[3.4] The Mistress of Agony - Lowlife BlightDrain Ascendant / Occultist - ALL content viable!

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djnat escribió:

***IMPORTANT: I am an Essence Drain lover.

I authored 2 ED builds on PoE forums: this one and the Trickster version.

The Scion build is optimal for damage, and it's currently going low life in its main iteration. Its lifebased version, btw, isn't used anymore, but it will be remembered for its past BotW glory. :)

The Trickster build was optimal for survivability, and was a CI build (Chaos Inoculation). I won't update that version anymore, because I think it's pretty dead in the current state of the game.

NEW: Witch variant added! Look at the passive tree sub-section of the guide for more details!



Hello!

First build post here, so feel free to post criticism / suggestions / whatever you want to improve it.

I know there are a lot of Essence Drain builds of all kinds. I just wanted to post mine, since I have received some in-game requests for it after posting some hints in the Witch sub-forum.

This build has its best iteration by going low life. You can start as life based and then switch to CI (and eventually low life) when all your ES items are in place, respeccing some key nodes. I highly recommend going LL in the end, to tackle all the content of the game. I've successfully killed Uber Atziri / Shaper / Guardians multiple times with my build.

The old life based poison version was featured in GGG's Build of The Week in Season 6, Episode 3 (29/9/2016).

The low life one came out after some experiments I made during Breach League. Since this new support gem was introduced in 2.5, I wanted to try it and gain all possible advantages from it... so this new iteration of the Mistress of Agony was born and I think it was probably the best way to play an Essence Drain based character in Path of Exile pre-Fall of Oriath.

I want to point out a thing: this is NOT the best clearspeed build of the world, but it is incredibly efficient for solo playing, farming, mapping, labyrinth runs while being quite safe to play.


Build background and evolution over leagues

Spoiler

I leveled my Scion up to 95 in Talisman League (2.1), when Essence Drain / Wither / Contagion were added to the game.

I decided to publish the build after Ascendancy came out because the character became even stronger than it was (and this was a common feeling in 2.2).

In 2.3 (Prophecy) we got 2 additional ascendancy points, so we could take advantage from the double starting point to save some precious passives which could be invested in a more efficient way.

In 2.4 (Essence) this build received some small nerfs, which fortunately didn't impact the playstyle, the clearspeed or the efficiency of the character in a noticeable way. The details:

- Pierce support gem got a 10% damage nerf and a 20% increase in mana multiplier
- Poison damage was lowered by 2%
- Bosses' curse efficiency reduction became a lot stronger

But some good things were added for us: Essence of Delirium (which allows to craft our endgame dagger), fingerless silk gloves base type (16% free spell damage on implicit mod), Shaper boots (free pierce while mapping) and crystal belt basetype (lots of extra ES from the implicit).

In 2.5 (Breach) the CWC support gem was introduced in PoE. And it came together with some nice new items too, especially Presence of Chayula to play low life while gaining some good survivability tools (extra ES and 60% chaos resistance).

In 2.6 (Legacy) there were no important changes to the ED playstyle. The CWC iteration was still the absolute best, as you can see in this Enfeeble Minotaur kill video.

In 3.0 (Harbinger) there are going to be some changes to the core game mechanics which completely destroy both the CWC and Poison interactions of ED. To summarize:

- Double dipping is gone, so the poison interaction with ED is plain dead
- Energy shield sources in the game are being substantially lowered, so it will be more difficult to achieve consistent ES numbers after Oriath's launch
- Essence Drain damage is being buffed by a significant amount (about 43% at high gem level) to compensate for the fact that it doesn't scale anymore with projectile damage modifiers
- Contagion damage is being buffed by a significant amount (about 25% at high gem level), it is going to have more radius at max level and its cast time is being lowered from 0.85 to 0.6, dramatically increasing the clearspeed of our Ascendant
- Breath of the Council chaos damage bonus is being buffed from 80% max to 100% max
- Vaal Lightning Trap's shock debuff is being nerfed (from 50% increased damage taken to 15%)
- The Scion's Trickster sub-ascendancy is being buffed (50% extra recovery of mana, life and ES after killing a mob is insane while mapping!)
- The Scion's "Path" ascendancy nodes now give 2 extra passive points
- The bandit rewards are going to be adjusted, now we still kill all bandits but we only get 2 passive points instead of 3 total
- Two new interesting support gems we can make use of are being implemented in PoE: Efficacy and Arcane Surge. We will use the first one to replace Slower Projectiles, and the second one as an extra Contagion link to take advantage from the spell damage boost when it is triggered
- Rapid Decay support is being renamed into Swift Affliction support
- Discipline aura now has 30% extra ES recharge rate built into it to compensate for the ES nerf
- Elreon ES% enchants on rings are gone, now we will look at the 20% faster start of ES recharge enchant by Leo for endgame purposes

This character can start from a really cheap gear and do normal Atziri on a really low budget (items like Solaris Lorica are usually dirt cheap even at leagues' starts), but if you want it to really shine at higher levels and destroy the endgame content you have to invest some serious currencies. I personally did a lot of farming and trading to get my Ascendant to her current state.

I can assure you this build is really enjoyable, especially at higher levels. Don't expect to be overpowered at lower levels: the Mistress of Agony enters the ownage mode in the 80s, and the even faster ownage mode in the 90s.

Table of Contents

1. Build mechanics and explanations
2. Pros / Cons
3. Passive Tree
4. Ascendancy Points
5. Gem Setup
6. Gear
7. Flasks, Jewels and Enchantments
8. Bandits
9. Pantheon Powers
10. Leveling and Ascension priorities

1. Build mechanics and explanations

Spoiler

First of all, this is an entirely chaos-based character who relies on the spreading of a damage over time single-target skill, Essence Drain. The spreading happens via Contagion, another damage over time skill, but with a good area of effect radius. Mechanics are simple: you contagion an area, then target the potentially weakest mob in that area and shoot an ED bullet in its direction. When your target dies, the entire Contagion area will be affected by both Contagion and Essence Drain DotS. And the Decay craft on a dagger can push the single target damage a bit further if you like it (but I do not).

This character makes also use of some utility skills and curses to boost both the damage and the survivability. Wither, when applied to a spell totem, constantly debuffs an area, increasing the chaos damage taken by all the foes inside by a stacking percentage (capped at 140% chaos damage taken, or 20 wither stacks). This has proven to be very useful against high health mobs / bosses, especially if you can pre-cast the totem at no damage cost (think about Atziri's phase changes, for example). This Scion also uses Vaal Lightning Trap, if needed, to apply shocking ground to an area, again increasing the damage taken by the mobs affected. Her curses help with sustaining the damage, too: Temporal Chains increases the duration of debuffs on targets (contagion, essence drain, wither or decay for example), allowing for a smoother gameplay, while making enemies' curses on her less effective. Don't go mad if your hideout ED tooltip looks low in terms of damage; it does not take into account the effect of Vaal Lightning Trap, Wither, enemies' chaos resistance reduction (from the Occultist sub-ascendancy) and combat gains (increased damage after killing a cursed enemy for example). The real DPS you do in optimal conditions, when all of the debuffs are up, is way higher.

The defensive options are great too: the Mistress of Agony has got strong evasion mechanics and a decent block chance, plus the extra mitigations from Fortify (applied in a wise way via Shield Charge if needed). She has two very strong defensive curses in her arsenal: Enfeeble and Temporal Chains. The synergistic flask setup and the life regen (converted into ES regen via Zealot's Oath from our only unique flask) from gear / passives / Essence Drain help a lot with survivability when mapping, breaching and lab running.

The theory is simple: we aim to have a decent ES pool (over 8k is achievable without tremendous gear costs, over 10k (with a peak of ~11k) with mirrorworthy gear, reserving most of our mana for curses via Blasphemy, and using a mana potion for no regen situations. The health (converted in ES) regen is quite good because Essence Drain has a regen mechanic included into it (Regenerate 0.5% of Debuff Damage as Life). That 0.5% is added to all the other sources of regen, like the ones we can get from our gear or the passive tree. To take advantage from this extra regen, in the lowlife version we use The Sorrow of the Divine unique flask, so we gain Zealot's Oath and Consecrated ground (and some extra damage too!),

This is not a leech build, so we have to adjust our gameplay accordingly. Dodging whatever mobs throw at us is important, especially in the highest tier maps and unforgiving fights like Uber Trio, Atziri, Core Malachai, Pale Council, Guardians and Shaper.

In optimal conditions of gearing / character level (90+), we should aim at these values:

- Overcapped elemental resistances to deal with Elemental Weakness maps
- Positive chaos resistance
- 9k+ Energy Shield (in the low life version)

2. Pros / Cons

Spoiler

PROS

+ Very funny and active gameplay
+ Very efficient in solo playing
+ Safe playstyle, you are a dotter and not a spammer of a single skill so you have time to dodge whatever mobs throw at you
+ Reflect proof, since chaos damage rocks
+ Can do all map mods!
+ More than decent clear speed if you aren't a fan of backtracking for crap currencies :D


CONS

- In parties this build lacks of burst damage, so it's a lot less efficient
- Hall of the Grandmasters CI champions cannot be killed with pure chaos damage builds like this one, but if you arrange a Scorching Ray setup in the Shav you can still complete the map to get the bonus objective on the Atlas
- No Regen maps: they are perfectly doable, but I find them incredibly annoying; I don't love to spam a mana flask every 5 seconds

3. Passive Tree

Spoiler

Level 100 Passive Tree

If you want to check the build endgame setup with mirrorworthy gear and its full gems / passives you can use this pastebin link in Path of Building:

https://pastebin.com/pLXw3vwQ

Please note that the passive tree is optimized for level 100, with 127 talent points spent; those include the extra passives we get from the Scion Ascendancies and from helping Eramir killing all the bandits.


Witch variant

Spoiler

On request, I deployed a Witch Occultist version of my Ascendant. It's more oriented to defense, but the damage is still very high thanks to the Occultist tools (Void Beacon is amazing).

Level 100 Witch Passive Tree

PoB pastebin link: https://pastebin.com/RtRDac2c

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