Is ED-Cont self sustaining for a leaguestart?

Help me make a choice here guys.

Last league, one of the builds I had the most fun playing with was an ED-Contagion Trickster. The issue was that updates to the character soon became way too expensive for me, so I dropped out to a Bleed Bow Glad that I used for the rest of the league.

The thing is, I had much more fun with the ED-Cont, and I can't help but feel like if I had used it better (I learned most of what I do for farming now AFTER dropping the character) I might have been able to update it all the way on my own.

So my question is: given that ED-Contagion builds that are capable of taking down the endgame (most mine managed to do was A1 Sirus, I wanted to go at least as high as A8 on my own) are so expensive, but also given that leaguestarter ED-Contagion builds are such good farmers, do you think it is viable to leaguestart as ED-Cont and use it to farm enough stuff to sustain transitioning to a better endgame build? Or should I just leaguestart with something broken like Poison BV and get money to make my ED character that way?

If you planned on taking an ED character to the endgame this league, how would you do it?

Trickster is faster at clearing maps but Occ is better for bossing and its easy to utilize lowlife - which seems to be the theme for the upcoming league.
Stun immunity without being locked into few gearing alternatives plus regen denial is huge for dot based builds, especially when maven is witnessing the fight.
Shavs is dirt cheap anyways and far easier to acquire than a +3 chaos spell bow.

Having said that:
Another alternative would be hierophant going agnostic to sustain RF easily while being immune to ele ailments and gaining massive boosts from arcane surge plus a good chunk AoE and MoM ofc.

Latter one is probably the cheapest option but suffering a little early on.


Its not like Trickster was the only or best option for ED.
Depends on what you want to achieve and what your budget looks like.

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Orbaal wrote:

Trickster is faster at clearing maps but Occ is better for bossing and its easy to utilize lowlife - which seems to be the theme for the upcoming league.

Thanks for answering.

About that, how much better is the Occultist? Because my issue that lead me to drop the Trickster was taking like, an entire minute holding down Blight on any bosses.

If an Occultist version of the build can manage to kill something like A1 Sirus without it taking me so long, I might have to look into starting with that instead.

personally i think occultist is better for those sort of builds than trickster, even for mapping. i dont think conta is that good with ED, u have it for sure, but imo ed + bane is just superior, and then occultist with the boom booms just wipes out mapping content far easier than having the clunky ed+ contag nonsense.

conta is good for legions etc, you still want it on the bar for niche situations, but for my money when mapping bane + ed + explody occultist... why would u want to press 2 spells when bane will just 1 shot an entire pack? you can gemswap bane for blight if thats the better choice for a specific endgame boss encounter.



i think the chaos spells make a fairly easy self found thing right? cause making a +1 chaos spells + chaos dot multi + spell damage wand with harvest is really easy, and you can do it with remove non chaos add chaos which isnt going anywhere.

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tyago04 wrote:

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Orbaal wrote:

Trickster is faster at clearing maps but Occ is better for bossing and its easy to utilize lowlife - which seems to be the theme for the upcoming league.

Thanks for answering.

About that, how much better is the Occultist? Because my issue that lead me to drop the Trickster was taking like, an entire minute holding down Blight on any bosses.

If an Occultist version of the build can manage to kill something like A1 Sirus without it taking me so long, I might have to look into starting with that instead.

Just import your previous Trickster into PoB, connect the tree to witch, note the dps and then switch to Occ and check dps again. Make sure to allocate pain attunement and check "always on lowlife" in your config tab.
Thats really easy to check and takes less than 2 minutes.

If you go lowlife Occ it should be about 30-40% more dot dmg overall.
Just because of the 30% more spell multi from pain attunement plus -20% chaos res for nearby enemies. Not accounting for anything else.

That said: Trickster sustain is far better on low budget, so there is that and you cant go Acro as lowlife build. Occ needs more investment to make that work, which doesnt matter as long as you are able to manually dodge stuff and kill fast enough.