[3.2] BHC Dancing Duo/QOTF/CI/Occultist - lvl97 and pushing

Hello! I felt that this build is pretty alright, and hipster enough, so here:

[spoiler="Character:"]
[spoiler="Defences:"]
[spoiler="Without pots:"][/spoiler]
[spoiler="With pots:"][/spoiler]

With potions and vaal grace up, dodge and spell dodge are 68&62 respectively.
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[spoiler="DPS:"]Check path of building link
Assuming 1k rampage stacks and no curse effect reduction, physical damage from two DD: 142976
[hr]Here's my math: https://pastebin.com/ynABRCJK[/spoiler]
[spoiler="Gear"]

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On Flasks:
Try to get Chemist's prefix on all of the utility flasks. Coupled with Arcane Chemistry notable allows you to get at least three uses from all of the listed potions. Make sure to cover all of the above immunities. I prefer to have curse immunity on my stibnite to get the most potential uptime. The Writhing Jar with 20% reduced charges used allows you to use it a third time.

As the build is running Poacher's Mark curse, you should have 100% uptime on all utility flasks, with the exception of some boss fights.

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On Jewelry:
Minion movement speed is king for the Dancing Duo. I crafted both of my rings for ~30% minion ms. Having 2 of these is a huge quality of life and clear speed increase. Amulet I found as is. Bis one would be similar with the minion ms craft.

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[spoiler="Jewels:"]

The abyss jewels provide a huge chunk of the builds energy shield, and damage for DD. I bought ilvl 83 Ghastly Eye Jewels and rolled all of them myself. Alt spam until you get high phys roll or high ES roll with a beneficial suffix. Regal and hope you hit the missing prefix (phys or es.) Exalt if your jewel is really good. If you're new to crafting or just unsure of the rolls, use poeaffix as a resource.

Try to have at least one jewel with "Minions have x% chance to taunt on hit with attacks". Ever seen immortal wolf form Rigwald fight immortal dancing duos? I have, and it's damn right beautiful.
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[spoiler="Bandits & Pantheon:"]Kill All.

Soul of Lunaris & Soul of Abberath.
Upgrade both all the way.
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[spoiler="Path of building link:"]https://pastebin.com/pVykEevJ

note: I'm using a custom flask to calculate rampage damage for dps.[/spoiler]
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[spoiler="Gameplay:"]The beginning of the map before you have your first 15 kills for rampage is the spookiest time. I start off by popping all my utility pots, running into a pack (if it doesn't look too menacing,) cast convocation, pooping out srs and spamming my writhing jar for extra monster kills.

When you hit your 15 kills and the ball gets rolling, perpetually keep your utility flasks active and merrily run through the map, watching everything around you explode in a beautiful chaos explosion. At this point the build should basically play itself. It's good practise to keep Vaal Grace up constantly, especially if the map has dangerous enemies and multiple rippy mobs. If the map has enemies that deal high damage with attacks, constantly pop your stibnite to release smoke clouds, making you virtually unhitable with attacks.

Vaal Discipline is your "Oh-shit-button." Hit it when something chunks you or you take damage in a no-regen map.[/spoiler]
[spoiler="Curses:"]The build runs Vulnerability and Poacher's Mark as curses for the best clear speed and damage.
Vulnerability is pretty self-explanatory as the build scales physical damage. Poacher's however allows your DD to gain Frenzy Charges, which work a bit different on minions: A Frenzy charge provides minions with a whopping 15% increased attack speed, 5% increased movement speed, in addition to the typical 4% more damage per charge.

Poacher's Mark also reduces enemy evasion by 73%, assuming current build and no penalties to curse effectiveness.

Try to acquire level 21 curse gems. When socketed to Heretic's Veil they'll be level 22, increasing the curse base radius from 10 to 11. The quality bonus on both curse gems are pretty meh, so 21/q works just fine.

[spoiler="Where's Your Third Curse?"]The original plan with the build was to run three curses. Enabling the third curse, which would be Enfeeble or Despair, requires 2x level 4 Enlightens. Alternatively you can get Heretic's Veil with the reduced mana reservation enchant for either Discipline or Grace. Such helmet does not and has not existed on BHC poe.trade for the past couple of weeks. Bestiary league has plenty.

Personally I kind of dropped the idea of running a third curse. A third curse would only provide marginal damage, or just defences, and no-one cares about them defences, m'I right?

Running the third curse with 2x4 enlightens would also reserve 100% of your mana. You can play around with mana reservation calculations here: https://poe.mikelat.com/#ZBi-55/wB9dd.NLrp/tNrp.m

So far I've vaaled 8 level 3 Enlightens. All of them remained level 3.
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[spoiler="Links and Minions:"]
[spoiler="On Links:"]To start off I want to mention that my links are not set in stone or necessarily even optimized, except on DD. The sockets on QOTF were rolled in preparation for running a third curse, (see "Curses" section above.)

I encourage you to experiment with your sockets, especially for spectres and srs. I very quickly just settled with the ones I have, as they don't really have an effect on dps or clear speed, other than getting rampage started.
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[spoiler="Manifest Dancing Dervish:"]Information I provide here is mostly all anecdotal.
[hr]
The base damage and attack speed of manifest dancing dervish is the weapon damage and attack speed on The Dancing Duo. Try to acquire one with as good rolls as possible. Applying the 30% quality beastcrafting corruption on the sword adds 6,9 avg damage (from 20%q.)

To figure out if a certain support gem works with DD, socket it in and check details of "Manifest Dancing Dervish" on your character sheet to see if the skill details get updated or not.

DD has hands down the best and most aggressive minion AI in the game. They do not follow generic minion controls like casting on a certain spot. Instead they will seek out enemies in your characters line of sight, relentlessly hunting down everything. They also can go really far away from you, way off your screen. Convocation helps targeting specific enemies if you cast it while next to your target. You can also move about to adjust your line of sight so only the enemy that you want to be targeted is in your LOS.

3.2 also brought about this change affecting DD: [quote]The minion created by this unique can no longer cross unwalkable gaps.[/quote]
I can confirm with high certainty that this is NOT the case. DD will constantly just zoom over unpassable terrain (such as water,) provided that you still get line of sight to the other side. Also sometimes they decide fly over walls and such. They're not much for respecting the rules of physics.
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[spoiler="Spectres:"]For spectres I chose Kitava's Heralds. These guys being the bruisers they are, are extremely tanky as is, require no maintenance, deal very high physical damage per hit, and most of their skills are aoe. They synergize well with your auras and curses. Grace let's them evade practically all of their own attacks in a phys reflect map. The only time I've come close to losing lvl84 Heralds is if I get them stuck in some nook with say a dozen of herald of obelisk ball lightning stuff for an extended period of time.

Try to get them from shaper's realm as soon as possible.

Feel free to experiment with different spectres and/or different support gems. For this build their only purpose is to not die and effectively get rampage going on their own.
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[spoiler="SRS:"]There is not much to say about SRS, they really don't do much and are mostly there to just keep me company while the spectres do their thing. I ended up linking them with culling to have a slightly faster way of killing bosses on demand.

As with everything else, feel free to optimize your links for more effective srs.
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[spoiler="Improving the Build Further:"]WRITINK GUIDE HARD WORK, WILL UPDATE LATER[/spoiler]
[spoiler="On Maps and Mapping:"]This build can run absolutely every map mod and combination, at least on t10-11. I alch & vaal every single map I run. Maps that get nothing but the corruption and the unid ones I run as is. 8-mod maps I usually run with two sextants, if I've got any. I forgo chiseling as it does nothing to pack size/experience gain, which is all I really care about at this point. If your map pool regresses, running the 8-mod maps with sextant that increase packsize/add mobs should give you a huge boost to map drops.
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[spoiler="FAQ"]
NO-ONE HAS ASKED ANYTHING

"IS this build capable of leaving your friends to die versus bosses?"
- Yes.
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[spoiler="Changelog"]
Apr 19, 2018 9:55:59 AM

• Updated path of building link
• Upgraded to a better DD
• Changed Ruthless for Maim, it's just straight up better. Thanks to XeonioTheImmortal for pointing it out

[hr]Apr 17, 2018 12:52:26 PM
Added sections for curses, links, and minions.
[/spoiler]

IS this build capable of leaving your friends to die versus bosses?

A true masterpiece of a build. Fun and refreshing in the current meta and it is surprisingly powerful for its cost.

This is absolutely hilarius. I started a character two days ago, currently only lv 50 had limited time to play and was planning on doing the same build. My tree is almost identical to yours so far. I thought I was hipster I gave my character name SecretOPBuild ;) I wasn't planning on going QoTF either to be honest but that's a really nice idea to fix the movement speed issue.

Anyway, I was going to use additional accuracy. I know Cyclone can't be supported by multstrike but minions don't always follow the same rules. is that the case here?

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Anyway, I was going to use additional accuracy. I know Cyclone can't be supported by multstrike but minions don't always follow the same rules. is that the case here?

Multistrike indeed does work with manifest dancing dervish, you get the attack speed multiplier, less dmg multiplier but extra attacks don't proc off it (this is a buff a good thing). On another note Ruthless support gem also works on the minion, it adds another layer of defence as it keeps enemies stunlocked.

I've no data on the accuracy of DD, but Poacher's Mark with 45% curse effect (73% less evasion) seems to do the job just fine.

OK, I have to admit that's a hilarious take on it.

I'm still not quite sure how the choice of ascendancy makes sense, but it's cute, so there's that.

The damage looks pretty bad compared to orthodox choices (necro, champ) but you're definitely on to something with QotF; there's a point where having more damage is less attractive than being more zoomy, and looking at this it's pretty clear I've gone way past that point myself. I'll probably try putting a QotF on my champ and see what happens.

As for accuracy, it's really bad, as for all minions. Champion's no-evade mod literally doubles the DPS at high mob levels. A boosted Poacher's is an interesting way to go about it, won't quite get all the way there, but should still come relatively close. I'd still consider the additional accuracy support, see what PoB gives you (esp with curses being bad on bosses, where DPS matters).

I'm not OP but my reasoning for occultist was mostly profane bloom for the good clear speed of chaos explosion + hexproof and the cheer amount of survivability you'd get from stacking Vile bastion. Also wanted to play around the idea of trying out a poison variant later on with last two points into Void Beacon for testing purpose. But accuracy vs boss is my concern too it's why I will be socketing accuracy over ruthless.

Keep in mind OP made it to 97 in hardcore so that's more than just proof of concept even if these were relatively low red maps.

HI! Thanks for the build, it looks really fun to play and i want to try it in HC as my second. IM still new to this game do you have any tips how to level this in HC? The tree dont have life node. How can i make leveling safer until i switch to CI?

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I'd still consider the additional accuracy support, see what PoB gives you (esp with curses being bad on bosses, where DPS matters).

I agree with you that minion accuracy rating is generally trash. However, as far as I know the dancing dervish/duo accuracy hasn't been released by GGG. I've no clue where pathofbuilding is pulling it from.

As for DPS, there are for sure DD builds out there that can reach way higher values. My build has 455% inc minion dmg at 1k rampage stacks, and even for my reletively low inc dmg the jewels with flat phys provide the highest dps increase. This would be even more the case for necro builds.

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I'm not OP but my reasoning for occultist was mostly profane bloom for the good clear speed of chaos explosion + hexproof and the cheer amount of survivability you'd get from stacking Vile bastion.

Exactly right! The build is designed just for high clear speed, which is enabled entirely by profane bloom. Fun fact is that minions inherit the profane bloom as occultist, and therefore increase the explosion dmg with minion dmg and relevant more multi gems.

I've realized I left out a whole bunch of essential information from the guide, I will be updating it soon.

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HI! Thanks for the build, it looks really fun to play and i want to try it in HC as my second. IM still new to this game do you have any tips how to level this in HC? The tree dont have life node. How can i make leveling safer until i switch to CI?

Well hello! I'm not really any good at making leveling guides, my usual advice is to get a tabula and level with either srs or with generic minions. Here's a quick path of building tree at around level 70 for leveling as life based srs: https://pastebin.com/NRiYxuTR

Other tips for safe leveling:

• prioritise as: resistances > life > damage, for maximum survival
• get and use a granite potion as early as possible
• try to have at least one seething/bubbling life potion at act 4 (upgrade pot base as available)
• don't be afraid to grab str/dex nodes on tree while leveling
• 1-2 point jewels can be great to fix resistances
• google "lutbot" logout macro, use it if you get in a spooky situation
• optionally ask friends or #820 for help on difficult bosses, no shame in that

please more details about lvling process, and some usful unique,
this build s still good without big invesment? i just have 10 chaos!
Thank you so much!