[3.6] Herald of Agony Blade Vortex Chieftain

Hi (sorry for bat english)

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If you're looking for something fresh and unique with a pretty smooth playstyle you're in the right place.
This build utilizes Blade Vortex to poison enemies and therefore generate Virulence stacks to beef up the Agony Crawler and let it clear the whole screen to make up for relatively low AoE of Blade Vortex itself.
So we're basically combining glory of BV single target with screen (and off-screen) deleting of Herald's of Agony, Agony Crawler.

Skill gems:

[6] Herald of Agony + Pierce + Dmg On Full Life + Minion Damage + Minion Speed + Vicious Projectiles
[4] CWDT(9) + Immortal Call(11) + Enfeeble(12) + Inc Dur
[4] Blade Vortex + Spell Echo + Added Fire + Inc AoE
[4] Flame Dash + Faster Casting ; Enduring Cry + Inc Dur
[3] Lightning Golem + Minion Life + Minion Speed
[3] Clarity(~8) + Enlighten + Vengeance
[1] Herald of Fire

- My gear (for easier visuals):


Choice of gems:

For our main skill you could try switching Vicious Projectile (or anything else to your preference) to Added Fire, Faster Attacks, Greater Multiple Projectiles, Vile Toxins or Empower.
Be careful though when swapping things like Minion Speed to Faster Attacks because getting 4green 1red on 144int chest might cause turbo cancer.

Swapping Lightning Golem for a Flame one is an option but I prefer quickness over a little bit of dmg. I'm also open for suggestions what we could do instead of straight up buffing him.

Clarity level may vary based on your taste and ammount of mana on items. I added Enlighten simply for laughs.

I could go Hatred here but Herald of Fire just looks cool.

Vengeance for afk killing.

*Try not to link Flame Dash with Inc Dur if you have it in the same item, as it will needlesly increase mana cost.

*You can level mentioned above gems on your switch weapons slots and see how you like them. If not - use the slots for copies of gems in use for future Vaaling.

Gear aka choice of legs:

The Coming Calamity - pretty obvious for a Herald of Agony build.

Essence Worm - great synergy with the one above because the Calamity's property cancels Worm's penalty for mana reserved.

2x Consuming Dark - core for getting these sick Poisons stacking. Before getting them support your BV with either Poison or Lesser Poison (or both).
Because of the Consuming Darks having such a high poison chance (we're sitting at 120%) it's pretty easy to keep up virulency stacks at 40.

Kalisa's Grace - we're going for BV in a 4 socket anyway so why not go for a bonus socket in a form of lvl 18 Faster Casting to stack up our BV faster and make our life more enjoyable.

All the mentioned uniques are cheap so you can spend a little more to go for perfect rolls.

The rest of equipment slots is for rares with Life and Resistances. You can also see how s̶h̶i̶t̶ bad my rares are so there is much space for improvement.

I don't like too heavily rely on my flasks so I keep this section simple: heal and run fast.
Those are mods I like to use on mine:


Prefered mods on gear:
- Life
- Resistances
- Cast speed
- Physical damage
- Fire damage
- Spell damage
- Area damage

*Also if you can, try to get some Mana Leech on boots' lab enchant to further improve mana management.

Skill tree:


Things to prioritize in a tree:
- Minion damage
- Cast speed
- Fire damage
- Spell damage
- Life
- Area
- Resistances
- Skill effect duration (just quality of life kind of thing)
- Some Dex to equip Herald and BV
- Light radius

For the bandits - help prof Oak.

*Gameplay becomes especially satisfying in delves.



Ascendancy:
- Chieftain.
- Why do we go Chieftain?
- Why do we go Chieftain.

To see the build in action sometimes:
https://www.twitch.tv/dungo4th

Happy huntings, Dungo

Such a nice hybrid build. How mapping goes? Have you tried high tier yet?

Didn't put that much time into it and since this season's map drop rates being as they are got to around ~10. First thing that's probably gonna lack is the defense because the damage is well above what I need.