If I were doing ssf, I’d make liberal use of essences as needed, and that should help quite a bit.
The only time I traded for anything other than specific uniques was for post act-10 resists for my Juggernaut. I haven’t found it necessary to upgrade gear all that often, except for weapons, other than to cover resists.
Hahahah. SSF. I like that they have an acronym for playing the game the way most people normally play a single player game.
So i finally decided to spend the ~40 chaos needed to switch my Righteous Fire-totem Berserker VuurRegverdige over to using Soul Mantle and dual Kikazaru rings. I might have been able to spend less if I was willing to 5-link the Soul Mantle myself, but that would have required trading for Fusing Orbs anyway.
There’s good and bad with the switch. The bad news first - lost about 900 life (down to 5900 now) and a decent chunk of armor. I’ve already died a couple of times in situations that I might have survived before. My flask-and-run reaction time is mediocre at best, going to need to get better at that now.
On the good side, with -80% effect of curses on me from the rings, I can more or less ignore any curse thrown my way. The RF totem damage is way up with Soul Mantle’s increase to totem life plus the extra link (still 5-link, but now I don’t have to use one on Spell Totem). And best of all, I was able to drop Ancestral Bond so my Orb of Storms now deals damage, triggering Elemental Equilibrium, as well as spreading Flammability via Curse on Hit. No more need to use Lightning Trap to trigger EE, which greatly simplifies boss battle mechanics.
I recently switched up my fire nova miner’s movement skill to lightning warp after I got enough quality gems to make it work well. As I had been running 2 skills, this freed up a 3-link which I have no idea what to do with.
Anyone have any ideas? Currently running CwDT+IC+Inc Dur+Vaal Clarity. Running dual curse Temp Chains+Enfeeble on Blasphemy so I don’t want another curse. I also don’t want another Vaal skill as the clarity uptime is extremely helpful. I probably want something else attached to another CwDT as another active skill would detract from mine laying and defensive movement time.
I’ll probably start with CwDT+Arctic Breath+GMP but if anyone has a better (or even just plausible) idea I’d love to hear it.
CwDT with Frost Wall may help give you breathing room.
Can’t recall if you can place mines over the wall, though as I think it blocks projectiles.
can’t place mines anywhere other than right at your feet so that wouldn’t matter. And I’ll be able to warp around them fine. If the mine explosions penetrate those walls it could work extremely well. If not, it still might be better than AB. I’ll give it a shot right now. Thanks.
edit: and a quick run tells me that I can indeed warp over them and mine explosion ignores them. Definitely going to give this one a longer look; it might get me killed at some point (I already died once when I couldn’t pick a valid point to warp to so didn’t move) but I suspect it’ll save me more often.
Vortex.
I’ll give this a try tomorrow. Frost wall has been both good and bad; pretty sure it saved my hide in a projectile heavy map, but it definitely got me killed in a tight hallway full of revenants and undead. Well, if I’d been faster and knew exactly how revenants worked I might have lived, but my usual method of just running away didn’t work there and I was too slow to think to warp.
For anyone like me who didn’t know precisely how the revenants explosion works: first they revive the undead. Then when you kill that revived minion it explodes after a short delay (2 seconds-ish).
Around level 60 on my chaos hierophant. At a point where the build is starting to feel a good bit stronger. It’s kind of fun clearing rooms full of stuff from off screen. I’ve bought a couple of pieces of gear that should be good for bringing some pain, but can’t wear them yet.
It took me quite a painful few tries through the bloody aqueduct with some rare revenants to figure out where the deadly exploding corpses were coming from :(
In which act do you find these exploding revenants?
Are those the things that explode when my totems punch them, or the things that explode when my totems punch them?
I get confused.
You’ll start seeing revenants in act 4.
And I think Bateau is the winner of the “what should Outlandish do” prize (there is no prize). Vortex is working quite well, thank you.
Yeah, Vortex was a good call. I switched AB for it after that post, and it’s totally better.
My hierophant smoked Kitava and can now move on to mapping. Seriously, I think the fight took maybe 90 seconds (there’s considerable down time in that fight)? I did get nearly one-shot once. Not even sure by what. But I hit my panic flask and health was back to full.
The sunder Juggernaut was fun, but this build is so much better for bosses.
Edit: Pretty damn pleased right now. Completed merciless lab for the first time. Izaro died ridiculously fast. Ended up with Sin Trek boots out of one of the lab chests, which fit my build rather well and give me 5% more move speed than I had. Decided to enchant them and got 6% chance to dodge spell damage, which is not too shabby. I needed 3 red sockets in my boots for CWDT+IC and wound up with 4, so decided to throw stone golem in there.
Nice! Don’t believe I’ve seen one of those.
Did Beachhead for the first time today. tier 15. The shards after the boss fight looked like that x5.
Kind of thinking I should try Atziri.
cant do uberlab yet because I still haven’t found two of the qualifying areas.
Had my first exalted orb drop yesterday. In a tier 5 map, of all things.
I have 2 ex from my years of softcore self-found. I have used a few chaos experimenting with master mods, but besides that I don’t use anything above alchs.
I have failed merciless lab several times on the first boss fight. I just don’t have the life or mitigation on this char to survive anywhere near him. So now I am going to try and pick up a few levels (currently 73) in low level maps, but I might just have to wait for the next big tree revamp to re-do my build for more survivability (currently ~2.5k life, 55% phys mitigation, as a melee char wince).
L60 alt sunder berserker is just waltzing through acts, nonchalantly facetanking most bosses. Don’t even have cruel lab or virtually any post act 4ish sidequests completed yet. Other than the odd levelling alch and a bit of crafting here and there, the only investment has been a few chaos to keep weapon pdps up to snuff. Sunder does some damage.
