[3.7] SC/HC - ED/Blight Trickster - Up to 10k eHP, Layered Defense, 3m DPS

I just made a 94 Occultist and a 94 Trickster into the same build to see how strong LL could be and how it felt for the upcomming league. I used the following gear:



It is by no means optimal, but most of it is legacy in terms of ES rolls, and I still hit around 10-11k ES on both versions (Could have gotten more on the Trickster if i went with Shade Form). The price premium to get the extra curse and slightly higher EHP is hardly worth it at all in my opinion. With current and realistic gear, I would have ended up with similar EHP as I have on my Trickster from Harbinger with this gear:



Instead of using gem slots to fit auras to force LL, I think I would rather aim for a +1 curse Aylardex and selfcurse Despair where needed or something similar. At the very least, I am sticking with Trickster as my ascendancy. It provides both smoother progress with bad gear as well as being competetive on high end DPS.

How can Trickster compete with Occultist's Void Beacon you ask? The main damage output of ED these days comes from Blight, ironically. The MASSIVE bonuses to cast speed that Trickster provides makes it easy to reach max stack of both Wither and Blight, while the Occultist struggles with a similar investment in the passive tree. Even though simulated DPS will most likely favour the Occultist, the Trickster is much closer if not even better than the Occultist in a real world (lol, computer game) scenario.

I'm curious why you don't craft jewelry with Essence of Envy to get %increased chaos damage stat

the unique's we use make it hard to get resist. We need jewelry with the most resist possible and the correct % to add up. For me anyways

Yeah, the MoM version really wants a high dex roll on one ring, good life and mana rolls as well as all the resists you can get. This is a tall order If you want to start essence crafting as well. It would be optimal, but it is not something I will prioritize during hardcore leagues.

So @Nedieth, what will be your starer for this league, Occultist or Trickster?

I always try to fool myself into thinking that Occultist is nice to play, and I want to do that the next league. It just isn't, and 5 min of playing Occultist today was enough. Trickster for life, baby!

So new despair curse at max lvl and quality would give us 6% more chaos penetration against shaper and 7% more dmg over time and that sounds weak but it means that now with this curse we gona do more dmg than before just becouse of penetration. Normal shaper chaos res is 25% so with curse its 19% also if we would go for that extra curse on enemy with longer way we would get 10% more curse effect that can lower shaper defence to 18% of chaos res. Also with those new shaper/elder items we can be able to make most of our spell 6l and thats another dmg boost and we dont gona need so many uniqes, that means we gona have more hp life and resist that gona make us more tanky but im still not sure about those items rolls so i have to wait for full possible prefix and sufix list before considering them as viable option.

I love ED but boss fights feels so slow always, still same in 3.1?

It all depends of those new items rolls if some of them gona have supports for chaos/dot its gona be faster than now if not it may be same/bit faster/bit slower need proper calcs to tell you but im to lazy right now coz i going to work soon.

I can't understand why there was no compensation on ED after the Wither nerf, which wasn't clearly intended for ED builds.

ED alone has a poor DPS output in 3.1, no matter what ascendancy you go for. You can go Trickster, Ascendant or Occultist and still be slow when compared to a fuckton of other skills.

The poison component in the double dipping era was about 65% of ED's single target damage. The buffs of 3.0 made ED extremely strong for clearing but the single target is so lackluster that we need another skill to support it.

Sadly, in single target, ED has become a support of Blight.