[3.10 HC] Apep's Darkpact Totems are BACK (original build 3.1-3.3)

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TexasSpades wrote:

Do you think this is a good build for group play? My buddy will be playing a Witch SRS build. Thanks in advance!

I play a lot with friends, including an SRS witch. I can keep pace with him, but have trouble keeping up with my other friends (cyclone and... molten strike, I think?) while clearing trash partially due to their better movement skills, but mostly because of the setup time of totems. That being said, they might not be as adventurous on HC.

Unrelated, but Doedre's Tenure are great dps/leveling gloves.

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TexasSpades wrote:

Do you think this is a good build for group play? My buddy will be playing a Witch SRS build. Thanks in advance!

DP totem should work well with SRS because the minions tank a lot of the dmg while your totems just blast away.

lvl 87 currently hhc name is japlesquad. cleared pretty much all maps with ease right now doing t13s. plan on taking it to guardians and shaper after uber lab enchant and 20/21 dp gem! going great.

The "Regenerate 2% of mana and life if you were hit recently" boot enchant from uber lab is really good with this build. Every time you get hit it doubles your mana regen (I have nearly 500 with it up) and adds another 100 life regen, for a total of almost 650 life regen (and I only have around 6k life).

It's very noticeable. Just watch that life and mana regen super fast when you get hit by trash mobs. I don't even have mana regen on my gear. If I had rings and amulet with it as well, you could get over 600 mana regen easily.

Preliminary testing of a new variation specifically geared toward improving high level DPS while maintaining a reasonable amount of tankiness is underway. Too early to say anything with certainty (Only lvl 74 atm) But preliminary results are promising.

My thanks to the folks who have been posting ideas in this thread, as my current experiment incorporates a number of those that have come from y'all.

Downside is this variation has significantly greater complexity to play, and may result in me getting myself killed while practicing with it.

Basic components that change from original for anyone who wants to mess around with it before I am done testing:

1. Uses repentance gloves (which do, in fact, significantly impact dps, and are not actually difficult to get required stats for on our tree. Str currently a bit under 400)

2. Uses devoto's helm, which is a significant improvement to clear speed, makes fights with bosses who have 1 shot mechanics feel safer, and makes getting needed chaos res trivial.

3. Uses Dream Fragments ring, which makes frozen ground a free mod and is anticipated to improve ease of playing with Hydra and Shaper significantly.

4. Adds wither>inc duration>faster casting (edit--wither on totem failed, wither self cast is working well)

5. Adds summon skeletons>spell echo>minion life>vaal summon skeletons.**

Summon skellies in this build has an absurdly fast cast time. Summoning skellies around any high health mob does in fact improve actual dps significantly, due to chaining effect, higher health of skellies with minion life gem, and greater ease of creating overlapping fields of fire. I do not use this for general mapping, but it is good for bosses and specific fights like harbingers/beyonders/tough rares. Skellies also pull some aggro.

**[edit--It's really the self cast wither on bosses that is doing that melting thing I've been looking for--this is where the top tier single target damage is for this build, as long as we don't get so distracted dpsing that we forget to renew the decoy, or forget to dodge, or forget to notice that we're out of flask charges, or . . . you get the idea. May drop Skellies or use in a CWC setup]

**[edit Wither>Cast While Channeling>Summon Skellies is the way to go. 4th link matter of taste. See post on page 39 for further discussion on this]

Defensively I'm currently around 9k EHP fully ascended at lvl 74 , and I'm expecting to get around 10.5k EHP for endgame, possibly as much as 11k, which should still be sufficient. More detailed report will follow if things work out and I progress to upper tier content. [edit-A bit over 10.3k EHP at lvl 83, going according to plan]

Please note that this is not a newbie friendly variant. I'm not even sure it's a me-friendly variant. Right now it's a race between my technical abilities and the level of content. That said, I believe that in the hands of someone with sufficient piloting skill (maybe me if I get in enough practice before I die) this version has the potential to really wreck the top tier content.

-O

Does %area damage scale less than %spell or %chaos, or is it all the same for us?

Re Damage Scaling:

spell/area/chaos/totem are all equivalent

-O

What can I add to increase single target damage? Having some trouble killing bosses above tier 11.

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Orion72 wrote:

Re Damage Scaling:

spell/area/chaos/totem are all equivalent

-O

Thanks! That's nice to hear, makes gearing about 10x cheaper :D

All in all a really fantastic build. Been playing since Prophecy league and would usually lose steam after the T15 maps but this is the first time I've ever managed to clear all 4 guardians on a considerably cheap budget. Up next, Shaper.