[3.5] Over 100k A Step - Making Abberath's Hooves Endgame Bossing Viable - A Guide
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Have you ever leveled with Abberath's Hooves and wished that you could do end game content with them? And I not just talking autobomber farming, I mean actually fight bosses. Well I did. I give you the glorious strength stacking Meme Boots Build. I currently have it doing over 100k a step (not to mention shock and focus which puts it at over 160k), with over 7k life, 34% block, easy leech cap, and a bit of evasion and life regen.
Betrayal is my first league ever, and Abberath's Hooves was the first unique of note that dropped for me. Early in the league attempted to make them work, but decided I just didn't have the currency at the time. So I made a dominating blow build and cleared elder/shaper/uber elder with it (guide here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2298078/page/1). After experimenting with other builds for a while, and experiencing the content of this game, I decided to go back to Abberath's Hooves. So far I have easily downed Shaper, Red Elder, and delved plenty around depth 300. I have made a decent amount of other builds now, and don't really have an interest to keep this build up to date or respond really. But I will leave it up incase people want its information or to talk about it. Leveling
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There are many guides for leveling with Abberath's Hooves, therefore I will be brief. It basically involves using added cold/lighting damage gems and good modifiers to your boots (so they have damage to scale), then using heralds to help with clear. Once you can equip and Inpulsa, you use it and autobomb your way to around level 80-85. At that point you can easily make the transition to a true Abberath's build.
Final Passive Tree Pastebin
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Pastebin link (with my full gear and settings for non-cd dps): https://pastebin.com/RGEz24RG
poeplanner link: www.poeurl.com/cggl Basically you go for strength nodes, health nodes, and the good damage nodes (including jewels which offer a large amount of damage). Gems
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Gems:
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Weapon 1: Vaal Righteous Fire/Efficacy/Increased Duration
Weapon 2: Anger/Herald of Thunder/Herald of Ash Helm: Phase Run/Efficacy/Increased Duration/Arcane Surge Chest: Cast When Damage Taken/Storm Brand/Combustion/Blind/Curse on Hit/Warlord's Mark (or use flammability if you have a leech watcher's eye (which I highly recommend). Gloves: Flame Dash/Faster Casting -- Cast When Damage Taken/Summon Stone Golem Abberath's Hooves: Elemental Focus/Controlled Destruction/Concentrated Effect/Immolate Explanation for gems:
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Vaal Righteous Fire is a good cooldown, with it and focus I get to over 200k a step. Herald of thunder gives the most damage (of non Ash heralds), and its proc applies ignites to packs before they get there to enable your Hooves' immolate. Herald of ash will also apply burns for this making you able to clear packs just running through. Storm brand applies the combustion debuff and ignite to trigger the Hooves' immolate. Its also a good tool to apply your curse for blind and leech (since unless you have a good watcher's eye, your only leech is warlords mark). You could use a different cast when damage taken set up, but I find the stone golem's ability to soak hits helpful. Those 4 gems in the Hooves are the highest damage combination, it means that you are unable to ignite with them yourself, but you have storm brand for that.
Phase run is super necessary for this build, it allows you to walk back and forth through bosses dodging many of their auto attacks, ups your dps with increased move speed, and allows you to run right through packs. With theses gems and a CDR craft on your belt, you get just about full up time. (Just remember that focus will cancel phase run, so make sure to focus for the fat dps before you hit phase run) Side note: you could self cast storm brand, but that takes time when you could be stepping on people. You could also do different cast on damage set ups, e.g., for delving I generally cut out the faster casting for cold snap for frenzy charges. Gear
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Necessary Uniques
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The gloves and the chest basically give your boots a 5th link, this is why you strength stack. Budget Gear
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Doon Cuebiyari does almost as much damage as a rare crafted piece, but lacks the focus craft for massive damage. That being said you could easily do shaper/elder with it.
Astramentis gives a lot of stats, this a lot of damage and tankiness, but Xoph's Blood does this while also doing far more damage (incidentally with Xoph's Blood you will only be able to shock with shocking conflux and elemental conflux, however this is still a decent up time and worth the trade off for this very powerful item). Cyclopean Coil is very good, better than anything other than a good elder belt, since an elder belt can get a cool down reduction craft and resistances. Black Sun Crest could be used until you got a better helm, but its really just not to good. Plus, no resistances. Current Gear
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I got a very good damage helm, and with all the uniques I was left to getting almost all my resistances on my rings. Damage and resistances could easily be moved around between rings and helm. Flasks
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For Shaper/Elder (and Uber Elder soon):
For mapping/Delve: Side note: You could make great use of a Wise Oak in this build, but since even getting maxed resists is pretty tight, I have currently opted not to use one. Jewels
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A watcher's eye for leech would allow you to use a different curse, likewise a watcher's eye for fire pen is a big dps boost. I haven't gotten one yet, but plan to soon. Edit: I got a watcher's eye for leech for uber elder attempts. It was not necessary before then, but is BIS for uber elder. Side note: You use a lot of jewels in this build. Since Abberath's Fury has a low base damage, the jewels giving flat damage (in concert with immolate) allows for your Abberath's fury to have damage to scale. Sadly it is by far the best dps option, not strength jewels. Pantheon
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I have been using Soul of Solaris and Soul of Garukhan, but these really are just personal preference.
Discussion on Bossing Versus Mapping
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Mapping with this build is very easy. Running through a pack generally kills it, though it may leave a few stragglers in a large pack. Surprisingly your Herald of Ash burn + storm brand often finishes them off, but sometimes you have to run back over them. Syndicate is not to hard, you can usually burst them down with focus and vaal righteous fire.
With bosses you have to be very careful. Since you are fully mobile it is easy to dodge projectiles, however you also are phase running back and forth through them so you may accidentally be hit by something as you are so close to them going all around their model. As I get better at playing this build, this is becoming far less of a problem. Kill/Mapping Videos
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Shaper: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/369442053
Red Elder: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/370061967 Mapping https://www.twitch.tv/videos/367443633 Lets Talk About Price
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Between crafting my belt and weapons, buying good versions of my uniques, six linking my chest, jewels, and the rest of my gear, I have spent about 22 exalt. An okay watcher's eye will bump that up to 23. This build is a meme, but a meme I wanted to make work. Using budget gear you could maybe do okay at 10-15 exalt. Regardless it is an expensive meme.
Final Note: As I mentioned this is my first league, and my second build I am proud enough to share. I love this game and I love making builds. I intend on doing more in the future and in future leagues. I also intend on killing uber elder soon with the Meme Boots (finger's crossed), as well as some other bosses, so stay tuned. If you have any suggestions or questions about the build I would be happy to answer, and you can watch my progress at my twitch (the one the videos were linked from) if you so desire, or drop in and ask me questions there. If you enjoyed this guide, whether you want to try it or not, than I am happy. Stay safe exile. edit: I did about 6 attempts on Uber Elder, but as this is my first league I'm really just not that good (plus this build is incredibly melee, that is, much less forgiving than my dominating blow character). I think I could get it in maybe 10-15 more attempts, and someone with more experience certainly could quicker (to do this you defiantly want a watcher's eye with leech). The damage is there, and you can survive a few projectiles without dying. But I've put about 600 hours into this league and I need a break. I may come back before the end to kill uber elder with this build, or I may try next league. Regardless I will see y'all next league with more original builds. I have made a decent amount of other builds now, and don't really have an interest to keep this build up to date or respond really. But I will leave it up incase people want its information or to talk about it. Edits:
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1/26/2019: A few grammar errors edited, nothing big.
2/2/2019: final note edit. 2/3/2019: edit to gear and gems. Last edited by Legarto on Apr 6, 2019, 11:11:40 PM Last bumped on Apr 6, 2019, 11:03:45 PM
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Well, my first reaction is: mapping is one of the slowest I've seen like ever.
With all this circle running and backtracking this gameplay looks annoying AF. | |
" It was fun for a while, defiantly gets a little old (especially on bosses where you are the meleeist of melee). But I was trying to pump bossing damage, and it came at the expense of autobombing. The mapping video is before I got all the best gear I had, but if there is health or resist mod it is fairly slow (slower than many otherwise). TBH the primary point of the build was to make the meme boots viable for bossing, and I think I accomplished that. Its rather hard to scale up a spell that does base 50-75 damage. I think you missed the point. Last edited by Legarto on Feb 9, 2019, 9:30:40 AM
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I'm also attempting to make hooves endgame viable at the moment.
There's a couple of techs I found that I wanted to share with you, since we're supporting the same cause. Vaal RF + Soul Ripper flask can have vaal RF have a 100% uptime (or close to it) essentially doubling damage from the boots and having a permanent 1m dps from vaal rf always on (I got mine to 15m dps). Curse on hit works on boots and is amazing with a curse builds, personally I tested occultist, since they have an inpulsa node that makes enemies explode for 25% of their max hp as damage (instead of inpulsa's 5%). They can be used to apply flammability, elemental weakness, and despair which will make MEMEBOOTS™ and vaal RF do literally 10x damage. Another way to go is to play boots with a chaos damage setup and tree, use them to apply curses (not damage) and use death's oath as the damage source, which again, deal 10x damage to mobs the MEMEBOOTS™ curse. I'm still looking for other ways to make this endgame viable, I'd like very much to work together to find something out if you're interested. -Also a note of criticism, you're full loading your damage into each step, playing a haste or going more movespeed might bring each step damage down from 100k to 90k, but if you're moving twice as fast you'll double your DPS since more movespeed = more DPS. You probably already knew that but I feel you need more speed. |
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"Chest: Cast When Damage Taken/Storm Brand/Combustion/Blind/Curse on Hit/Warlord's Mark"
So this doesn't work... I researched the issue quite a bit with a guild mate and neither of us could figure out what we were doing wrong. (if anything) The cwdt will proc the brand but the brand won't proc the warlords mark w/ the curse on hit. I swapped the brand for orb of storms and it worked fine. Doesn't appear to work with brand? Any input? |
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" It worked fine for me. IDK what to say. Sorry for the late response, I had left this guide. It will be my last response on it. |
