Exsanguinate Scion SSF Viable

Intro:
I just wanted to post a short highlight of my favorite build that I have ever played that was able to comfortably clear most content.
For me this was my first serious take on playing SSF during a league, and it felt great for me all the way through the end game with reasonable upgrades to work towards.

Pro's:
Clear feels amazing
Single target uptime is very strong
Relatively tanky versus most types of damage
Very aesthetically pleasing

Con's:
Very hard to mitigate physical damage
Reliant on gem corruptions to get the most out of the damage
Inconsistent defensive feeling (dodge/evasion)
cast speed is clunky early on

Premise:
This was initially something that I found being played on PoE ninja by several people, but self cast exsanguinate seemed pretty niche in general, and I had some ideas that I wanted to bring to the build with a skill that I wanted so badly to love (long time arc player).
I had tried in 3.14 when the skill initially came out but was underwhelmed, so in 3.15 I decided to try and run it back in SSF for the first time, because of a frustrating league start in trade league that had lost my interest quickly.

Gear:
Spoiler




Skill Gems:
In order of importance
Exsanguinate
Brutality
Controlled Destruction
Cruelty
Swift Affliction
Efficacy

While clearing I swap out swift affliction for chain

Passive tree:
https://pastebin.com/fqgG1Tyr

Playstyle:
I try my best to lean into the dodge based aspect of the build by staying on the move constantly, but as far as dealing damage goes, the build has good coverage to allow you to focus on your own movement first without needing to be very precise to continue dealing damage. It also has very good feeling while clearing due to chain, and on regular map bosses I generally will just leave chain in without swapping to swift affliction.

More detail about the build:
For defense, the build boasts an impressive 416k effective elemental damage health pool with flasks and basic buffs active, as well as almost 300 thousand chaos eHP. Where it falls short defensively, is taking physical damage. I have tried to mitigate it as much as possible through minimum endurance charges, but it still is not quite as high as I would like it to be.
With that being said, it is a dodge character, so just don't get hit lmao.

I utilize the divine flesh keystone as well as a born in chaos cluster jewel to get a high maximum chaos resistance, and to help with elemental damage taken. I have also decided that I prefer the dodge and ailment immunity through elegant form cluster jewels, as opposed to just getting more life.

For offense I leaned into the frenzy charge side of the character to make the attack and cast speed feel better, as well as trying to scale aura effect and fit in as many as possible. I use maim with herald of purity along with the lab enchant for the belt and helmet enchant to apply maim to increase the damage a little bit as well.
All in all with good uptime on corrupting fever you could expect around 4 million boss dps, but in trade with better gem scaling you could see much higher as well. Looking at PoB it doesn't get reflected, but after testing on awakener level 8 Sirus I have confirmed at least fighting him getting 40% cruelty is up the entire time for me, and PoB doesn't calculate cruelty at all.
The damage has felt more than enough for all endgame content that I have been able to tackle, but I expect it would struggle in the highest levels of endgame like the feared etc.

Closing Thoughts:
I came into this build fresh in SSF having a really negative perception of the league early on, and it completely changed my viewpoint (almost). I had a ton of fun playing it and I would strongly recommend as a new player or veteran who wants to have something to scale up into an endgame machine. It felt very tanky despite the fact that I have died over 200 times. But in the builds defense, I play like a clown.
Last bumped on Oct 1, 2021, 6:50:31 AM
Hi, started playing this build after skipping about 5 leagues. started into SSF and have been a lot of success with this build so far, thanks for posting this!!
That's great man welcome back, I am glad you like it.

Report Forum Post

Report Account:

Report Type

Additional Info