[0.11] Voll's Devotion Power Siphon/Discharge Build

I've been inspired by Kripp to take a stab at my own discharge build. I should mention from the outset that the build's basic elemental wander/discharge set-up does not require Voll's Devotion.



The Voll's Devotion difference(TM) is it allows you to chain discharge. Voll's Devotion grants an endurance charge whenever a power charge expires. So, when you discharge your power charges, you gain endurance charges, allowing you to discharge again. Therefore, the goal of this build is to build power charges to allow for a double blast of discharge.

The build will cap out at 5 power charges(3 + 2 passive tree), 5 endurance charges (3 + 1 passive tree + 1 bandits) and 3 frenzy charges. Power charges will be built via power siphon killing blows, endurance charges via enduring cry and Voll's Devotion, and frenzy charges via frenzy. These various methods of building charges will allow for multiple paths towards discharge depending on the situation.

A notable advantage of this build is it offers several options to build charges at range, and can dish out significant elemental weapon damage without ever discharging. This pattern of attack provides a modicum of safety when the situation demands it.

100 point Passive Tree: http://tinyurl.com/kkcwgl7
105 point Iron Reflexes Version http://tinyurl.com/kzddkyb


Skill Set Up

6 Link:

Discharge/Life Leech/Chance to Ignite/Elemental Proliferation/Increased Area of Effect/Increased Burning Damage

4 Links:

-Power Siphon/LMP(GMP if damage is sufficient)/Life Leech/Added Fire Damage

-Frenzy/Life leech/Added Fire Damage/Weapon Elemental Damage

-Reduced Mana/Clarity/Discipline/Determination

3 Links:

-Enduring Cry/Enduring Cry/Decoy Totem

-Flammability(Elemental Weakness when grouping)/Enfeeble/Temporal Chains. I'd highly recommend snagging a Windscream to allow for double cursing.

Skill chain for groups:

-Temporal chains/enfeeble, enduring cry, discharge endurance charges, power siphon, discharge power charges, discharge endurance charges.

-Temporal chains/enfeeble, frenzy, discharge, power siphon, discharge power charges, discharge endurance charges

-Some combination of above. Decoy as needed.

Skill chain for single targets:

-Curse, frenzy, discharge, repeat. Enduring cry, discharge as desired to kill adds.

Why Life Based?
We won't need the points for unwavering stance and to worry as much about elemental status effects. Furthermore, since we have over 240 intelligence, 100% increased armor and 100% increased energy shield, ES/Armor pieces will provide significant energy shield amount of energy shield over and above the 200%+ life modifier from the passive tree.

Why Vaal Pact?
To ensure that we're not killed by reflect mobs. As long as we're not hit against any single mob takes our whole life pool, we'll live.

Why Resolute Technique?
We won't have the accuracy to hit mobs if we don't take it. The lack of critical strikes will help ensure we don't one shot ourselves on reflect mobs.

Why Iron Grip?
To buff our Frenzy and Power Siphon damage.

Why Conduit?
Group utility. If you're with other dischargers and using Warlord's Mark, the fire works will be rather incredible

I'd love your feedback!!!

How much damage does a non-crit do? Do you have enough life leech and health to survive a 3xshock stacked extra damage ele reflect mob? The reason Kripp went CI is because it is far superior to life and it ensures he won't get one shotted by the worst case scenario.

If you went CI your build would be much more efficient. Right now the majority of your points are spent moving around the tree trying desperately to pick up all the life nodes you can, and even with that you won't have as much effective health as a well optimized CI build. If you go CI you can move through the tree to the important keystones picking up ES (which I guess you think you want to use anyway) and damage nodes. The latest version of this build uses unwavering stance and iron reflexes to get an absurd amount of armor (like 10,000 +); it's probably as well optimized as this build is going to get. Anything that isn't a close variant of that build is just going to be inferior, especially life based builds.

Also, if you use conc effect you will almost certainly one shot yourself at some point.

I don't see where I really went out of my way to pick up life nodes. They are all near keystones I'm going for.

It is true iron reflexes/unwavering stance is a powerful combo, but you have to go way out of your way to pick it up. This means you will lose out on taking closer nodes with a significant amount of utility. Furthermore, unwavering stance will not protect you from shock stacks and being frozen. If you take the items needed avoid these effects, you're losing out on all the stats you might get from other equipment. Relying on flasks to dispel these effects will probably eventually get you killed due to the flask being empty or slow reaction time,

I also expect that the combined life/es pool will be very large. I'm not sure how you'll achieve as much armor and combined hit points on a CI build since a huge energy shield pool depends on using ES pieces. Elemental adaptation + purity may be more necessary than I thought, and could be added if the reflect damage numbers are worse than I thought.

Another change could be made to make reflect less problematic. You could forgo using enduring cry and warlord's mark to avoid discharging power and endurance charges at the same time. Instead, you could just rely on the double discharge pattern allow by Voll's Devotion.

I should also note that Kripp's build misses out on the synergy between Voll's Devotion, power charges, and endurance charges, which is the whole point of this build. Also, I have an issue with the focus on the situation where you and the mob are triple shocked stacked in an extra damage map and you happen to have full ES. All of those circumstances happening at once is a rare occurrence. I would be more worried about surviving the more frequent circumstances that may cause death, which I believe are better avoided by my hybrid approach.

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Furthermore, unwavering stance will not protect you from shock stacks and being frozen.

The problem isn't you getting shock stacked, its an ele reflect mob getting shock stacked and then doing more damage to you. Dream Fragments is still a pretty solid choice since discharge is mana intensive and you really can spare that one slot.

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I also expect that the combined life/es pool will be very large.

It might be large but its not going to be as large as a pure ES pool. If you do a combination then you're splitting your passive increases (more/increased ES and health) between two resources instead of the one. If you focus on the best one, you can get substantially more effective health over all. In the current state of the game ES is the best option of the two, although that could always change.

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I should also note that Kripp's build misses out on the synergy between Voll's Devotion, power charges, and endurance charges, which is the whole point of this build.

He's skipping this synergy because he doesn't want to one shot himself against that perfect storm of a mob. If you play enough, it'll eventually happen.

Here's what I would suggest.



Maybe IR isn't completely necessary if you would rather pick up more ES nodes or the other Nullification. You would have to compare the effective health of both builds and see which you liked more. But I really think you're underestimating how much damage the worst case scenario is. If you are going to put all this work into gathering this very expensive end game gear, you have to be damn sure you're not going to blow yourself up against a single monster.

Thank you for all your feedback! It's good I have a lot of time to think about how I'm going to do this before I try it given it'll take me awhile to build the wealth to execute the build!

There are a few things about Kripp's build I don't understand. How can the ES and armor numbers both get really high at the same time? I assume if he's going to use hybrid armor, the total ES will be lower than is typically seen in CI builds.

Aren't shock stacks on you still a concern? A 1.4 to a 2.2 damage multiplier on you is a big deal in general, and is even more of a worry when your damage is reflected back at you.

Isn't critting very dangerous? It will add at least a 1.5 multiplier to an already big payload of damage. Just from that alone you'd have to be ready to have 50% more hit points to accommodate the hit. It seems that my build, as long as it has more than half the total of Kripp's build, would be competitive for those rare overboard damage moments.

As an aside, the Voll's Devotion effect isn't about stacking power charges and endurance charges for bigger single discharges. Rather, it's allowing you to chain discharges, since a power charge discharge would immediately grant endurance charges which could then be discharged in turn. So, unlike Kripp's build, this build is about stacking power charges that will allow two discharges in a row. Endurance charges from Enduring Cry and/or Warlord's Mark can be discharged in the way Kripp does as well.

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Also, isn't critting very dangerous? It will add at least a 1.5 multiplier to an already big payload of damage. Just from that alone you'd have to be ready to have 50% more hit points to accommodate the hit.

If you look at the build I linked you can see all the increased/more armor nodes that are mixed in with the ES nodes as well. Plus, IR turns all the evasion, which is also increased by the passives, into armor. Your defensive items will be armor energy shield. A CI build that really tries to get all the ES nodes can reach well up to 15,000 ES which is way overkill. To determine if you can survive crits you look at the worst case scenario. In this case that would be critting a single target in an extra damage map with ele weakness while the target is triple shock stacked.

If your life leech outpaces the damage in that situation then there isn't any situation in which you will die to reflect, including when you crit huge packs of reflect monsters. This is because life leech is calculated after each damaging blow. Say there are ten ele reflect monsters and you hit them all with a crit from discharge. The game makes the following calculations: take the damage from the first monster then add the ES from life leech back instantly (due to Vall's Pact), repeat for remaining 9 monsters. So if you have more life leech than the worst single hit can deliver, no amount of adding and subtracting, regardless of pack size, will kill you.

But what if you don't have enough life leech? If you hit one monster, that's fine because you will still have so much energy shield leftover. Maybe it deals 500 extra damage above and beyond what you get from life leech. What happens if there's 10 of those monsters and you crit all of them? That's 5000 damage, plus whatever damage they are doing to you from other attacks. That's why its so important to have a good health pool and know exactly how much damage you could take from the worst scenario. That's also why Vall's Pact is so important, which in turn, makes the already defensive CI build more attractive.

Just to be clear, you can hit 8K+ ES with armor/ES and evasion/ES pieces in a CI build? If you can... wow. That's incredible.

I understand the Vaal's Pact mechanic; I took it for all the reasons you pointed out. My point about about critical strikes is that if you crit a mob, you still have to worry about taking at least 1.5 times more damage. Therefore, as long as a non-crit life build has half as many hitpoints as a CI build, given a similar base damage, they will have similar ability to survive the damage if a discharge is reflected. I suspect, however, that my build would have more than half a CI build's hitpoint total, giving it the edge for reflect survivability.

One could, of course, take resolute technique and elemental adaptation in the CI build as my life build does, although finding the points to do so in a 100 point build would be difficult.

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8K+ ES with armor/ES and evasion/ES pieces in a CI build? If you can... wow. That's incredible.

Yep. CI is overpowered.

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My point about about critical strikes is that if you crit a mob, you still have to worry about taking at least 1.5 times more damage. Therefore, as long as a non-crit life build has half as many hitpoints as a CI build, given a similar base damage, they will have similar ability to survive the damage if a discharge is reflected.

I think maybe you are focusing on the wrong mechanic here. With life leech you should never "see" the damage from a reflect mob because it is healed back instantly provided you have sufficient leech. I've seen the numbers for the well optimized CI build and the difference between the damage you take and the damage you leech is less than 1%. That's 1% away from being able to one shot yourself to a pack of reflect monsters. If you run the numbers for a life based build the leech may be sufficient, but even so, in hardcore it's still riskier. A life based character is going to have a health pool of 5k-6k maximum with pretty decent armor and capped resists; they may even be able to survive the worst case scenario for discharge (though I'm skeptical since life leeched is based on percent health). Either way, a CI character can do all that as well, except with 3k-4k more effective health and more armor. Your build might work fine, it's just going to be outclassed by the CI version.

Life leech is applied after you take the damage, which is why you can kill yourself on a reflect mob even if you leech more damage than you take. The key is not doing so much damage that the amount reflected is more than your current hit point pool. Critical strikes, therefore, are important since they raise the amount of damage reflected by a multiplier of at least 1.5x. Even though you will also be leeching more life, you will have to have the hit points to survive the larger hit before the life leech is applied. This is why that, given the same base damage, if you are not dealing 1.5x critical strikes, you only need 1/(1.5)= 2/3 as many hit points to survive reflect.

I made a mistake in my previous post- oops! You would only need half as many hit points if the critical strike multiplier was 2x.

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Life leech is applied after you take the damage, which is why you can kill yourself on a reflect mob even if you leech more damage than you take.

Yes that's right, I needed to do more research on that subject. You also need to include your resists.

Lets say you are up against a single extra damage, reflect mob in an extra damage map and both you and the monster have three shock stacks. You would take 52% reflect damage. If you crit for 20,000 but have 75% resists you would only take about 2600 damage. That's pretty easy to survive. Then you need to decide how tanky and defensive you want to go, and since it's hardcore you probably want to max defense out as much as possible. Either way, I don't think you have to worry about crits.