[3.7] SC/HC - ED/Blight Trickster - Up to 10k eHP, Layered Defense, 3m DPS

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frenzul wrote:

Hi guys, sorry to bother you.. I just came back to the game and am trying to remember how to play. So far, so good. I had a stupid question though.

My ED doesn't seem to have the ability to spread outside of closely packed groups. What could I be missing? I am low, so I've only got one small loop of +aoe range nodes.

That's it, if your contagion is low level, the radius is small. Once you level up, it will spread like...:)

The level of Contagion is actually irrelevant to the spreading of ED. The build does not start to feel worthwhile before you get to level 38 and link contagion to increased area of effect. Going directly for both witch and templar AoE clusters as well as getting a 20% contagion for another 10% increase area of effect will greatly increase the spread of your essence drains.

Don't usually do this, but i've invested my luck and my heart into this build this league, been meaning to do ED contagion for a while and a friend pointed me at trickster.

I done well, i think, considering. I've played the game a lot over time but never even seen a T10 map before this league. The majority of my playtime is the first year of the game was out.


So i found a shav's, then i chanced a skyforth, and sold it. This combined with lots of other general good trading and playing has gotten me very very far.

I really don't understand the whole decay thing still, if someone could tell me what i could gain by having one as an alt weapon setup maybe i could understand this, but i just don't understand what it would gain me.

My goal is killing uber atziri, and the 4 guardians and shaper, content i never dreamed of seeing before this league.

Here's what i've achieved with luck, trading, crafting, and some yolo exalting:

hideout tooltip: 7056 to 10564 chaos damage, 44,415.8 chaos damage per second, without flasks on, more with them on obviously, etc, that's base damage, in hideout, on low life.

And for a sidenote, my damage TOOLTIP didn't go up much over RBBGGG skin with the low life, BUT, my ability to chuck out ungodly fast large amounts of EDs went through the roof....so that's a HUGE boss nuke ability upgrade i'd thunk.

Please help me understand what i could gain from an alt weapon setup and how that works if i get an decaY weapon now...and any other tips on things to change around...

I did create a variant on boots i hadn't seen anyone do that i came up with which really gives me insane move around speed with basically always being phased for projectiles full piercing.



edit: just realized i certainly don't need enlighten on helmut no more for mana clearance, i can reset colors and put arctic armor up there, nifty. All of it at once...doin that.

edit edit, fixed that, now i have 253 mana and with the level 16 clarity leaving me with 6/1337 life i can chuck 5 super fast ED in my hideout without leeching before a pause. That feels good.

In an ideal life i'll someday get version of gloves and belt with str...but exalts did what they did on em for the moment and i'm broke now cause i aint sellin the WBBGGG skin

@Fuzzballx: Nice to see you are enjoying the build. I haven't recomended the shaper boots as I play HC and feel like I would miss out on too much ES and resists, making it harder to reach 169/170% in hideout. They are still very nice, and even though I get by with 0% pierce, it is a huge quality of life.

Now, when it comes to decay, let's do some math. I am basing this off base values, so it is easier to understand:

You are rocking a level 4 empower. This makes the ED dot tick for 1227.6 DPS as your ED is effectively level 24. Decay gets applied on hit and deals 750 DPS. Due to the modifiers on our ED skill, Decay scales with every single damage scaling stat we use, and is therefore just added to the initial hit. With decay, your initial hit will hit will apply a DoT that deals 1977.6 DPS with just one hit. This is very nice while mapping, as the first target dies a lot faster and you can get your regen and AoE damage going.

Poison on the other hand deals 8% damage based on the initial hit, which at level 24 is 354 to 530. On average the poison DoT will be 35.36 DPS, but since poison double dips with nearly all the damage we have (%increased/more damage over time does not double dip), the better gear and gems you have, the stronger poison is relative to decay. Based off a rough memory of some math I did earlier for my own character, I guess that your poison does about 3-400 DPS after double dipping at base values.

In conclusion, Decay deals double damage of poison, but poison stacks. Two guardians are immune to poison (Chimera and Hydra), so decay is superior there anyway. Decay also lasts for 10 seconds, and poison lasts for 2. It is first when we go low life that poison really starts to get interesting, since we are then able to run clarity which lets us rapidly cast ED without relying on mana flasks or leech. For Hydra and Chimera, using a decay weapon and shield is most likely your best bet, while on Phoenix and Minotaur, you might be better off with Consuming Dark and a shield. For Shaper on the other hand, things gets more interesting. While he is not using his giant beam of doom, we are mostly just running around. Decay really shines in this scenario. When he beams, he stands still for several seconds and we are given a great chance to spam EDs in his face. I have opted to dual wield for Shaper, and have been very happy with the results, although going with just your Consuming Dark will work as well. It is during the beam attack that we are really able to do significant damage.

I hope this clarifies a bit when it comes to Decay/poison, and good luck killing the guardians.

Hello Nedieth,

First I would like to say thank you for the amazing guide. I have been playing ED for a couple of leagues now and I am still in love with it as I was when I first saw it. I have never gotten as far with it as I have now though, thanks to your guide. I can do almost every map I try, and I have downed Phoenix and Minotaur with ease. My dream for this league is to kill The Shaper with my ED Trickster or my Occultist but I am worried that I wont have the damage or survivability to manage it. Would it be possible for you to recommend ways that I can improve my character? I know I still need a level 4 empower and level 21 ED, but beyond that I am stumped. Also I feel like I have a problem with my mana regen, so I stil use a mana potion.

This is my current gear.



Thanks! <3

That verbose explanation REALLY helped, Thank you so much!

I'll look to get a decay weapon as my next step for those two guardians at least and experiment.

@JoshieBee: I see that you are using Doedre's Damning as a second ring. You could consider losing the vulnerability from your Witchfire Brew and get another rare ring. This would allow you to get slightly more mana and a few more mana regen rolls on the rest of your gear. This is mostly a solution I have used for Low Life characters, where I also run level 20 clarity (making the %mana regen have a substantially higher effect than for the CI version). As CI, I mostly run some easy merc labs until I can get .5% of damage leeched as life/mana if you have killed recently. This makes abyssal cry and ED hits leech enough mana to keep going. Most map bosses also has a pack of blue monsters to trigger the leech, giving you a good 2-4 seconds of boss nuking with mana leech, which should be enough to kill any non t16 boss without a sweat.

For situations where I am unable to get any of the methods above to work, I use the spare mana flask that I keep in my inventory. All in all, going low life will greatly improve your mana situation relative to CI.

It is also worth noting that vulnerability is an "increased damage taken" debuff, just like wither and shock, making it quite insignificant in the big picture against bosses.

@Fuzzballx: happy to help! I should add some more mechanics explanations to the actual guide, but I haven't gotten that far yet (breach too much fun!).

I never played ED before, but this build looks great to farm Uber Atziri with. I have an ST char that can farm shaper deathless but it dies a lot on Uber Atziri. So I was looking for a build to do U-Atziri deathless.

Would it be better to just level a whole new char first? I've heard some people say it's a completely different experience. I have the currency to respec into the LL version (except level 21 ED), but I don't know if I'll be overwhelmed if I just start at the "end: if you know what I mean.

I'm a Softcore player so I assume I can just get away with dual-wielding all the time?

Even while playing my character on standard, I am running shield + decay wand. The shield allows me to easily cap resistances for ele weakness maps, making it less to think about for general mapping. As LL you already have twice the DPS needed to clear t15 maps, but each to their own of course. If you have something you can respec, I feel that ED can be played quite comfortably without much practice. There is some finesse to the build when it come to prioritizing cast orders, but you can learn that by trial and error in dried lake and mid tier maps. If you choose to level a fresh character, I would level as blade vortex or something similar until level 38 when you get inc. aoe for your contagion.

Thanks for the response!

Just a few other questions if you don't mind.
How does going LL necessarily give us more dps? I've only done LL once a long time ago. It was an ele build where we just stacked dps auras like wrath, anger, heralds.

I don't have a +1 curse chayula amulet (they're super expensive). I assume that I just run temp chains + enfeeble? Not having vulnerability/witchfires should still allow me to do endgame stuff comfortably right?