[3.10] Talamoe's 💪 Strength Stacking 💪 Blade Vortex Chieftain | 2400+ Str |

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Snarky85 wrote:

I spent 30-ish exalts to craft myself this weapon setup:

Double AoE mod is just too good to pass up for clear, alongside the explode mod. Feels amazing. Doubling up on explode didn't make a difference (they do stack, but it doesn't matter), so I went for T1 strength + aoe on the offhand. Dual influence on the offhand pretty much only for the 20% phys as fire. I had the base from a failed annull attempt, so I just used it, worked out well :)

Did not see anything comparable on the market, but you can make them yourself kinda reliably, at 3 levels of investment:

Spoiler

explode and aoe mod are both 1000 weighting, so you can easily hit them in a couple 100 alts.

Level 1:
- get maces, one with shaper and one with elder influence. Minimum i80 for t1 phys as fire, i82 if you want t1 str, i83 for t1 pen.
- roll explode as only influenced mod on shaper mace
- same with elder, roll aoe
- use awakener orb to create mixed base with both mods. Can already use that for minimal investment. Craft %fire/ignite if you get an open prefix, strength if open suffix.

Investment: pretty much only awakener orb (1.5 ex) + some change

Level 2:
- get 1 open suffix + 1 open prefix. If you're lucky, you already got it after awakener. Otherwise annull. Got it 2nd try.
- clear prefixes via "Suffixes cannot be changed" craft + scour
- you now have a clean base with the only mods being aoe + explode. Can use multimod here to add %fire and fire to spells.

Investment: chance to brick annull. If you hit it, additional 4 ex + change.

Level 3:
- on the clean explode + aoe base, craft "Cannot roll Attack mods"
- Exalt slam once. You can only hit +1 gems, ele pen and phys as fire.
- If you didn't get what you want, craft "Suffixes cannot be changed" and scour. You have the clean base again. Rinse and repeat.
- if you hit it, multimod %fire and fire to spells.

Investment: 4 ex per attempt, 1 in 7 chance for t1 phys as fire. Better odds if you can live with t2 phys as fire, or t1 pen. I settled on t2 for my mainhand, hit t1 for the offhand on the first try.
About 30 ex on average, if you want no less than T1 phys as fire. Can improve the chances by using an i80 mace to remove t1 pen from the affix pool.


For the offhand, I alt-regal'd into t1 str + aoe. Used less than 1000 alterations, did the same thing twice last season. So fairly consistent to hit. Clear prefixes and multimod, if you have a pure elder base. If you have elder/shaper base you can get phys as fire using the same method described above.

Cubeiyari + my current mainhand only gives about 7% more damage and 200 ES. Much easier to get ofc, but the double aoe is just soo juicy.

https://pastebin.com/MTYsfbGh

17k ES on my clear setup, 20k for single target weapon swap (but damage drops about 10%, need a better shield). Definitely some room for improvement here.


Clearing a random map looks like this. Youtube butchers the quality, but you get the idea. Not the fastest clear in the world, but enjoyable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj5SRS7WSNk


I cannot stress enough, how much the weapon setup has improved my enjoyment of this build. Without aoe/explode, the clear feels awful. One explode/aoe weapon is probably sufficient, but I cannot go back from the double aoe.

Some notes:
- You really need to hit about 15k ES for the build to feel reasonably tanky. Without any real additional defense layers it feels kinda squishy otherwise.
- Avoid 60% reduced recovery maps. Those got me killed the most. Even no reg is better, since it does not affect leech. Just pack an enduring mana flask and go. But 60% maps are bad.
- Metamorphs can be hard sometimes. I'm at about 2M shaper dps now, so they're mostly fine. But before, when they happened to roll something like life, resists, end charges and regen, I sometimes could not out-damage their regeneration. So I had to skip or get a frostbomb.
- Veritania can be problematic. I usually swap in a Dream Fragments, without her freeze, she is a breeze :>
- Did not attempt Sirus yet, I have another character that does him deathless and don't want to risk losing xp

- Not sure, if Vaal RF is worth it on a 4 link. Didn't try a 7 linked version, I might at some point. It does give decent burst on a metamorph, but not sure if I want to give up fossil -9% etc from the helmet slot. The area on Vaal RF is pretty impressive with 2 aoe weapons though :D
- Phase Run feels pretty good, especially with 20% + enhance.
- Crafting hunter belts has made me a ton of currency. The base is like 80c, but there are many people undervaluing it. I've bought bases for 1c, 20c etc. Scour, quality, chaos spam and you have a decent chance to hit str + %attributes, which commonly sells for 2+ exalts at decent values.
- Astramentis is hard to move away from. I might try at some point, but not having to worry about dex and int is just so damn convenient.
- If you go for a corrupted blood jewel, do it on Might of the Meek. All the other options are way more expensive.
- The more ES you have, the higher becomes the optimal IC level. Without charges, at 20k ES, a lvl 18 IC provides optimal EHP (assuming starting from full, perfect CWDT trigger, IC active till dead, not counting regen/leech etc) I just use lvl 20 though, didn't want to re-calculate whenever I gained some ES, and if you factor in recovery, it is probably optimal anyway.

- The visual effect for BV seems to be capped and not get any bigger beyond a certain point. At my current setup, inc aoe and conc effect do not have any visual difference. However, the actual skill area does change, with conc effect the aoe pretty much matches the visual, but with inc aoe, monsters die way before they hit the visual effect.

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Chunu0327 wrote:

better than astramentis?

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Snarky85 wrote:

Made a small comparison of spell visuals vs actually affected area.

Spoiler

Spell visuals look pretty much exactly the same size in both pictures (conc effect even looks bigger, but that's just an optical illusion :)).
However the actual area of effect (the "kill zone") is significanty bigger if you use inc aoe. You can see the enemies exploding on the left, at the edges of the kill zones on both pictures.