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

True. ED on it's own is just a clearing skill these days. It is absolutely useless against bosses without Blight, and even for clearing it requires a 5/6L + 3/4L. This makes an ED char forced to rely on 4 active skills in order to be competitive against other builds in overall efficiency, which is absurd. We hardly have room for any utility or CWDT setup, while other builds can slap on a 6L and be good to go. I do love our current playstyle, but I do miss some of the utility we used to be able to fit.

I just wish one of those new boots/helmet possible rolls would be faster casting or increased aoe that would make me do 2x cast when channeling setup spell totem-wither-cwc-contagion and blight-cwc-ED-swift afliction-controlled destruction-void manipulation, I think it could work fine for both single and clear dmg especially we could get more utility and cwdt.

I will go with this build as my starter for abyss.

Never played ED before, wish me luck hehe

But i will probably use Brightbeak for the clearspeed.

I dont have intention to kill boss with the first build, so, clear speed meta we go.

ED builds are simply good league starters, right? I'm so torn apart, I don't know if should I make it to earn some currency and skip most bosses after T10+, or simply use different build to start league with.

If you add a Blight setup, or even invest in Allelopathy, your boss DPS is effectively Shaper ready from level 70. This is very nice, as killing bosses is an important part in filling out your atlas early on.

Added: Updated gear from all my 3 ED characters during 3.0 to show off some examples of possible gearing. Added screenshot of ladder placement during Mayhem to show off build potential in early league progress.

How does Trickster compare to Scion (occultist/trickster)? Haven't seen you talk about this variant.

Thank you!

While the Occultist part of the Scion ascendancy is very good, I feel that the Trickster part is very lackluster. It gives you a slightly worse version of the regeneration, but it does not have anything close to the Trickster charge generation, mana management or attack/cast speed. I choose to play Trickster mostly for these three things, so picking Ascendant for a MoM ED build doesn't make much sense to me. Ascendant is very strong in terms of raw DPS vs. guardians and Shaper, and might be better than both Occultist and Trickster for these bosses in 3.1. The problem with Ascendant is just that Trickster will still be better for pretty much everything else, including boss killing in maps (assuming you move fast enough to have a few seconds left on charges when engaging a map boss).

Im really torn on making this my 3.1 starter or just going with the boring tried and tested slayer cyclone :(

from my league starter id like a char that can do most if not all maps on the atlas atleast once that includes all the vaaled red maps for atlas completion maybe guardians [even if its with a couple deaths i play soft core] with decent clear speed for farming t10-t13 maps after ive sorted my atlas out

I dont play solo self found so i can buy up cheap gear to help out ofc my big goals early on will be sorting my atlas, getting high level masters/gems/leveling up and working up enough currency to get a 6 link, allelopathy, breath of the council and eventually biscos [my long term goal after that is to make a lab farmer and mix it up between lab and mapping on essence drain and farm my way up to a headhunter]

this goal is very similiar to my goal last league my league starter was a vaal pact/dark pact crit beserker and shortly after a lab farmer to mix and match and on a very small budget i managed to slowly earn my way up to a headhunter


my questions are can essence drain do all of that on a reasonably small budget with pretty low end gear?

also i was planning to go trickster dual curse with a witchfire brew and blasphemy/temp chains to make boss killer slightly safer/easier would this work on your version of your build [which is by far my favorite!] id be getting an extra curse from the skill tree ofc for just 5 passives it also comes with 10% curse effectiveness :)

thanks in advanced to anyone that can answer any off these question!

When it comes to budget/performance, I guess you can just check out the listed gear. You can see that is is mostly garbage. Excluding Breath of the Council, nearly all of it cost me just a few chaos or is self found. At the start of the league, I save up for Allelopathy (it has been around 25c on day one in everything I did in 3.0). With Allelopathy only, you can crush everything up to red map bosses. At this point you could consider getting Breath of the Council to make it easier to stay at 20 stacks of Blight and move out of abilities as well.

The great thing about the build is that if you decide to keep the ED/blight char for farming t11-13 maps, you really don't need to worry about a 6L at all, making the total budget needed for the entire character around 100c for "strong enough" gear.

Possibly interesting note:
My gear listed from both Turmoil and Mayhem is pretty much exclusively self found. In mayhem, The only things I bought were BotC, the helmet and Allelopathy.


When it comes to including Despair in 3.1, I am currently torn between getting dual curse from the tree or corrupting an Aylardex to +1, and then getting the curse itself from either the Witchfire Brew or manually cursing with an unlinked curse. We'll see what I end up with.