[3.5] CoCcultist BURST - barrage CoC [1.36M+ Dps, spell spam, calculations, beginner/cheap]

Message me in game if you have any questions:
"SquishyKunGottaGitGuD" in Betrayal.


Video demonstration of build, Tower T15 map:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLnqTfq_rJ0


How it works!
We use bursts of projectiles at enemies to 'target' them and when hit, our linked spells fire at them in order. We make up for quality of spell damage through sheer quantity.

Occultist?!
Energy shield (ES) is ideal for this build as it gives a high health pool with the same mitigation as life, and occultist gives massive bonuses to ES. Occultist has two ES key nodes which give us 250 flat ES, which is about 1200 extra ES. Furthermore, we get stun immunity, 1% ES regenerated for 4 seconds for each enemy killed (huge regen for clear), and if you can evade a boss for 2 seconds to start ES recharge, you can get your ES to keep recharging regardless of damage for the next 4 seconds. Great recovery and extra ES. Next we get good damage, an extra power charge with damage and area of effect and an updated notable that gives 20% penetration for our cold and chaos added damages from bladefall and glacial cascade.


You don't use vaal pact?!
Correct. Vaal pact increases recovery by 20% normally to 40% (2x 20% life leech recovery). So we simply stack regen to about 10-15% (and an extra 30% when clearing mobs for 60% base recovery total!!!) and use normal life leech recovery rate for 30-35%. This is slightly less but it means we can avoid pathing 20+ points to pluto in exchange for a mere 5% extra recovery which would make our regen not apply at all. Regen also applies out without attacking so you can kite while taking hits without having to worry as much. But if everything fails we still can do something about it ... firstly, vaal pact AND leech can be crafted on an amulet for 4 seconds with a 12 second cooldown from the time of casting. Secondly, evade for 2 seconds to start occultist ES recharge. Third, vaal discipline for emergencies which stacks with everything!

Essentially recovery isn't an issue without vaal pact.



Barrage for burst fire
This is the core attack of the build, where we fire periodic bursts of projectiles that are skillfully timed. Each critical hit on an attack will proc a spell, and barrage fires 5+ projectiles after a wind-up per attack. 40% of the attack time is used for wind-up. We can time the cooldown of cast on crit to land on the wind-up of each attack to have an even, maximum proc rate. The maximum proc rate I have obtained for barrage is 5.5 casts of each spell per second, or 180ms cooldown.


Cast on crit
Each critical HIT on barrage will proc a spell as long as it isn't in cooldown. Cooldown time is 150ms, but realistically 180ms (... which I think might be due to the servers or my ping being 30ms? Hoping to get this clarified at some point).


Barrage build theory (math)



Bringing the theory out of the books ... how to calibrate your CoC



My notepad scribbles from testing if you want an example:


The result of a perfectly calibrated CoC, what you WANT:



Notice:
- I use blood rage so I have it active with 3 frenzy charges from frenzy.
- Frost bolt and ball lightning have replaced my main spells so I can see and count exactly what is happening.
- My aps is on the character page and I can keep an eye on it so I can make sure I know the correct aps for the procs.
- My aps range was +58% to +64% for 4 triggers on 1 barrage at the right attack time.
- Change the jewels around to find the precise attack time for your weapon.


OK, so what spells should we be using?
When it comes to playing with CoC, it's all about picking your favourite poison. Pretty much anything works but some things work better in different builds. For this build we require TWO skills.

Bladefall (green) and Glacial cascade (blue): Physical base so we can use "#% physical gained as extra *****" which helps a lot, and hatred. This also shotguns to a degree, so for each spell a boss will usually take 2+ hits on each spell being cast (so multiply by two I guess... which is awesome!) Great AoE too. This is my recommendation. Furthermore because we have a lot of chaos and cold damage with this we get some nice synergy with the occultist node Void Beacon.

Arc (blue) and ball lightning (blue): pretty nice damage and shocks. Clears well. A well rounded choice. Use wrath instead of hatred.

Others ... pick up a tabula and give it a shot in the blood aqueducts!


Passive trees for progression:
Level 72:
poeurl.com/cdE4

Level 80:
poeurl.com/cdE9

Level 89:
poeurl.com/cdE6

Level 98:
poeurl.com/cdE8

At level 72 you can make the switch, before then level in blood aqueducts using blade vortex linked to increased duration, added fire/efficacy, power charge on crit and with hatred and herald of ash. Or you could use bladefall + added fire + controlled destruction + power charge on crit.

Obtain the wicked ward and vial bastion parts of occultist first to help with survivability. An example level 72 tree with points close within 21 (your respec points) of the level 72 CoCcultist tree is here:
poeurl.com/cdFc

Pantheon:
Major
Soul of Arakaali: reduced damage over time, reduced damage from shocks. 50% increased recovery rate of ES if you've stopped taking damage over time recently... this work with blood rage and immortal call, meaning when we take a hit and aren't taking damage over time already we will then regain ES much faster for a short period.

Minor
Soul of Tukohama: barrage requires us to stand in front of a target and attack them while still due to the burst nature of the skill. We gain up to 8% reduced phys dmg taken, and up to 2% life regen depending on how long we've tanked that targets attacks while still. My preference.

Soul of Ralakesh: a valid choice, reduces blood rage damage and other phys damage while moving. Makes us immune to blind which is very helpful.


Sustaining charges is easy!
If you require frenzy charges you SHOULD take frenzy charge duration so you have more time to kill the boss and run to the next mob without losing charges. Assassins mark and enough duration can be used to replace power charge on critical support as well. Sustain of charges simply means not losing charges and being able to get them from mobs. For shaper or elder pcoc + frenzy is ok, but it's up to you.


Dps? Do you even kill things?
Yessir. If you've calibrated it correctly you'll have 2 procs of each spell per barrage. Simply take you damage per hit out of PoB and do the calculation from there. For example:

My spells hit at least twice each. So x2.
My spells are cast twice per barrage.
My aps = 2.77, with 2 spells.
Glacial cascade = 52553.3 (46989.4 on bosses)
Bladefall = 69048.3 (58381.2 on bosses)
DPS = 2.77*2*2*(58404.2+75374.4) = 1,482,266
DPS = 2.77*2*2*(52220.8+63730.0) = 1,284,734 on bosses

Realistically, because of my effective crit chance on attacks my dps is about 92% of the above. So 1.36M and 1.18M DPS respectively.

And my gear isn't even maxed. With high end investment you can exceed 2M realistic dps, if you are standing in front of the boss and landing all your projectiles with your flasks and charges up.

Some fights require you to move so ye, don't go expecting the impossible when you need to be a long way away!


What about if I don't have enough barrage projectiles? What if I have cooldown reduction on gear?




My build:

Weapon, we want high crit, attack speed, multi and spell damage. Example NICE wand:


Armour, general high ES gear with accuracy, resists and other essential stats:


Body armour options, damage or survivability or cost:


Belt, high ES, resists, strength, cooldown recovery is FANTASTIC but optional, crafting bench has some nice suffixes too like regen.


Amulet, %ES, Gain physical as extra COLD (we are cold pen remember?), resists, accuracy and VAAL PACT suffix for crafting.


Rings, resists and accuracy, unique options add a LOT of damage.


Jewels, key unique jewels greatly enhance the build but are by no means necessary to start:


Flasks:


Gem setup:


My current gear at time of posting:


Path of building paste bin for my current character:



Budget tips for beginners:
- The tree and levels are important, level 80 is where it will start to come together.
- Starting dps should be around 500k, but it gets better. Low dps feels fine if you are get all the crits.
- skin of the loyal is cheap! Tabula is an option if you don't need the ES. You need the 6L.
- no need for expensive jewels
- 7.5k es is easy to get and fine for mapping up to T10
- nice dps, but you still need to do the calculations ... and your dps may be a bit low if you can't get 6 projectiles. Still sufficient for other stuff...
- fundamentally, you MUST get 91%+ crit chance, 80%+ barrage crit chance and with a diamond flask have >88% crit chance effective in path of building on barrage. This build feels TERRIBLE without near perfect crit chance.
- If you are willing to spend 60 regrets, you can level with Alleopathy unique gloves and blight. It's a similar build but gets upwards of 600k dps now and only costs ~10-20c to start.

Example gear for when you've just jumped into the maps:
(You'll be level 75 in blood aqueducts and ready to roll by the time you've gotten this less than 60c worth of gear!)



Thanks for reading!

Thoughts on Skyforth instead of PCOC, then maybe having a higher DPS support / another spell in there?

I've toyed with the idea of so that you don't need accuracy. I've done this in a previous league on just a normal wander and it was very effective, but not sure about coc, but it could be paried with global blind % on gloves.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

"

AvocadoCake написал:

Thoughts on Skyforth instead of PCOC, then maybe having a higher DPS support / another spell in there?

I've toyed with the idea of

so that you don't need accuracy. I've done this in a previous league on just a normal wander and it was very effective, but not sure about coc, but it could be paried with global blind % on gloves.

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

I've considered those previously and they're suitable ideas. However there are some things to consider...

For skyforth, true, you can use hypothermia which gives 16% more damage or so. But the best boots have cooldown on them and that's 10-16% more as well and they can have more than 100 extra flat es, but they cost more. However you still might want to go for skyforth even with tonnes of ex because if you have 20% cooldown on belt as well, then it can be hard to get the required maximum aps for 35% total cooldown reduction, in which case using skyforth lowers the aps requirement while giving the same damage with slightly less ES. You can also go buy leech skyforth too so you don't have to farm cruel lab for it (which sucks lol, i haven't got it yet). My current boots as an example:



Secondly, that amulet is a good idea in theory but in reality we want as much effective crit chance as possible and it requires the foe to be blinded. If you can blind the enemies you hit from a screen a way with good sustain on that then that amulet would be ideal. I don't know how to do that... so I can't recommend it. It would be a viable gear swap if you have a 'super high dps' full gear swap for U Elder or similar where you can sit on the boss and stibnite/blind them, but otherwise it might be hard. Also, the Multi/ES/%extra cold amulet usually gives quite a significant amount of dps so it's a little hard to say if going from 91% -> 95% crit chance actually gives more dps if you have the right setup. Essentially, I'm against it because I don't know how to get ranged blinds continuously. Good if you use cyclone instead of barrage though!

Edit: I didn't look at your wand closely, YES that is an interesting idea and it has synergy with barrage hitting a lot. It's definitely worth a try so I would like to hear how it goes. You still want some accuracy so you have 89%+ chance to hit lol.



Also, I'm posting a video tonight for this because I'm going to play with discharge on this character so you'll be able to see some gameplay. That build idea has a similar tree so I can just use 20? regrets and swap the gear sets to play both... probs won't go well coz discharge only gets 8.5k es lol.

Hmm, that's a fair point about the boots. That's probably better than Skyforth, especially as I don't mind splashing the cash a bit. My belt is "only" 11%, so I don't think that's an issue yet .

As for the wand, it's not a huge commitment either way as I'd need some accuracy anyway. I guess i'll just try both.