[3.1] [Theorycrafting] Volatile Dead Hiero (?) Inq (?)

Just watched the newest Exiled podcast and both Ziggy & Ziz suggested Inquisitor for many benefits including cast speed.

EE was talked about and not recommended, EO wasn’t really mentioned but that doesn’t mean it won’t be good.

While Volatile Dead looks cool & will give it a go, looks like the damage from the buffed DD is going to be quite good.

😉 We live in interesting times....

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Burmania написал:

So I was doing some theory crafting myself and came up with the following:

I was personally inclined to choose between Assassin or Inquisitor, as they are my favorite ascendancies and seemed like the best option for carrying this character from mapping into bossing (if I so desired).

Inquisitor will most likely be the better map clearer because of Instruments of Virtue, but might feel better to carry through to endgame with Assassin.

Assassin will have a great way to generate power charges for end game content (outside of map rushing) and I would expect it to feel the best because of the high crit chance.

I was also thinking about how the skill will work. The way the description explains how the damage is dealt it seems like the 3% corpse life damage will be upfront, and the fire damage will be what the ball deals. What this means to me is that this is going to end up being a great character to map with that can swap in Detonate Dead for end game boss content.

Inquisitor Setup:
6L Volatile Dead - Controlled Destruction - Inc Crit DMG - Inc Crit Strikes - Inc AoE/Conc - Faster Casting/Spell Echo (whichever ends up feeling better)

3L(?) Desecrate - Spell Cascade - Faster Casting
3L(?) CWDT - Immortal Call - Warlord's Mark

4L Unearth - Spell Totem - GMP - Faster Casting
4L Herald of Ice - Ice Bite - Curse on Hit - Assassin's Mark
4L Shield Charge - Faster Attacks - Fortify - Culling Strike(?)

Talent Tree

Uniques Intuitive Leap, Inspired Learning, Brightbeak

Shield Charge around like a madman with Brightbeak. Swap to doryani's for bosses, if necessary.
I'm hoping to be able to get some shatters and Frenzy/Power charges from Herald of Ice, although we will not know how likely that is until we get to play around with the skill.

Since we are relying on crit, we don't need fire penetration because Inevitable Judgement will set enemy resistant to 0% when we crit. From playing around in POB (using fireball as the damage skill) Crit strikes would likely be necessary to get that crit up.

Assassin Setup:
Same setup with 2 small changes, switching out inc crit and assassin's mark. Could add in blasphemies for either setup but I want to try and maximize MOM.

6L Volatile Dead - Controlled Destruction - Inc Crit DMG - Fire Penetration - Inc AoE/Conc - Faster Casting/Spell Echo (whichever ends up feeling better)

4L Herald of Ice - Ice Bite - Curse on Hit - Flammability/Poacher's Mark

Talent Tree - basically the same as inquis.
Uniques Intuitive Leap, Inspired Learning, Brightbeak, Pure Talent (new unique jewel)

With Assassin, penetration is going to be more useful for us. We switch out inc crit (as we won't need the added crit in the 6L because of all the bonus crit we get from being an Assassin) and put in Fire Pentration. We use Pure Talent for a 5% pen - I am unsure how great of a damage boost this will be versus 30% multi from a rare jewel, I'm assuming the 5% pen will be better for bosses as I would assume having a balance of multi and penetration is better than just having a large amount of one or the other.

This is just something to consider and mess around with. I was also thinking that maybe added cold would fit as the damage modifier is 120% and will benefit pretty well from flat added. That would also help for shatters and frenzy/power generation. If it turns out that Herald just doesn't work that well, then throwing Elemental Focus in would be the obvious choice and will be used for leveling.

I am going to try this as an assassin build on my stream and see how it goes. I think that using VD for leveling and mapping will probably feel clunky at first and ramp up until end game. Swap in DD for end game content (elder/shaper/atziri) and see how it goes. With the insane damage of Detonate Dead I'm expecting some decent results.

Hello,

Thanks for the awesome post man !

I was wondering, why not take those nodes in your tree?

To avoid self casting wouldn't it be possible to use a totem for both corpse generation and using skills like VD or Cremation?

Would be fun to use a totem that spams the floor with corpses and another triggering a detonation or crematio etc.

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JohnnyV76 написал:

To avoid self casting wouldn't it be possible to use a totem for both corpse generation and using skills like VD or Cremation?

Would be fun to use a totem that spams the floor with corpses and another triggering a detonation or crematio etc.

It's ofc possible :)

what about volatile dead on a cast on crit or cast on kill support gem? do you think thats viable as well? what skill would be best to use with it? maby molten strike?

There's a pre-cast buff missing, like Desecrate + Spell Cascade + Faster Casing + Arcane Surge, this would add a nice damage numbers to Volatile Dead.
Came to this tree.
PoB shows like 50k damage for Inquis (naked, HoI, AssassinsMark, 5L, 3 power charges up, 17 lvl gems, after cast and attack, VD + ConcEffect + ElemFocus + ICS + ICD). With double Divinarius, Carcass and Diamond flask it's more like 100k+ (per ball i guess). Looks promising.

"

► 6L : Volatile Dead + Cascade + Controlled Destruction + Elemental Focus + Fire Penetration + Concentrated Effect

Curious about this. Isn't cascade decreasing the dmg of VD, too?

Hey everyone wanted to chime back in.

tl;dr
Switched to DD over VD. Current tree: http://poeurl.com/bFxS
(DD) New proposed tree for level 90: http://poeurl.com/bFz1
(DD) New proposed tree for level 95: http://poeurl.com/bFz2


6L Detonate Dead - Elemental Focus - Chance to Ignite - Spell Cascade - Inc Crit
4L Desecrate - Spell Cascade - Faster Casting - Arcane Surge (level 7)
3L Cremation - Chance To Ignite - PCoC
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I made all of my assumptions based off of NOT YET playing VD and DD. So, please don't blame me if you don't like the build and don't be afraid to continue using any tree you might have planned yourself. This is a theorycrafting thread afterall!

After a few days of playing it (level 77 as of this post) I've made some changes and took some notes from Pohx and Ziggy and what they were doing.

First big note:
Cremation is insane. If you aren't already doing a poet's pen hype leveling for a character, then cremation in a nycta's (or any 3 link) with Controlled Destruction and Elemental Focus is actually super powerful and makes bosses trivial. Give it a try. You could use it as a main leveling skill honestly, maybe just tack on GMP and see how that feels. I personally think it shines socketed into Nycta's.

Second big note:
VD doesn't feel very good. It really doesn't.
When the patch first came out there was a bug where sometimes the balls would deal no damage when they had to travel further than a screen or around corners. This was very frustrating because I could watch the balls hit - assuming they would kill - and end up face to face with death when they did not. There is also a lag time between spawning the balls and their AI targeting. This feels really clunky and since there isn't a way to speed that up (minion speed or projectile speed, think SRS) then that feeling will never change. For map clearing, I think because of that factor it is actually really weak, but Detonate Dead ends up shining.

Third big note:
I drastically underrated the power of the abyss jewels. I think a tree that favors as many jewels as possible might be the best option this patch.

Important note about Spell Crit Interaction:
As far as I can tell. Detonate Dead does not scale with crit spell/spell multi nodes.
However, Volatile Dead does. The trees will look different because of this.
That means that for a Volatile Dead tree we would want Annihilation (witch) and Doom Cast (Shadow), but for Detonate Dead you do not want these trees.


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Changes I've made: (again, influenced from watching some streamers as well as playing with some stuff myself)

Went with Inquis initially (even though I said I would try out Assassin) beacuse I was worried about the amount of investment to get Assassin going and thought that if I want to use this character to map clear Inquis would be the better option.

Current Links:
6L Detonate Dead - Elemental Focus - Chance to Ignite - Spell Cascade - Inc Crit - Inc AOE/Conc

4L Desecrate - Spell Cascade - Faster Casting - Arcane Surge (level 7?)

3L Cremation - Chance To Ignite - Power Charge on Critical

Aura Blasphemy - Temporal Chains

Notes About Links:
6L I am not using a 6L currently (still on 5) and would love some feedback on perhaps a better 6L setup. For right now DD - EF - CtI - SC - Inc Crit feels pretty good and I'm happy with it up to yellow maps thus far.

Threw out Controlled Destruction for Chance to Ignite to help the scaling of both the % damage and base fire damage and to help out the crit strike. Since DD has a better scaling (both the % damage and flat damage) I think it makes more sense to scale as much fire and elemental as possible, rather than spell damage. For now, VD has taken the back burner because DD just feels much better to play.


4L Adding Arcane Surge to Desecrate helps out a lot. I am currently using level 7 arcane surge to ensure it goes off every time. At level 20 Desecrate will have a mana cost of 36. Leveling it to level 10 would generate Arcane Surge every two casts. I'll be testing this out as I level and see how that feels. Personally, I think having it matching the mana cost seems best for now though.

3L Initially I wanted to try and use HoI to generate charges. I don't think this will work very well because the feeling of the skill banks off of not destroying corpses with someting that isn't VD or DD. The build really shines when you can chain corpses between packs and if we were shattering, then that means we have to cast desecrate more which will slow us down.

So, to generate power charges, I have tacked PCoC into the Cremation 3L and it feels really good for stationary fights. I am not too worried about 100% uptime for clearing, but for abyss and bosses, PCoC works very well to keep the charges on. I took out Elemental Focus and put in Chance to Ignite because if I ignite enemies then we get +45% multi from Inquisitor's Righteous Providence Ascendancy trait.

Uniques
I have no idea what to use for this character post leveling phase, but here is what I have been thinking of for chase.
Weapon Doryani's Catalyst - lots of elemental, ele prolif for 3L Cremation ignite spread, tiny bit of leech.
Chest Belly of the Beast
Shield Vix Lunaris or Invictus Solaris (new unique shield). I like the idea of using Vix Lunaris so you don't have to worry about being frozen. A good spell crit shield may be a better option.
Belt Darkness Enthroned (2 abyss socket belt) - This will likely be BiS (besides maybe HH)
Helm Lightpoacher (Spirit Charges ok?)

- With my new proposed tree we could get 7 abyss jewels in the tree, and at least 3 in our gear, making that 10 total jewels and 10 total spirit charges for Lightpoacher.

"

nocx13 написал:

Hello,

Thanks for the awesome post man !

I was wondering, why not take those nodes in your tree?

I think there are better options than the fire tree.
Abyss jewels are incredible and I think we need to use more of them.

"

JohnnyV76 написал:

To avoid self casting wouldn't it be possible to use a totem for both corpse generation and using skills like VD or Cremation?

Would be fun to use a totem that spams the floor with corpses and another triggering a detonation or crematio etc.

A Spell Totem with Desecrate or Unearth would be a great option for boss fights! I don't think it is as good as self casting desecrate for map clear though.

If you used a totem you would have to cast totem, wait for totem to cast, then cast DD/VD.
It's just a bit slower, not necessarily worse.

I think you could come up with a pretty good all totem build with Heirophant or Chieftain. Heirophant would have a great way to generate Power Charges and if you self casted Unearth or Desecrate then you could do a DD totem and a Bodyswap totem (or some cool stuff like that).

GGG fixed VD bug with no damage out of sight yesterday, so these balls of death just destroy open maps at about 2 screens around. Like homing spark.

DD feels better at tight combat area due to fast damage. Maybe stronger in boss fights. But I don't think clearspeed of DD better than VD after the fix. No matter how I tried, it's not.

I really can't get the power of cremation skill tho. I think it's just useless due to the same damage as VD, but I'll give it a try one more time later.

P.s. Thanks for Arcane Surge tip. Helps a lot =)

UPD: Tested 3l Cremation with Controlled Destruction and Elemental Focus, got it now. Really helps with big ass mobs.
Also dropped Instruments of Virtue for c-ground tree, feels more tanky and comfortable.
And yeah, warlord's mark + blasphemy here, no more stupid deaths.