[3.6] Tahreyn's 83/83 Block Herald of Agony Gladiator - Über Elder Viable

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Nephanis wrote:

So i decided to try it out, and so far i really like the build, i can do pretty much all content, even shaper, with real ease. However i have now tried to kill uber Elder 4 times, failed every single time.

Basically im struggling HARD on uber elder, i know its possible, but i dont know wheter its a L2P issue or something i can change in my setup to make it easier.

https://pastebin.com/01G5yEGV
Here is my pastebin if you feel like looking at my (your) build. Anything i can improve on?


Overall, very solid build, delving at 400 depth with ease, facetanking shaper guardians with pretty much any mods.

In my opinion there are two mechanics in the über elder encounter that makes it as hard as it is. First you have all the ground clutter and other things that can overwhelm you if you're not killing them fast enough, or get bad locations on them. Secondly there are the super annoying slows.

The first part is mainly about learning the fight and having a good enough single target DPS. Engineering Eternity has a good guide that covers this among other things: https://youtu.be/d29NT6uxc0g.

The slows are both easier and harder to deal with. You can easily "cheese" it by equipping Kaom's Roots (or using Unstoppable as a Juggernaut), which will pretty much give you an immunity to them. For your first kills I strongly recommend to use Kaom's Roots as they'll enable you to focus on learning the other parts of the fights. If you checked my über elder kill video you probably noticed that most of the close encounters and the death was due to the slow effects making me unable to avoid some damage, this could've been avoided if I used a pair of Kaom's Roots. If you're not using Kaom's/Unstoppable, then you'll need a high enough effective HP to be able to soak up the damage until you're able to move out of the slow. Basically use Kaom's Roots, it'll make it easier :)

Any thoughts on how this build will shape up in 3.5? Definitely considering it as my league starter.

Maybe is a rip build ?

Herald of Agony
The Agony Crawler summoned by this skill now deals increased Physical Damage per Virulence you have, rather than increased Damage.

Anyone smarter than me can work out how much damage we lose from the 3.5 changes, particularly when using hatred & physical to lightning & EE? Also bear in mind the molten strike projectile changes and whether that has any impact on virulence stacking and LGOH for defence. Really want to use this build as a league starter, if it's still strong at endgame.

• The Agony Crawler summoned by this skill now deals increased Physical Damage per Virulence you have, rather than increased Damage.

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Bmoffett wrote:

Any thoughts on how this build will shape up in 3.5? Definitely considering it as my league starter.

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zamundo wrote:

Maybe is a rip build ?

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pathofexile3 wrote:

Anyone smarter than me can work out how much damage we lose from the 3.5 changes, particularly when using hatred & physical to lightning & EE? Also bear in mind the molten strike projectile changes and whether that has any impact on virulence stacking and LGOH for defence. Really want to use this build as a league starter, if it's still strong at endgame.

The only thing that the change does is to reduce the effectiveness of flat added damage of non-physical damage, unless there are some rules to the agony stacks that I'm not aware of. Thus Added Chaos / Added Lightning, wrath/anger, and abyssal jewel stacking won't be effective for the skill, not that they were the best options to begin with. However, the change is a major nerf for Occultists and the HoAg + Profane Bloom combo. Previously you would get insane explosions with your crawler as the explosion's chaos damage was scaled. With the change Profane bloom's base damage won't be affected by the virulence stacks.

The reduced projectiles for MS shouldn't be much of a difference. I've mainly run cyclone for this build with no issues to reach 40 stacks of virulence, and even with 2 less projectiles you should have a higher hit count with MS than I've had with cyclone. The reduced lgoh is a small nerf, but you'll still manage to pop up to full life almost instantly.

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Tahreyn wrote:

• The Agony Crawler summoned by this skill now deals increased Physical Damage per Virulence you have, rather than increased Damage.

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Bmoffett wrote:

Any thoughts on how this build will shape up in 3.5? Definitely considering it as my league starter.

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zamundo wrote:

Maybe is a rip build ?

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pathofexile3 wrote:

Anyone smarter than me can work out how much damage we lose from the 3.5 changes, particularly when using hatred & physical to lightning & EE? Also bear in mind the molten strike projectile changes and whether that has any impact on virulence stacking and LGOH for defence. Really want to use this build as a league starter, if it's still strong at endgame.

The only thing that the change does is to reduce the effectiveness of flat added damage of non-physical damage, unless there are some rules to the agony stacks that I'm not aware of. Thus Added Chaos / Added Lightning, wrath/anger, and abyssal jewel stacking won't be effective for the skill, not that they were the best options to begin with. However, the change is a major nerf for Occultists and the HoAg + Profane Bloom combo. Previously you would get insane explosions with your crawler as the explosion's chaos damage was scaled. With the change Profane bloom's base damage won't be affected by the virulence stacks.

The reduced projectiles for MS shouldn't be much of a difference. I've mainly run cyclone for this build with no issues to reach 40 stacks of virulence, and even with 2 less projectiles you should have a higher hit count with MS than I've had with cyclone. The reduced lgoh is a small nerf, but you'll still manage to pop up to full life almost instantly.

Isn't it the case that the damage converted to cold/lightning/chaos from various means is no longer scaled by the virulence stacks as it now only scales the physical component? As a hypothetical example with 30% conversion added as cold/light/chaos (and correct me if I'm wrong) before you would get:

(100phys + 30cold + 30light + 30chaos) * 40 = 7600 total

whereas now you would get:

(100phys * 40) + (30cold + 30light + 30chaos) = 4090 total.

That's pretty significant if my math is correct and the assumption is that the damage conversion happens before the virulence multiplier.

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pathofexile3 wrote:

That's pretty significant if my math is correct and the assumption is that the damage conversion happens before the virulence multiplier.

The virulence stacks should be added before any damage conversion takes place, thus the changes will not affect the damage conversion. It would be a bit strange if it actually did, as the crawler has a inbuild phys to chaos conversion already. That would've created a wierd mechanic where ~60% of the added damage from the virulence stacks is scaled and 40% of the added damage is left untouched.

It should only be flat added elemental and chaos damage, as well as the occultist's Profane Bloom, that is affected by the change.

There was a thread about it on our subreddit if you want to check it out:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/a39o29/can_somebody_please_explain_the_herald_of_agony/

I'm generally a pretty skeptical person so will reserve my opinion once 3.5 comes out to test. It won't take long to quickly jump onto Standard to do an Uber Elder run. The time to kill will either be practically the same or nearly double, depending on the outcome of the change.

On another note, I am very interested in the Dread Banner skill. Some things we need to know about Dread Banner to make full use of it - how much % chance to Impale does it give? how much is the aura reservation? how much of the phys damage is stored per Impale? If all of this aligns, we could be looking at some pretty decent extra damage :)

Also, with the new Champion Master of Metal node we can get 4 - 8 flat added phys damage per Impale on the enemy. This is pretty damn significant as a level 20 Herald of Agony only has 45 to 84 flat phys damage and WILL scale all our elemental/chaos damage as well (since we know flat added damage occurs before damage conversion). With 5 stacks on the enemy we're looking at nearly 40% more damage and that's not even counting the stored physical damage on the enemy! However, I'm not sure if all this extra damage is worth losing max block and spell block.

Hi Tahreyn, just wanted to leave a quick note thanking you for this build guide. This was my main last season and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Strong build, smooth play style, perfect for Delve. Thank you, and good luck in the coming league!

Hey :) really great build, i probably gonna start with it.

Have you tried using this as an early league ulab farmer? Perma fortify should be quite good.


To other posters regarding conversion. Conversion always happens last and in order. There is absolutly zero chance this would work here differently.