[3.7] Ahfack's Crimson Cyclone | Shaper FULL Life Kill Vid | 100% Pure Phys | All Content | PoBs

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Tanerian wrote:

Starforge? or the Axe version?
What would be the key differences between the two? I'm assuming both can solo all content. Is one faster at mapping etc?

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gurkanson wrote:

Hi,

First of all I just want to say this is a great guide, having a lot of fun with it!

But I am just curious on the belt choice, I looked at a video explaining how leech and The Retch interacts with eachother. And the outcome was that to get the most out of it you should use Vaal Pact (I am not using Vaal Pact), and now that I look at your character it seems that you are going with a Stygian Vise socketed with a good flat phys abyss jewel.

So my questions is if it's really worth going The Retch without Vaal Pact instead of just getting a nice Stygian and perhaps some boots with a nice lab enchant?
What are your thoughts?

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Thukker wrote:

I think I've gotten to the best expression of the build that I can, not much has changed since my initial impressions but here are some conclusions I've gotten to:

-100% Bleed is not important. Crimson dance is still a nice DPS gain for 1 point, as bleed stacks to 8 in-perfunctory even at only 25% chance on hit, but more reasonably, it is not important to try and scale bleed as a damage source and attempting to do so will result in a net loss of DPS vs just simply acting to increase cyclone damage (which, too, will increase bleed damage). The instances where scaling bleed may be better than cyclone can be counted on one hand, and are even then in no way conspicuously better than just improving cyclone, which brings us to point 2:

-Starforge is better.

-Iron Reflexes is bad, because:

-An Abyssal Jewel with Blind is brokenly strong. Especially with a Jade Flask. You give up almost nothing to have it, and as a result you have 70%+ evade against bosses. Armor in the small quantity that this build has it is terrible regardless - trash is dying too fast for it to matter, and it is providing a marginal defense at best against the size of hits bosses do (like <10% reduction). Add to this that blind reduces the chance to be crit.

-Tombfists are so good. Intimidate without having to use a Belt of the Deceiver, get a blind jewel without sacing a vanilla jewel on the tree.

-Vaal Pact is so much stronger than taking ~5% regen on the tree, especially with the length of time overleech stays in effect. The Writing Jar is really strong for this as well, and makes trials a breeze.

-The Retch is completely unimportant as a damage source. I still choose to use it for QOL purposes because 60% increased flask duration is awesome, as is 15% movespeed while flasked.

-Breezes though content all the way up to T16, even with a Sadima's Touch and Bisco's Leash used vice Tombfist/Retch. I pretty much only put them back on to kill guardians and elder/shaper.

It farms endgame content with ease, and here are videos for it:
T14 Elder
Chimera
Hydra
Phoenix
Minotaur
Shaper
I'll make a UAtziri whenever she decides to drop an ignorance.

Gear:

Spoiler

DPS Tooltips, buffed and unbuffed:

Spoiler

Unbuffed in HO:


Flasked, warchief, blood rage, frenzy charges, recently killed, onslaught (no Rallying Cry):

Pretty much the only thing I have left to do for gear is get a Devoto's with Cyclone speed, but that's only an 8k DPS increase over vuln enchant and costs ~10ex, which I think is a completely unresaonble use of money while I still need to buy a VD enchant for my LL PP VD occultist, so that'll be way down the road if I even do it.

Perhaps a sweet Stygian Vise to replace my retch as well, but I've yet to see anything resembling a reasonable replacement in Abyss.