apr 8, 2018, 12:32:23 PM
sweet build idea, gonna give it a try
nice build, i have been working on a potential build that uses the same idea, but with icestorm totems. you use int to scale the base damage of icestorm, mana and ES all the same time, and use indigon for your damage. i originally wanted to do a cwc scorching ray variant instead of totems, but i dont think that i will be able to get the mana cost of scorching ray high enough for it to work well.
Initially, I made the build without any specific purpose. I did look at Whispering Ice as an option as well. WI should work really well, but as you say, the channeling part might be tricky to balance. With any kind of self cast, you could get some leech going as well. Eventually you will most likely hit a mana cost where your combined regen and leech can't keep up and you will stop casting, interrupting the CwC part. That's where a CwC build using Indigon might start feeling really clunky.

I don't think you would have any issue with keeping the mana cost high though. If you just use an Arctic Armour totem to get the mana cost going, you can then pop a clarity totem to manipulate the mana cost even further. My AA totem costs around 4k mana before I start casting anything. When I still used Clarity totems, the initial mana cost were around 300-500, making it easy to quickly bump up my recent mana spent as well as mana cost.

I still think totems is the better choice, but at least you can try it out. Either way, it is just 20 respec points for ascendancy and 10-15 in the passive tree.
Hello, i find this build is really interesting but as a comeback player from 3.0 i feel a little overwhelmed, can you just let me know what is best optimize set up for all item, skill gem and tree, which stat to look for, please. And can you also post PoB link , i still cant see how this build deal with chaos damage. Thank you very much, looking forward for your reply
Last edited by Janu4ry on Apr 12, 2018, 6:29:03 AM
As a baseline, you simply stack mana and mana regen on everything. This scales really well with the base % mana regen that our totems, cloak of defiance and pure talent provides.

The mods I have on my belt and Watcher's eye act as a more multiplier to everything else.

For the chaos damage, the answer is pretty much "we don't". Since I just have 1.1k life (and 50% MoM effect), chaos damage is a huge potential problem. Shav's is the obvious fix, but cloak of defiance gives me a total of 2k mana regen per second at my gear level, so I do not want to swap it out. Instead, I use both anti-chaos pantheons, get some chaos resistance through presence of chayula, and use a life flask and coruscating elixir in combination to manage it. I have not died once to chaos damage yet (not even on chimera's snakes), but it does require some flask management or game knowledge. This build probably isn't for you if you.

If you want to check my character out in PoB, my account name is Nedieth and the Character name is NediManaMancer. PoB gives very bad info on a build like this, as it does not support hierophant totem regeneration or indigon. I can currently reach 1.1m tooltip in hideout on my GC totems, have 11k mana and around 7k-10k mana regenerated per second depending on the situation.
Hey man, thanks for finally making this guide! After watching your videos I knew I had to try and put this build together myself.

I am not sure where to improve my gear at this point, my mana regen/pool is not there yet to get the crazy dps tooltip like yours. I can reach a max of 400~ at my HO, I'm just a few casts away.

My stats (Clarity/Discinple at HO):
9k ES
7.7k Mana
1890 Mana Regen (not casting)

Any tips would be very much appreciated!

Gear:
Spoiler


Jewels:
Spoiler



Also, I think my weapon has some potential but I am unsure how to craft it properly.


Thanks!
Last edited by DigitalStealth on Apr 13, 2018, 3:38:26 AM
Nice build! I'll play it with Shav's. Do you have any suggestions for the free flask slot (because i don't need corus elixier)?

Maybe a Conc Ground Flask ?
Last edited by coryu on Apr 13, 2018, 5:33:16 AM
@coryu, I swap between quite a few flask. if you manage to make your cold res the highest, a combination of Taste of Hate, wise oak and atziri's promise is probably the best options for DPS. To be honest, the DPS I am showcasing in this post is just stupid at this point. I would much rather go for a Rumi's, Sulphur flask and then some evasion or armour stacking for the rest. Everything you want to die dies instantly (I forgot to swap inc. aoe for conc. for uber elder once, didn't notice).

@DigitalStealth, do you go Low Life for the tooltip cheesing with conc. effect in the link? your gear looks pretty much perfect, so I don't understand how you could be far off my DPS. Do you cast curses/orb of storms when the mana cost is too high to be able to place totems?

EDIT: I checked your passive tree. You have swapped around your The Long Winter over Witch and Healthy Mind at Scion. Swapping these two jewels will give you a ton more mana. Also, due to your helmet enchant, you could consider getting another jewel socket, dropping The Long Winter x2 and getting 3x Grand Spectrum.

EDIT2: for your weapon, i realized that you might be able to slam penetration on it with relatively high success rate. if you craft cannot roll attack mods, you remove quite a lot of other suffixes from the roll pool (check poeaffix.net to be sure/consider risk), but you are unable to hit attack speed. Worst case scenario you lose 2 ex and re-craft attack speed on it.
Last edited by Nedieth on Apr 13, 2018, 7:43:13 AM

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