[3.7] Essence Drain/Contagion Trickster (the best one)

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qaizr написал:

thanks for the guide!

i'm playing ssf and mostly following steelmage's build. using wand/shield for now but will start looking for bows/quivers. i'm in t7 maps and still looking for my last lab trial.

i'm chancing sorcerer gloves for allelopathy. would you chance something else or would the gloves be the most impactful? cadiro offered allelopathy for 1100 last night and i only had 750...that stung really bad :C
do you have any other advice for ssf?

i found these three chests that i'm thinking about using. i'd need more dex for the uniques. pretty happy with all the high rolls. which one would you use?

any other suggestions for my build?

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rlauren2 написал:

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qaizr написал:

Скрытый текст

thanks for the guide!

i'm playing ssf and mostly following steelmage's build. using wand/shield for now but will start looking for bows/quivers. i'm in t7 maps and still looking for my last lab trial.

i'm chancing sorcerer gloves for allelopathy. would you chance something else or would the gloves be the most impactful? cadiro offered allelopathy for 1100 last night and i only had 750...that stung really bad :C
do you have any other advice for ssf?

i found these three chests that i'm thinking about using. i'd need more dex for the uniques. pretty happy with all the high rolls. which one would you use?

any other suggestions for my build?

I'm too chicken to play HC or SSF, so I applaud your courage. I've never investigated chancing odds, so I can't really give you any advice on whether you'd get better returns on something else. Allelopathy does seem like a nice choice to roll the dice on, since most of the other useful uniques like Atziri, Vertex, Devouring Diadem, etc. can't be chanced anyways or will be ditched later like Zeel's.

For the armor, I'd go QotF, but only if you can get the appropriate flasks to reach the evasion numbers, and I'd only switch once you get the bow. That way you don't have to worry about trying to 6-link it yourself. Farming Porcupine div cards seems like the best route. Once you get them all, you can color it and swap out the tabula.

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qaizr написал:

for some reason i really like ID'ing gear so ssf is a good fit for me

thanks for the advice! i don't think i can roll the +2 support gems on the short bow since the div card drops an ilvl 50 bow. so i will probably look at 6 linking one i find.

btw, why don't you have vaal blight in your wand for the +2 gem level?

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rlauren2 написал:

Just lazy gem swapping. I'm much more sloppy with my actual character than my guide :)

I only recently grabbed Allelopathy, and I had been using vaal blight until then. I never pop the vaal blight anymore, should take it out completely and level something else but just haven't for some reason.

For the bow, the +2 support gems is a crafting bench option, not a rolled affix, so you can use it still. The only mod we need to roll on the bow is +1 to socketed gems, which conveniently enough is an ilvl 50 mod. The porcupine short bow is 100% viable to use.

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1) Diadem is a very viable route. If you use it, you can run Malevolence, Discipline, and Flesh and Stone in it without even needing an Enlighten. I would only do this if I were also wearing Perfect Form like you are, since you wouldn't want to undercut the ES gain from Discipline by spec'ing Acrobatics. You also could run Grace instead of Discipline in a Diadem/QotF combo and spec back into Acro. Basically Malevolence and Flesh and Stone are miles above everything else in terms of value, so there's not as much of a return on investment for using Diadem. You lose the easy ability to proc Arcane Surge on bosses and the -9% to nearby enemies chaos resistance in order to gain a little more ES or evasion. It's almost mandatory for builds that spam spells since you can recover ES faster than mana, but we don't have problems even on only 25% unreserved.

2) Yes. If I had to only run one curse in this setup, it's Despair. Getting the Temp Chains aura is nice, but not if it means losing Despair.

3) Malevolence would go in the Essence Worm since it has the highest mana reservation. You use this combo with MoM because it allows you to build up a much higher unreserved mana pool which buffers HP. You can also use Essence Worm without MoM and without EB in order to run Malevolence, Discipline, and Flesh and Stone. You're basically trading the stats on a ring for Discipline, so that depends on what you can make work with your other gear.

4) Correct. There's only one mandatory 6-link, so you can leave your armor unlinked if you have the bow. Later on, you can do some luxury combos to save gem slots if you end up having a 6-link armor and bow, like putting Contagion - Inc AoE - Intensify - Faster Casting - Arcane Surge - Flame Dash in the armor. That way faster casting supports both contagion and flame dash, and both can trigger arcane surge, and you can level arcane surge a bit more since your skills will cost more mana. Coloring that on a Perfect Form would be a nightmare though. This is all just hyper end-game fun, not necessary for now. In regards to crafting, annul = annulment orb. An item has to be rare in order to use the crafting bench, but we only want one stat on our rare item (+1 to socketed gems). The only process to obtain a one-stat rare is to use annulment orbs to randomly remove affixes.

5) Also correct. With EB, you will only be able to get Arcane Surge through the crafted mod Increased Cast Speed, Chance to gain Arcane Surge on kill. For mapping it won't make a big difference, but it does for bosses. With EB you won't have Arcane Surge for large portions of most boss fights.