[3.18] Seedmole's Poison Seismic/Exsang Sabo - HCSSF, Exarch and Eater down, ripped to Revenants lol

3.18: according to the patch reveal stream, no balance changes, so this build will still work.


TL;DR: the build still works great in 3.17, feels as if this archetype of trapper is here to stay.


Updated POB export as of mid-February: https://pastebin.com/T3dZCyfp

Bear in mind this character is in the Archnemesis HCSSF, so don't feel like you need to stack as much tankiness as this. So far I've defeated all four of the new bosses (i.e. the two new main ones and their respective minibosses), with zero deaths (duh bc HC). I did have close calls in the intermission phase where you have to find the portal in the swamp (dark souls flashbacks..) but luckily those didn't cut my run short.. beware that fight, though. Also Archnemesis has been a fairly simple mechanic for this build, though I've had close calls with the modifier that applies a mark on the player.. don't select any fast or hard-hitting attack-based monsters with that modifier.


Regarding 3.17 Seismic Trap:
Spoiler
the overlap will be less likely, and will no longer increase as you get larger amounts of increased aoe. Instead of getting giga overlap you'll just get giga aoe coverage. So stuff like Sirus, where it's a pain to keep them in the bounds of the skill, will be somewhat less likely to avoid your skills now when they scoot around.


Regarding 3.17 Exsang:
Spoiler
damage should be roughly the same, as it's getting a large increase in both its base hit damage and its added damage effectiveness, but that increase is being balanced with worse Less Damage modifiers on things like Cluster Trap and Trap Support. It may be viable to swap from Cluster Trap to Swift Assembly, though the change to Cluster Trap simply brought Cluster Trap (and Multi Trap) back in line with Swift Assembly rather than leaving them far ahead in both value and consistency.


Divine Blessing Support:
Spoiler
Divine Blessing enables the use of an extra aura, or of the standard auras but at an earlier point in building the character. While leveling this time, I held off on the reservation nodes very late because I was instead activating Determination with Divine Blessing and Lifetap. With the increased duration of skills nodes that the build relies on already, that ends up lasting approximately 20 seconds, making it a very reliable way to get Determination running at a lower level than before. It can also let you use Malevolence (or perhaps Discipline for extra tankiness) despite already being at full reservation.





Pre-3.17:

Spoiler
Just reached 100 on this, rank 4 sabo, rank 17 overall. Currently around rank 15 on delve depth ladder. Wanted to chime in one last time on this, build worked great, dominated the little boss content I did, was a great clearspeed build once fully built out, and was extremely tanky (like, stand still and facetank most things). 10/10 would recommend. Great league starter too because it comes out of the gate strong and takes very little added gear other than normal life/res/(spell supp) rares, and chance to poison on weapon.

POB of the character in its final state, at lvl 100: https://pastebin.com/RV0ZEsjv


Second edit:

Here's my current POB: https://pastebin.com/YMQ6r5u1

The build is going great. Finally got a 6link and I've been swapping between 5linked seismic + 6linked exsang for clearing and 6l seismic + 5l exsang for bossing.. you feel the benefits of the 6l exsang so much more often when doing clearspeed-oriented stuff, but 6l seismic dominates in places like maven 10-ways. Also I managed to work Ghost Dance in, with the life as extra ES craft, feels very very tanky so far.. no close calls since swapping to that, I definitely recommend it. And I've managed to get a second Coated Shrapnel jewel so now I'm able to get by with just one poison notable on tree, and Malevolence instead of Herald of Agony. Also I've gotten capped on chaos res, which has taken a lot of stress off (especially considering that my closest call was against sirus-dominated Al Hezmin rares with auras). And with that chaos res comes corrupted blood immunity because the chaos nodes I'm using have ailment mastery as their tag.

Still trying to get a Hunter Rune Dagger, preferably with a high base speed (1.5), to spam with chaos reforges. I've had some good results using reforges on uninfluenced rune daggers and hunter influenced regular daggers, but the best combo need to be a rune dagger to be able to get the +phys or all spells prefix, and hunter influenced to be able to get the huge increased chaos damage over time modifier (goes up to ~90%). Those two (or three if you get lucky and roll both +1 all spells and +1 phys spells) with chance to poison and dot multi. Not sure if you can still get both generic dot multi and chaos dot multi anymore, but if so then that's huge.. if not then crafted trap throwing speed is also big.


--------------------------------------------


Edited thoughts post-league launch:


The damage is very high, survivability vs spells is very high with spell suppression, but it's still sketchy vs attacks (physical in particular.. chaos also before res cap). And spell suppression is available rather easily on gear (20% on chest, 20% on shield, 15% on gloves and boots). Each bit of spell suppression on gear is that many passive nodes you can instead spend on life and damage and evasion.

Also, I've had very good returns from getting the Evasion Master node that grants 100% increased evasion from body armor plus using Grace instead of Malevolence. With that, and a high evasion chest that has decent life and some spell suppression, it's easy to get rather tanky vs attacks.. though it still lacks one-shot protection vs attacks so by all means try to avoid things as if you're playing with zero evade chance.

Back to the original pre-launch post from here on...



--------------------------------------------


Hey folks,

I played a Poison Seismic / Exsanguinate trapper in HCSSF Expedition during 3.15, and it worked well enough that I pushed the XP ladder on it for a while before sadly ripping while doing a boss just after getting up from a nap (F, was in the top 50 though so that's nice I guess). The build got a bit of attention from some people as an alternative to crit pure-phys Seismic trapper, and it saw some use in the 3.15 Gauntlet (the top Shadow and second place overall played it, for example).

Naturally I wanted to try to make the build work in 3.16, and I've plunked out a basic POB containing several life-based trees for it, including Masteries. Here is the pastebin link:

https://pastebin.com/hAyvZG1A


It has 3 endgame trees maximizing life, damage, and spell suppression, and 3 other endgame trees that go for combos of life + damage, life + spell suppression, and damage + spell suppression respectively. It also has several leveling trees at spaced out intervals, and one giga life tree that sacrifices some high value nodes in exchange for capping out life. It's hard to say which of these trees to recommend without the opportunity to test the upcoming patch at all, but one of them, or a combo of their features, should do just fine.

Also of note, the gear used in the POB is from my HCSSF character and so it had very limited optimizations. Ideally in 3.16, it would have high evasion on gear, as well as spell suppression on gear where available. Also, minimum endurance charge crafts are a huge increase to survivability against physical damage -- spell suppression should help a great deal vs physical spells, but EHP versus physical hits is lower than in 3.15 due to the Fortify changes.

Another note: to reach 100% chance to poison with these trees, you'll want the 30% chance to poison suffix on a weapon ("of Virulence"), or two of the lower tier versions if you dual wield. Other tools for capping it out include the Coated Shrapnel jewel, the "of Poisoning" jewel suffix for rare or magic jewels, the Chance to Poison Support gem, annointing or travelling down to the Toxic Strikes notable, and the Curse Mastery that gives +20% chance to poison cursed enemies. There are probably quite a few other options, just gotta be sure it's something that can affect spells (one that doesn't affect it is the veiled modifier that gives local increased phys damage and poison chance; that one only affects hits with the weapon it is on, so it doesn't work for this.)


I think that's everything worth mentioning about it, probably forgetting some stuff though. Lemme know if there are any questions!


Link to the trapper from when it died in HCSSF Expedition: https://poe.ninja/challengehcssf/builds/char/seedmole/BaldTrapLOLW


Thanks for checking it out, good luck!
Last edited by seedmole on May 5, 2022, 4:29:57 PM
Last bumped on Jul 14, 2022, 8:42:56 AM
how is the damage compared to the pure phys version? or what is the advanctage of this build. the POE damage numbers seem a lot lower but that cant be true right?
The main difference is that the damage is very consistent because getting 100% poison chance guarantees that every hit does that much damage, rather than having the chance of unlucky strings of noncrits. Overall it feels very consistent, but I haven't played the phys crit version so that build may feel just as consistent in the end.

There's also the whole playstyle difference between hit damage builds and dot damage builds, including the option of going dual curse with Temp Chains to get poisons to last even longer, and the fact that on-kill effects (e.g., life gain on kill) work because your traps' dots are your dots.

Also I don't have a POB in front of me for a pure phys version so I don't know how much skill effect duration they get.. this build can get a lot more than in 3.15 but part of that is from one of the masteries in a cluster so the phys/crit version wouldn't get that.

One other thing is that a big part of the phys build's boss damage comes from bosses having zero reduction for Mark skills, as well as zero non-armor phys reduction, meaning you do full damage to bosses because it's a physical spell. This build doesn't do full damage to bosses, because Despair gets nerfed, and because they have Chaos res (which stays positive, partly because of the reduced curse effectiveness), but that means the damage is much much higher vs things that do not have Shaper-/Sirus-level defenses. That's not really relevant when bossing, which is arguably most important, but still it's worth considering because it means things fall over when mapping.. you don't really ever need to place wither totems or even cast Despair when mapping.

Ultimately, both work. And while the mastery options for poison seismic are good, I haven't looked in detail at what masteries enable for the crit version.. they're probably both gonna feel better than last time, except in regards to the fortify change.
Last edited by seedmole on Oct 21, 2021, 2:33:58 PM
going to be trying this out this league, looks promising!
"
warlock360 wrote:
going to be trying this out this league, looks promising!


Sick! It's working well so far, very squishy vs phys attacks though. Gotta be careful in the Krangle zone.
I'm giving this a go as well - my tree is a bit scuffed but I'm noticing what you mean about phys attacks especially in the krangle zone. I wonder if we could potentially use Temporal Rift as a defense given HoAg and Skitterbots are the auras we're running... might help to get out of sticky situations
Yeah Temporal Rift definitely is a possible solution. I feel like it would have been amazing last league because recovery was a bit lacking, but the revamped access to regen nodes helped a lot in that department. Also it's not in the POB but the node that gives flat life recovery per trap triggered is really useful when spamming Exsang taps.

And another thing since playing the patch, I've swapped Malevolence to Grace because that brings me up to near the evasion cap. That seemed to help a lot, though obviously Malevolence does a lot so it's kinda bad to lose it. Probably won't be able to run both Grace and Malev bc Skitter+Unbound Ailments and Hoag are too on-point for the build to skip. Maybe late game with Enlighten and Malevolence/Grace reservation efficiency modifiers on gear.
Doing this atm in hcssf, was thinking of taking a claw mastery to be crit proof. But, I’m not sure if it’s the poison poisoning or if it counts as is poisoning. Any clue?
No idea tbh, "by you" might be very restrictive and not count poisons from non-player entities. Someone should test it in pvp against a character with max crit, or something. If it works for poisons applied by traps then yeah it'd definitely be a viable option to help deal with crits. You'd still obviously be at risk from random hits by unpoisoned enemies, but yeah that would help vs most situations.
hi guys, trying also this build but either i'm too stupid to use this build or path of building; since pob doesn't show me any poisondamage whats so ever..or only 1/10 of what i actually should have.

https://pastebin.com/hrCcdbFB

where is my mistake ? any help or suggestions are welcome

Report Forum Post

Report Account:

Report Type

Additional Info