[3.4] Tanky Totem SRS + Skelly Mage Occultist

Ah, of course;it's too good to be anything but expensive.

I did a little research today and discovered the easy way to obtain Atziri's Reflection at no great cost at all. All you have to do is defeat Atziri in the Alluring Abyss while holding Atziri's Mirror. For this to work, though, you need to have the prophecy called The Queen's Sacrifice.

To obtain that prophecy, all you have to do is collect five cards called Beauty Through Death and trade them to Navali for the prophecy. These can be easily obtained through dog knows how many runs through the Vaal Temple map. This is only a tier 16 map, so it ought not to be much of a problem for most players to obtain all five of these cards.

All you have to do to obtain the Vaal Temple map each time is to gather the four advanced Vaal fragments Mortal Grief, Mortal Rage, Mortal Ignorance and Mortal Hope and combine them into the Mortal Set for placement in a map device.

All you have to do to acquire these advanced Vall fragments is to collect sets of the four Sacrifice fragments, Dusk, Dawn, Noon and Midnight multiple times and throw them into a map device together in order to gain access to the Apex of Sacrifice enough times to defeat Atziri there enough times to gather enough of the Advanced Vaal fragments, as noted above. Simple!

I've already started collecting those Advanced Vaal fragments. So far, I have none.

One begins to wonder why Atziri's Sacrifice demands such a high price on PoE trade!

Ha, A small amount of sarcasm is healthy.

I've been playing around with this build, and think it may be awesome to swap atziris reflection for mon'treguls grasp and put some zombies in the build.

The skeleton mages arent that necessary, so skelly melee could go in with the same supports.....

We'll see.

That's an intriguing idea! Mon'tregul's Grasp is about a billion times cheaper and easier to acquire as a drop in the game than Atziri's Reflection. Since you mention swapping the two items, I guess you've been running around with Atziri's Reflection equipped and finding it lacking (tee-hee-hee).

I like having the mirror version so far. Among other things, the curse reduction, curse reflection and decent all resist are valuable, at least while I'm levelling.

After levelling a bit more, I was able to equip Asenath's Gentle Touch Silk Gloves. These have intelligence, life, mana and a built-in level 10 temporal chains curse on hit. With arc in the gloves chaining constantly among mobs, they ought to be slowed pretty much all the time.

My newly equipped boots Windscream Reinforced Greaves, I can apply an additional curse. I am eager to see what can be done with multiple curses while clearing out maps and stuff. I guess curses won't help with bosses, so it remains to be discovered how best to deal with them with this build.

At present, I and my skeletons are doing enough damage that I haven't needed to place totems for most leveling tasks. I've used them with alacrity on bosses of Act 6 and haven't found the cursedness applied to me when totems die to be difficult to handle. I have a Basalt flask of Warding to remove curses, and am getting used to coordinating the disappearance of totems with finger press on the right key for removal of curses. So far, so good!

Hi Binaryreed.

I tried a few different theory's with different skills, and it morphed into this with zombies, using dodge for defense and shroud of the lightless for boss dps: (quite cheap)

https://pastebin.com/eUuCWaa2

So then I actually levelled a character from scratch, and it morphed again into this: https://pastebin.com/rDDpbbT5

Using phantasms and elemental damage skeletons.

Note how hard the skeletons hit bosses, which are absolutely melting at the moment (Tier 9 maps). Note also that once we prep the phantasms, we run around at about 800K screenwide DPS with zero button pushes for 30 seconds. This has been so fast to map with, it's incredible.

Only in the 70's levelwise at the moment, so still have low life pool (4.1K), but this will go up by 100 with each level, and a few good items would get it to 5.5-6.3K

Well, Mr. Grimlock, both of those builds are interesting, and the latter is especially enticing. I wonder if that might not be worth trying to work on at the start of the Betrayal League. I have an itch to participate in the league, but haven't come up with any good ideas for an exile to play on. I think I just got a good one from you!

You have certainly been busy exploring possibilities using minions in the game. I have just gotten to Chapter 10 on the totem-tossing witch with Atziri's Mirror, and she is doing fine! I'm eager to try some mapping with her before the new league kicks off. I think I'll wait until then to start another witch. Unless you become dissatisfied with it in the meantime, I reckon it'll be an attempt at the phantasm/elemental-damage skeleton build.

Thanks so much for all the great builds!

"

Unless you become dissatisfied with it in the meantime

I've taken the eleskelly/phant version to level 14 tier red maps and 220+delves at level 82, and had no problems. I think overall it's a winner. I'll probably write a guide for 3.5 expansion. In the meantime, you can check my profile, view character 'phantabee' to see the items and skill tree.

This will mean that you have taken this SRS totem build the furthest, so let me know how it goes mapping for you!

Wow, that sounds really good! I will check out phantabee to see what she's got! From the character name, I'm guessing she packs a powerful sting!

I'll let you know how mapping goes on Agnab. After killing Kitava last night, dying three times in the process, I did a couple of tier-1 maps just to get my feet wet. I was getting too tired to play properly, though, so I'll do more testing this evening.

After finishing Act 10, the thought occurred to me that I ought to have tried opening a portal in the arena so I could quickly pop into town to get my flasks refilled. There's so much going on in that fight, and so much damage, that at least on a squishy witch, flasks are vital, at lesat at my level of playing skill. My flasks never refreshed in that fight until I got killed and tossed out of the arena.

To my credit and unlike some of my other bouts with Kitava, this time I remembered to buff up again before running back in!

I like your term eleskelly! I'd like to adopt it myself if you will allow it.

"

After finishing Act 10, the thought occurred to me that I ought to have tried opening a portal in the arena so I could quickly pop into town to get my flasks refilled. There's so much going on in that fight, and so much damage, that at least on a squishy witch, flasks are vital, at lesat at my level of playing skill. My flasks never refreshed in that fight until I got killed and tossed out of the arena.

Remember, you are playing a meme build, it has little synergy, so fights will be tougher than a 'good' build. (melee skeletons are better in almost every way to SRS)

"

I like your term eleskelly! I'd like to adopt it myself if you will allow it.

go ahead.

Thanks!

Good reminder!

I took Agnab to the Graveyard again last night, just magic version, and though she survived, she lost some skin off her teeth. I spent the rest of the evening (until almost 2:30!) working on getting her resistances capped while not losing to much in the way of damage dealing and keeping three auras up while still having a tiny amount of mana left to cast spells with.

Now we've gone back to the graveyard and had a much better time of it. Went to magic version of Lookout as well and enjoyed the kind of mass explosions of MOBs that was so enjoyable while leveling through the story.

I think I'll keep playing around with this build to see how it develops as I slowly fill in the skill tree.

One of the most enjoyable aspects of this totem SRS playstyle is the use of Arc. Now that resistances are finally capped again, most groups of enemies and rogue exiles go down nicely to the combination of Arc damage and debuffs, skeletons casting whatever it is they cast and Flesh Offering. Most normal clearing now doesn't necessitate the use of totems, so I save them for boss fights and any situation that starts to get scary.

Arc is also wonderful for breaking barrels, vases and urns and stuff. I've always felt a need to break all the stuff as I go along, even though the returns are mostly paltry. Once in a while, some nice currency comes out of it. I wish the game had a counter for the breaking of stuff; I'd like to know what my urned run average is!