Kinetic Bolt is sort of a chain lighting, but instead of chaining in continuous, well, chains, it ricochets bolts of I guess lightning off of mobs. Seems a pretty good AoE type thing, less great focusing on a single boss. The build I’m trying to follow (here) relies on golems, which I don’t have yet, for defense, so I’m using zombies. I’m also casting Contagion because, well, it’s there.
Bobtree
5067
I was getting client crashes today, like one every 2 or 3 zones, until I switched to the London server again. It might be a coincidence, or maybe the Delirium performance issues are more than skin deep. I know a lot what looks like FPS drops is really server-side hiccups, so some of them killing the client in a server-dependent way seems plausible.
Just got my animate weapon summoner through Act 5. She’s starting to hear voices in the delirium fog, which is a nice little flavor touch. To this point, I’d grade playing animate weapon as a C…pretty much average. Damage is fine, but no better than traditional summoning, and you have to do more work than just spamming Raging Spirits or Skeletons. Defense is about the same since I’m using zombies with meat shield, though that may go down if I end up dropping them later on. Of course, this is still early days. Got another 5 acts until maps and the real build evaluation can begin.
Was having horrible lag spikes that made character control and combat iffy, but my wife played last night and said it was fine, so maybe it’ll be ok today.
HFT/Elemental Hit totem build I am following is mostly cruising, bit squishy as early tree investment is traversal, so not a lot of life nodes. Currency has been pretty kind, so I am close to picking up a Frostferno, which seem to be going pretty cheap so early in the league. That will set me up to switch to EH Ballista once I hit 60.
Had a Vanity Div card and Lycosidae drop, so 6C right there. I recall Lyco’s being really pricey last league, but they doubled in price overnight.
I am waffling on the two builds I’ve been running. Animate weapon build feels pretty unfulfilling. And I tried a Bane build for a while and although it’s fine for packs the boss damage is so weak… Even using ED on bosses, it feels super weak. And given the damage going on in Delirium I’m casting about for a build that will be a little more tanky I guess.
Added Empire’s Grasp while I continue to level and get into a position to switch into EH. Empire’s Grasp is awesome, I always wanted to get around to a totem build with it. With three totems, I knock-locked Brine King in place and wandered around in relative safety as all the adds were also sucked into the fire mealstrom.
Leveling zombies was much rougher than in the past couple of league, but still not too bad. Hitting yellow maps now and starting to pick up a few decent pieces of gear, so the dps is smoothing out a bit. I suspect at 10+ zombies, things will be back in good shape offensively. Defensively, I’m still not sure as I haven’t done uber lab yet, so I’m not doing the cyclone cast-on-channel thing, nor do I have shaper’s touch gloves, so my ES is lower than normal. We shall see!
Bobtree
5074
Late game performance is just atrocious. I keep abandoning Delirium runs to escape the slideshow.
Animate Weapon did just fine in A6-10. Just finished beating up Kitava. The damage is pretty intense, more than I remember from skeletons last league. Earlier I said it felt average, but it’s definitely above that now. Defense feels a little weaker, as I’ve dropped the zombies, but I do still have a guardian and three spectres in meat shield mode.
I’ve died a couple of times to Delerium mobs, but nothing I couldn’t have avoided if I’d been more careful. I’ve been tearing through everything at light speed, using my Quicksilver flask pretty much constantly and only stopping when there’s loot to pick up. Which gets me killed occasionally when I run into a big bunch that hit me before the swords chop them up.
Just had my first death due to Delirium lag, and it was only in a tier 2 map. Complete slideshow, by the time I had control again, I was dead. Can’t imagine how much worse it must be in red maps!
Bobtree
5077
I tried a bunch of tweaks, and the one thing that actually helped was to disable the “Engine Multithreading” graphics setting. FPS is lower overall, but it doesn’t completely crater like before, going down to 20ish in bad situations instead of 5. My crashes on the US servers also stopped.
Got my first watchstone and first yellow map under my belt tonight. I’ve switched back to using zombies for some more defensive comfort, though I’m not sure how much it matters. The only dying I’m doing is of the insta-death variety, when some sort of delirium explosion kills me before I know what’s happening. I’m actively avoiding going through the mirrors until I’ve cleared large spaces around the area, sometimes as much as the whole map. I expect a patch in the next week or so will address some of the lag issues, at which point I may try doing bigger fights in the fog again.
On the damage front, the animated weapons are great. Bought a relatively cheap (10 chaos) 6-link corrupted chest, so I’ve got all the easy damage boosts active. Still lots of minor additions to go, of course, and they’ll all be expensive if I decide to chase them down. Still early in the league so I haven’t gotten all my gems lined up exactly how I want them yet…the RNG has not been kind in coloring sockets…but it’s just a matter of time.
Hit 60, switched out to Elemental Hit Ballista, but did not get a chance to play much further as it was late. Befire I switched form HFT, I died to a DOT in Cruel Lab after downing Izaro in the final trial, ugh! I was too pot happy and was only carrying 1800 life into the run.
I believe I have finally found a build I wanna take to maps. It’s a Summoner Guardian that uses Herald of Purity and Herald of Agony. You spin around with Cyclone applying poison and your heralds and crawler kill stuff. Closing out act 5 and it feels very smooth so far. Heck, I even killed Innocence without dying, which is a big deal for me.
I did revisit the Animate Weapon build and it feels pretty good. I watched a video of someone playing this build and they had their loot filter set up to show pretty much every weapon that dropped on the ground so he didn’t have to constantly spam bladefall or whatever to get weapons to animate. That seems like a really good idea to me, because spamming blade fall and animating them seems like the clunkiest part of that build.
Yep, that’s what I’m doing. It’s still clunky, but not as much as trying to use Bladefall all the time. I basically only cast Bladefall now when I need to resummon weapons en masse (usually after zoning) or to apply the EE debuff on rares/uniques.
On a different topic… have people run across any (interesting) cluster jewels? I have not seen a single one yet. Do you only get them from deliriums or can they drop from random mobs?
Romalar
5083
They drop from mobs in the delirium fog. I’ve gotten some interesting ones, though I have to craft or trade them to get something good for my build. They seem to start dropping around act 5.
Yeah, I would guess most builds could use one or two specific clusters, and there’s probably a couple of chase clusters most people would use if they got it. And as usual, if you are looking specific keystones, you will undoubtedly have to trade or craft to get it, rng being what it is.
Holy bejezus, full fire conversion Elemental Hit Balistae put out some DPS.
