[3.5] Say_Ten's Melee Shadow - Murder Everything Cheaply

"

LordStibbins wrote:

I'm a pretty new player so please excuse me if these questions seem kind of dumb but would it be possible to replace the LS 4-link with maybe a Riposte to get some extra melee damage during Rumi's duration or another CWDT setup? I did play your build up to T7-8 in Essence where I found I was mainly using the LS and AM curse for the mana leech which I plan to sort through gear and/or 1-2 passives this time around.

Love to hear your thoughts on this.

"

jhblingbling wrote:

Hello, I am following ur build for my first char in Breach League. I'm wondering what would be the best set of weapon at lv 70. 2xTouch of Anguish? or Touch of Anguish&Rive?
I'm rly enjoying the build btw ty :)

"

blizz99 wrote:

Hello Say_Ten,

I quit POE about 3 years ago after reaching level 71 as a CI lightning strike with really crappy ES gears.


Just came back to POE some days ago and re-did my whole character based on your build, and oh boy I'm so glad that I did.

My Dualstrike at max buff is only like 20k and my LS is around 18k, I have no idea how you guys get your dmg output that high.

I'm having a lot of fun trying to upgrade my gears little by little. Would you take a look at my gears and give some suggestions as to which piece of gear I should try to get next?

Again, thank you so much for the guide, it was very entertaining to read and even more fun to play.

"

Say_Ten wrote:

DO YOU HATE THAT PANSY ASS RANGED SHIT?

DO YOU LIKE TO BASH SHIT INTO A BLOODY MESS?

MY FRIENDS, YOU HAVE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE.



Standard IGN: Polarized_Hens
Breach IGN: Spencer_Fletcher

3.5 Million DPS

Spoiler

With a couple of crazy aurabot buddies from the Essence League...got a screen shot for shits and giggles

SLIGHT MELEE BUFFS IN 2.5. BUILD WILL SHRED BETTER. SHRETTER. SHREDDER.

First off, I would like to thank ninedeadeyes and grindst0ne for some of their ideas on this build. I decided to make a separate thread because I was getting a bunch of questions about it on the side and my build differs from theirs enough to make a guide.

I had a lot of fun with this build during the Talisman season and was very impressed with the amount of things that I could facetank, aside from the fact that the clearing speed and damage are excellent. The attack speed is addicting.

I start this build as a Shadow and, as such, went with the Assassin sub-class. You could also start as a Ranger and go with the Raider sub-class for even crazier attack speed. However, I like the crit from the assasin tree as I believe that drives the damage sky-high.

Dual Strike DPS is about 585k AOE/722k Single Target and rising (in a temp league)...self-buffed with Hatred, HoA, Ice Golem, Taste of Hate and Atziri's Promise

Spoiler

Current Level 94 Skill Tree in Essence

Spoiler

http://www.poeplanner.com/AAMAAVBBQU1HQVNzQWVnQUdBRjRCM0FPSEJMRUZMUVcxQ0M0SldBeHpEWTBSTHhIVkZDQVY5aFg5RnI4WmpodXRJV0FqMHlQMkpwVW9LaXlGTGxNd2ZEWHZOajAzMURydFF6RkY5RWQtU24xTV8wMlNUaXBRUjFGSFVkbFZTMWVYV2hwYnIxOF9ZRUZoNG1KNVlxeGpjR1N2WlUxc2pHOG5ienR2VjNCU2RPMTFfWGZqZUJsNWFIc1VmWFdCUVlSdmhObUhkb25UaWppTFQ0dzJqWDJOdjVWbWwzbWFhcDJxb3RtamlxWl9xVzZ3a3JEWXNiTzB4YlZJdlRhLXA4QWF3UVRCaThHZ3d1ekRNOU52MDM3VF9OUkMxZ2Zhd2R1bjQ1X2tVZXRqN1RfdFFlMkQ3Zzd2RHZ6Rl9ycl9reENTRjdBak5qSXlTb3RURUx4djJZWT0ACEFBQUFBUUFBAAA=

Sample High-Level Tree

Spoiler

http://www.poeplanner.com/AAAABAYBV7DYotlR2bCS_5MWv3X94tXtQYRv1EK1SOtjNj2dqmyMYqy0xSaVYeJVS8LsBbWNv1FHMHyNfSP2TZKjirGzG60EsXsUDHOVZgOH037uDvzFDY1br04qI9NvJ5pqTP9DMVeXEdVjcGBBvqdlTb02R36E2Yd2459KfQHcd-OpbnlowQRfPxQg7w5QR-RRl3koKotPwBpvO9rBdO0FLXrvLlPTb8MzWhoshSFgwYuBQTXvOu0V9mJ5AAbnVCT9_96MNonTcFIRLwzypcsV_Yo4ZK9F9G9XAF4Zju2DCC54DbXyNZLYvTfU7T8-z73mIzZTEBewSosyMhCS

Quick and Dirty Look at Some Gameplay

Spoiler

This was in Talisman while I was still leveling. Facetanking a double Jungle Valley Boss, which, for your newer exiles, used to be one of the harder bosses in the game in a mid-tier map.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfAtuU-YITw

T14 Maze with Ridiculous Mods

Spoiler

THIS VIDEO IS FUCKING BORING. DON'T WATCH IT.

This was my 94 in Essence. I swapped my off-hand for a random, shitty Twin Claw I had and took a mana flask with me to deal with the insane mods. No regen, no leech, and major boss buffs.

https://youtu.be/mdwEEUpmydc

Stats

Spoiler

DPS numbers keep going up. Currently at 585k AOE and 722k Single Target as of 11/6/2016.

APS: Well over 14

Life: ~5400 on my current lvl94

Block/Spell Block: 64/13 with Rumi's up

Basics and Leveling Guide

Spoiler

You're going to use Dual Strike and Lightning Strike as your main attacks throughout the entire game. The synergy of these skills is excellent since you can hit enemies at range with Lightning Strike and kite them or get up close and personal and tear faces off. Lightning Strike is great for open areas, clearing trash, and physical reflect monsters or volatile monsters you can't get close to (because GGG hates us melee guys). Dual Strike is major DPS and you can clear most trash faster than LS with it in a lot of cases, especially when your gems are 20/20 and you have serious AOE.

Since this is a life-based build, your end-game survivability comes from having a decent life pool, some block, and killing shit before the game even spawns it. Your life pool should be at least 4500 in the end game and your block chance should be a bare minimum of 25% without Rumi's flask.

You will use Whirling Blades to dart around from pack to pack and/or to evade bad situations. It will also fortify you as you move into combat territory. If you feel the need for an alternate movement skill, like Leap Slam, you can put Brightbeak and a defensive shield in your alternate weapon slots, but fuck that shit.

To level this build, you can do whatever you choose (like most characters) but I personally enjoy starting with Dual Strike and Lightning Strike from the get-go.

As you being to level, link support gems to your attacks, and attack fast as fuck, you will invariably wonder "Say_Ten, what do you do about this mana crap?!" If the league is new and you don't have access to Elreon jewelry, you should pick up a Wurm's Molt to assist with mana problems. If between that and mana flasks you are still having mana problems, pick up mana regen on jewelry, find something with Mana-On-Hit, or simply don't run certain auras that reserve your mana. You will deal less damage but it will also be less annoying. All other leveling gear, including a Tabula Rasa will work, provided you deal with the mana problem first.

As with any character, try to keep your resists high enough to minimize...well...dying. Goldrim is an excellent helm to start for this. Your jewelry can provide flat physical damage and life (and resists if you're lucky or rich) and you can run Jade and Granite flasks for additional defense. All of your gear will essentially look the same in the end game, just with better stats. See my gear below for reference.

Some people have asked which weapons are good to level with and the answer is: all of them. There are some nice unique swords, axes, claws...really anything with good damage that you can dual wield is fine. Lakishu's Blade gets a shoutout for the free Multistrike built in.

As mentioned above:

Gear

Spoiler

The only staple gear piece for this build is the Bringer of Rain, which you can now get relatively easily and cheaply.

Don't focus all your attention on the ARM/EVA...just try to get a decent life roll. You can always get a cheap one to get you mapping/leveling and then buy another down the road. This is also useful for Uber Lab enchants. Let's say you get something like Blade Flurry Damage on your BoR. Ok, now you've got an expensive item. Sell that for a million dollars and put your spare BoR on.

FWIW a Dual Strike enchant is going to be the best for this build.

I also dual-wield claws in this build since the attack speed is very high and I am benefiting from hitting many things at once and the Life Gain on Hit mechanic. The build can also scale Life Leech well. Or you can use both...it is a matter of preference and what gear you have at the time of your decision.

Claws are quite a bit cheaper than daggers and used to be seriously cheap until Mathil ruined that shit for us.

For endgame starters, Touch of Anguish is (still) very cheap and totally awesome. The free chain makes Lightning Strike good until you do enough damage to flip your gem to q20 and get the 40% pierce chance. Then you will have both pierce and chain going on.

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Touch_of_Anguish

If you are hurting for mana, or want to try out some additional auras (reserving the vast majority of your mana) with the help of some passives, Gemini Claws are good for their Mana Gain on Hit too. Other options for mana are Mana Regeneration or Mana Leech on your gear (jewelry or gloves).

While leveling, get enough life and resistances on your armor, boots and helm to help you survive. I can't stress this enough. With a unique helm and no chest armor, you will have some trouble capping your resists AND getting enough INT and DPS at the same time. Don't rush...focus on defense first. Good resists and high life rolls.

You can pick DPS gloves and jewelry to kill stuff fast eventually.

To focus on the resistances, try to find items that help this category significantly. For instance, I used Goldrim one season until I could put on the BoR. Hard to beat those resistances. I also used a Tabula Rasa, Wurm's Molt, and Elreon jewelry until I could put on the BoR...if you have leveling gear like this, the leveling experience becomes trivial.

Eventually, you will want to optimize life and resists more on all your equipment. I look for + physical damage and/or attack speed on gloves and + movement speed on boots. You can use Whirling Blades to get around very quickly, so the movement speed isn't too important, but I do often find it useful. I prefer to look for flat physical damage and life on jewelery as a rule of thumb.

Shoot for an absolute bare minimum of 4000 life. A low life pool is the symptom of the most deaths people are asking me to help them solve.

Shoot for 75/75/75 resists. If you can overcap them, it will be useful in maps with an Elemental Weakness curse. Don't worry about chaos resistance. It's a luxury and would make the build a lot more expensive.

For flasks, I advise to use at least one life flask with instant recovery and the rest of the flasks can be whatever you want. The ideal flask setup is a single Divine Life Flask with instant recovery and a chance to gain a charge on crit, a Basalt Flask that removes and immunizes from bleeding and also has a chance to gain a charge on crit, Rumi's Concoction, Taste of Hate and Atziri's Promise. ToH is very expensive and Rumi's can be expensive, so if you don't want to shell out the cash for those or happen to find them, you can instead use any others you like, such as an additional life flask, a granite flask, a stibnite flask, etc. I have tried Silver Flasks and while they are fine if you don't have anything else useful, they don't seem to provide enough of a benefit on their own...FYI.

To focus on DPS, you will find the highest physical dps 1H weapon possible and just use that to start. Don't spec into claw nodes until/unless you are wearing two good ones already. When you finally do spec into claws, you should like for ones with at least 240 pdps (there are cheap unique options, such as Izaro's Dilemma, Allure, Rive, etc). As previously mentioned, I like Touch of Anguish. If they are Life Gain on Hit and/or Mana Gain on Hit claws, then high attack speed (1.75+ APS) is useful but not required since you are getting a ton of attack speed from the tree.

Current gear on my 94 in Essence:

I also use jewels that give any combination of:

Damage or Physical Damage
Attack Speed
Life
Crit and/or Crit Multi

Be sure to include similar stats for "one handed weapons" and "claws" in your searches.

Skills

Spoiler

These skills and support gems are listed from left to right in order of importance/use. Sometimes you might have one before the other and sometimes you might prefer a defensive gem over an offensive one so the ultimate combination can be your choice.

Dual Strike - Melee Physical Damage - Multistrike - Faster Attacks - Crit Multi - Melee Splash

When you finally put the BoR on, use Dual Strike - Multistrike - Crit Multi - Melee Splash

When you are about to face a tough single-target boss, swap Melee Splash for Weapon Elemental Damage, Added Fire Damage, or Melee Damage on Full Life. WED is more consistent damage across the board since you don't have to rely on being at full life during the fight but at the same time if you are up against enemies with high elemental resistances (or high fire resistance in the case of Added Fire Damage), you may want to use MoFL.

Another option I tried this league (Breach) which has its utility is swapping splash for Ancestral Warchief. The totem will benefit from the BoR buffs and do massive AOE damage while simultaneously buffing you and taking some aggro off you. I carry this gem around but don't use it too often because I can kill most bosses very quickly and putting up a totem is fucking boring.

*Your tooltip DPS with Added Fire Damage might be a little higher than with the Crit Damage gem, but keep in mind that monsters have an inherently higher elemental resistance so Crit Damage is more useful.

If you could somehow get an awesome BoR with a godly enchant and corrupt it for the sockets GRBW, you could swap Splash for Increased Critical Strikes for massive damage.

Your main attack for close-quarters combat. Serious DPS.

Lightning Strike - Multistrike - Curse on Hit - Assassin's Mark

If you are keeping power charges up with the Assassin tree, you may want to swap to Warlord's Mark, or just buff the damage of LS with Crit and Crit Multi. I generally just keep Assassin's Mark on unless the map is hexproof...then I may consider the two crit gems. You'll kill everything so fast it won't matter anyway.

Your Pseudo-Ranged/Area of Effect attack. Also very good DPS and kiting ability.

Cast when Damage Taken (low level, 1-5) - Immortal Call - Increased Duration - Enfeeble/Temporal Chains/Warlord's Mark (your choice of curse...I recommend Enfeeble for newer players)

More survivability.

Hatred and Herald of Ash - Summon Ice Golem

Your aura(s) and buddy. Excellent DPS increases across the board.

Whirling Blades - Faster Attacks - Fortify

Your mobility skill which doubles as a way to get Fortify.

I also use two Unset Rings to manually cast Blood Rage and Vaal Haste.

Bandit Rewards

Spoiler

Normal - Help Oak and get (a) Life

Cruel - Help Kraityn and get Attack Speed

Merciless - Help Kraityn and get the Frenzy Charge or Help Alira and get the Power Charge...your choice. Most of the time I go for frenzy but if your weapons don't have decent crit on them you could rock the power charge.

Leveling Tree Examples:

~20 points:

Spoiler

http://www.poeplanner.com/AAAABAYBV7DYotlR2bCS_5MWv3X94tXtQYRv1EK1SOtjNj2dqmyMYqy0xSaVYeJVSyM2UxAXsEqLMjIQkg==

~40 points:

Spoiler

http://www.poeplanner.com/AAAABAYBV7DYotlR2bCS_5MWv3X94tXtQYRv1EK1SOtjNj2dqmyMYqy0xSaVYeJVS8LsBbWNv1FHMHyNfSP2TZKjirGzG60EsXsUDHOVZgOH037uDvzFDY0jNlMQF7BKizIyEJI=

~60 points:

Spoiler

http://www.poeplanner.com/AAAABAYBV7DYotlR2bCS_5MWv3X94tXtQYRv1EK1SOtjNj2dqmyMYqy0xSaVYeJVS8LsBbWNv1FHMHyNfSP2TZKjirGzG60EsXsUDHOVZgOH037uDvzFDY1br04qI9NvJ5pqTP9DMVeXEdVjcGBBvqdlTb02R36E2Yd2459KfSM2UxAXsEqLMjIQkg==

~80 points:

Spoiler

http://www.poeplanner.com/AAAABAYBV7DYotlR2bCS_5MWv3X94tXtQYRv1EK1SOtjNj2dqmyMYqy0xSaVYeJVS8LsBbWNv1FHMHyNfSP2TZKjirGzG60EsXsUDHOVZgOH037uDvzFDY1br04qI9NvJ5pqTP9DMVeXEdVjcGBBvqdlTb02R36E2Yd2459KfQHcd-OpbnlowQRfPxQg7w5QR-RRl3koKotPwBpvO9rBdO0FLXrvLlPTbyM2UxAXsEqLMjIQkg==

~100 points:

Spoiler

http://www.poeplanner.com/AAAABAYBV7DYotlR2bCS_5MWv3X94tXtQYRv1EK1SOtjNj2dqmyMYqy0xSaVYeJVS8LsBbWNv1FHMHyNfSP2TZKjirGzG60EsXsUDHOVZgOH037uDvzFDY1br04qI9NvJ5pqTP9DMVeXEdVjcGBBvqdlTb02R36E2Yd2459KfQHcd-OpbnlowQRfPxQg7w5QR-RRl3koKotPwBpvO9rBdO0FLXrvLlPTb8MzWhoshSFgwYuBQTXvOu0V9mJ5AAbnVCT9_96MNonTcFIRLwzypcsjNlMQF7BKizIyEJI=

120 points (lvl98):

Spoiler

http://www.poeplanner.com/AAAABAYBV7DYotlR2bCS_5MWv3X94tXtQYRv1EK1SOtjNj2dqmyMYqy0xSaVYeJVS8LsBbWNv1FHMHyNfSP2TZKjirGzG60EsXsUDHOVZgOH037uDvzFDY1br04qI9NvJ5pqTP9DMVeXEdVjcGBBvqdlTb02R36E2Yd2459KfQHcd-OpbnlowQRfPxQg7w5QR-RRl3koKotPwBpvO9rBdO0FLXrvLlPTb8MzWhoshSFgwYuBQTXvOu0V9mJ5AAbnVCT9_96MNonTcFIRLwzypcsV_Yo4ZK9F9G9XAF4Zju2DCC54DbXyNZLYvTfU7T8-z73mIzZTEBewSosyMhCS

...and so on

Questions? Ask away.

"

Say_Ten wrote:

"

blizz99 wrote:

Hello Say_Ten,

I quit POE about 3 years ago after reaching level 71 as a CI lightning strike with really crappy ES gears.


Just came back to POE some days ago and re-did my whole character based on your build, and oh boy I'm so glad that I did.

My Dualstrike at max buff is only like 20k and my LS is around 18k, I have no idea how you guys get your dmg output that high.

I'm having a lot of fun trying to upgrade my gears little by little. Would you take a look at my gears and give some suggestions as to which piece of gear I should try to get next?

Again, thank you so much for the guide, it was very entertaining to read and even more fun to play.

Glad you are enjoying!

It's really the flat physical damage on gear (aside from leveling more to get more passive skill points).

You are missing out on 20-30 from the Bringer of Rain, up to 9-15 per ring, up to 15-25 on the amulet and up to 6-10 on gloves, not including attack speed.

Take some time to get the right gear and make sure your resists are still capped and you will see it skyrocket.