Oversoul one hit kill information

I can't remember the actual damage numbers of the various attacks, but they were posted by one of the devs at some point.

But if my memory serves me well they were roughly in the order of 2000 lightning damage from the laser, 5000 damage from the smash, half physical and half fire, and about 900 or so physical damage from the falling rocks.

The laser always applies shock so getting hit by it makes you especially vulnerable to all the other attacks, and attacks from the summons.

I believe these attacks can also crit for even more damage.

Try putting your skellys on a totem with some support, they do some good damage and also act as decoys so he attacks them instead. This isn't very good for dungeons but is great for Val.

Do not go CI for Val, I had to unspec out of it to get by him.

Try to get the curse don't expire node and use either enfeeble or chains on him.

After OB try a build with two curses, two totems no +elemental nodes, all minion nodes.

One thing I've noted: You're going down south on the tree and just taking +int nodes. These could be respecced to go for more ES or life.
Concerning CI: Nothing in the game at the moment can hit your life directly with CI, as it includes immunity to chaos damage (poison and the snake spit). It also gives yu +50% to ES which can be a tremenduous boost and easily make up for the 800 points of life you lose.

The problem I have with CI is two fold:

1. I currently have 800 Life and 1200 Energy Shield. That's effectively 2000 Life, right? If I take CI I will have approximately 1500 Energy Shield, right? How can 1500 be better than 2000? What am I missing here?

and even if it did benefit my Life dramatically:

2. I use the difference between Life and Energy Shield as a tactical indication of when to retreat. As soon as my Energy Shield is gone, I know something isn't right. I then have a visual guide to tactics.

If I have just Energy Shield I have no obvious, corner of my eye visual guide to my playstyle, I would actually have to concentrate on the rate at which the Energy Shield was reducing, much harder than an eyeflick.

I must admit, I had no idea Choas Damage was the specific damage which bypassed the Energy Shield, I just noticed some monsters were able to bypass it. I never would have made the connection between poison and Chaos Damage, I naturally assumed they were different types of attack.

Anubite mentioned life leech, however. Maybe not a real in-game threat(?), but PVP?

But even respeccing to accommodate CI for a (quantifiable?) Energy Shield bonus, I would still lose point 2, which, for me, is crucial to playing PoE.

Don't people just take CI because it offers a general immunity rather than for a life quantity(Does it really?) bonus?

And Choas damage isn't really an Oversoul issue (is it?)

If you don´t want to use CI i made a non-CI Summoner Witch. Just killed Oversoul on Merc. Check out this thread (http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/53221).

Resists are very important, especially for oversoul. I run it with 77% fire and lightning res. Only the physical stuff gets dangerous. As a ranged char i would use enfeeble over temporal chains, since if you get one shot enfeeble helps a lot with 30% dam-reduced.

Edit:
Just to clarify: I have about 1000 life and 1500 ES. Worked fine.

"

Never_nou wrote:

The problem I have with CI is two fold:

1. I currently have 800 Life and 1200 Energy Shield. That's effectively 2000 Life, right? If I take CI I will have approximately 1500 Energy Shield, right? How can 1500 be better than 2000? What am I missing here?

and even if it did benefit my Life dramatically:

1200 * 1.5 = 1800, not 1500. Get slightly better ES gear and you'll be there, plus you can toss the life rings away and get better resists in their place, you'll become more tanky in no time.

"

1. I currently have 800 Life and 1200 Energy Shield. That's effectively 2000 Life, right? If I take CI I will have approximately 1500 Energy Shield, right? How can 1500 be better than 2000? What am I missing here?

ES regens fast as hell, even though it has a cooldown. You're basically independent of life flasks. However, I totally get your second point. I had the same trouble when switching to CI, however, I got used to it pretty quick. You could always spec out of it with an Orb of Regret if it isn't to your liking.

800 life is terrible, end-game map chaos monsters will one-shot you, probably still even if you can scrounge up another 400 life somehow

Your ES items are very, very weak right now. If you were to find even slightly better ES gear, you could take CI and have way over 2000 effective life. My Shadow, who's 10 levels lower than your witch, has 3k ES and he has awful gear, save for his robes, which give 350 base ES.

ES regens so quickly that with summons or cold spells, you can regen to full while mosnters are completely distracted

There's quite a lot for me to respond to here and quite a lot of older posts I haven't even got around to responding to yet. This is a good thing and I thank everyone for their input (although anubite does seem to be incredibly grating for some reason and it's difficult to separate the good from the bad in her posts, I've no idea why, I'm sure she's lovely IRL). If I don't respond to anyone specifically it's not because I haven't liked their post, it's because my post would be crazy long (even for me!)

Firstly, thanks to the Moderator for the stats, though if it was 2000 then surely I wouldn't be one hit, as I have a smidgeon of life over that? Or does the Oversoul pretty much always crit? The blue ray killed me every time with one hit.

Secondly, that's an excellent thread there peteter, congrats on a HC victory! I don't know whether to respond to you here or in that thread! But I guess this thread is pretty much derailed so what the heck:

My intention was never to be a pure-anything. From what I could gather from 'going with the flow' of the game was that the concept of firing Fireballs into crowds of Zombies/Monsters was one that just screamed out as puuurfect.

Admittedly, by end-game, I have indeed been a tad disappointed with the whole Fireball thing. Not only is the Fireball not like the Fireballs-of-old (showing my age here) but it also seems to be a very glitchy and temperamental spell. I can quite literally fire 3 or 4 into a Monster's face, face-to-face, and see zero reduction in their HP. Not only that but the splash damage turned out to be a bit puny and didn't start being really noticeable until I had a 5 Linked Chestplate - even though I never used the Increased Radius Gem.

So, if I was to go again, say for Open Beta, then I do indeed have quite a few spare Passive Skill Points to play with and your Totem/Resistance method looks like a charm. I guess it's either that or the Curse route.

But, essentially, I am very content with my build. Fireball has some wonderful advantages, such as long distance range combined with mob splash, burning for visual entertainment and heavy battles etc.

I have Minions, but I don't need to dedicate myself to them as, essentially, they are useful either alive and fighting or dying quickly and exploding.

Which leaves me plenty of Passive points to improve my main stats of Life, Mana and Energy Shield. Which, by default, leaves my equipment pretty open to requiring just one big stat on each rather than dedicating all my stats to one thing or another.

Which brings me to the CI thing and the complaint of anubite that all my equipment is crap:

I am (not really, but generally) perfectly adequate equipment. I used a level 8 wand right up until I was at level 58 simply because it gave me the best DPS - namely, Attack Speed. Aside from Spell Damage and Attack Speed I didn't care for all the other relatively uniteresting (for my build) stats that any other wand could replace these stats with. You will notice my Wand has 12% Speed - that's why I don't need Passive Skill Speed as you suggest.

If you look at all my equipment you will notice such things. I have 4 Chaos Orbs. I looked at my equipment. For my build I had no desire to risk the stats on any of them.

Likewise, I do not 'need' to prioritise Energy Shield on my equipment as I have designed a play-style which does not require me to 'max' any one particular stat, but rather spread my risk over a plateau of different areas.

This all worked excellently. Until the Oversoul on Merciless, hence the post. To which it seems Totems and Curses and Resistances are much more the missing element (excuse the pun) rather than completely re-speccing to Energy Shield CI just because it might give me 500 more life than I currently have, which, according to the mods stats, might only 'possibly' help me defeat the Oversoul.

I said 1500 instead of 1800 because my 1200 stat already includes percentages. Surely the 50% increase would only increase my 'Base' stats, not accumulate with my Base and it's already existing percentages?

I've no doubt I will experiment with both CI and Curses/Totems at some point, I have shed loads of Respecs left, and shed loads of Chance/Scourings to buy more, but I shall be doing it out of a desire to try something new, not because it's necessarily a better build. But after I try them I will definitely admit so :)

Obviously, as I've had so much fun with my build, I also recommend people give the Fireballing into Zombies spread build a good run for it's money ;)

Anubite - read thyrandor's reply which says the same thing but doesn't do it gratingly and implies he 'knows what I'm on about' and offers a suggestion rather than a 'demand'.