[3.21] Intuitive Link Herald of Agony Saboteur // Hands-off Virulence uptime // Mediocre defence

TL;DR

1. Intuitive Link can proc multiple spells at once with individual cooldowns, but is limited by poor damage scaling compared with other triggering mechanisms.
2. Intuitive Link requires some minion investments, Syndicate Operatives provide good trigger rate as Linked targets. Herald of Agony is the main skill of choice.
3. Intuitive Link vomits rapid-hitting Bladefall and Blade Blast to keep up Virulence stacks hands-off, increased to 70 using cluster jewels. Triggers are doubled by Triggerbots from Saboteur with improved cooldown recovery.
4. Intuitive Link drains mana over time, solved by reducing mana costs by 100%.
5. Anomalous Convocation to keep linked minions close, and helps Triggerbot targeting.
6. Limited room for defensive investments lead to “easy” defences including Grace, Suppression, Crit and Ailment immunity.
PoB: https://pastebin.com/Ss5cUK35 (15 divine budget)
Demo video: https://youtu.be/QHPClke5CY0

Exploring Intuitive Link for solo play

(This is not a build guide but more of an exploration of Intuitive Link.)

Building around Intuitive Link has been on my mind ever since I saw the Mastery “Link Skills can target damageable Minions”. I really wanted to find a way to make Intuitive Link viable. With Triggerbot introduced in the 3.21 Saboteur rework, triggering skills could have their time to shine, so I made the commitment.


Comparing triggering skills

First let’s take a look at the triggering skill gems and the required investments to understand why Intuitive Link is largely unused outside of proccing utility spells like curses and offerings:

Cast when Damage Taken (CwDT): 0.25s cooldown; 25% less damage penalty; building around requires: self-damage (e.g. Wardloop/recoup)
Cast while Channelling (CwC): 0.35s cooldown; 30% less damage and 1 link penalty; building around requires: channelled skill and mobility (e.g. Cyclone)
Cast on Critical Strike (CoC): 0.15s cooldown; 10% less damage and 1 link penalty; building around requires: attack-based skill, attack speed and critical strike cap
Spellslinger: 0.42s cooldown; 30% less damage but with 186% wand added damage (at level 22); building around requires: attack speed and mana reservation
Intuitive Link: 0.5s cooldown; 37% less damage penalty (at level 22); building around requires: minion hits

From this comparison, you can already see that the cooldown and damage penalty are inferior over other triggering methods, and its building around does not scale trivially with damage, making it a suboptimal main skill candidate. Still, there are some desirable qualities for Intuitive Link.

First, you get a low-maintenance, hands-free way of triggering spells, while not Wardloop-level of automated, is still good for freeing up your attention and targeting. Secondly, similar to CwDT, you can support multiple skills and have multiple minion hits trigger them all at once with independent cooldowns, which technically means triggering two spells is equivalent to a 100% more damage support, and with multiple Intuitive Link setups, it could scale well like the new Manaforged Arrows support. However, CwDT (specifically Wardloop) also have these two qualities, but the damage potential is 238% more (half the cooldown, much smaller damage penalty).

Implicitly, I have omitted the mana cost as a building around, because it will be a major issue for most trigger-based builds outside Mjölner or Wardloop with intrinsic recovery, but this is also an extra issue with Intuitive Link’s constant mana drain while active on top of the costs of triggered spells, which can only be reduced with %mana cost reduction. Not to mention, if the mana cost is not zero, having your mana drained (e.g. the Mana Siphoner ring) will instantly disable the Link.

/rant The low-maintenance is not guaranteed, that is because 1) Link spells have a base duration of 10s and needs refreshing similar to Offerings, 2) your Links will break if you wander too far away; and 3) annoyingly re-casting your Links have rather poor targeting and short range. While the Links do prioritize unlinked minions, it doesn’t prioritize targets with shortest remaining Link duration if all targets are linked, so that it is impossible to reliably refresh the uptime of all links, and very often you end up missing a minion or two despite recasting every 8-9 seconds.


Necessary ingredients for Intuitive Link

Just stating Intuitive Link requires “minion hits” is quite an understatement, because behind the scenes there are a lot more requirements:

1) You need to make the minion tanky (you die if any Linked targets die), which means scaling minion defences separately from our main character.
2) Minions you link to have to be damageable and should not expire/get resummoned (which is considered as dying).
3) To max out the trigger rate, you need fast-hitting or a horde of minions. Movement speed and aggression are also necessary so that they stay on the target.
4) You need to path to a Minion Defence Mastery to take “Link Skills can target damageable Minions”.
5) You need to solve the mana-drain issues on top of the mana costs.

Based on 1-3, my knowledge and experimentation points me to using Spectres as our Link target as they are easily the tankiest minions, as even Zombies die quite often in maps without resistance investments. In particular, Syndicate Operatives have high attack speed, are relatively aggressive seeking out targets. The downside being that Spectres have low summon limit, and they require additional investment into accuracy to hit.

In the end, I got my Spectres to level 25 (limit 3 spectres, higher max life), anointed Death Attunement (+1 limit), and supported them with Minion Life, Anomalous Feeding Frenzy (1% life gain on hit) and Bone Offering (69%/68% block chance with Minion Defence Passives for the Mastery). Only with these investments I feel they can reliably survive the Invitations and the Endgame bosses, which could be overkill and is more of a “feel” while testing in-game, so I am still not sure if there is an lower optimal investment level to keep our Link targets alive.


Choosing Herald of Agony as our main Skill

With so many auxiliary things (minion count, minion life, minion speed, mana) to invest in, I believed that spells that do not scale with minions are unlikely to be optimal trigger candidates, as that would stretch our tree too thin. But at the same time, minions like Phantasms or SRS are equally unfeasible as they will easily mess up your Link targeting and lead to suicides.

Another candidate is Absolution+Herald of Purity, with Crucible introducing Absolution damage scaling with minion damage on the tree, while also giving us Sentinels to Link to, saving a lot of investments on Spectres. However, the sentinels do not really scale well with high trigger rate (only duration is refreshed), not to mention the hefty 37% less triggered damage penalties for our hits (which allegedly does not apply to minions). As I failed to find potential in its PoB, I gave up… on finding a main triggered skill.

Instead, I found a minion spell that utilizes rapid triggers very well, so the gimmick is not totally lost, introducing Herald of Agony (HoAg).

In short, HoAg gives an undamageable (thus untargetable by Link) minion that gets stronger given how many Virulence stacks it has. To build up Virulence stacks you (not your minions) need to inflict poisoning hits rapidly, as the stacks also dissipate quickly, even faster when stacks are high.

To scale the damage of HoAg, which uses projectile attacks, there are a few axes.

1) Generic Minion-related stats. Minion attack speed and minion % damage are good. Flat damage (e.g. abyss jewels) is not good because Virulence scaling overshadows any added damage. Critical strike on minions are generally hard to scale, but not impossible if other stats reached diminishing returns (e.g. Spirit Offering over Flesh Offering with Virulence scaling attack speed).

2) Virulence cap. By default it is 40, but Pure Agony notable on medium cluster jewel raises it by 5. This can stack, so with 6 allocated the cap is raised to 70.


3) Gem level. The Virulence-related scaling increases with the HoAg level. Two important break points are at level 21 and 29, where attack speed per Virulence goes up from 4% to 5% to 6%. With 70 Virulence stacks this effectively increases attack speed by 70% past each break point. Scaling becomes ineffective beyond level 30. Conveniently, HoAg has Herald, Physical, Chaos and Minion tag, which makes it relatively easy to scale with a plethora of affordable awakened support gems, wand prefixes, corruption implicit and also the Chaos Mastery.


4) Chaos damage taken by enemy. While Awakened Added Fire is nice given HoAg’s high physical damage, I think it is easier to scale chaos damage as HoAg has an implicit 40% phys-to-chaos conversion. With improved cooldown on Anomalous Withering Step, Wither stacks can be sustained. Chaos resistance can also be lowered further with Despair, Profane Ground and Eber’s Unification/Crown of the Tyrant, though the opportunity cost of losing a +2 minion helmet is worth considering.


Sustaining Virulence is the most important for HoAg builds, where it is traditionally achieved with rapid hits (e.g. Storm Rain) or channelling skills (e.g. Winter Orb), both limiting the actions of the player and lead to inconsistent damage uptime, which is where Intuitive Link can shine, triggering two rapidly-hitting spells, Bladefall and Blade Blast with minimal upkeep.

Notably, Blade Blast requires lingering blades for rapid hits, so it was on a separate Link from Bladefall, which is supported with Concentrated Effect and Spell Cascade for more condensed lingering blade delivery. With these, we can have 2 Spectres Linked for each spell to can sustain 70 Virulence stacks quite reliably on a single target.

Putting all the remaining necessary pieces together, we have to still address poison chance for our spell vomit and mana issues, both for the HoAg reservation and the Intuitive Link mana costs for triggering spells. For poison chance, Divergent Herald of Agony is used, with remaining poison chance found on the Passive tree, jewels and Eldritch glove implicit.


For mana reservation, we use The Coming Calamity, and to solve mana sustain we remove mana costs altogether, achieved with Link and Mana passives near Scion start, crafted mods on rings and plenty of jewels. Inspiration support is only used to offset the weapon trigger cost, as we are socket-starved with two sets of Intuitive Link.


Defences

Here is where the build falls apart. With our investments stretched too thin across many required facets, defence has to come as an afterthought and see what we can patch up.

Some easy defence, given we are a Saboteur with Born in the Shadows blinding enemies, is Evasion and Suppression. I opted for permaflasks for Evasion using the Traitor, given how Brutal Restraint can enhance Minion stats on allocated notables, while also getting Despair aura via Witchfire Brew, conveniently a Stibnite flask.

Recovery comes from Ghost Dance and life gain on spell hit mods found on Elder rings and Watcher’s Eye mod for Vitality.

Jewels, given the large number of cluster jewels used to raise Virulence cap, provide much needed sources of Maximum Life, among other avoidances.
Elemental ailments is 100% avoided thanks to a shield, boots and the new Ancestral Vision jewel.

The Poison Mastery also give us full immunity against critical strikes.

As with many Evasion-based characters, we are weak against Physical hits given our low Life pool and no mitigation. It is just something to accept.

Annoyingly, many of our defences do not seem to work with environmental hazards, e.g. strongboxes, lab traps, Hydra turrets etc., as we cannot blind or poison them.



Side note: Golden Rule, Tainted Pact and Apep’s Supremacy

These three uniques were my first go-to defences, as we are a poison build while Herald of Agony actually recognizes self-poison when getting Virulence, so with the Golden Rule one can effectively double the rate of Virulence build-up. Coupling this with the Tainted Pact and even Apep’s Supremacy, there could be a great combination for defences. However, Tainted Pact requires you to be leeching to have get chaos-heals. While you hit very rapidly, each leeching instance is small and thus, have miniscule duration which does not add up. What results is bursty leech instances that activates Tainted Pact for a split second every time spells are triggered, but could not last the entire poison duration (base is 2s) and the poison kills you afterwards.

To be more specific, to have a single leech instance last at least 2 seconds, one needs to leech from damage equal to at least 4% of maximum life (2% per second). For a character with 4k life and leeching 0.4% damage (e.g. Eldritch glove implicit), one needs to inflict individual hits of at least 4k * 4% / 0.4% = 40000 damage, which is unlikely given our double damage penalties from Intuitive Link and Triggerbots sacrificing quality for quantity. Even disregarding the poison wear-off and the best case scenario for non-stop triggers (0.33s with 50% CDR), one still needs individual leeching hits of ~6.6k damage.

Even with Spiritual Aid anointment my triggers would not be sufficient, so Tainted Pact was unfortunately not incorporated. On the other hand, with Intuitive Link, I can sustain 70 Virulence stacks quite reliably on single-target even without Golden Rule, so it was not used either.


Cost and Summary

I spent around 15 divines on the build, mostly on the wand (3div, +2 chaos much cheaper than +2 minions) and the +2 Coming Calamity (4div if you want +2 minions). Second-most expensive items were the gloves (Eldritch implicits were painful), shield, boots and +2 minion helmet at around 1div each, just to squeeze in every bit of defence I could. Watcher’s Eye was 1 divine (for bad rolls), Ancestral Vision 70c, Virulence jewels around 40c each, 5-passive Voices 20c each and the -%mana cost jewels were around 10c each. Gems, including awakened and alt. quality ones, cost ~3 divines total.

While not the most expensive, I do feel there is little room for adjustment or improvement, as many investments and tree pathing are mandatory. Many gear slots could have better rolls (e.g. Voices, Watcher’s Eye, mana cost/poison chance, Eldritch implicits), but they do not bring transformative improvements to the build, at best freeing up a jewel socket or passive points. I might have gone overkill with Spectre investments given I have never died because of them past level 90, but I don’t seem to have much gained by taking away minion defences either.

To conclude, I think Intuitive Link as it stands is a bait for dealing damage, as everything it does CwDT Wardloop just do better – faster cooldown, more damage, better recovery and sustain and even less maintenance. Even if the mandatory gear pieces for Wardloop is arguably more than investing in minions, there is a much higher ceiling for damage. While Intuitive Link can offer a lot of utility for summoners, it also prevents you from using temporary or dispensible minions, further narrowing its application.

As final suggestions to GGG, I think Intuitive Link can have more defining features as a triggering skill. While it’s original niche is probably a summoner/support skill with longer trigger cooldowns, I don’t see any harm removing its damage penalty altogether as it could open up a different trigger playstyle (which is still 33% less damage than CwDT with capped trigger rate given twice the cooldown).

This is cool. Commented in reddit too but just wanted to reiterate that Triggerbots have been underwhelming for me thus far. After discovering that Firestorm triggers are broken, I kinda lost interest. Perhaps exploring Intuitive Link will be a worthwhile venture