Dark Pact - Necro VS Occultist [SOLVED, thank you <3]

Hello there!

I have a little questio for you all since, yet again I have the feeling that I am missing something.

I am fiddling around with a Dark pact build at the moment and according to PoB, Occultists come around with higher DPS than the Necromancers.

Whenever I look up existing Dark Pact Builds, people use Necros most of the time (I guess because of the mistress of sacrifice skill) while occultists are a friggin rarity in comparison.
The chaos focus of the Occultist seems like a total no brainer at first sight but this is the very moment where I think I am missing something...

Can you help me out a little?
Every single word of advice would be highly appreciated.

Thanks!

Did you check the actual builds in PoB? Dark Pact scales considerably with the hp of skeletons, and Necromancers get +2 levels and 20% more life for them. I do not think this is particular common for Dark Pact builds, but in theory you could alternatively scale 200% increased cast speed if you find a way to automate corpse consumption while you cast Dark Pact.

On poe.ninja, there are currently five different builds with different approaches. One Necromancer that works with the minion nodes, one MoM totem Hierophant with Soul Mantle, one low life totem Hierophant with Ivory Tower, one self-cast MoM Hierophant with Indigon and Pledge of Hands, and one low life Assassin with Shavronne's Wrappings.

Going a bit further back, there used to be an Occultist with a similar build to the Assassin.

I do not think that Occultist is necessarily the strongest choice. Only two of the ascendency notables directly benefit Dark Pact.

Nope, so far I only had time to compare the stats if I change the ascendendcies in PoB... it's super superficial at best. I started the character as a necromancer but felt as if the damage was barely acceptable at best.
I began to question if the Damage of Dark Pact really scales with the skelly life and changed the ascendancy in PoB just to see if focusing on chaos damage could help out in some way.
PoB has shown me higher DPS and well... It confused me enough to ask here if I am just had too much dumb juice and miss the obvious (which is absolutely what happened lol)

Guess I'll just hop back to Necro and try to make it work.
The Corpse consumption part feels iffy and without the "trigger socketed spell when you use a skill" enchant and I am not really lucky with unveails so I hope there will be a way around that at least.

Thanks for the answer.

Did somebody say automatic corpse consumption?

"

Agynn wrote:

Nope, so far I only had time to compare the stats if I change the ascendendcies in PoB... it's super superficial at best. I started the character as a necromancer but felt as if the damage was barely acceptable at best.
I began to question if the Damage of Dark Pact really scales with the skelly life and changed the ascendancy in PoB just to see if focusing on chaos damage could help out in some way.
PoB has shown me higher DPS and well... It confused me enough to ask here if I am just had too much dumb juice and miss the obvious (which is absolutely what happened lol)

Guess I'll just hop back to Necro and try to make it work.
The Corpse consumption part feels iffy and without the "trigger socketed spell when you use a skill" enchant and I am not really lucky with unveails so I hope there will be a way around that at least.

Thanks for the answer.

PoB does not account for the skeleton life automatically. You need to check the skeleton life of your skill and then enter it in the configuration manually. Note that if you do not create new skeletons for each Dark Pact cast (most builds will not), the skeletons will realistically not be at full life, so you should enter the average value between the maximum life of the skeletons and the point at which you create new ones.

And of course you need to configure your Dark Pact to calculate its damage based on using skeletons rather than your own life in the first place.

"

BearCares wrote:

Did somebody say automatic corpse consumption?

How would you scale this to consume 25 corpses per second? From what I can tell it has a 2 second base cooldown, so even with Awakened Spell Cascade and cooldown recovery speed on your belt you would get 30% increased cast speed from that at most.

Well that's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is "free corpse consumption + a lot of freakin damage too"

I mean have you tried them? They really do a lot of damage.

"

DER_PSYCHOPATH wrote:

Note that if you do not create new skeletons for each Dark Pact cast (most builds will not), the skeletons will realistically not be at full life, so you should enter the average value between the maximum life of the skeletons and the point at which you create new ones.

I'm pretty sure the amount sacrificed is based on the skeleton's maximum Life, not its current Life. That's the way most "sacrifice % of Life/Mana" effects work, e.g. The Agnostic's sacrificed Mana doesn't taper off as your Mana drains. So the Life sacrificed will be the same until the skeleton is at less than 6% Life, at which point it will probably die pretty quickly and cease to be a factor in damage calculation.

"

ekaye wrote:

I'm pretty sure the amount sacrificed is based on the skeleton's maximum Life, not its current Life. That's the way most "sacrifice % of Life/Mana" effects work, e.g. The Agnostic's sacrificed Mana doesn't taper off as your Mana drains. So the Life sacrificed will be the same until the skeleton is at less than 6% Life, at which point it will probably die pretty quickly and cease to be a factor in damage calculation.

Ah, that makes sense. I knew that the damage was going to be lower if the spell sacrifices less life than on full life, but I did not know that it would only sacrifice less if there was less to sacrifice.

That just means that you do not need to resummon skeletons anywhere near as often as I had expected, and that skeleton life scales Dark Pact damage even better.

If you get the Blessed Rebirth notable from medium minion life cluster jewels, skeletons essentially cannot die for 4 seconds, so you only need to resummon them every 16 Dark Pact casts to keep doing full damage, assuming that you cast more often than 4 times per second.