[3.6] Herald of Viper Assassin - Melt all Content! - [BUDGET FRIENDLY] - 2 MIL+ DPS

Yo !

I didn't play a lot of PoE and only played some elemental Shadow before and wanted to try something new this season with some chaos/poison damage. Aside that I am a "beginner" and dying a lot because of stupid full dps talent tree, I played around viper strike+herald of agony but had a hard time killing pack with just those 2 skills (used blade vortex to go on) and decided to give up (lv 60) because it wasn't what I expected. I searched for guides but couldn't find any cool one, so I rerolled to enjoy the game as beginner friendly and you did the guide 1 day after I decided to give up. And well, thanks mate you showed me that it can be a lot of fun and I am planning to play it when I'll have the required items :)

Cheers mate !

My only issue with your guide is you didn't tell us what support gems you used in the Coming Calamity, and I can't check out your paste bin because I don't have Path of Building.
Would you be able to just use the tree on here and show us?

"

byorz wrote:

Yo !

I didn't play a lot of PoE and only played some elemental Shadow before and wanted to try something new this season with some chaos/poison damage. Aside that I am a "beginner" and dying a lot because of stupid full dps talent tree, I played around viper strike+herald of agony but had a hard time killing pack with just those 2 skills (used blade vortex to go on) and decided to give up (lv 60) because it wasn't what I expected. I searched for guides but couldn't find any cool one, so I rerolled to enjoy the game as beginner friendly and you did the guide 1 day after I decided to give up. And well, thanks mate you showed me that it can be a lot of fun and I am planning to play it when I'll have the required items :)

Cheers mate !

Glad that you have some interest in the build. I honestly would have posted the guide earlier but I had a bit of a slower start since I league started with the build.

I was working on leveling, theorizing and testing other builds too so that slowed me down a bit.

Luckily the build is dirt cheap so if you want to reallocate your points from a previous build, it will be fairly easy. You literally only need like 3-5 chaos for the required items and you can just use rare gear for the rest of your items.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Good luck!

"

0u0r0b0r0s wrote:

My only issue with your guide is you didn't tell us what support gems you used in the Coming Calamity, and I can't check out your paste bin because I don't have Path of Building.
Would you be able to just use the tree on here and show us?

The support gems are all in the "Skill Gems" setup. What do you mean? The first 6-link setup is the The Coming Calamity gem setup and even in the order of priority of gems.

If you do not have Path of Building (I would highly recommend it though), you can just follow the tree and the skill gem setups in the "Skill Gems" portion of the guide.

All of the skill gems are definitely there. I take a lot of times making my guides and make sure I hit all of the main points. If there is something missing or you have other questions, let me know. :)

Cheers!

Cool build. Saw it and just had to give it a go after getting bored starting league with Molten Strike jug.

Decided to level directly towards the endgame build with just a Tabula Rasa and some 4-linked insignificant uniques.

Though not as fast in leveling it was a lot of fun seeing the Crawler grow stronger and stronger through the levels (so far 10 hours up to lvl 66, my Molten Strike jug took 8 hours with similar laid back play-style)

I used Blade Vortex with Poison support and Added fire (and later Spell Echo) to apply the poison's and EE debuf.

In 1st lab I choose Noxious Strike first. After that it was a real breeze leveling, being able to Whirl through everything with Blade Vortex up.

At 53, with all gear in place, I ditched Tabula Rasa for 5-link Coming Calamity, allowing me to add Hatred.

Now I just finished leveling up to endgame and really impressed with the damage (PoB shows 600k ...) Very cool to see everything get 1-shot

Only annoyance can be the Crawler being far away when shooting his spikes, missing the majority of the pack. Probably need a lot more experience to time the Convocation with my movement to perfectly align for clearing packs at once.

Again, cool build, much fun, crazy DPS.

"

otritono wrote:

Cool build. Saw it and just had to give it a go after getting bored starting league with Molten Strike jug.

Decided to level directly towards the endgame build with just a Tabula Rasa and some 4-linked insignificant uniques.

Though not as fast in leveling it was a lot of fun seeing the Crawler grow stronger and stronger through the levels (so far 10 hours up to lvl 66, my Molten Strike jug took 8 hours with similar laid back play-style)

I used Blade Vortex with Poison support and Added fire (and later Spell Echo) to apply the poison's and EE debuf.

In 1st lab I choose Noxious Strike first. After that it was a real breeze leveling, being able to Whirl through everything with Blade Vortex up.

At 53, with all gear in place, I ditched Tabula Rasa for 5-link Coming Calamity, allowing me to add Hatred.

Now I just finished leveling up to endgame and really impressed with the damage (PoB shows 600k ...) Very cool to see everything get 1-shot

Only annoyance can be the Crawler being far away when shooting his spikes, missing the majority of the pack. Probably need a lot more experience to time the Convocation with my movement to perfectly align for clearing packs at once.

Again, cool build, much fun, crazy DPS.

Glad to see that the build is treating you well. Yeah, getting used to movement and timing your Convocation can take a bit of time. Once you get it down though, it runs like butter. Even though this is the case, the Frenzy Charges really does a lot for the Agony Crawler too. If you tried playing Agony Crawler with its normal speed, you will feel that it feels super clunky. Pierce and Frenzy Charges just makes the Agony Crawler feel that much better.

One other tip I would give is to always be progressing through the map. The Agony Crawler will move fast enough while having Frenzy Charges. It will also forcefully go to you if you are too far from it too. You just have to get used to maneuvering in general and you will be good. :)

The damage can get REALLY scary once you start min-maxing and getting your gems at a higher level. Just wait until that happens. :O Good to see that you already have the additional projectiles helm enchant too. That does wonders for the build.

Good to see you enjoying the build though. If you have any questions and concerns, I am all ears. :)

Tried out your build, the damages is as promised toatally insane. But i have some issues with survivability. During flask down time even a group of white mobs can 1 shot me at t8/10 maps. Currently 4.8k life barely any armor or evasion and level 75 with 2 life clusters left to take.

Have you considered play this build as a champion? I feel like it would boost the survability hugely. We could swap out ornament with a faster weapon with chapions taunted enemies can not evade attack and the free fortify you get with that ascendancy. All the while retaining 80% chance to poison which we can offset by getting a faster atk speed weapon. Feels like a suboptimal choice of ascendancy by going assassin only for 1 useful notable in this build.

"

Knark wrote:

Tried out your build, the damages is as promised toatally insane. But i have some issues with survivability. During flask down time even a group of white mobs can 1 shot me at t8/10 maps. Currently 4.8k life barely any armor or evasion and level 75 with 2 life clusters left to take.
[ITEMS]
Have you considered play this build as a champion? I feel like it would boost the survability hugely. We could swap out ornament with a faster weapon with chapions taunted enemies can not evade attack and the free fortify you get with that ascendancy. All the while retaining 80% chance to poison which we can offset by getting a faster atk speed weapon. Feels like a suboptimal choice of ascendancy by going assassin only for 1 useful notable in this build.

One thing I would suggest is that you need to keep on moving and make sure that your Agony Crawler is always spawned. Make sure you are always moving to ensure that your Agony Crawler follows you as close as possible. When I say always stay moving, I seriously mean that as that in itself is your defensive measures. If your Agony Crawler is always close to you or attacking at targets you are close by, mobs will never pose any danger.

For example, even in the sample clip, that was run on an extra fire damage and boosted enemy critical strike chance mod and I was still surviving with no problem and deathless. You always want to be moving and having your Agony Crawler kill everything to keep your flasks always up. I think it just takes a little getting used to. I will record another gameplay clip from the start to finish of a map so you can see what I mean. If anything, mobs are what you worry the least about. It is actually more so about bosses and especially ones that have phases or have dialog before the battle begins. I mention this because you will sometimes have no Virulence stacks and have to build it back up from 0 which can be dangerous at times.

Just always be using Whirling Blades. Whirling Blades to a pack, Viper Strike them a few times and keep using Whirling Blades on the pack to make it harder to hit you and evading attacks. Your Agony Crawler should melt everything before anything poses a problem. Also use Convocation. This is easily one of your most offensive and defensive skills to use. I say defensively because your Agony Crawler kills everything before anything can pose a threat to you. Your Agony Crawler is essentially your defense and offense. One thing I would suggest is grabbing life on as many items as you can. Since we are mostly a rare item build, you can do this pretty easily. Once you cap your resists, just grab life everywhere you can get it. I was sitting at 5k+ life at level 70. I assure you the tips I gave along with grabbing life on your gear will boost your survivability.

-

I have definitely considered a Champion, but there are so many builds that do the typical Block or Herald of Agony thing with Champion. When I see Herald of Agony builds, it is usually the typical Champion/Gladiator/Bow variants. Champion technically still has to taunt them before enemies can't evade attacks. We always have attacks can't be evaded up. It's just my own personal "hipster" mindset. I hate cookie-cutter builds and rather formulate and use my own builds that I theorize. Nothing wrong with those builds, but I just prefer to run whatever I build myself. I find it a lot more enjoyable and I like being different. Oh, and the fact that I love getting into the face of my enemies and face-tanking. Yeah, I'm a melee lover even though it not as efficient as range and caster builds.

Honestly, that one node alone from Assassin works wonders for the build. You do not have to grab any chance to poison nodes or gems to increase your chance to poison. Instead, you already get the 60% from Viper Strike and grabbing the node gives you 40% meaning you get instant 100% chance to poison. Other builds might have to go out a bit to grab chance to poison or items/jewels that give them that chance. Just know that we never miss and always guaranteed to poison does wonders for the build. Yes, the rest of the Assassin's passives do not do much on the DPS side, but for the survival and utility it also brings us, it helps the build a lot.

Another thing to note was that a lot of the life nodes going from the right side of the tree to the left side of the tree paths very well reaching into the minion nodes. The Duelist has a lot of life nodes on the bottom as well, but you could end up grabbing too many life nodes where now you do not have enough skill points to grab the minion nodes for more damage. It really is just preference but I have cleared a majority of the end-game content with the build as is. My character would easily be over level 90 if I kept playing, but I usually start a new build at level 85-90.

Hope this wallol of text helps. Sorry if it is long. Once I start typing, I just really start going.

Its quite a unique playstyle now that i have spent more time playing it, i have better understanding about the limitation of my character. Now doing red maps with 5.2k life and fully upgraded pantheon. It is a noticeable difference in tankyness. But sometimes still getting stun-locked to death when whirling blade through a pack of mobs. This build is absolutely amazing at dealing with syndicates as it insta-kills them as they spawn from the portal. Allthough like every minion build it struggle abit with incursion and syndicate research lab mainly from the long cd on convocation to reposition the crawler. I am now gonna try enfeeble/temporal chains curse since we have abundant damage from crawler and ele equilibrium.

"

Knark wrote:

Its quite a unique playstyle now that i have spent more time playing it, i have better understanding about the limitation of my character. Now doing red maps with 5.2k life and fully upgraded pantheon. It is a noticeable difference in tankyness. But sometimes still getting stun-locked to death when whirling blade through a pack of mobs. This build is absolutely amazing at dealing with syndicates as it insta-kills them as they spawn from the portal. Allthough like every minion build it struggle abit with incursion and syndicate research lab mainly from the long cd on convocation to reposition the crawler. I am now gonna try enfeeble/temporal chains curse since we have abundant damage from crawler and ele equilibrium.

Yeah, it takes a lot of getting used to how to run the actual build. It plays very different from other builds and even other melee builds at that. This is what I was kind of aiming for. Something completely different. Convocation is definitely really good, but once you maneuver around quick enough and get Frenzy Charges on your Agony Crawler, it catches up pretty well.

I honestly don't have too much problem with it being too far since I move so far up in a map that the Agony Crawler is forced to come over to me unless I have Convocation ready to use again. It just takes getting used to, really. Syndicates are a joke with the build too. By the time they get out of their portals, they just instantly die. I league started with this build so I was in the group of people that never struggled against them. They would always die before they did anything dangerous to me.

I personally don't have any problems in the Incursion and Syndicate labs. Not sure. I usually just blaze through them quickly and the Agony Crawler follows me pretty well. Just always be on the move, which is always my biggest tip I give players for this build.

Though I say Whirling Blades through everything, you don't do it blindly, of course, unless you have your Agony Crawler right behind you or a Convocation ready to be used.

Glad that you are starting to figure more things out with the build though. I personally haven't played anything like it either but once I got used to it, it has been one of the most fun builds I have played. The build just makes you feel really involved with the build. It's like your one with the build. Don't know if I'm the only one that feels this way. :S

Good luck with the rest of your journey, exile!