[3.5] Acceleration Brand BHC [dead]
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Introduction
Up until 3.5 there have been no easy single player methods to utilize mistress of sacrifice acceleration very well. However with 3.5, brands have been released that scale with cast speed and multiple totems has become a gem that allows players to effectively spawn lots of corpses pseudo passively via unearth totems . Essentially asynchronous damage like cremate, but cremate did not scale with cast speed so there was no good reason to accelerate. Since they gave Ascendant all the useful non minion necro stuff, this is the last unique aspect of non-minion Necromancer. Spritual aid becoming a thing also really helped the viability. This combination had to be played! Build Overview - Primary skill gems: Armageddon Brand Volatile Dead Unearth Totems Key Necromancer Ascendancy: - Mistress of Sacrifice: 2% Increased attack and cast speed for each corpse consumed recently How the build plays - For clearing just brand stuff 60/47 block with ~8k HP means you usually won't be in huge danger unless you run directly into fat packs with buffs off. VD if things aren't dead and you get bonus of acceleration. Probably won't have more than like 30-50 corpses eaten at a time usually. - For things that die less quickly pop some unearth totems, try to align yourself perpendicular to the path of your totems to single target as this allows you to consume the most corpses per cast of volatile dead. After about 2 seconds you become pretty fast. at 4 seconds you are really fucking fast, and beyond that you accelerate at a slower rate due to first eaten expiring but you are now consuming even more due to increased speed compared to the first ones so still accelerating. - Delve? Probably won't go deep, not enough defences. However in lower level delve you can have fun and accelerate pretty reliably often since you are often fighting in a confined space. Main reason to play this build: It is really fun to go super fast when you eat lots of corpses. For the player who doesn't like to invest large amounts into anything, you can have a mini soul eater experience without a zerphi/headhunter. And it works against prolonged boss fights too. Misc. Info
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- fairly low damage
- spams a shitton - eye cancer - squishy: only defence is block - Cheap to build, it's brand after all - easy to get chaos res - struggles for sockets - Unearth can only create up to 10 corpses at a time, doesn't matter if it's from multiple totems or not) - NOT atziri viable due to reflect, not reflect viable in general. Notable character stats at level 89 (dead) with bad gear - 5.4k Life 3k Mana with MoM - 33 chaos res without amethyst - 45/38 block, (60/47 with a rumi's) - Approximately 100-450k dps: see below for more on damage PoB of current char (1 corpse):
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Additional tree stuff:
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Honestly block nodes are not good. I don't recommend them, I got them cuz I'm a roleplayer but they are not very effective on this build however they do let you stand in barrage of trash better and keep accelerating sometimes so if you like to play really offensively then go ahead.
Celestial judgement is also a dps effective node that I didn't grab yet. Note that cast speed nodes will provide less raw dps but remember that it will allow you accelerate better. Current gear and gems (pretty trash stuff)
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Primary Skills: Brand Volatile Dead: 19/10 brand (vaal orbs didn't work out of me...) 20/0 volatile dead... Other Didn't bother crafting a stygian vise yet since somehow I couldn't get any cast speed when crit recently jewels or any decent abyss jewels for the matter but a stygian vise is probably ideal. Or onslaught while fortify belt, reliable +20% cast speed is just good. Using a shitty sceptre with just cast speed some flat mana and flat damage to auto cast tempest shield and bone offering. This makes the playing build a bit less annoying and makes your offering more reliable, considering this build already needs to micromanage several skills at a time. Can also consider putting desecrate in there but just be aware that the skills cycle through and the more skills you have in there the higher the chance bone offering is not going to be cast on on top of also losing inc duration. Another item worth considering: if you can somehow get enough blue/white sockets on this thing, it provides a more reliable and very effective onslaught which IMO is super good for casters. Alternate/additional gem setups
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Offerings: I have no experience on self spirit offering tbh but If you like the hybrid style go for it. Flesh offering is probably better than bone offering for most things honestly however as a character with only block as a defence, I decided to go for more block. Wand? I always take option to fortify on movement skills and I think it is nice to make use of the attack speed we get from acceleration so I prefer melee weapon over wand but if you like flesh offering/the smoothness of running, then profane wands can give more cast speed. If you have dual curse and/or warlords mark or just don't want enfeeble, you can easily drop mana leech for a damage link on volatile dead. Faster casting is my first choice because I like acceleration but others will provide more raw DPS. One of your skills should be using combustion while the other uses elemental focus. fire pen or conc effect for another damage link. If you choose a 7link chest like or other method of arcane surge then add controlled destruction as well. The damage can scale much higher than my shitty cheap setup. My VD links are dedicated to consuming as many corpses as possible so they are missing direct damage support gems. Note that VD does more damage on sandbags and stuff that won't constantly kill your unearth totems while armageddon brand does more damage if you need to dodge a lot or do other tasks so take that into mind when setting up your links and what you prefer. Blatantly missing stuff: get another 25 totem elemental resist if you can and quality on spell totem as totem placement speed is really nice for this build (though I didn't have any). Get cast speed wherever you can (gloves, rings, ammy, weapon, shield). My character wasn't able to get any aside from weapon. Other stuff: If you like vaal rf put that in if you got the sockets. For less mana (essentially hp) and more damage use herald of ash Could do essence worm anger for ~15% more dmg but I needed the chaos res/life/attributes from rings most of the time About fire burst options:
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At 100 corpses, my armageddon brand hits over 5 times per second per brand (so 10.4 times per second) while volatile dead hits ... quite literally countless times but anywhere as the eating of corpses also hits. An estimate is: 8 cast per second * 9 baals per cast, ignoring the initial hits ~ 72 hits per second. Note that fire burst has a fairly high cooldown on top of the low proc rate I believe so the high hit rate just means you will be really close to hitting 1/cooldown fire bursts per second (asymptotically close) as per cooldown mechanics. So you could try fire burst as well in exchange for defences. Will have to link up the fire burst somewhat though, as you will need to put VD links with fire burst and maybe need a different method of autocast bone offering. Damage Damage on this build is not very clear. The stats are dynamic due to corpse consumption and you use multiple skill, one of which is fairly passive/automatic and other are manual/active and there is a fair bit of micromanaging. Additional damage Info:
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Note that rate at which you consume corpses is based on rate at which you consume corpses, theoretically it has exponential damage scaling with cast speed. However the fact that recently refers to only 4 seconds, there are misc tasks such as dodging, replacing totems, recasting brands, and the base rate of growth is fairly low, it is reasonably bounded in game.
Damage (shaper): with 1 corpse recently Brand: 90k DPS VD: ~ 130k DPS with 100 corpses (it goes higher than this but unless it's a sandbag you aren't really going to get this consistently) Brand: 190k dps VD: ~ 288k dps Note the highest I have observed on this character was ~145 corpses consumed recently for +371% cast speed to armageddon brand when fighting the Omnitect When clearing or fighting stuff you need to dodge a lot it will be closer to ~20-50 corpses consumed recently. Note my gems are on 4/5 link with lots of non quality/low level gems (couldn't get leech on boots after 20 lab runs so long so I planted mana leech on VD). I would be happy if somebody took this build and made it way better than my mediocre implementation :) Last bumped on Feb 27, 2019, 5:25:17 PM
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