Path of Exile

Deathwing

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Kinda hard to tell without the gems in PoB yet. Though, supposedly, if you're so motivated, you can switch your PoB to a branch that has the Reap gem. Still wouldn't be surprised if the gems turn out to be shit.

My investigations into Corrupting Fever has me doubting it's even worth it. There isn't that much increased phys and phys dot multi on the tree. Bleed gets a lot of its damage from ailment increases or bleed-specific nodes. So while my starter character has ~1.1M bleed dps, corrupting fever stacked to 10 is maybe doing 10% of that? That's including supporting it with Brutality and Swift Affliction. When you consider that you have to get your main skill to cost life in someway, that seems quite lackluster for a 4L of investment. In fact it might be a dps loss overall because lifetap support(~30% more multiplier) would likely replace a ~50% more multiplier. Or you take Blood Magic keystone, and I bet that's worse.

I'm betting all of this improves with investment into cluster jewels. You can get a ton of phys multi there.

Probably still going to start bleedstorm. If it sucks, bleed EQ is the same gear and a few passive point respecs. And can try out that self-damage Vengeance stuff too since my other starter's endgame transition(worm blaster) got deleted.
 

Arbitrary

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Doing cold dot last season I was relying hard on damage over time multi notables from cluster jewels. I expect to have to do the equivalent with Reap or Exsanguinate. There's just not a lot of that stat found on the passive tree.
 

Il_Duce Lightning Lord Rule

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Doing cold dot last season I was relying hard on damage over time multi notables from cluster jewels. I expect to have to do the equivalent with Reap or Exsanguinate. There's just not a lot of that stat found on the passive tree.
Ya, pretty much every dot build I see relies heavily on clusters. I have seen a couple people theorycraft up some Reap builds, even an inquis one. The inquis one they say will be easy to transition to another skill if Reap ends up sucking, so there is that.

Personally I'm waiting until POB updates to start messing with any of the new stuff, I'm too lazy to do it all by hand.
 

ronne

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Kinda hard to tell without the gems in PoB yet. Though, supposedly, if you're so motivated, you can switch your PoB to a branch that has the Reap gem. Still wouldn't be surprised if the gems turn out to be shit.

My investigations into Corrupting Fever has me doubting it's even worth it. There isn't that much increased phys and phys dot multi on the tree. Bleed gets a lot of its damage from ailment increases or bleed-specific nodes. So while my starter character has ~1.1M bleed dps, corrupting fever stacked to 10 is maybe doing 10% of that? That's including supporting it with Brutality and Swift Affliction. When you consider that you have to get your main skill to cost life in someway, that seems quite lackluster for a 4L of investment. In fact it might be a dps loss overall because lifetap support(~30% more multiplier) would likely replace a ~50% more multiplier. Or you take Blood Magic keystone, and I bet that's worse.

I'm betting all of this improves with investment into cluster jewels. You can get a ton of phys multi there.

Probably still going to start bleedstorm. If it sucks, bleed EQ is the same gear and a few passive point respecs. And can try out that self-damage Vengeance stuff too since my other starter's endgame transition(worm blaster) got deleted.

Yea I loaded up the Reap version of PoB and it just doesn't look great. Can get to maybe a million combined Reap DPS without clusters, but that's just not nearly enough to deal with having to self cast and spend HP etc vs just playing cold or chaos dot.

At this point I'm either getting sucked in to playing bladestorm again with lacerate as a backup, or trying out burning arrow elementalist and just falling back to arma brand again if it sucks.
 

Il_Duce Lightning Lord Rule

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I had a good idea for lacerate last league: Slayer masterful form + endless hunger + olesya's delight belt + red trail boots + golden rule.

Self bleed but unaffected by bleed that generates affliction charges. Armor based defenses, and endurance charges as well. The tricky part was generating attack speed, but I think it's a relatively easy problem to fix. The main benefit is you don't have to worry about the expensive replica farrul's to generate frenzy/affliction charges. I was also toying with the idea of doing conversion to take advantage of the 'non damaging ailments' part of olesya's, but didn't get around to it.

I wasn't planning on using it this league though due to all the bleed stuff almost surely being meta and therefor expensive. You never know though.
 

Deathwing

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Yea I loaded up the Reap version of PoB and it just doesn't look great. Can get to maybe a million combined Reap DPS without clusters, but that's just not nearly enough to deal with having to self cast and spend HP etc vs just playing cold or chaos dot.

At this point I'm either getting sucked in to playing bladestorm again with lacerate as a backup, or trying out burning arrow elementalist and just falling back to arma brand again if it sucks.
1M would be ok starter for shaper if you're doing a dot build. If you have to actively maintain it, I shoot for 2M.
 

Caeden

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I’m doing BF/BB chieftain. May dip over to something champion then something gladiator (bladestorm or perforate?!)

upshot is I’m absofuckinglutely not doing a CoC this league.
 

Xevy

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Some of you bladeblasters should look into Kitava's Thirst variants. They're amazing if you're lazy. One button play and you just lose some gem options (to get 100 mana cost/limited to 3 supporst in the helm) and a helm for the unique. The best part is bladefall is hampered by triggered effects, but blade blast is not so there's no downside. Also you can get some gross corrupts on helmets when people start blasting these new Alva's and get +2 to AoE gems which can help a lot.

Watching Ziz/Mathil/Steelmage podcast and Ziz said Spellslinger Reap/Exang Gladiator which actually sounds pretty fucking good. You'll get bleed from the trigger attack which will also get explosions and if you DW you're getting free frenzy/endurance charges on kill. He's HC so he may be doing some block stuff, but it seems pretty good.

I wanted to do Chieftan reap with full convert but the dot component of reap can't be converted. Not sure if it means it just doesn't exist or it just will stay all phys. Probably the latter, which means it'd still be viable, but you'd miss out on any Flamm curse/fire pen/ele dmg passives.
 

Deathwing

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The inconsistency on triggering Kitava's Thirst is anti-synergy with the one-button playstyle it tries to promote. Depending on how badly explodey chest got hit, you can no longer rely completely on BF and chain explosions for clear. Waiting for blades to fall and then Kitava's Thirst to proc is going to be really annoying.

Spellslinger Reap/Exsang does sound good. The last popular build that spellslinged two spells is no longer around due to the mana reservation changes. Combine that with starting in the Duelist area, I question whether you can actually fit reserving that much or if you're going to have to sacrifice a good aura.
 

Arbitrary

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Watching Ziz/Mathil/Steelmage podcast and Ziz said Spellslinger Reap/Exang Gladiator which actually sounds pretty fucking good. You'll get bleed from the trigger attack which will also get explosions and if you DW you're getting free frenzy/endurance charges on kill. He's HC so he may be doing some block stuff, but it seems pretty good.

Spellslinger with Reap or Exsanguinate is going to reserve life instead right?
 

Xevy

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Spellslinger with Reap or Exsanguinate is going to reserve life instead right?
I honestly don't know. I'd also wonder how the blood charges with reap work or it could majorly fuck your mana reservation. Again, Ziz said this so he knows about 3000% more about the game than me at this point and I've never touched spellslinger. With most of these new skills they just don't work with most stuff until someone tries something fucky and it becomes omega powerful. So may have to wait a day or two before some one "cracks the code" so to speak.

Kitava's 50% chance isn't terrible if you have enough cast speed. My original chieftan was at like 6 BF per second juiced and all non-detonated blades means is a bigger boom at the end unless you get a really bad RNG streak where they start to disappear.
 

Il_Duce Lightning Lord Rule

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I believe you can't get blood charges when reap is triggered rather than self-cast, not sure about exsanguinate. I think I read that on one of the database sites...
 

Deathwing

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I honestly don't know. I'd also wonder how the blood charges with reap work or it could majorly fuck your mana reservation. Again, Ziz said this so he knows about 3000% more about the game than me at this point and I've never touched spellslinger. With most of these new skills they just don't work with most stuff until someone tries something fucky and it becomes omega powerful. So may have to wait a day or two before some one "cracks the code" so to speak.

Kitava's 50% chance isn't terrible if you have enough cast speed. My original chieftan was at like 6 BF per second juiced and all non-detonated blades means is a bigger boom at the end unless you get a really bad RNG streak where they start to disappear.
I think this actually highlights reliance on explodey chest. IIRC, you were using Spell Echo. The repeat doesn't spend mana, so it can't trigger Kitava's Thirst. So, at a minimum, you will have to stand in place for 3/6th of a second to get your first real proc because if it procs on the first cast, there will be no blades in the ground. On average, you'll have to wait 5/6th of a second to detonate blades.

I don't know how Spell Echo works with animation rework, but I want to say the repeats are more punishing than they sound. For example, if I cast a spell once for X seconds, I'm not actually locked down for X second because PoE lets you do something else that isn't an action with cast time earlier than the spell would take to finish. My rule of thumb is that for an ability to feel good, it should have a maximum cast time of 0.33s. But you're locked in place for something less than 0.33s.

With Spell Echo, are you locked in place for the full 0.33s + part of the repeat? Note that this is not how Multistrike works. Multistrike is interruptable at any time, Spell Echo isn't.

Obviously, what feels good is a matter of taste. My suspicion is that without explodey chest, some ugly parts of Kitava's Thirst builds might be exposed.

EDIT: Reading your post again, were you suggesting that clearing with just BF was ok?
 

Xevy

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Once your damage was high enough if it was fine. My BF was like 2.5m SDPs, but at the end I did have an explodey chest. However putting herald of ash in helps as well with some clearing but your AE is so massive it just fucking obliterates the entire screen.

This is my original run from Harvest league. Changes have been made since then to most stuff but besides explodey chest (I don't even remember if I had one, tbh), it's pretty much the same and there's actually some QoL stuff put in:


Edit: I didn't have an explodey chest, I had a hunter spell crit chest. I DO awaken an explodey chest at the end after Sirus though.
 

Thregin

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That video reminded me of how f-ing stupid the gardening was...ptsd triggered and stopped watching after a minute....

jk but not completely
 

ronne

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Numbers on vaal ground slam are fucking insane. Should be the best slam starter by quite a lot now if you can deal with it's meh clear.

Easy ~15m dps on a full tank champion in trashcan gear. Should clear every map boss and sirus etc without any trouble.
 

ronne

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This is the most minmaxed reap build I've seen so far and it still looks pathetic

 

Thregin

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problem with vaal ground slam is that fist of war support doesn't work with it.
I wonder if the smart thing to do, for these new skills, is get a synthesis implicit scepter (because the normal sceptre implicit are just for ele dmg) just because you can harvest force +1 phys gem on scepters.
 

ronne

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Fist of war most certainly works with ground slam, and losing the link for the vaal skill hardly matters
 

Thregin

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I'm not trying to argue but my point was it's not straight up, blow EQ out of the way, crazy whitout that support.
Correct me if i'm wrong but normal ground slam does like 2.25 (1.5*1.5ish) times damage while EQ does 4.2 (1.2*2.5).
VGS is like 600% (4*1.5ish) damage
Fist of war is 2.5 times damage, so 4.2 EQ *2.5 is 1050%.

I realize EQ needs less duration stuff so GS makes up a bit of ground in that regard