[3.0] AFK Gone Cheap - AFK up to T16 guardians||Shaper killed || 3.0 balls video montage!

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FRAKTUREZ wrote:

but I just can't manage to facetank merciless Izaro somehow, so he can sometimes oneshot me ...
Can you tell me if I just have to do more leveling or did I miss something?

If you want to AFK or facetank Izaro you do need more life. For starters get the 5 missing points at Constitution (aka the "Scion life ring")... that's a whopping 25% increased maximum Life right there.

IMO Profane Chemistry isn't the best of choices (only 12% max Life in total), these three skill points are later better invested in the Barbarism/Juggernaut area.

To kill Izaro you don't need your active skill (Blade Vortex). You can get rid of your Tabula, BIS there is Kaom's Heart. If that's too expensive a Belly will help to boost your life pool (can be cheap, unlinked sells for less than 10C in Breach).

On this note: Tabula Rasa has only been used to showcase the functionality of a low-cost build. But in terms of survivability Belly of the Beast is a much better choice and it doesn't necessarily have to be am expensive 6-link. Five or even four links will suffice to generate all the hits/ignites we need (BV + Spell Echo + AoE + Chance to Ignite). Sure, Added Fire Damage and Controlled Destruction will boost the BV damage by some margin but this is by no means essential for this build to work. Same goes for Spark + Spell Echo + GMP + CtI ... or whichever spell combo tickles your fancy.

P.S. since you have Adds Fire Damage to Spells on your sceptre (a tier 2 roll at that, CG) you do not need Avatar of Fire.

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procproc wrote:

On a related note, since I didn't see any discussion of it: I assume the 40% increased damage from an Opal or Void Scepter is better than the 6% penetration from a Sambar Scepter? I haven't done the math, but it doesn't seem like we're anywhere close to the point of diminishing returns on increased damage for the 6% pierce to catch up with that much additive increase.

Here's my tree without AoF, but it's basically the same other than the fact that I went for double curse (flammability aura + WM or preference in CWDT):

The flammability aura basically duplicates all of the benefits that the fire nodes at the top of the tree would have given, if not exceeds them. It gives more ignite chance in the end, same ignite duration boost with 20q, and a lot more damage, albeit at the cost of being useless against Hexproof stuff. The mana reservation is a non-issue since by default we don't reserve anything more than AA's 25%, and we have mana leech from Berserker.

I've not done the Sambar math either, but in my case I have quite a lot of penetration already (fire pen gems for main BV--possibly no longer optimal--and Fire Burst, plus the 2% on the tree, plus the Flammability aura taking off another ~51% against non-bosses and ~20% versus bosses), so I'm probably hitting diminishing returns on penetration more so than increased damage. I'll see if I can bother to run the simple calculations later. However, if you're using The Taming + Emberwake then you'll almost certainly hit the crossover point of diminishing returns on increased damage versus anything with decent HP/tankiness, and as long as your clear speed against mooks seems fine regardless you'd be better off with more penetration.

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TimeDilation wrote:

Here's my tree without AoF

Where did you get your fire damage? Mantra or new sceptre? ;)

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TimeDilation wrote:

I went for double curse (flammability aura + WM or preference in CWDT)

I still don't get why you need Warlord's Mark to leech? Is it because you had to sacrifice two CWDT-spells for Blasphemy + curse? IMO the obvious choice for dual curse would be Flammability and Elemental Weakness, no? Or Temporal Chains to increase the ignite duration and subsequently increase the ignite stack on monsters which is handy with The Taming.

Any thoughts on the following links for active?:

Incinerate
Cast While Channeling
Spark
Gmp
Chance to Ignite
Pierce/faster projectile

Would have more active skills hitting at the cost of an initial delay. In the process of leveling a marauder for this.

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tomay wrote:

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TimeDilation wrote:

Here's my tree without AoF

Where did you get your fire damage? Mantra or new sceptre? ;)

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TimeDilation wrote:

I went for double curse (flammability aura + WM or preference in CWDT)

I still don't get why you need Warlord's Mark to leech? Is it because you had to sacrifice two CWDT-spells for Blasphemy + curse? IMO the obvious choice for dual curse would be Flammability and Elemental Weakness, no? Or Temporal Chains to increase the ignite duration and subsequently increase the ignite stack on monsters which is handy with The Taming.

Mantra for damage. WM is endurance charges for extra phys mitigation, plus more stunning, so just generally more survivability, but as I've said before it is largely a relic of being too lazy to try to get three off-colors on that piece of gear. It might also help with making all reflect maps a major boon to me, instead of anything resembling a problem (or even a wash). I've never bothered to test it again, because lazy. Otherwise, a guarantee of 4% leech (actually, 4.2% with effectiveness) of all damage types against everything makes reflect either barely noticeable or a net gain on life even without Cloaked in Savagery. I also don't have a Taming, so nothing ever involves that for me.

Elemental Weakness and Enfeeble are both perfectly great choices. As is Poacher's Mark even, for more flask charges (the life/mana on hit is useless since that's only for attacks, and we're pure spells up to whirling for movement).

Wouldn't enfeeble achieve the same effect as WM plus some?

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Atomic_Tin_Can wrote:

Wouldn't enfeeble achieve the same effect as WM plus some?

Yes, it probably would, since the less multiplier will certainly equal or exceed the mitigation of the endurance charges. It might not be as useful against reflect, assuming the leech is necessary, since I can't recall if reflected damage counts as coming from the monster or you. I think I recall that attacks used your own accuracy rating against your evasion to see if it even hit (and so it used to be that archers would get a base evasion of about 50% against themselves and then would get the node in the bottom right that doubled evasion chance--not rating, chance--versus ranged attacks, but then they nerfed that to a much smaller buff versus ranged attacks and a detriment to melee), but no idea if it still counted as damage coming from the monster. Going by the behavior of CWDT, I'd guess the reflect counts as coming from the monster, which would therefore make Enfeeble nerf the reflected damage. We then only need about 3% leech to off-set elemental reflection damage; reliably we have 2% from Berserker, and 4% versus fire with Eye. Add in either or both of AA and Fortify as appropriate and you might be sitting pretty. So that might work out, depending on how much physical (and non-fire elemental) you're doing and how much physical mitigation you run. That all assumes, of course, that we aren't procing Savagery so much that all other forms of leech are almost always irrelevant; if in fact we are, then extra sources of leech are pretty much irrelevant. More mana leech *might* help if you try to reserve even more mana, but that's getting dicey on how many gems you're dedicating.

One major difference is that the endurance charges are on *me*, whereas the curse is on the monsters. I can therefore mitigate damage against monsters not yet cursed by the setup if I have endurance charges, whereas the enfeeble will only protect me from those monsters after the fact. The endurance charges therefore can tend to be better as you're clearing, but probably not so good against bosses (unless they spawn lots of adds). The endurance charges also aren't susceptible to reductions in curse effectiveness from map mods (hexwarded, I think); well, it might be harder to get the charges, but once you have them they act in full force, whereas the enfeeble will have its mitigation lowered.

As I said though: it's a pure armor piece of gear and I've been too lazy to use the chromatics to get 3 off-colors on it. One of these days I'll probably give it a whirl.

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Xanqos wrote:

Any thoughts on the following links for active?:

Incinerate
Cast While Channeling
Spark
Gmp
Chance to Ignite
Pierce/faster projectile

Sounds a bit dodgy to me... considering the cool down time you'll get a LOT less sparks to "spread the mayhem", Incinerate will take quite some to build up the damage without without faster casting/Spell echo.

But feel free to try and report back how it goes. ;)

Alright, decided to spend the durn chromes...

A phys reflect Core Map with enfeeble (both on the map mod and in place of my WM) seems to be a non-issue. Still an immortal death machine. Only issue I'm having is that my ISP seems to have decided to give me a shitty unreliable connection as an early Christmas present. Connection keeps going into 500+ ms latency, forcing me to disconnect the router's power entirely to try to get an actually stable connection. Made it impossible to dodge the one actually deadly, but highly telegraphed and normally very easily avoided attack of Malachai. Wouldn't have died even then if it wasn't for the enfeeble on me; he'd have been dead, otherwise.

However, according to the wiki, Enfeeble has no effect on reflected damage. Must just be maintaining Cloaked in Savagery.

So my BV cast does between 1-7k dps (1-20 stack) no flask/buff.

Would clear speed be hit hard if I put Conc on Fire Burst? Currently sitting at 10.8k dps non flask/buff.

Also is there a specific reason to be running elemental focus? You could even switch it with Conc to get the damage buff around the same level at the cost of some AOE, compared to not being able to burn.

I understand the build isn't built around burning damage, but taking the 10% damage boost for a loss in some aoe... would that be worth it?

If not I refer to my previous question of taking conc > aoe. I have a hard time seeing the burst proc so I don't know how many units the aoe base is.