[3.3] The BVCopter - cast spells by Weapon swapping



Note for 3.4+
Spoiler
Weapon-swapping will be limited to a lower rate, effectively reducing the regen and spell trigger rate.
Using this build to auto-cast probably won't be effective anymore.

HOWEVER!
This won't be the end for Heartbound Loop memes.
Defeating a sandwich only makes it tastier.


Introduction

Do you want to spend all of your currency on a trashy meme build?
Then you have come to the right thread!
With this guide you can transform your Marauder into a literal Karui Chopper.

The BVCopter will not only require you to have a good computer and internet connection if you want to pilot it effectively, but also disconnect you regularly at full throttle.

This is going to be a basic guide on how to create a weapon swap caster, but I'll also show the build I'm playing as an example.

You can make this endgame viable by putting a lot of currency into it, but the majority of players are probably better off just using this guide to meme spells all over the screen.


1. The Basic Concept
Spoiler
The core of this build revolves around casting spells with the support gem Cast when Damage Taken.
_____________________________________________________________________________

The damage is not received by taking damage from enemies, but from yourself.
Using The Heartbound Loop:
_____________________________________________________________________________
Crafting a weapon with Essence of Insanity will cause it to spawn three minions, which will die when you swap your weapon, triggering your ring - and therefore your spells.
_____________________________________________________________________________

This damage is mitigated by abusing the hell out of Juggernaut's Ascendancy node Unbreakable, which will make it actually heal you.


2. Maths
Spoiler
Life Regen
This is the amount of regen my character has after 10 seconds of weapon swapping.
Now, my base regen is 860/sec, which means the net bonus provided by Unbreakable is 7637/sec.
This build uses increases to life recovery rate (total of 100%), which means the regeneration is boosted to 17000.

However, the build also takes consistent damage.
Righteous Fire, with defensive flasks up, will cause about ~800 damage per second.
The rings also cause damage: since the life recovered is 7637, we can calculate that the total received damage per second (assuming 90% phys. mitigation) is:
7637 / 0.15 / 0.9 = 56570

After being mitigated by armour and Unbreakable's 5% reduction, this will result in:
56570 * 0.1 * 0.95 = 5374 damage taken per second.

Therefore the net life regen of this build is 10826/sec, which can temporarily rise to 16200 by stopping the weapon swap for a split second.


Required Armour
On the wiki you can find a formula to calculate the armour needed to mitigate a specific amount of damage:

Wearing two Hearbound Loops will cause you to take hits of 700 damage each.
4 Endurance charges and the Gruthkul Pantheon provide 25% phys mitigation, so you need your armour to provide a 65% reduction.
Therefore the required armour is 13000.


CWDT Trigger Rate
Using the calculations from above, we already know that the damage taken is 5374/sec.
Factoring in the 250ms cooldown of CWDT's damage counter this means:
A level 20 CWDT will trigger 1.164x a second.
A level 1 CWDT will trigger 2.871x a second.

3. Picking the right Gems
Spoiler
Viable
Since the trigger rate of CWDT is rather low compared to the amount of cast speed you could get on a real build, you should either use spells that have a high damage-per-cast ratio or duration spells that don't require you to cast them a lot. From my experience, the latter tend to be significantly more powerful.
You can have multiple spell setups, but often you're better off using a really good skill and building around it.

Main Skills
Duration Spells:
Blade Vortex
Cremation
Vaal Molten Shell (works on this build!)

Damage Efficient Spells:
Volatile Dead
Molten Shell
Dark Pact
Firestorm
Arc
Glacial Cascade

Reserving Mana
This build doesn't use any mana at all, so you can reserve as much as you'd like. A Vitality aura should always be used along with the Watcher's Eye jewel that grants life recovery rate.
If you need more armour, you can use Determination, otherwise the best auras are those that increase the damage of your corresponding skill (Hatred, Wrath, Herald of Ash, ...), followed by Purities to increase your maximum resistances.
Your auras are best used in your weapon swaps, as they will not be turned off when you swap. Make sure to put them in the exact same gem position or it won't work.

Supporing gem setups
You can autocast any spell on this build and should make use of this to empower your main skill.
There's are many setups that are not quite apparent, so I'll list a few here.

What's important to note is that you can't trigger CWDT setups in your weapons because they'll reset everytime you weapon swap. They'll only trigger when something attacks you.
However you can proc Vengeance, which you can then support with other gems.

Examples:
Power Charge on Critical
Culling Strike
Combustion
Blind
Maim (on Vengeance)
Any curse
Summon Skeleton (for Dark Pact)
Unearth (for VD/Cremation)
Hypothermia + Vortex

I highly recommend Righteous Fire because it doesn't only give a huge damage multiplier, it will also increase your life regen and allow you to use Divination Distillate in combination with Mind over Matter.

You can briefly disable it with a dousing flask to proc Soul of Arakaali.



You can also proc it with Blood Rage, which will automatically get removed when you socket it in a weapon with CWDT. However, I think the bonus damage from RF is worth the degen.
Meme
You want to use as many spells on level 1 CWDT setups as possible, the more flashy the better.
Fire spells like VD, Cremation or Magma Orb tend to cause the most eye-cancer, so you should prioritize those.

You still want to use efficient gem setups, e.g. making the most out of your sockets by supporting multiple skills at once.
An example 4-link would look like this:
CWDT - GMP - Fireball - Cremation

You should prbably use something like an Abyssus to take more physical damage. This means that you can also use CWDT setups in your weapons.

It's worth noting that spells like Bodyswap and Flame Dash can teleport you all over the place which looks really silly.

Also don't forget to turn all your MTX on so everyone knows that you have a lot of money.

4. Gear you'll need
Spoiler
Weapons

You want a total of 4 Insanity crafted weapons to swap between. If you're running an elemental spell use Opal/Void Sceptres, otherwise a 50% crit chance Dagger.

Rings


Body Armour
You need a chest with high armour to reach the 13k threshold for 90% physical damage mitigation.
If you're not using Brass Dome, you probably need a Determination aura, although you can get much more life on your chest that way.

Belt

An Elder Belt with life recovery is pretty important (it's a multiplier to your regeneration).
Get high life aswell.

Other Gear

The rest of your gear is pretty much just life and resistances, although you can get a bit of damage on your amulet.

Jewels
The stats here depend on your build, but follow the same priority pattern:
1. Life
2. Crit Multiplier
3. Damage increases
4. Crit Chance
5. Resists or dex

Oh, yeah. You also want this 6ex jewel with Life Recovery Rate.

5. Skill Tree & Ascendancy
Spoiler
Tree
http://poeurl.com/bZaV

This is a basic template for a crit caster build.
You want to customize this for your personal memes, i.e. if you're using a fire spell, pick up Heart of Flame.

Sometimes it's better to use Elemental Overload, but in general you can't go wrong with crit.

Ascendancy

1. Unbreakable
2. Unflinching
3. Unrelenting
4. Unstoppable

Note that the build doesn't work until you get Unrelenting.

6. Bandits and Pantheon
Spoiler
Bandits
I chose to kill all, but you can also help Alira.
If you're running a physical spell (like Blade Vortex), Oak is actually an alright choice for this build.

Pantheon
You need both of these Pantheons:

Major God: Soul of Arakaali for the 50% life recovery rate, which you can proc by disabling Righteous Fire with a dousing flask.


Minor God: Soul of Gruthkul for the physical damage reduction.

7. Issues with the Build
Spoiler
Swapping weapons really fast
Using a Macro that automatically swaps your weapon is against the Terms of Service, therefore you need to come up with something else.

What you are allowed to do is bind your mouse wheel to "X", so you can swap by scrolling. Confirmed by GGG
I've heard that GGG wants to update their policy, but I'm not sure if unlocked mouse wheels are allowed, so do this at your own risk.
A simple remap script for AutoHotkey would look like this:
"
wheelup::send x
wheeldown::send x
#MaxHotkeysPerInterval 100000

Otherwise you can also connect a digital piano to your computer, rebind all of the keys to "X" and hire Elton John to play a song for you.

Internet Connection
The numbers of weapon swaps I'm getting are on a ping of 15ms.
The worse your connection gets, the less swaps you'll get and the worse your build will end up.

Furthermore, you can get kicked for weapon swapping too fast on Predictive mode. Lockstep will never kick you, but also halve the amount of swaps you can get.

However, you'll only get kicked if you weapon swap while holding your movement button - you can avoid this by doing individual clicks instead.

Map Mods
There's a ton of mods this build can't run:
•Reflect
•No Regen
•Less Recovery Rate
•Less Armour (if you don't have enough)
•Vulnerability/Elemental Weakness - can be run with a Warding flask
•-Maximum Resistances (if Regen is too low)

Picking up loot
You have to stop swapping everytime you pick up an item, which makes this a pain to play. If you're playing BV, you'll lose stacks which results in less damage.

The price tag
It's not really possible to play this without investing a lot of currency. You need 4 Insanity weapons to begin with, but the Watcher's Eye is also really important to the build.
Not to mention your damage will be pretty bad until you get a 6L.

8. My Character (+PoB)
Spoiler
Gear + Gems
Gear:
•Basically I'm using the usual BV caster gear, plus a total of four Insanity weapon to swap between.
•There's a lot of armour on the items to reach the 13000 threshold.
•Watcher's Eye and an Elder Belt are used for the life recovery rate increase.
•I need a lot of extra dex to cast BV, so I got that on my gear aswell.
•Jewels should have life, damage increases and crit multiplier, but you can also get dex and resists.
•There are many different options for flasks, but this is my favorite setup.

Gems:
•I'm using BV as a main skill because I can reach just about 10 stacks with it, supported with Hypothermia, which is activated by Vortex' chilled ground.
•Maim on Vengeance increases physical damage taken by enemies, so it's worth using.
•RF adds a lot of spell damage and triggers the Arakaali Pantheon by using a dousing flask.
•Raging Spirits enhance by regen by a tiny bit more everytime they die, but they can also cause blind along with the Firestorm. If Firestorm lags too much, Skeletons are a good replacement.
•The Offerings in weapons only proc when I take damage from enemies, they are there to protect me from Detonate Dead effects. They are two different spells, so they don't share a cooldown.




Tree & PoB
Skill Tree

Just a regular Crit Caster Tree that you can find on many builds, picking up 90% skill duration to help with BV sustain.

Alchemist can be picked up for 3 skill points, it's actually really good with Quicksilver, Ruby and Divination Distiillate flasks.


PoB:
https://pastebin.com/ZAYJEUan

9. Videos

FAQ
Spoiler
What about Maligaro's Lens + Necromantic Aegis?
Wouldn't use it on Juggernaut.
Builds and Guides:
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2198879
Last edited by SHEPUUURD#7714 on Aug 31, 2018, 2:39:47 PM
Last bumped on Jan 16, 2019, 1:34:22 PM
I'll just complete 36/40 fast and stop playing for a while. Aaaaaaaaand I'm playing a meme build like this again.

10/10 would do again
Last edited by Codrake#4650 on Jun 19, 2018, 10:52:52 PM
you need to figure out how to add arc to the build somehow, for max meme status
Last edited by Zaxex21#5431 on Jun 19, 2018, 10:33:37 PM
Seeing this thread and video made me laugh out loud. I love it.
(2-3-2019) Buff underused skills (3.23?!)+ selfcast, stop nerfing defense, build in threshold jewels (3.23?!), implement D3-style looting, add death log + MTX preview, actually rework flasks, stop balancing around the .01%, unnerf Harvest, ADD NEW WAYS TO LEVEL, finally implement Loot 2.0
this is amazing!

Thanks for putting in the effort.
Finish this build, I'm willing to spend every exalt I have on this.
By all that is holy...

This is fantastic work, very memetastic.
I really hope this will get a build of the week feature.
Probably won't but would be funny/cool.
As an OSU player, I think I will just bind z and x to weapon swapping then play freedom dive in the background while mapping
Bind Weapon Swap to Mouse Scroll Wheel for maximum liftoff overload
"
FrenchDigglet wrote:
By all that is holy...

This is fantastic work, very memetastic.
I really hope this will get a build of the week feature.
Probably won't but would be funny/cool.

They're not going to promote a build that spam disconnects you from the servers, lol.

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