[3.21] Vatinas' Spiders + HoP Guardian - CI, 70K armour, 1400 ES on block, millions of DPS

So far this has been a great build. I am level 85 with 7300ES and 61K armour, and pretty much unkillable in maps. Guardians and Conquerors are no problem.

I had difficulty with Sirus 8 today. I had no problem tanking his attacks (though I tend to dodge his beams and attacks out of habit from using other, less tanky characters). But I had trouble keeping the spiders up and I was doing very poor damage, particularly in his 4th phase.

In the crazyness of the screen clutter, I found I wasn't spawning the spiders reliably. I would desecrate, pop a worm flask and cyclone, but no spiders would appear. I think my minions are killing the worms too quickly or something.

Do you have any advice for this fight?

"

theta40 wrote:

So far this has been a great build. I am level 85 with 7300ES and 61K armour, and pretty much unkillable in maps. Guardians and Conquerors are no problem.

I had difficulty with Sirus 8 today. I had no problem tanking his attacks (though I tend to dodge his beams and attacks out of habit from using other, less tanky characters). But I had trouble keeping the spiders up and I was doing very poor damage, particularly in his 4th phase.

In the crazyness of the screen clutter, I found I wasn't spawning the spiders reliably. I would desecrate, pop a worm flask and cyclone, but no spiders would appear. I think my minions are killing the worms too quickly or something.

Do you have any advice for this fight?

Vatinas can give more insight into this but here are my 2 cents ;)
What I recommend to check and have is the pantheon. Soul of Ryslatha was a life saver. I now go in with only 2 flask and leave with both full charges. One summon of the spiders easy for the the firsts phase. Then I wait for all the minions to dissapear while he casts his storm and then re-summon only when I go under his throne, that way they are ready and haven't wasted time of their duration. Worth to mention I didn't allocated the increased duration annoint (I counldn't find rings with 20% reduced so I went to the "Champion of the cause" annoint to balance that). Last phase was when things can go more slow, but I notice that not cause of not enough dmg, but more than the spiders spent most of the time running trying to get to where sirrius is. In this phase is where I really use up to 3 to 4 re-summons and when the pantheon save my ass :D.
Other issue I notice when using the build is that desecrete is casted where you have your cursor and the worms can pop in the oposite direction causing 6, 4, 2 or even 0 spiders to appear (happened to me under Uber elder and atziri fights due the fact that I was dogin some attacks and have my mouse over other part of the screen).
First time I did the fight I had problems with keeping summoning the spiders cause the flasks run out of charges, last ones were a breeze and maybe not as fast as kill sirrius in 1m, but It didn't take more than 3 to 5 mins the whole fight.
Besides that check that you have the build as close as the one posted in the guide.
GL :)

"The Glancing Blows Keystone now causes you to take 65% of Damage from Blocked Hits (from 50%). It has been moved so as to make it more difficult to acquire via a Thread of Hope jewel."

GG?????

"

Vatinas wrote:

"

Tooks64 wrote:

Thanks for the feedback, I was mainly making it as a worse case scenario in case you felt the nerfs meant the build wasn't good, and as an interesting challenge.
I think I will start on your glancing blows variant, as it functions on much lower investment, and once I get more currency, I may transition it to my non glancing blows variant, as I want to see if it can work without needing rumi's up. One change I may try in the build is swapping the carrion golem to arena master spectres, as that could save a gem socket for increased duration or another aura.

I heard someone mention that, but forgot to try it out during the league; do you think the spectre(s) would survive without minion life regen investment?

Edit: I looked a bit into it, and saw that it grants a decent amount of attack, cast, and movement speed, which would be great. Also, their AI looks good, and they have a ranged attack, which would mean easy Feeding Frenzy procs. But, on top of the life regen thingy, what gems were you thinking? Raise Spectre - Feeding Frenzy - Blood magic? (I very rarely play with support spectres, so I'm not sure how to go about this :p)

I think this could be interesting, now that you mention it, I never actually played with the golem (died too fast, hard to resummon (mana cost greater that available mana) and didn't feel the need for dmg). So the spectres could be a good alternative. Also I was seeing the patch notes and not sure how the marks could work yet, can we use Poachers Mark with vulnerability? or that need "one extra curse to be applied"? (the -20% Phys Dmg reduction looks interesting to play around). Other idea that could be put instead of the golem?

"

DAELMAN1 wrote:

"The Glancing Blows Keystone now causes you to take 65% of Damage from Blocked Hits (from 50%). It has been moved so as to make it more difficult to acquire via a Thread of Hope jewel."

GG?????

I suspect this shouldn't be a problem for Templars assuming it will still be in that starting area, just harder to get using the thread of hope which this build does not use as far as I can see.

@Vitanas: you really made one of the best guides I ever saw and thanks for the reassurance that the change to GB won't hurt us much and it was probably for those pesky necromancers :)

"

Tooks64 wrote:

"

Vatinas wrote:

"

Tooks64 wrote:

Thanks for the feedback, I was mainly making it as a worse case scenario in case you felt the nerfs meant the build wasn't good, and as an interesting challenge.
I think I will start on your glancing blows variant, as it functions on much lower investment, and once I get more currency, I may transition it to my non glancing blows variant, as I want to see if it can work without needing rumi's up. One change I may try in the build is swapping the carrion golem to arena master spectres, as that could save a gem socket for increased duration or another aura.

I heard someone mention that, but forgot to try it out during the league; do you think the spectre(s) would survive without minion life regen investment?

Edit: I looked a bit into it, and saw that it grants a decent amount of attack, cast, and movement speed, which would be great. Also, their AI looks good, and they have a ranged attack, which would mean easy Feeding Frenzy procs. But, on top of the life regen thingy, what gems were you thinking? Raise Spectre - Feeding Frenzy - Blood magic? (I very rarely play with support spectres, so I'm not sure how to go about this :p)

I don't have too much knowledge either, but from what I have seen they don't seem to need anything like blood magic, so I was considering using the gem socket for something else, possibly a 2nd movement skill or moving gems around to fit tempest shield into the increased duration setup, or possibly I may see if I could fit one of the new area control skills like void sphere for utility.
But I won't really know what works until I try, so I will probably mess around with the utility links :)

I read something written by a guy who messed around with them, and he said that Blood Magic seemed to increase the rate at which the spectres cast their buff (I can try to find the reddit post again if you want), but I guess it's worth the try. :) And if we can handle having them in 2L (Spectre - FF), I'd need to think about what gem could be best, but it would definitely be worth looking into! That being said, I think Tempest Shield is not that useful for us, since its damage is almost non-existent, and we're already capped in block. But it sounds promising nonetheless; please keep us updated :)

"

Kemmotar1 wrote:

"

theta40 wrote:

So far this has been a great build. I am level 85 with 7300ES and 61K armour, and pretty much unkillable in maps. Guardians and Conquerors are no problem.

I had difficulty with Sirus 8 today. I had no problem tanking his attacks (though I tend to dodge his beams and attacks out of habit from using other, less tanky characters). But I had trouble keeping the spiders up and I was doing very poor damage, particularly in his 4th phase.

In the crazyness of the screen clutter, I found I wasn't spawning the spiders reliably. I would desecrate, pop a worm flask and cyclone, but no spiders would appear. I think my minions are killing the worms too quickly or something.

Do you have any advice for this fight?

Vatinas can give more insight into this but here are my 2 cents ;)
What I recommend to check and have is the pantheon. Soul of Ryslatha was a life saver. I now go in with only 2 flask and leave with both full charges. One summon of the spiders easy for the the firsts phase. Then I wait for all the minions to dissapear while he casts his storm and then re-summon only when I go under his throne, that way they are ready and haven't wasted time of their duration. Worth to mention I didn't allocated the increased duration annoint (I counldn't find rings with 20% reduced so I went to the "Champion of the cause" annoint to balance that). Last phase was when things can go more slow, but I notice that not cause of not enough dmg, but more than the spiders spent most of the time running trying to get to where sirrius is. In this phase is where I really use up to 3 to 4 re-summons and when the pantheon save my ass :D.
Other issue I notice when using the build is that desecrete is casted where you have your cursor and the worms can pop in the oposite direction causing 6, 4, 2 or even 0 spiders to appear (happened to me under Uber elder and atziri fights due the fact that I was dogin some attacks and have my mouse over other part of the screen).
First time I did the fight I had problems with keeping summoning the spiders cause the flasks run out of charges, last ones were a breeze and maybe not as fast as kill sirrius in 1m, but It didn't take more than 3 to 5 mins the whole fight.
Besides that check that you have the build as close as the one posted in the guide.
GL :)

Great advice right there :) Ryslatha is the go-to if you're struggling with some bosses. Otherwise, you can play with 3 worm jars. And also keep in mind that that stuff comes with practice too; the more you do it, the more naturally it will come to you, and eventually you won't need either of those things :) If you want to see how the resummoning is "ideally" done, feel free to check out one of my videos (I think the A8 Sirus fight, apart from a messy beginning worm-wise, was pretty smooth in that regard).

"

Kemmotar1 wrote:

"

Vatinas wrote:

"

Tooks64 wrote:

Thanks for the feedback, I was mainly making it as a worse case scenario in case you felt the nerfs meant the build wasn't good, and as an interesting challenge.
I think I will start on your glancing blows variant, as it functions on much lower investment, and once I get more currency, I may transition it to my non glancing blows variant, as I want to see if it can work without needing rumi's up. One change I may try in the build is swapping the carrion golem to arena master spectres, as that could save a gem socket for increased duration or another aura.

I heard someone mention that, but forgot to try it out during the league; do you think the spectre(s) would survive without minion life regen investment?

Edit: I looked a bit into it, and saw that it grants a decent amount of attack, cast, and movement speed, which would be great. Also, their AI looks good, and they have a ranged attack, which would mean easy Feeding Frenzy procs. But, on top of the life regen thingy, what gems were you thinking? Raise Spectre - Feeding Frenzy - Blood magic? (I very rarely play with support spectres, so I'm not sure how to go about this :p)

I think this could be interesting, now that you mention it, I never actually played with the golem (died too fast, hard to resummon (mana cost greater that available mana) and didn't feel the need for dmg). So the spectres could be a good alternative. Also I was seeing the patch notes and not sure how the marks could work yet, can we use Poachers Mark with vulnerability? or that need "one extra curse to be applied"? (the -20% Phys Dmg reduction looks interesting to play around). Other idea that could be put instead of the golem?

The golem is cast when stunned, so no worries about it casting too much mana or dying too fast (it's basically resummoned every 4 seconds) :) So while the spectre could be an alternative, if it doesn't work out, going back to the golem will definitely not be a bad thing.

If I understood correctly, you won't be able to mark + curse. I'll have to look into more detail and run some numbers to figure out if a mark would be worth a socket and giving up on cursing while clearing, but the new Vulnerability and Punishments look extra juicy to me (I'll talk about it more in my 3.12 note I'll be writing today).

"

JohnnyV76 wrote:

"

DAELMAN1 wrote:

"The Glancing Blows Keystone now causes you to take 65% of Damage from Blocked Hits (from 50%). It has been moved so as to make it more difficult to acquire via a Thread of Hope jewel."

GG?????

I suspect this shouldn't be a problem for Templars assuming it will still be in that starting area, just harder to get using the thread of hope which this build does not use as far as I can see.

@Vitanas: you really made one of the best guides I ever saw and thanks for the reassurance that the change to GB won't hurt us much and it was probably for those pesky necromancers :)

Yeah, it's "GG" for necros :P But we'll be fine. And thank you so much @JohnnyV76, it means a lot :)

This looks like a great guide and something I want to play in Heist, coming back to my favourite ascendancy after the Harvest was an awful league for me.

One question re delirium - since this will be a new Zana mod for Heist (16c) how well does this build fare in the timed delirum zone?
Can you get through to the map boss under the fog with good loot numbers?

"

YarrCahAdhir wrote:

This looks like a great guide and something I want to play in Heist, coming back to my favourite ascendancy after the Harvest was an awful league for me.

One question re delirium - since this will be a new Zana mod for Heist (16c) how well does this build fare in the timed delirum zone?
Can you get through to the map boss under the fog with good loot numbers?

To be honest, I never really liked the Delirium mechanic, so I didn't pay much attention, but I see no reason why not; we have good clear speed, great movement speed, and enough single target to kill most map bosses in a few seconds at full build, so I think so.

That being said, the one weakness of the build is large AoE coverage, which makes it a bit below average at things like Blighted maps, Legion encounters... So if you want/need to fully clear a large open map without backtracking, you might encounter a few issues, I don't know.

As for the Simulacrum, it's one of the best builds I've seen/played for it.

Maybe someone who has played around a bit more with Delirium can tell you more about it? Everything I just said is basically me imagining what it would be like :p

"

Vatinas wrote:

Everything I just said is basically me imagining what it would be like :p

Appreciate the honesty! ;D

I admit, I got spoiled with legion (started with ED/C) and Delirium (started SB Inq and made herald stacker my 2nd toon) but I know there are not many builds that can handle both efficiently without several dozens/hundred exalts which with a lower density of mobs (like Harvest) will be impossible for me to make ;)

I'm impressed with the tankyness shown and will 100% play it (for better or worse) and asked about the Delirium mod since it will be fairly expensive to run but a guaranteed source of cluster jewels and splinters if the build can handle it OK.

So hope to hear from someone who run them regularly to find out :)

"

YarrCahAdhir wrote:

Appreciate the honesty! ;D

I admit, I got spoiled with legion (started with ED/C) and Delirium (started SB Inq and made herald stacker my 2nd toon) but I know there are not many builds that can handle both efficiently without several dozens/hundred exalts which with a lower density of mobs (like Harvest) will be impossible for me to make ;)

I'm impressed with the tankyness shown and will 100% play it (for better or worse) and asked about the Delirium mod since it will be fairly expensive to run but a guaranteed source of cluster jewels and splinters if the build can handle it OK.

So hope to hear from someone who run them regularly to find out :)

I understand :) If noone answers, I can try to get to get to maps as soon as possible in Heist and see how it goes, but to be fair, the moment when I get the core of the build running will depend heavily on my luck with the drops I get; if I'm lucky enough to get it running early on, I'll run the tests and let you know. :)