[3.3] IcyBerserker - Up to1.3M shaper DPS with Tabula Rasa - Budget to Endgame

This post is still on updating! I will post my update in reply, and maybe integrate it later in the main post.
PoB is available below.
Check "10. Some Variant" part to see my latest Double Strike set.

What I have done with this build:



Hi everyone! This is my first build post and this post is still in building process. Once I find a reliable way to upload pictures there will be more pic in this post!
I'm not an English speaker. Sorry for my poor language skill.

This is a build defined as a middle or low budget one. That's the reason I choose berserker instead of champion - the upper limit is low for berserker, but the lower limit is higher than champion. That means even with poor gears it can still reach a relatively satisfying level of DPS.
If you are searching for a powerful build that can go through everything in the game like a breeze, this build may not be your best choice. It can do endgame contents but not super easy(I mean, you will possibly die before finally finish it or find it requiring manual operation).

Thanks for the inspiration from corosou. He helps me a lot on playing this game and making this build.
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1. Some pre-talk: What's interesting in this build?
Berserker and Frost Blades have been spammed for long. Even though there are some new ideas in my build that make it worth a try.

Malachai's Artifice

This is a ring that can give you a 75% effect Elemental Equilibrium, which means mobs can get -37.5% reduced resistance if you use it correctly. This is a significant increase to our cold damage as a berserker instead of an Elementalist or Inquisitor because we don't have much penetration from passives. In other words, you can think it as a substitute of Cold Penetration Support which will occupy one of your sockets in a 6-link. It is a deal between a socket and life+added physical damage.

This ring causes 20% reduced elemental resistance but also gives you high resistance of a single element. In all, the resistance you need to fix is 15%~40% lower, and the gears you need are more likely to have high single elemental resistance instead of 2~3, which is much cheaper.

Red Trail

The reason I choose it is mainly the frenzy charge obtaining roll. I like frenzy charge. Every of it gives 4% MORE damage and 4% increased attack and cast speed.

With all the 5 frenzy charges activated in this build, it actually gives 20%+ MORE damage. For mapping we have Blood Rage for frenzy charges; but how when bossing?

Wait... you may have thought of Frenzy or new Vaal Cold Snap or something. I know them too but the frenzy charges themselves are not the only thing I want. I have more things to do with them.

The first and the most important thing is "AUTOMATING". After several tries on several builds, I recognize that although there are many added mechanics that boost your DPS, you can't really apply all of them. The reason is, more keys and timers you need to notice, less "effective attack time" you have, and that actually lower your DPS. Take my Inquisitor as an example. I need to place the totem every 10 seconds, Orb of Storm every 4 seconds, and use Frenzy every 5 seconds to sustain my frenzy charges, activate Blood Rage every 9 seconds and keep an eye on my golem… these works keep disturbing me when I’m attacking the Minotaur. As a result, I’m killed or can’t deal damage at all because too many things need to notice and that’s not what I want at first when I’m introducing these mechanics. While in this build, I use many Cast When Damage Taken and Red Trail to automate them for a better game experience.

The other reasons I use Red Trail is that there are two ways to consume frenzy charges for damage boost in this build: Phase Run and Rotgut.

Phase Run is a buff that gives you insane 30% MORE melee physical damage in its second effect duration. It’s quite short (0.2s base duration) but can be extended by consuming frenzy charges. With all the 5 frenzy charges consumed, it reaches a decent duration of 1.2s compared with the 4s cooldown.
Rotgut is a unique flask that consume all of your frenzy charges and gives you Onslaught(20% increased attack, cast and movement speed) for a period based on the charges number it consumes (2s per consumed frenzy charge).

These two mechanics insanely boost your damage but with the cost of many frenzy charges, which can’t be covered only by Frenzy or Vaal Cold Snap. But with Red Trail and very fast attack speed we can meet the need without any extra cost.
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2. Playstyle and how it works
Go straight forward and sweep all the things on your way! With several decent defensive mechanics we can ignore almost any threats. When you want more damage against single target, set Ancestral Protector (more attack speed) and Orb of Storm (-37.5% cold resistance), and see your enemy broken up!

Defensive mechanics

Offensive mechanics

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3. Shortcomes(including map mod issues)

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4. Path of Building

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5. Gear

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6. Gem link

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7. Passive Tree

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8. Jewel

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9. Pantheon

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10. Some Variants

Dropping some love for my homie's first venture into build guide making...

Looking good yo! Keep that shit up ;)

"

corosou wrote:

Dropping some love for my homie's first venture into build guide making...

Looking good yo! Keep that shit up ;)

:D very happy to get ur support!

Here comes my current character in Incursion league.

Gears:


Tree:


I have made several changes on this build.

You can find that I switch to Dual Strike. The main reason is the incursion. Mobs in temple are too strong to facetank with instant leech in only half of the time. In normal map it doesn't matter indeed, but every time I got into the incursion my life pool was shot to empty by those chaos damage mobs(I didn't care much about chaos resistance so most of the time it's -60%) and I can't always leech it back instantly. This is kind of the "tough fight" I mentioned before so I choose Dual Strike for it.
The Dual Strike link is:

Now I'm farming maps around tier 10 so most of the time I don't really use Damage on Full Life. The mapping set is enough.

Another big change is that I dropped Arctic Armour and use a 4 linked Ancestral Warchief for more damage. I'm not sure if this is a better change, but it works well currently, giving more damage against rare mobs in temple.
The Ancestral Warchief link is:


I also made some change on passive tree.

More and more I feel it is so important to be immune to stun... I have to give up some damage for it.

Change 1.2. Mainly focused on bleeding mechanics.
:D
First of all, here comes my current gears in Incursion league.

The Red Trail makes you have a chance to be inflicted bleeding when attacked. So that means I need to wait for mobs to attack me several times, otherwise I can't sustain my frenzy charge in boss fight?


No... I found a solution. The Golden Rule.

This is an unique jewel that can reflect bleeding that inflicted by yourself. More important thing is, the bleeding damage from yourself is much lower than that from mobs. This reflected bleeding will overwrite the previous ones so that gives more safety(how much lower? Now I can move around with the bleeding on me and worry about nothing!)

Wait again... how can we inflict bleeding?
I'm not using Frost Blades, but Double Strike. Then use Hrimsorrow, together with passive I get 90% physical to cold convert. The 10% left physical damage can inflict bleeding. In the meantime, use Chance to Bleed on my Double Strike link to get the bleeding chance. Besides, use Melee Splash to replace Melee Physical Damage when mapping.
Seems like a big damage loss right?
Actually with these changes I get even 100k higher DPS! The reason is within the mechanics of Double Strike: Add flat physical damage to bleeding enemies.

And you see, the Vaal Double Strike can create 2 clone of me which using Double Strike for 8s. This even further improves my single target DPS(and makes mapping funny lmao)!

Now that we only using main-hand weapon(Double Strike strict), we can put a pure support weapon in off-hand. The shaper/elder weapon will be the best choice, giving me tons of DPS.

Adding some small but significant changes.

As you see, I dropped the 2 life nodes and pick the bleeding and poison chance nodes below(I'm not sure whether I can pick only 2 of them. Need to test more).
This change allows me to drop Chance to Bleed in my Double Strike link and replace it with Damage on Full Life, which leads to a significant damage improvement.

This is my damage comparison. Notice that these are all done with Tabula Rasa

Mapping set before change:

Mapping set after change:

Single-target set before change:

Single-target set after change:


A new problem is the poison. With the Golden Rule jewel, the poison we inflict is reflected on ourselves, and sadly our chaos resistance is always -60% or -25%(with Atziri's Promise, but still very low).
For this problem, I change the pantheon:


Immune to poison!
I also change my major god to Arakaali, for more DoT mitigation. According to my game experience, DoT is more dangerous than hit damage for a instant leech build.


-----------------------------------------EDITED-------------------------------------------------
I got this offhand sword with 15c:

which has a 15% chance to cause bleeding. And I drop the bleeding chance in passives. But it seems not enough to proc bleeding on a single target with 15% chance to bleed.

So here is my final set:
Pick only 15% in passives and use a 15% chance offhand weapon.

Spend 5c to get this :D

So I can use only CWDT + Bladefall to apply Enfeeble!

Now both Enfeeble and Arctic Armour is online :D The life loss in last reply is kinda fixed.
I found a lv.8 Vorici service to recraft my corrupted Bloodseeker to fit the new sockets settings.

And I dropped Immortal Call for an extra socket, then put on my Arctic Armour.

There is a fatal mistake in my previous skill set:

"Add 6 to 15 cold damage to SPELLS and attacks"

This roll adds cold damage to my Orb of Storm. So with Hrimsorrow, the Orb of Storm is actually increasing mob's cold resistance by 18.75%. That's stupid and I didn't find it until today.

I've change Orb of Storm to Summon Lightning Golem (while giving up stone golem). As a minion, lightning golem is not affected by your added cold damage so now it really works as a -37.5% cold resistance reduction. The drawback is that now I have to manually summon the golem, while the advantage is that I don't need to cast a spell every 9 seconds. Anyway, it's not bad until now.

The previous socket for Summon Stone Golem is empty and I put a Spirit Offering in it for extra minion ES and resistance. It helps a little when mapping but is not mandatory. Use anything you want in this socket.



BTW, I've done a little change in passives. PoB tells this gives higher DPS.

The notable point below previous dual wielding cluster gives "26% increased attack damage with mainhande weapon, 20% increased attack speed with offhande weapon". The 20% attack speed is far too better than 26% attack damage but we attack with only mainhand weapon with Double Strike. So thats not very profitable to use 4 points to reach the final notable passive.