💀┃acolyte

[tender ridge]

mark of death doesn't deal damage

[lost gale]

marked for death doesn't deal damage

[bold citrus]

Exactly

[tender ridge]

it just reduces resists

the cold one that's exclusive to Flay also doesn't deal damage

[bold citrus]

I know what I mean there doesn't seem to have a lot of consistancy

in the definition of curse

[tender ridge]

isn't that just the mace and the mace's affixes tho

[lost gale]

that's by far the biggest source of flat curse damage

and idk if the idols with curse damage have been proven to work (i'm not giving them benefit of the doubt...)

[bold citrus]

How about Marina's lost soul

[tender ridge]

the definition of curse is just a special tag that denotes the thing is a curse

as a blanket definition, it's a special debuff applied by some acolyte skills

some deal damage, some don't

[lost gale]

Marina's lost soul doesn't add curse damage?

Damned isn't a curse, it's the stacking necrotic dot ailment (and also quite terrible)

it adds Necrotic spell damage, which should work for every damaging curse other than acid skin

[bold citrus]

You're right it's only a %

I though it was a flat +xx

[lost gale]

oh you mean the base type

yeah that should work

[bold citrus]

no it's my mistake

I remembered wrong

there is the Helmet affixes that do that though

[lost gale]

https://www.lastepochtools.com/ailments/ if you type curse in the filter here you can see the tags

[tender ridge]

i wanna play with Damned overload at some point outside of a witchfire build

it's a really strong effect

[bold citrus]

me too

Damned + Torment dot stacking

[tender ridge]

pyre of affliction is basically the only way to make them scale well though

[lost gale]

I did notice something interesting

if you do the marrow shards & zombies setup that Maomao posted

as a warlock with the damned when hit or on kill/minion kill

you can get like 150 stacks of damned on yourself

while spamming tons of hits from marrow shards, which could apply damned

[tender ridge]

yeah that's one way I was thinking of doing it

another is fissure spirits and crit multi

the crit multi node on fissure is all necrotic damage, not just torment's damage

[lost gale]

and you don't need to mess around with ignite -> damned via transplant

[lost gale]

yeah but even with that marrow shards has considerably better multipliers for ailments I think

[bold citrus]

Hungering soul with the staff that makes them hit a single target can also stack tons of ailments

I tried a witchfire build and I could hit 150-200 stacks with a few casts

[tender ridge]

hungering souls has pretty poor skill tree modifiers though

[bold citrus]

yeah it's useless

[tender ridge]

you're getting a bunch of stacks but they're doing little damage

[lost gale]

HS has 100% more dot, 40% more dot vs possessed, 60% more and then 6% more per minion

[sonic wind]

that staff's only purpose is spam proccing bone curse lol

[bold citrus]

aside from stacking ailment

[lost gale]

it's not terrible

[tender ridge]

and 60 something less from the staff

[bold citrus]

but I find it fun to spam little skulls to mass stacking damned and ignite

[lost gale]

mishka did UA with reasonable gear offline using the 3 minion node via 3 skelly archers in 1.2 IIRC

she moved onto chaos bolts because it was better but still

[tender ridge]

i'm pretty sure the 3 minion node is the best multiplier on the tree

[sonic wind]

the staff didn't always have the 60% less damage on it

not sure when that was added

[bold citrus]

but the 60% reduced damage doesn't apply to the ailemts it afflicts right?

[lost gale]

it was there in 1.2, I tried it

[lost gale]

yes it does

it's a generic multi that applies to everything

[bold citrus]

ok that's annoying then

[tender ridge]

it has as long as I've played. I started just before multiplayer was added

[lost gale]

2/3 less damage in exchange for shotgunning

[bold citrus]

I think it should only apply to the hit itself not the ailments it applies

[tender ridge]

it would be nuts if it didn't apply to the ailments too

[bold citrus]

And I'd love it 😛

[lost gale]

mshards has 100% more consume minion, 25% more, 75% more, 75% more, 150% more for ailments and lets u leech without enemies by hitting minions

and another 100% more and 100% more for hits only

[tender ridge]

imagine leeching when we can just play LLW

damned overload wants your life to be as low as possible to get as close to 200% more damage as possible

[lost gale]

you get tons of ward with that zombie setup

but yeah i guess u could entirely skip leech

use pyre of affliction and titan heart so you're as low as you can be?

[tender ridge]

can't do that if you're using marrow shards

it costs current health, but if you get your health to a low enough 0 you can't cast it anymore

I've done it

[lost gale]

so you need some healing

[tender ridge]

need some amount of regen, yeah

if you're stacking damned on yourself though it's gonna kill your regen

[lost gale]

that won't work then

because damned

you have to leech

or have some kind of healing that scales with HE like AoD

[tender ridge]

either leech or have a different skill

[lost gale]

different skill won't kill zombies fast and get you to >100 self damned

what if you just don't scale phys/spell damage and leech a bit from mshards phys leech on the tree?

or you have zombies heal you on death and play LLW no leech?

no minion health scaling

[tender ridge]

i'm wondering if there's enough cast speed available without a staff/wand

pyre being an axe really throws a wrench in that

[lost gale]

cast speed while cursed idols do heavy heavy lifting

[tender ridge]

what are you cursing yourself with

[lost gale]

bone curse maybe? or self torment

[tender ridge]

bone curse could work

[lost gale]

@tender ridge https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/olVxDXxq realised titanheart is pointless with big self damned

[stuck owl]

Warlock, Level 100

Game Version:

Season 4: Shattered Omens / 1.4.5

Class:

Acolyte (26) / Necromancer (10) / Warlock (77)

General:

▸ Health: 1,805, Regen: 15.28/s
▸ Mana: 108.51, Regen: 8/s
▸ Ward Retention: 111%, Regen: 134/s
▸ Attributes: 4 Str / 4 Dex / 27 Int / 4 Att / 25 Vit
▸ Resistances: 80% / 9% / 9% / 35% / 9% / 135% / 34%

Defenses:

▸ Endurance: 20%, Threshold: 361
▸ Dodge Chance: 1% (16)
▸ Armor Mitigation: 5% (104)

Used skills:

Summon Volatile Zombie / Marrow Shards / Profane Veil / Bone Curse / Hungering Souls

[pearl snow]

What is happening here

[tender ridge]

don't you need the auto-reviving zombie items for the marrow shards pops to work

[tender ridge]

damned overload memes

[lost gale]

oh yeah, I knew I was forgetting something

[tender ridge]

you could self penance instead of decrepify for 3 more damned per second

i don't think penance applies on-hits but if it does you'd be hitting yourself and I think applying damned with your damned chance

[lost gale]

self decrep might be kinda dangerous actually

[pearl snow]

Self Decrep in this era is nuts

[tender ridge]

i was running self decrep on my soul feast build

it's really not that bad

[pearl snow]

Pyre memes is great though

I swear everything is a DoT

[tender ridge]

yeah but all the DoTs that are gonna do enough damage to kill your are gonna do it regardless of decrep

[lost gale]

I tried the mshards/zombies thing on warlock and you get easy 100+ stacks of sustained self-damned from aspect of death

[pearl snow]

Decrip would just give me an excuse (im really just bad at the game)

[tender ridge]

based

[pearl snow]

Hmm, now change it to ignite with the belt for spell dmg kek

They really gotta upgrade that belt

[tender ridge]

i do see a problem with this setup though, and that's actually activating damned overload

[pearl snow]

Hmm true

[lost gale]

cast hungering souls?

[pearl snow]

HS no?

[lost gale]

gotta cast it for the buff vs possessed anyway

[pearl snow]

Big true

12 sec cast treat it like a cd

[tender ridge]

I don't wanna stop spamming my right click

if you're only using souls for the damage vs possessed you probably want to move more points into that node

8% is barely worth stopping the spam

[lost gale]

I switched the tree after linking it

[tender ridge]

i've got a warlock around level 90 still

Maybe i'll go farm out some uniques and try this setup

[lost gale]

better check that I'm right about aspect of death and the mshards/zombies thing

it worked offline but who knows

[tender ridge]

even if it doesn't work i just go back to my bugged soulfeast setup

[lost gale]

how the hell is pyre of affliction LPL76 lol

nobody uses it

[tender ridge]

i mean it can theoretically get into the thousands of necrotic pen pretty easily

the effect is very strong

it's just damned sucks lol

[lost gale]

max roll, 100 stacks = 1600% pen yeah

[tender ridge]

does aura marked for death work with mark of the rat?

[lost gale]

Pretty sure

[tender ridge]

can use a boneclamour barbute for the helmet

[lost gale]

I was thinking glacier helmet but boneclamour seems fine

[tender ridge]

nah we're just not gonna get hit. no need for armor or crit reduction

i think i like boneclamour more because you're gonna need every bit of ward generation you can get even with zombies popping off giving you ward

your health pool is going to be essentially 0 at all times

and purely ward

[lost gale]

I have zombies giving health not ward, but I did take the ward per minion death in necro

[tender ridge]

cthonic fissure's zombie node is another thing I wanna see buffed

with all three fissures down you're theoretically getting more than 1 zombie per second, but that's not super relevant

[brazen wigeon]

is this any good

[lost gale]

yes

you can get about 30 stacks with just 5/5 in the spirit rate node

takes some getting used to keeping it up

[tender ridge]

worth noting that the spirits don't automatically hit you, they target you. you can actually outrun them if you're kiting a lot

[brazen wigeon]

could be funny with stygian beams

[sonic wind]

Its decent for beams but the mana cost is a problem. Rip blood just fits better as a flat source for beams.

Someone convince me not to blow tons of resources rerolling to some cursed rampancy stacking flay build using the leech damage stuff.

Whoever was in charge of convincing me you're fired. -400k favour on 2h axe prophecies to hopefully get a perfect 2lp sword catcher.

[bold citrus]

It's Janky and only 100 Corruption but I'm having too much fun with 3 Deathknight spamming hungering souls with me the damned stacks are racking up super fast and high this is dumb but funny

[rocky flame]

Does Dread Shade buff aura stack with multiple minion stay close together?

[old hull]

No

[primal vault]

decided i might as well slam this

[lost gale]

no but there's a snapshotting trick you can do where you have the buff with aura on one minion and spec the no-aura node and put it on another minion and the minion with the no-aura shade gets a lot of the bonuses twice

[wise leaf]

Anyone knows how this build works exactly? You spam both chaos bolts and summon skeleton? https://www.lastepochtools.com/profile/Warai_Otoko/character/Skele

[lost gale]

you cast chaos bolt to get the spell damage buff for minions and spam skeletons which your mages blow up and the death of those skeletons has a chance to summon zombies

minions dying generates a fair bit of ward.

skellies dying generates mana which works with the helmet as another defensive layer

[wise leaf]

ah okay i see, so chaos bolts exploding the zombies isnt that important

[lost gale]

I'd say it's secondary

[sly forge]

@wintry flame hmm to think I skipped the last phase without needing killing threshold (offline but still amazing here) :)))

[brazen wigeon]

wraiths scale with spell damage?

[sly forge]

no

flame wraith does

[brazen wigeon]

but node gives spell damage to minions...

[sonic wind]

some minions use spells some minions use attacks.

[brazen wigeon]

so what do regular wraiths use...

[sonic wind]

Regular wraiths use melee attacks

You can usually see this on the skill tags. At the bottom it says physical melee area

So wraiths by default use a physical melee attack that hits in an area

[brazen wigeon]

I'm asking due to the video up

since man uses chaos bolts to boost minions, but has regular wraiths

[sonic wind]

I don't see any wraiths in that planner

[brazen wigeon]

this one

[sonic wind]

the wraiths aren't the damage source there from what I can tell

looks like they are fodder for the death knights to sacrifice

Yeah this node and the node next to it.

[brazen wigeon]

I did similiar stuff with skeletons and auto-zombies

but sadly it requires shield for 100% auto-ressurecting skeletons

can't use with staff

pity the set shield is only thing that gives auto-ressurecting skeletons modifier

[sonic wind]

you don't need 100%

[brazen wigeon]

it's convienent

[sonic wind]

having to resummon them every few minutes isn't really a big deal

[brazen wigeon]

to me it is 😄

also it sadly it can't fuel giant zombies

[sonic wind]

you can also always just equip shield + a 1h wep when clearing echoes and then equip staff for bosses

[sly forge]

no, this is a hunger soul build

hunger soul deals more dmg per minion

[sonic wind]

Well that explains the bees

[sly forge]

also the one doing the dmg is death knight

[brazen wigeon]

is that fire aura of decay?

thought it's transmog

[sly forge]

btw the above is just offline build

[sly forge]

yes

[brazen wigeon]

I still wonder if there will be necrotic version

[sly forge]

I tried to one shot but failed

it might be able to one shot but needs to stack elemental res instead of all other defensive suffixes and use the bee experiment affix

[rocky flame]

We can use sacrifice on bees right?

[brazen wigeon]

yes

tho getting bees on acolyte is tedious and hard

it's pure rng

[lost gale]

Sacrificing anything other than summon skellies in large numbers is unsustainable mana wise

[wintry flame]

Getting close haha

[brazen wigeon]

autobomber with reassembling skeletons and volatile zombies?

or just zombies?

[obtuse quest]

Autobomber generally means skeletal mages doing the bombing not you.

[pearl snow]

Ideally you have them both explode but I havent seen that used well yet I dont think

[brazen wigeon]

doesn't pact severence trigger when zombie explodes?

damn dual wielding those need lich tree

[obtuse quest]

Yes, but it casts sacrifice with your stats and with your mana

[brazen wigeon]

ugh

I was expecting more damage tbh...

[lost gale]

yes but zombies can trigger sacrifice when they die anyway with no proc limit and a big mana discount

[brazen wigeon]

gulp! cheers!

[ashen scaffold]

what are survival strategies for using the health/ward sealing passive node in lich? do i just need to stack a bunch of health?

[tender ridge]

yeah you still need to build health

[ashen scaffold]

ive got a procced harvest bleed build going and i need that node so the bleed immunity on exanguinist is always active but im having trouble stacking enough health

i guess i could just spec out of the self bleed node in harvest but that loses a lot of pen

although i already have over 100 pen from aod

[tender ridge]

are you leeching a lot? exsanguinous in a LLW setup should make it so you're always on low health

[ashen scaffold]

yeah im reaper form

[tender ridge]

the self bleeds shouldn't matter at all. they don't scale with your stats

[ashen scaffold]

im getting up to like 70 stacks though if im hitting big packs of enemies

kills me pretty quickly

unfortunately it doesnt cleanse bleeds you already have when you get to low life so unless im constantly at low life, it stacks up a ton

and if i dont take the passive node that allows dot to go through ward, then my ehp would go way down cause it would always be ticking away at the ward instead, and if im not doing the lowlife node then most of my ehp is ward

cause id also be proccing rip blood and spec into the ward instead of health in that version

proccing both from chaos bolts

ive considered mask of indifference so i can use a different body armor for more tank but that means no carrion

[tender ridge]

then i guess the answer is just "exsanguinous and more health"

exsanguinous wants you to build as much health as possible anyway

[ashen scaffold]

yeah

guh i just need to get better rolls

also need to get some actual decent idols

a couple red rings would be nice but i dont have any to imprint

just using exalted rings atm

im max rank cof but would it be worth trying out mg at this point?

[vapid kindle]

mask of indifference also offers bleed immunity

[muted mist]

Are you using physical aura of decay? That will reduce the damage from self bleeds by a lot. I played a cold harvest build and once I had leech and aura of decay the self frostbite stacks were fine, though I didn't push it very far. I also did not attempt to use any low life items

[ashen scaffold]

yeah that was a though but then id need to switch off carrion

[ashen scaffold]

yeah, it doesnt seem to help that much. maybe ill try speccing out of the dot bypassing ward node and see if i can still.take hits

[muted mist]

That should go better with exsang, I guess. I also played that build last season, so I didn't have to worry about omen density, I assume that's where the stacks get out of hand. Do you have ailment cleanse on belt to reset to stacks? I would expect it to be okay while leeching mostly. If you have the node for faster leech that can be trap

[ashen scaffold]

i do not have ailment cleanse, that would help

i feel like thats more of a bandaid solution though

[ashen scaffold]

ok yeah even with phys aod active, max phys res, and exanguinous, im taking like 400 damage per bleed tick on single targets

that feels a bit excessive

only at around 20 bleed stacks

[tender ridge]

that seems like something is wrong then. self-ailments don't normally scale with your stats

[sonic wind]

Get leech, you can leech off self damage.

like over 100% leech

[old hull]

The damaging self-applied ailments from AoD do scale with your stats, they are pretty much the only ones that do

[sonic wind]

bone curse too

Actually aod doing it is interesting. Might have to try dropping my poison resist to like -200% and stacking some leech

[ashen scaffold]

do they scale with your pen as well?

or just % damage

[muted mist]

AoD self-ailments i believe just scale with your stats full stop. so it's probably mostly NOT the harvest ones unless those are bugged

[ashen scaffold]

of they scaled with pen then wouldnt they double dip the downside of the int scaling pen node?

or does that only specifically apply to enemies

[muted mist]

'you and enemies' but you can stack resist to counter

[ashen scaffold]

it seems to be half and half

i tried unspeccing the self bleed in harvest and i was taking up to like 200 bleed per tick as opposed to 400 or 500

[muted mist]

wow that might be bugged then

or the tooltip is wrong and it does scale

i dont' think i was scaling ailments very hard at the time when i tried this as cold

[ashen scaffold]

yeah it feels like its way too much for it not scaling with stats

[muted mist]

take off a bunch of gear and see if it ticks for less?

and then bug report, lol

[ashen scaffold]

yeah i might test it tomorrow

pretty tricky to test though since its all chance based lol

guess i could just use the dummy

[muted mist]

the harvest node for self-bleed is 100%, so yeah, should be relatively easy at dummy

use the trio of 3 dummies

[ashen scaffold]

true

[muted mist]

your best bet might be mask of indifference then

[ashen scaffold]

ill just test it with and without a ring with dot increase

[muted mist]

but then you can't use carrion

[ashen scaffold]

yeah i would have to regear a ton

[muted mist]

or you could go full low life

[ashen scaffold]

or i could just health stack with low life yeah

either way i just need better gear

[muted mist]

that's a warlock build though, not lich

can't sustain reaper form

(that is literally a warlock build that Dread did a video about as I recall)

[ashen scaffold]

yeah i think i rember seeing that

[muted mist]

i just pivoted to crit on my cold harvest build

[ashen scaffold]

i play this game very on and off so i dont remember exactly why i didnt go warlock, i think i figured stacking int was a lot easier on lich and reaper form offered better stats than warlock could offer for bleed support

id have to take another look at warlock passive tree lol

i only just beat regular abberoth for the first time today with this build lol

i just need to get better at gearing as i think i have a decent understanding of build mechanics now

[lost gale]

Lich offers more damage to ailment builds by having a lot of % increased than warlock does.

[pearl snow]

Warlock is really only useful at the moment for unlocking builds that use fissure or Profane Veil

[lost gale]

Sadly

If they can make damage vs enemies with X status work for ailments & subskills more comprehensively then it'll perform a bit better I think.

Fissure and veil are very good skills though and the warlock passives aren't awful, just don't compete with all the benefits of reaper form and dual wielding

[brazen wigeon]

I noticed warlock has barely any damage passive nodes...

[obtuse quest]

most of warlocks power comes from the fact that they have lots of multipliers in their skills or buffs like overload instead.
Or just have better proc methods.

[sly forge]

warlock is only better at builds that REQUIRE their class exclusive skills as main skills

such as profane veil

apoc zombie (which requires profane veil to work)

flame whip or dot fissure

lich is better at literally everything else

and now with the existence of madness

it is even more reason to go lich

[brazen wigeon]

always wanted to use this node, but I kinda can't find build for it

[plush loom]

Can penance crit?

[brazen wigeon]

since most warlock are DoT

[obtuse quest]

No, I'm not even sure how you're feeding it crit.

[lost gale]

this warlock build uses it to good effect

I think it does 5 curses for 10% chance total

[pearl snow]

CB has double dmg on hit if chilled

[lost gale]

I wonder if that works with Wreak Havoc

wouldn't be shocked if that and chaotic strikes were the same effect on the back end

[sonic wind]

Acid skin, crit vuln, and the spiders debuff from that really bad weaver's will mace.

idk if those would work, but if anything works it would be them.

[obtuse quest]

Acid skin didn't work for bone curse, even though you can feed it crit via flat spell crit chance means.

[old hull]

I would guess they are different purpose-made effects and are independent of each other, but hard to say without testing and I'm too lazy to do that atm lol

[lost gale]

it wouldn't exactly make or break a build either way, it would just be 30% crit multi on 6% of chaos bolt hits lol

[old hull]

That's pretty balanced for a primalist

[prisma dust]

beat the fractured prison on hc with lich! such a strong build

[sly forge]

@wintry flame actually this is not the glass cannon version. I might try full glass cannon latter to see if one shot is possible

[wintry flame]

not the zhp

[open cedar]

This set affix is still not working and NOT applying the flat curse damage to curses
This bug has been standing since 1.3 and has been reported multiple times by me and others on both forum and this discord
And they had the audacity to buff the affix with the set buffs in 1.4

I really hope some dev sees this

[tender ridge]

that's a silly looking mace

[open cedar]

I just made it to test this, but I agree, it is indeed

[tender ridge]

but yeah it's a known bug. wouldn't be surprised if it's a 1.5 fix at this point

[open cedar]

This affix has the potential to make Torment Warlock great again

Also to make this build, which I played last season, be a good build https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/A834kplg

[stuck owl]

Lich, Level 100

:white_check_mark: This character build is verified

Game Version:

Season 3: Beneath Ancient Skies / 1.3.5

Class:

Acolyte (20) / Lich (82) / Warlock (11)

General:

▸ Health: 5,715, Regen: 31.2/s
▸ Mana: 266.51, Regen: 15.2/s
▸ Ward Retention: 216%, Regen: 11/s
▸ Attributes: 39 Str / 29 Dex / 108 Int / 28 Att / 41 Vit
▸ Resistances: 106% / 106% / 106% / 181% / 115% / 155% / 127%

Defenses:

▸ Endurance: 63%, Threshold: 1,715
▸ Dodge Chance: 21% (704)
▸ Armor Mitigation: 50% (3,140)

Used skills:

Bone Curse / Reaper Form / Chaos Bolts / Aura Of Decay / Harvest

[open cedar]

It still turned out surprisingly good even without it, I just went for T8 flat curse dmg on helmet. And with a lot of gear the build became pretty playable

[tender ridge]

that affix would be so much fun on a CD bonecurse build if they would ever actually buff the node

[open cedar]

What do you call CD bonecurse? Because this build's main dmg is Bone curse from aura being procced as often as possible with as many hits from chaos bolts as possible

[lost gale]

They also buffed destruction engine in 1.4 by increasing the cast speed of abom's devour and called it out in the notes as a buff to destruction engine but didn't fix the bug where abom sacrifices itself...

Really makes you wonder sometimes

[lost gale]

I tried that before they put a proc limit on the rip blood triggers but I hadn't really seen any reason to consider it after they put the stupidly low proc limit on it.

[open cedar]

Yeah, it's a small amount of hits from rip blood, compared to those from chaos bolts itself

Rip blood is probably <10% of the hit/sec assuming 2/3 or more of the chaos bolts are hitting the target

[lost gale]

surprised you aren't using seed of chaos & acute infliction.

[lost gale]

I meant crimson enlightenment which proc rip blood when bone curse expires on an enemy, with acute infliction and extra chaos bolts you could trigger rip blood quite quickly on densely packed enemies

[open cedar]

If I went that I would lose a lot of single target cause I wouldn't sustain mana

Or I'd have to deduct points from Chtonic aurora

[lost gale]

what would stop you sustaining mana?

[open cedar]

Which would still lose me single target

[lost gale]

would seed of chaos stop you sustaining mana or something else?

or you mean the curse being removed?

[open cedar]

nvm I can't read

I misread it as 80% inc mana cost

[lost gale]

it gets reapplied almost instantly by bone curse aura, you have to hit incredibly quickly to actually break the 4-hit curse

[open cedar]

It's just 80% of bolts mana cost when you proc it

[lost gale]

yeah

it targets some other enemy

[open cedar]

But why would I get those which you mentioned, just for clear? I don't have much issue with clear

Also seed of corruption would go beyond my bone curse aura radius most of the time

[lost gale]

seed of corruption can chain react and clear the screen sometimes but it's kind of rare

was more common before they put the minimum range on it

[open cedar]

Are the chaos bolts still gonna cast bone curse on those enemies when I have it specced as aura?

I thought the aura disables all the other sources of it

[tender ridge]

CD bonecurse is a node on the left side of the tree that gives it a 6s CD but multiplies the damage, makes it fall off in a single hit, and guarantees a crit

however because you can proc bone curse SO MANY TIMES it's a dramatic DPS loss

it genuinely needs to be like 10000% more damage and even then it might not be enough to keep up with just casting bone curse normally

[lost gale]

I think the proc on CB still works but it's kind of weak at 6s cooldown

[open cedar]

oh I see. Didn't TheCurse make a build around that in S1 or something? I think it didn't have this cd back then, or not everything reset the cd

[tender ridge]

its always had the CD attached to it afaik

it could be a fun lightning conduit style build if you've ever played that in PoE

just a 1-2 combo build. maybe use soul feast to trigger it

[open cedar]

I actually played an automated LC build last league in poe 😄

I get what you mean, and yes, it would need so much more dmg from that node to be worth going for it

[tender ridge]

i love it conceptually

it just sucks lol

[lost gale]

the 4-hit bone curse I like but the 1-hit version is dreadful

[tender ridge]

even 4-hit is pretty bad just because of how many times you can proc the curse normally

[lost gale]

well, I say I like it, trying to use bone curse for damage rather than utility seems like a bad idea in general, especially with sinathia affix borked

[lost gale]

bone curse aura re-applies it so fast it's hard to break the 4-hit one

[tender ridge]

well yeah because bone curse damage sucks lmao. those nodes are supposed to change it into a damage dealing skill

[zenith current]

is bleed marrow shard a thing? i dont think i saw anyone did it yet since they changed more hit damage to more damage %

[pearl snow]

Bleed no not really

Crit yes

[zenith current]

it seems like an underexplored avenue, no? seems like the multis are on point

if i could just find a way to constantly summon a minion

[pearl snow]

Kinda, there are just better bleed engines

[zenith current]

what are those

[pearl snow]

Chaos Bolts

In theory you can run rip blood and marrow, but I doubt thats even remotely as strong

Zombie shards maybe

But its really just bolts

[zenith current]

i was thinking zombie marrow

prolly with rip

[tender ridge]

chaos bolts is def better than marrow shards

if they ever fix soul feast it should be competitive with CB

[zenith current]

tryna look for some underexplored builds

yall tried marrow shards in 1.4?

bleed?

not sure where the comparison is coming from, anyone did the research?

[tender ridge]

haven't tried it, no but having played a boatload of marrow shards in the past it's just not going to be as good as chaos bolts

it doesn't have the same multipliers chaos bolts has access to and doesn't apply as many bleeds at once

[zenith current]

but marrow shards did not use to have ailment multis before

[lost gale]

zombie rings, zombie chance on minion death and zombies summon a vanguard on death, zombies trigger mshards on death. Goes insane.

[zenith current]

they used to be hit

[tender ridge]

yes i'm aware

but i also know how the skill functions

[zenith current]

so what makes you convinced its worse?

not that i dont believe you i just wanna know your rationale

[tender ridge]

it hits fewer times, has worse multipliers

[zenith current]

even with bone splinters on top?

[lost gale]

marrow shards only hits once afaik

[tender ridge]

you're either hitting with bone splinters or you're hitting with marrow shards

you don't get both

[zenith current]

well, bone splinters technically benefits from both multis

so splinters got, lets see.

[lost gale]

75% more, 25% more, 100% more, 75% more, 150% more

[tender ridge]

yeah and it's still smaller than what you're gonna get with chaos bolts due to hitting several times and having the DoT per missing health

[zenith current]

yup, thanks

and how chaos bolts compares

[lost gale]

think u may be underestimating how many zombies you can have trigger mshards

it's a lot

If you selfcast it with doublecast you're getting maybe 3.3 mshards per cast from eating one zombie and one vanguard and there's another consume minion in there if available to eat the next zombie

So even 8 chaos bolts isn't a huge effective multi over that

[zenith current]

rip blood is bait i think, right? double cast seems to be more sound.

[lost gale]

For bleed, definitely, for hit/crit well arcane absorption is appealing

[lost gale]

& the way zombie revive seems to work is very very favourable to the build, the chance seems to roll at the time of the revive not the time of death so if you're consistently keeping your number of zombies at 1-3 as you eat them you have a very high chance of having every zombie come back and also leave behind +0.3 zombies in the form of a vanguard

[zenith current]

im keen to cook with that if you dont mind helping me out a bit.

[lost gale]

And when you stop casting you'll certainty bounce back to 6 zombies because like 30 or 40 will try to revive

[zenith current]

would you go splinter nova?

[lost gale]

Yes splinter nova is massive power creep for mshards

It makes all other options obsolete tbh

[lost gale]

I was looking at doing damned mshards/zombies the other day rather than bleed

[lost gale]

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/ApbdLdLj this is what I was looking at with Damned, Bleed would ofc use different stuff but

[stuck owl]

Warlock, Level 100

Game Version:

Season 4: Shattered Omens / 1.4.5

Class:

Acolyte (26) / Necromancer (10) / Warlock (77)

General:

▸ Health: 2,034, Regen: 15.28/s
▸ Mana: 110.78, Regen: 9.2/s
▸ Ward Retention: 103%, Regen: 134/s
▸ Attributes: 24 Str / 2 Dex / 34 Int / 2 Att / 16 Vit
▸ Resistances: 40% / 5% / 5% / 5% / 5% / 176% / 21%

Defenses:

▸ Endurance: 20%, Threshold: 407
▸ Armor Mitigation: 25% (1,091)

Used skills:

Summon Volatile Zombie / Marrow Shards / Profane Veil / Bone Curse

[lost gale]

blasting your own minions with mshards stacks tons of damned on you so it's a rare build where Pyre actually seems appealing

[zenith current]

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Bxvjyjjm first draft... not sure if i got the idea right

[stuck owl]

Warlock, Level 100

Game Version:

Season 4: Shattered Omens / 1.4.5

Class:

Acolyte (32) / Lich (31) / Warlock (50)

General:

▸ Health: 1,419, Regen: 20/s
▸ Mana: 104.51, Regen: 8/s
▸ Ward Retention: 64%, Regen: 60/s
▸ Attributes: 2 Str / 2 Dex / 12 Int / 2 Att / 4 Vit
▸ Resistances: 35% / 0% / 0% / 10% / 0% / 189% / 28%

Defenses:

▸ Endurance: 20%, Threshold: 284
▸ Armor Mitigation: 10% (251)

Used skills:

Transplant / Marrow Shards / Summon Volatile Zombie / Rip Blood / Bone Curse

[zenith current]

would probably like to use aura of decay

maybe the primordial bleed gloves

[tender ridge]

yes absolutely

[tender ridge]

i still need to get around to trying it

I got distracted with a silly disintegrate runemaster

[lost gale]

Lich is almost certainly better for bleed than warlock

warlock is used for Damned because of the synergy between Aspect of Death & Pyre of Affliction

[zenith current]

🗒️ ✍️

[tender ridge]

i would only go bleed warlock if there's a very specific thing you're doing that requires warlock

[lost gale]

and yeah you'd go with aura of decay for sure

I'm only not using it there because there's no necrotic AoD

You'll want to self curse with bone curse aura because cast speed while cursed idols are absolutely insane with idol altars, easily the best source of cast speed along with ladle for Acolyte

[zenith current]

noted

[lost gale]

Zombie death gives ward + leech along with corrupted form will be good sustain for lich

[zenith current]

100% marrow shards on transplant worth?

[lost gale]

nah

just zombies and self cast imo

[zenith current]

wait, youd go life?

not ward?

[tender ridge]

if you're CoF and end up with random bits of marrow shards projectile speed, it's pretty nice QoL for clear

[lost gale]

on lich absolutely

[zenith current]

humm

all right

making ver 0.2

[lost gale]

so imo u need mshards, aod, zombies & bone curse specialised and the 5th skill is probably reaper form

carrion of creation is amazing, better use it

valdyr's chalice is probably okay, ladle & flayer shield maybe? or use the plague staff

[tender ridge]

i like chalice a lot more on lich since you're gonna be capping your health at 50%

and you can overleech

i wanted to use it on warlock for the extra bleed chance, but I was playing LLW and the healing was pretty antisynergy

[zenith current]

whats the best idol setup for 4x1 stacking?

[tender ridge]

like a pyramidal setup?

[zenith current]

yea maybe

ladle seems weird

that works for spell damage

not ailments per se no

[tender ridge]

probably these

[zenith current]

ya i know

just didnt know what idol structure

works

pyramidal i guess

[tender ridge]

pyramidal feels like the standard answer for everything now

they might be a lil too good

[lost gale]

oculus is better for wings of discord

but yeah pyramidal is great for everything else really

except for 1x1 maxxing (mana stacking)

[tender ridge]

basically that

[tender ridge]

tru, but so few people use wings of discord

[zenith current]

hold on

is this more?

[tender ridge]

it is

[zenith current]

wild

[tender ridge]

it's a new affix

it's only on chest iirc?

I was gonna use it on the damned marrow shards build

level of marrow shards is helmet so it doesn't compete there

[lost gale]

seems good on some primalist stuff

[tender ridge]

i think it's really underrated. just the stats on the item itself are good

[lost gale]

yeah but so are the stats on nest so if you want to juice idols and you don't have good affixes on a wide range of idol shapes then nest seems considerably better

[tender ridge]

for sure

[zenith current]

@tender ridge @teal mirage https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/A834k4dk v 0.2

[stuck owl]

Lich, Level 100

Game Version:

Season 4: Shattered Omens / 1.4.5

Class:

Acolyte (20) / Lich (63) / Warlock (30)

General:

▸ Health: 4,175, Regen: 24/s
▸ Mana: 122.51, Regen: 8/s
▸ Ward Retention: 102%, Regen: 54/s
▸ Attributes: 8 Str / 8 Dex / 31 Int / 2 Att / 8 Vit
▸ Resistances: 65% / 65% / 65% / 74% / 70% / 184% / 112%

Defenses:

▸ Endurance: 58%, Threshold: 918
▸ Dodge Chance: 1% (32)
▸ Armor Mitigation: 27% (1,204)
▸ Block Chance: 20%, Mitigation: 24% (400)

Used skills:

Aura Of Decay / Marrow Shards / Summon Volatile Zombie / Reaper Form / Bone Curse

[tender ridge]

think you tagged the wrong emy lol

is there a reason for the yellow amulet and non-lego uniques

i'd move points here and find more int from passives/gear. it's the single best resistance reduction you have access to

doubled potion gain isn't super high value when you're gonna be constantly healing through leech, chalice, and zombies

[lost gale]

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/ozwKVKq8 haven't done all the slams and I'm not really sure what the best chest & helmet to use are but

[stuck owl]

Lich, Level 100

Game Version:

Season 4: Shattered Omens / 1.4.5

Class:

Acolyte (31) / Lich (77) / Warlock (5)

General:

▸ Health: 1,899, Regen: 20/s
▸ Mana: 122.51, Regen: 9.6/s
▸ Ward Retention: 212%, Regen: 4/s
▸ Attributes: 17 Str / 9 Dex / 86 Int / 2 Att / 3 Vit
▸ Resistances: 15% / 15% / 15% / 56% / 23% / 166% / 46%

Defenses:

▸ Endurance: 20%, Threshold: 570
▸ Dodge Chance: 7% (220)
▸ Armor Mitigation: 31% (1,522)
▸ Block Chance: 20%, Mitigation: 24% (400)

Used skills:

Marrow Shards / Summon Volatile Zombie / Reaper Form / Aura Of Decay / Bone Curse

[tender ridge]

if you make the changes to AoD, phys pen on the passive tree loses a lot of value so might be worth moving the points around. Corrupted Form and overleech is still very strong even if it's (maybe?) still bugged and doesn't always count as low life. int also provides a boatload of benefits since you're using reaper form

[lost gale]

corrupted form works, but the tooltips/character sheet doesn't reflect that

[tender ridge]

you're not stacking leech affixes on your gear to get any real benefit from the inc damage

if you need to find more passive points, removing the leech passives from the warlock tree is one way. it's 6 points for only 3% leech

[tender ridge]

yeah definitely want to use it then

[lost gale]

honestly if you just need to heal then a build with good damage output is basically fine with the 1% leech lich gets from mastery alone

and leech rate increases are best avoided imo

[tender ridge]

pretty sure you can't overleech without the capstone passive

[lost gale]

you should get overleech with just corrupted form

[tender ridge]

leech stops when your health reaches cap normally, and corrupted form caps your health at 50% of your maximum

the passive specifically says leech stops at 66%

it's the only way to overleech now afaik

[lost gale]

leech stops at max health, corrupted form stops you ever reaching max health

I get what you're saying but afaik that capstone reduces the 100% leech falloff to 66%, corrupted form doesn't drop it to 50% by itself

[tender ridge]

I've only played with both since the lich rework and haven't tested without, but I was basing that off of some dev posts from just before 1.3

back when all this was being revealed

[lost gale]

#👨┃ask-the-devs-not-support-no-bugs message i asked, my game takes so long to launch I don't want to test it myself

[tender ridge]

fair

honestly the bleed soul feast and wind shaman builds have probably been my favorites this season

even though they're both bad. soul feast mostly because of the bug

[lost gale]

wind tempest spam?

I remember u talking about that

[tender ridge]

yeah. it's strong enough to clear 400c comfortably and kill abby

but i haven't done observer yet and uber is out of the question

[lost gale]

#👨┃ask-the-devs-not-support-no-bugs message works without accursed

[tender ridge]

Right on

I don't remember who said it, but one of the devs specifically said the interaction I mentioned

[lost gale]

if devs knew how the game worked then primalist wouldn't be so primalist

[zenith current]

ah so youd go half hp + ward. okay.

i might cook with this, got a month until poe 2 so might as well

[tender ridge]

Yeah and don't take the leech node at the end

That was me misunderstanding the mechanics of it

[zenith current]

Just... placeholder. couldnt think of anything lol

[tender ridge]

There's a real argument for Plague bearer's Staff instead of axe+shield

[zenith current]

yeaaa im seeing it too

[tender ridge]

It's another multiplier

And you can put cast speed on it

[zenith current]

all right, making v0.3 now

health drain is sustainable in reaper form?

i thoguht its a no no

[lost gale]

the 61-91% reduced health cost on the shield is a real meaningful benefit with this build tbh

[zenith current]

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/AL0z2ZMx v0.3

[stuck owl]

Lich, Level 100

Game Version:

Season 4: Shattered Omens / 1.4.5

Class:

Acolyte (33) / Lich (75) / Warlock (5)

General:

▸ Health: 4,909, Regen: 24/s
▸ Mana: 122.51, Regen: 9.12/s
▸ Ward Retention: 128%, Regen: 29/s
▸ Attributes: 17 Str / 8 Dex / 44 Int / 2 Att / 8 Vit
▸ Resistances: 99% / 99% / 99% / 120% / 77% / 197% / 87%

Defenses:

▸ Endurance: 44%, Threshold: 1,473
▸ Dodge Chance: 1% (32)
▸ Armor Mitigation: 36% (1,925)

Used skills:

Aura Of Decay / Marrow Shards / Summon Volatile Zombie / Reaper Form / Bone Curse

[lost gale]

it's flavor text on most builds but here we're using almost every node which increases the health cost of mshards and stacking cast speed

[zenith current]

trueee

and its 10% more on axe

i think thats enough to get me started on this build tho

i think i can adjust from here

🙂

[zenith current]

can you explain what you were trying to understand here

[tender ridge]

It's sustainable

[tender ridge]

It shouldn't matter if you're actively leeching

I've played marrow shards with reaper from before and the health cost doesn't really matter

[lost gale]

it drops your 1 shot EHP loads for a few frames several times a second

yeah sure it's not gonna kill you often but it can

[tender ridge]

I think the times it kills you are far outweighed by the multiplier from plague+cast speed

It's so rare for the health cost to not be immediately recovered by leech

[lost gale]

normally when you hit max health leech effects end and if you lose health you have to deal damage again to start leeching again.

Corrupted Form means you never hit max health so whenever you take damage you're leeching on the next frame/tick if you've been dealing damage in the last 3 seconds.

If you take Accursed Feast then you leech a lot more, but that 3 seconds is reduced to I think 1.8 seconds.

[zenith current]

is accursed feast worth, then?

[lost gale]

not imo, if you deal good damage then even <1% leech is plenty to keep you alive usually

and lich gets 1% by default, valdyr's chalice has more on it for bleed

thing is good builds deal millions of DPS so 1% of that is massive overkill for characters with like 5k max health.

One thing is normal leech can't leech on overkill damage, if you have 1% leech you can recover at most 1% of the enemy HP by killing them so if the enemies don't have much health and you're taking a lot of damage then the difference between 1% leech and 10% leech can be meaningful but really either one has to full health within a few frames of taking damage

[zenith current]

i see.

unrelated, think those idols are hard to farm ?

or im better off going merchants?

[tender ridge]

Idols aren't too bad tbh. If you want them exactly just go merchant. I can't speak to price though. CoF only here

Each one only has one mandatory affix though and the other parts are flexible with multiple options that can fit

[lost gale]

the roll range on cast speed while cursed is quite big

and you really want high rolls

so not trivial but not the worst

[zenith current]

hmmm okay

[lost gale]

and yeah the bleed suffix is the best but you're mostly here for the cast speed

that said, you may be able to get too much cast speed

because zombies triggered by awakening presence cost you mana

it's the only thing that costs you mana really, but the faster you cast the quicker you're cycling through vanguards

[zenith current]

dont i care just about zombies mostly? whats the vanguards for here?

[tender ridge]

Minions that aren't zombies so you can spawn more zombies

[zenith current]

ah

[lost gale]

getting more zombies and being fodder for giving you 100% more damage on your mshards

every zombie that you eat with mshards is another mshards and a vanguard which is itself +0.3 zombies

I explained how the revive works at the start

even though the limit for zombies is 6, you can have way more than 6 zombies waiting to revive at any one time

and if you have few enough zombies when it's their turn they'll come back anyway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAPdD3kWysA this guy is doing a similar setup but doing hit/crit, you can see how many zombies are being exploded (he's using corpse parasites which don't trigger awakening presence)

#💀┃acolyte message this message shows it with vanguards

[zenith current]

splatty

[zenith current]

Any tips what i could level this with until i get the whole zombie cycle going?

and the gloves?

[lost gale]

check maxroll acolyte levelling build

[zenith current]

eww no

[tender ridge]

something that relies so heavily on so many uniques shouldn't level as that build tbh

[zenith current]

i just need something thematically similar until then xD

[lost gale]

you can't use zombie rings till, what, 68 and the build is non-functional until then

[zenith current]

i guess ill just rip blood with marrow shard trigger

there.

[lost gale]

that's the maxroll levelling build isn't it?

[zenith current]

solved.

[tender ridge]

lel

[zenith current]

hell if i know, i dont touch that thing with a 10 foot pole

and Im a Pole

[lost gale]

well, lich levelling is a pain so good luck

[tender ridge]

nothing wrong with using someone's build

[zenith current]

nothing wrong, just have no fun doing that

[tender ridge]

i'm stubborn and will use my endgame skill regardless

[lost gale]

I like infernal shade on minions for levelling

[tender ridge]

but i'm not always gonna use the same setup

[lost gale]

it isn't amazing but it's quite fun

5 Skeletons with shades burning

[zenith current]

i just need some transitional weapon

[tender ridge]

soul feast kinda sucked to level with

as soon as I hit 70 for wheel of torment it was a blast though

[lost gale]

you can use the plague staff at lvl 40 and firestarter's torch is good before that

[zenith current]

hmm

kk

[lost gale]

plague staff is good for levelling

[zenith current]

but its not bleed tho?

i thought there might be some bleed unique i can use

[tender ridge]

it doesn't need to be

[zenith current]

fair

[tender ridge]

plaguestaff gives you more DoT vs plague

same with firestarter torch and spreading flames

[zenith current]

okay yeah nova chunks

i can work with this

[lost gale]

Mshards tree is all juice now, barely any travel

[tacit plinth]

Has anyone found a fix for abomination sacrificing itself when doing blood specter sacrifice build, i have a friend having this problem and was wondering if any of you have a solution ,or you have to go manual sacrifice yourself?

[obtuse quest]

One “fix” is to make sure abom is never near the minion it’s trying to sacrifice

[tacit plinth]

Cool ty will pass that along

Kinda annoying it has been idk so far 2 patches of this being a problem

[solid jewel]

Hey guys never done an aco before just curious why having CDR on idols for abom is important? I can't seem to see the skills in his tree this might help?

[obtuse quest]

Any node that provides abom with a skill has a cooldown, minion CDR is important for builds that rely on those skills.

[solid jewel]

Ah ok I saw all of those but didnt see any cooldown timer hence having no clue haha

makes sense though so spam cdr and he'll basically just attack and do more cool stuff more often, got it

One more - why do people stack strength on items with abom builds as the scaling looks like int?

[obtuse quest]

The follow up question would be: Does a cleaver exist?

[solid jewel]

oh shit DUH no wonder they were all using it, thanks - lol sorry

[tender ridge]

it's pretty clever

[tacit plinth]

Stacking strength has many benefits like abomination gets flat damage from t Rex relic if they still run that on the set up,also very tanky like doing uber quite easy,and other bosses ,run bastion be max blocked by stacking strength pretty cool

[solid jewel]

Yeah it’s still on the few builds I saw and the new cdr corrupted idols it seems hence my first question I’ll roll a lil aco tonight sucks I hate no gear to twink with but yet a 77 relic lol

[tacit plinth]

Dont sleep on stomp and its cd nodes its quite strong and was a bit overlooked on thr maxroll guides

That stuff breaks any ai even uber the little guy doesn't even remember what he is supposed to do for quite sometime at times

[solid jewel]

Aight I wasn't going to use maxroll for anything but reading lizards thoughts haha - what would be the quickest levelling skill for an aco?

this guide looks like its just min dmg and minion melee stuff so assuming its summons and I already have cross over stuff from my primalist so that would be ideal

[sonic wind]

I always just spirit plague rip blood marrow shards and go. Idc if its fastest or not.

stuff dies and you level up

[solid jewel]

hahah ok - for 2100 hours now I've only ever played Sent, Rogue and Primalist. Mostly the first 2 so its gonna be a change

[pearl snow]

necro minions is always fast for leveling

[tender ridge]

Spirit Plague does kinda make a joke of trash packs you find while leveling

[inland ledge]

You never played the mages? I'm shook 😄

[solid jewel]

Haha yeah generally bit of a melee / tank kinda guy and was that way when I came from Poe bout time I tried it I guess

[inland ledge]

Flay Lich is melee-AF

Possibly the most melee build I played

[zenith current]

question - if I use marrow shards nova, does it matter if I pick up Splintering Impact?

[lost gale]

having splintering impact has no benefit and increases the health cost

at best you save one travel point by not needing to put 2 in dead weight but that's one of your main damage nodes so

[old hull]

Eternal arrow doesn't have a cooldown btw, it just casts at some rate

[lost gale]

abom can't have two arrows out at once can he?

[old hull]

I don't know, since it doesn't scale with CDRS it would probably be tough to have many out

There was a lot of discussion about that, Mike couldn't see anything in the code limiting to 1

but that doesn't guarantee that he didn't just miss something that does

[lost gale]

Huh, #👨┃ask-the-devs-not-support-no-bugs message
mike just said that the range reductions on dead weight and mshards make no difference to splinter nova

wow splinter nova really is by far the best way to play mshards

[tender ridge]

yeah it's the same as bone splinters before

bone splinters previously was just obnoxious to play with

it has always done more damage though

[muted mist]

That node needs a 30% or 50% less damage multiplier on it, sheesh

(compensated by more damage elsewhere in the tree)

[lost gale]

if you stand too close to somthing they get hit by the mshards and not the nova and the damage diff is really big

which is a bit of an issue for zombie triggered mshards if you let the zombies leap onto stuff and explode

because they're definitely too close then I think

[tender ridge]

tbh i don't think it really needs to be compensated. marrow shards just deals way less damage than bone splinters since splinters inherits all the damage stuff from shards

but it gives it significantly more clear

[tender ridge]

shouldn't the shards immediately break into a nova? I thought the nova just replaced shard casts with splinters

[lost gale]

I think it spawns the marrow shards proj and then destroys it really quickly but the mshards proj has a generous hitbox

[tender ridge]

interesting

[lost gale]

you can see a damage difference if you stand on top of the dummy and cast or stand a little away from it and cast

[old hull]

lol

[coarse hinge]

heh thanks, that explains it, noticed how sometimes I bosses went down slow and other times super fast, same boss

when I was standing inside dragon for example

[tender ridge]

draven and I were brewing up a phys ghostflame build with marrow shards autocasts

dunno if he ended up playing that or not

[muted mist]

am i correctly following that

• if you just have Marrow Shards, you do X damage
• if you have Marrow Shards plus Bone Splinter, you can either hit with the shards for X, or the splinters for Y damage by either hitting the ground, a minion, or a primary target, but you can't deal both X and Y on the same target
• if you have Marrow Caster, you usually do Y damage, but if you stand on top of the enemy you do X+Y?????

i just assumed the 'your marrow shards are instantly destroyed' was flavor text, and it replaced themarrow shards cast with splinter nova.

that node is insane, then. the whole point of the original skill tree design is that the splinters do way more damage, but are way more annoying to use, and then that node makes them not annoying at all, and then it lets you double dip???

[lost gale]

no if you stand on top of them you only do X

it's a big damage loss

there's no way to get a cast/trigger of marrow shards to hit the same enemy twice afaik

[muted mist]

oh. that's less imbalanced but also much, much stupider

[tender ridge]

marrow shards and splinters can't hit the same target afaik, never have been

[coarse hinge]

Tested on dummy now, 400k vs 70k hit

[tender ridge]

i guess instead of replacing the nova they really did just make it instantly break the shards, but the initial frame before the break can still impact stuff

[coarse hinge]

distance is something like 2m

maybe the speed nodes have something to do with it

[muted mist]

yeah, the splinter nova must be replacing the bone splinters, plus something to reduce the range to almost nothing. way easier to code that way i bet.

[coarse hinge]

not tested that 🙂

[zenith current]

any comfy way to self-curse other than bone curse as lich?

[tender ridge]

cthonic fissure. torment is a self-curse that buffs you if you have the node for it

oh wait

lich

[zenith current]

as lich

[tender ridge]

no, just bone curse

warlock is pretty much the only one that can comfy curse itself

[zenith current]

pain

xd

[old hull]

There are some non-warlock methods, they just don't seem super useful/reliable

[tender ridge]

I think the shield corrupt to Mark for Death on block is bugged currently and self curses you with it

[old hull]

I am just too lazy to really look into it also lol, maybe when I get off work

[tender ridge]

there's some pretty big opportunity cost to it, but Zerrick's 2-set marks you for death when you use a potion

[zenith current]

yea ill pass 😄

Thanks for the option tho

[tender ridge]

there's a shield that marks you for death as well

but yeah bone curse is the primary way as lich

it rips through your mana though

[zenith current]

nothing else uses my mana other than reforming zombies (if those take mana)

[tender ridge]

it's like 15/s before mana efficiency

[zenith current]

yea should be just break even with mana efficiency

[tender ridge]

depends on if you have any other cost adjustments too

most of them add to the cost/s if you have the aura

[old hull]

The zombies from rings are free, but the ones from zombie tree are expensive

[lost gale]

awakening presence costs mana and it can be quite expensive if you spec stuff like cooldown zombies, corpse worms, big zombies, marked for death, skelly vanguard etc.

[zenith current]

only skelly vanguard out of these

[lost gale]

I think it'll cost you about 14 mana with the 60% mana efficiency spec

[tender ridge]

Sinathia affix just doesn't work at all, right? It's not certain curses that don't benefit or witchfire not benefitting, but all curses?

kinda want to explore utility minions in warlock at some point. there's gotta be ways to use things like golem or skeletons outside of just marrow shards

[old hull]

Pretty sure it's only the flat part that doesn't work, but the % does (which is the only part witchfire cares about)

[sonic wind]

I use revenant from the passive tree with AoD to keep it up all the time and mantle of the pale ox.

since it has a lot of health

and mantle stats are solid anyway with 2lp

Revenant also does have that rapid hitting spin throw which might have some uses for various procs

[tender ridge]

i wish mages had some kind of utility other than being able to convert to a traversal

they have no shred of any kind on their tree, no buffs they apply

[sonic wind]

could try and make the cold ones freeze stuff lmao

Death knights are generally good at staying alive without tons of invest

[tender ridge]

i'd just play cold minions for that

they can actually freeze trash and kill stuff

[sonic wind]

They really need to buff the crap out of those "Added damage per skeleton mage" idols

flat 2 is kinda a meme

[tender ridge]

yeah the flat spell per mage stats would be fun to play with if they actually gave a relevant amount

[sonic wind]

even if you go super hard on it

[tender ridge]

...and mages had any utility

[sonic wind]

Well if the affix was high enough it would be the util

[tender ridge]

skeleton warriors can cast bone armor, but there's so much better ways to get bone armor

[tender ridge]

then they're just a glorified stacking buff at that point. kinda lame

[sonic wind]

not really because you also still have minions and that lets you do other stuff

[tender ridge]

soul feast randomly has a node on it that gives your minions frenzy when you kill something with damned

[sonic wind]

the idols with 5x omen, reliquary nest, and a perfect triple t7 pyramid altar is 24.2 flat per mage.

lol

[tender ridge]

that's like what, 72 on a non-necro?

that's not nothing but it might as well be for how much investment it takes

[sonic wind]

its laughable when you consider that just running 1x2 weaver idols is basically the same amount, also gives %inc, and doesnt even require altar

and you have prefixes on those weavers too

[tender ridge]

yeah

[sonic wind]

which could be pen/vit/health

legit they could safely triple the flat per mage

[tender ridge]

i think the biggest concern with buffing it is making a potential spell necro too strong

it's completely useless outside of necro and maybe passable for necro

[sonic wind]

Spell necro already has flat

from lich's scorn

giving it a bunch of necrotic is kinda meaningless

[tender ridge]

i didn't say it was good, just at least usable

you can get at most 3 mages on non-necro so the buff would need to be huge to matter

[wintry flame]

you can get % increased spell per mage too

[wintry flame]

5 at most with staff

[tender ridge]

true forgot about the staff

[wintry flame]

you can also have them assume your HS tree and use them as procs

not sure what the use case is there, but yeah... I guess if you wanted to do some weird channeled Wandering Spirits + Hungering Souls build with Chronicle. You can get like 400% damned chance for HS and have them run around proccing it when hit

[tender ridge]

i thought about what utility you could get from HS too but there's really not any

maybe kill threshold but you can get that more easily elsewhere

[wintry flame]

yeah I mean from them the only thing you can do is use them as a damage vector

[tender ridge]

right, which was my gripe earlier

I was looking for utility minions on non-necro. Things to use other than zombies in warlock

[wintry flame]

yeah it's just the % spell dmg or flat necrotic.

tbf it is a lot of % spell

[tender ridge]

a couple of companions and totems are usable just for utility in Primalist so you'd hope that'd be true for the other summoner

[sonic wind]

Skeleton warriors are trying but lets be real their tree is like 40 years old at this point expecting it to do anything productive is unrealistic.

It would be cool tho to have like a dedicated supportive focused mage to spec into

there is a lot of useless noise on the mage tree anyway so it could defs fit in

[tender ridge]

golem seems fit for a single big support minion to slot into builds, but it doesn't really tank all that well

sanguine orb from the blood golem could be cool for a healing source but it's not very reliable

[cunning mist]

Blood spectre raelly good for boss huh

1st uber kill of the season

[glossy granite]

U using 2h axe or axe+ bone pack/shield ?

[cunning mist]

2h axe

Super squishy lol

Die to a sneeze very often

[sly forge]

yes

third best

after abom and crit HS death knight

did you try crit HS death knight?

[lost gale]

rogues are decent at carrying infernal shade around for damage with their teleport to target skill, revive chance, mana return on death and how quickly you can replace them

[cunning mist]

What's HS

Hunger soul?

And i just got 3 2lp vises after 5 kills

[zinc jay]

Any good build for acolyte?

[sly forge]

yes

[cunning mist]

Do you have a planner?

Or guide whatsoever

[obtuse quest]

You're going to need to be more specific like what mastery and minion or non-minion

[sly forge]

@wintry flame has one

[zinc jay]

I have no idea

[sly forge]

at least for budget online gear

but it will not reach the potential of skeletal mages

[obtuse quest]

Mana flay then?

[cunning mist]

@wintry flame yo heard you got a sick death knight thing build for uber

Can i have the planner and explanation how to play?

[tender ridge]

AaronARPG made a death knight build early on in the season. His builds tend to have some odd choices sometimes so it has probably been refined by the community since then, but he did get to like 700+ corruption on the first day

[gleaming trail]

For flay, is there any ways to reduce the cost other than the -3 in the skill tree?

Keeping it as melee so no turning into spell -> spell cost reduction affixes

[obtuse quest]

I hope you didn't expected much

[gleaming trail]

Would that even work with you being moved around with the skill?

[obtuse quest]

Your first cast would.

[sonic wind]

you can also remove the movement with that node

also some movement skills dont remove stacks

transplant for example preserves all stacks

[tender ridge]

I still need to get around to playing with spell flay

it's a shame that so many of the nodes rely on the melee hit though

[candid escarp]

da fuq

[pearl snow]

Crit HS DKs, search the channel its been linked a few times

[zenith current]

Yall think for bleed marrow shards, Cast speed/cursed and bleed/phys spells is better than Damage Over Time to Bleeding Enemies for Marrow Shards and poison chance (if we're converting via carrion anyway?) hard to gauge how good is 3-4% more vs up to 33% cast speed.

[tender ridge]

do you mean the bleed chance chest affix?

because right now the things you've mentioned don't compete with each other

[wintry flame]

I haven't optimized my planner for Uber

[cunning mist]

Dis one?

[sly forge]

yeah that

but like he said it's not optimized for Uber

I think to build optimal crit HS death knight you need to be offline or MG to find suitable affixes

[tender ridge]

i mean that's gonna be true for anything through. if you want to build the literal optimal gear then just generating it offline or buying it in the bazaar is the best way

[sly forge]

but crit HS death knight takes it to the next level

because you need weaver item with the right affixes to make it optimal

and you need a lot of mana stacking

and int too

I absolutely do not recommend playing crit HS death knight or any skeletal mages in general if you play CoF

[wintry flame]

yeah, I'd actually use the bee setup one as reference. https://maxroll.gg/last-epoch/planner/7p5wms0e You could go the blight staff for 2 extra mages, you could snapshot, you could go vessel, build more mana, etc. There's a lot of options to consider and I'm not sure what is best for Uber.

I mean snapshotting would be the most optimal way but people hate it. But if everyone abused it, it would get fixed faster 😄

[wintry flame]

it's perfectly fine in CoF

if you mean for Uber then yeah I guess.

[lost gale]

I think the cast speed is better until you run out of minions to consume which probably also means running out of mana recovery.

If you go into negative mana then blood curse aura will switch off and you'll lose your cast speed anyway

[zenith current]

so depends if it hits the bottle neck, then

[lost gale]

I think so

I'm not testing the build though, my windows 98 setup can't handle it

I'm addicted to builds with tons of triggers, aoe, hits etc none of which I can really play properly

[lean sequoia]

For anyone playing profane oblation skeleton mages, does minion cast speed actually matter? I can't tell if it's making a difference in how often the skeletons are popping - I know I read somewhere it's coded to go off when the warriors attack

[wintry flame]

where'd you read that? it scales with minion cast speed, but the skeletons have to be near a target to get popped, there is a priority system for skill casts, and technically your cast speed matter too. Death Knights outside of melee range will cast Profane faster due to not cycling between basic attack and the spell cast as they will prio the Profane when not in range to use basic attack.

[muted mist]

that was probably me attempting to quote from memory a dev response

[muted mist]

found it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/1ifq1en/comment/malyykn/

The AI specifically works by only targeting minions that are currently using a melee attack. And the mages prioritise that spell above all others, and it has no cooldown, so they'll generally detonate a melee skele as soon as it gets in melee range and starts using an attack.

i don't think I was remembering the details correctly

[muted mist]

The AI specifically works by only targeting minions that are currently using a melee attack
from https://www.lastepochtools.com/skills/profane_oblation we know it's a 1.76/s base speed. so yes cast speed matters for the mages: the higher their cast speed, the faster they can spam Profane Oblation, and as long as there are skeletal warriors mid-swing when they go to cast, they'll cast Oblation over everything else

if you can't summon warriors fast enough to keep up then they'll be using their less damaging regular attack instead, which acts as somewhat of a soft cap, but that's still more damage

since the skeletal warrior just has to be in the middle of an attack, attack speed for them probably doesn't matter (unless it affects their windup or something and causes them to count as attacking sooner, but i doubt that)

move speed is probably more useful so they get to enemies and start their swing sooner

so if you hold down summon skeleton vs a boss and you get to your skeleton cap, your mages could use more cast speed; if you don't, then you could use more cast speed for yourself. in theory anyway

in practice having excess cast speed on your skeletal mages means you can just hold down the button without worry about wasting mana, which can be nice QOL. on the other hand having excess cast speed on yourself means the Oblations will continue if you have to move out of the way of an attack, which is nice for generating ward and healing

cast speed is much more of a concern for Archmage builds where you only have one skelly mage

[lost gale]

skeletons have a far from instant animation when summoned before they can attack

I can easily imagine the player having too much cast speed

[wintry flame]

interesting detail

[wintry flame]

well we also don't know if it's during the activation of their melee attack or the actual use of the skill after activating it. so whether you count or ignore the use delay

I don't think it's exactly on use because I'm not sure I sense a 0.6-0.7 delay in profane casting. So I wonder if them activating the skill is enough

[lost gale]

if wraithlord wasn't a racist you could use him to summon wraiths for the mages to blow up

alas the wraithsupremacist won't tolerate the presence of mages

[zenith current]

if bone curse is barely break even without vanguards... it might be it. but ill figure it out

[lost gale]

max mana efficiency & nothing that increases the cost of bone curse and it's manageable

[lean sequoia]

Shouldn't have posted right before a meeting, didn't mean to abandon the thread lol. Thanks for the input all, I am running into a scenario where I can summon skeletons faster than they pop so I may need to add in more minion cast speed

[sly forge]

@wintry flame in the bone kindling node

oversummoning skeletal mages are only counts as unsummon right?

they don't count as death

at least that's what happened with bees and thorn totem when I attempt to have the frozen vengeance effect from apogee

[lost gale]

Pretty sure he said oversummoning mages works fine for bone kindling

[sly forge]

then why frozen vengeance does not work with oversummoning thorn totem?

[lost gale]

Spaghetti code

[sly forge]

I gained zero stack of frozen vengeance when I oversummon thorn totems

and bees

[lost gale]

yeah that's how it works, oversummoning vines with the vine boots works for frozen vengeance though

who can say why different minions behave differently

[ornate gyro]

hi does 2 aura of decay stack with each other (from 2 different player )?

[obtuse quest]

Great question. No clue, there's a small amount of MP players.

[ornate gyro]

we will experiment this with a friend and see

[lost gale]

the legendary 4 aura of decay party

they heal each other, they apply res reduction, they apply ailments, they deal zero dps

[obtuse quest]

REAL

[lost gale]

I haven't seen a meme "cold RF" frostbite build with aod yet

I guess nobody has yet deluded themselves into thinking it would be good

[obtuse quest]

Yet

[wintry flame]

Zombie ring and/or swap dread shade after putting it on to summon zombie when needed

[sly forge]

I mean beastmaster/shaman thing

[wintry flame]

oh then vine boots

[sonic wind]

If the res reductions stack they might actually do more than zero dps if they went bleed.

-1000% phys res is kinda nuts.

[lost gale]

I think 1 warlock can get more than 1600% pen for damned

and apply it with bigger multis

haven't actually built it though

[sly forge]

I mean

what kind of logic that makes vine works but totem and bee does not work?

[sonic wind]

Spaghetti

its italian logic

[sonic wind]

I assume you mean from the meme axe but yeah.

[lost gale]

yeah, doing the whole marrow shards & zombies thing stacks a consistent 100+ stacks of damned on you with the Warlock capstone passive

[old hull]

Generally speaking, unsummoning (from oversummoning, duration expiry, etc.) is intended to not trigger any on-death/killed effects. Any other behavior is technically a bug, either as a bad description or unintended behavior.

[lost gale]

at which point it's by far the best wepon you could possibly use rather than a meme

[sonic wind]

Bleed is a bit interesting because of funny gloves and iirc it has good access to duration whereas good luck getting damned duration.

and you know, there isnt a necrotic AoD

[lost gale]

there's all of 30% damned duration available afaict and it's all on the warlock tree

[lost gale]

if the huge scaling you get is like 1600 pen then AoD isn't really offering anything

well, actually, reducing necrotic DOT taken would be important because 100+ self damned is going to hurt

[sonic wind]

Ye cant stack leech to turn it into healing if not lich

[lost gale]

you do leech on the damage you deal to your zombies and vanguards though

which is capped by how much health they have but it's not nothing

ideally you want to be low-life anyway because damned overload has 1% more damage per % missing health on you and the enemy

but idk if LL can survive all that self damned even if removing all your health regen is helpful for WPS

can get cleanse on demand from profane veil, which you probably want for mark of the rat anyway

[sonic wind]

so I did play a self damned build for a bit back in stone ages with the spirit plague self ignite stuff. I didnt have much issue sustaining through like 400-600 stacks

But I was using old twisted heart so

[wintry flame]

my guess is if there is a entity that triggers an overwrite of minions or something like decay it invalidates the death trigger. With vines, there isn't an entity triggering that effect you walk and they just overwrite or die after you hit max. So code doesn't know to ignore the death trigger.

[lost gale]

I could never get that much self ignite going with spirit plague & maehlins

[sonic wind]

There was some additional tech I had iirc but it was forever ago

I think there was a way to reset the duration

Might have been something with old soul feast? I know I was using that skill at least.

Ah it was actually from the ignite on kill. The only timeline I ever pushed on was reign of dragons and that boss spawns adds.

napkin math tho theres no need to be at all concerned about self damned damage.

500 stacks would be under 3k taken per second

cuz self ailments last I checked dont get the pen per area level that enemy ailments do

[zenith current]

Think that self-cast self-curse is better than Ghostflame trigger and not caring about cast speed?

[lost gale]

for bleed zombieshards?

[zenith current]

ye

[lost gale]

I wouldn't consider ghostflame tbh

making ghostflame sustainable is a third of a build by itself

I guess you get more damage vs damned while channeling, that's fairly nice

3.2 casts per second is pretty weak compared to doublecasting it yourself

[zenith current]

ye i guess

[tender ridge]

what if we politely ask the damned stacks to heal us instead of hurt

[lost gale]

How could they refuse us?

[tender ridge]

exactly

fool proof idea

[sonic wind]

I mean they actually don't deal much self damage. 35/s per stack. 100 stacks is 3500, but you have resists vs these since no pen.

[lost gale]

Damned
Deals necrotic damage over time and reduces health regen
Duration: 2.5 seconds
Max stacks: Unlimited
Base Damage: 35 Necrotic (over time)
Effects:
20% reduced Health Regen
This means it deals 35 damage over the 2.5 second duration, not 35dps for 2.5 seconds.
So it actually deals 35/2.5 = 14dps

along with reducing your health regen to 0 at the kind of stack counts we're talking about

[sonic wind]

division is hard ok

1400 dps tho *0.25 from resists is still an easily managed 350

[lost gale]

the axe has 26-13% less fire and necrotic DOT damage taken too

yeah seems easy to manage

though probably too much for low-life to feel good

and low-life is a huge scalar for damned

[sonic wind]

if lich you could make dot bypass ward and pray

[lost gale]

gotta be warlock, can't self damn via aspect of death otherwise

and warlock has 30% damned duration, the only damned duration on enemies available anywhere I think

so that's a huge multiplier that usually doesn't factor in the warlock vs lich comparison

oh yeah warlock also has damned proliferation from profane veil.

[sonic wind]

I don't think this is anywhere near enough to stop you from doing low life honestly

[lost gale]

well the other thing is you'll have zero health regen and mshards costs health so you need to get enough healing to always be able to cast it but not too much that you can't stay low-life.

I think the answer is to have zombies heal you on death for a small amount and scale it as little as possible but that could still be too much

[muted mist]

Huh, isn't it a percent of current so if you're at 0 health it costs 0?

[lost gale]

That makes sense to me but someone said you can't cast it at 0

I haven't tested it, game barely runs for me

Any testing I do is a <20fps affair that takes 10 minutes to launch

LET is the real game anyway

[muted mist]

oof. i got noticeably better load times after i added a second stick of RAM to my potato laptop (2 sticks -> less RAM load speed bottleneck somehow)

[muted mist]

hrm. if on a legacy character Apophis doesn't offer to sell me things and I don't have a quest from her, am I bugged? or do I just need to complete a greater omen?

[obtuse quest]

Did that character clear a tomb yet?

[muted mist]

Yep, I'm at 300 corruption and 10/10 Harbingers (was 200 and 6/10 when 1.4 hit), pretty sure I've cleared some tombs and cemeteries

[sonic wind]

You cant cast it at zero because you die at 0 health and cant cast skills while dead

Health is stored as a float so you can have decimals

if they are doing integer comparisons on floats to check skill costs then this whole game is cursed

[muted mist]

Yeah, that's what I meant, even if the health bar shows 0, under the hood you should have some fraction of a health and be able to spend some fraction of that to pay for marrow shards. If I were implementing I would probably use an integer and just use it to represent 1/1000th of a health or whatever, so you don't deal with the weirdness of floating point math, but then if you are at 1 millihealth the cost should round down to zero

[random dome]

Quick question: Attack speed from Julra's Obsession isn't applying to Blood Wraiths (Sacrifice).
0 difference in bleed stacks on the dummy, and no visual change. The gloves work on my other minions though. Has anyone else tested this?

[sonic wind]

How much attack speed is on them?

if its like 10% it will be really hard to notice

[random dome]

It has 42% in total, including the corrupted stat.

[sonic wind]

hmm. Try checking a non corrupted pair and see

could be a bug but you should be able to notice that much

[random dome]

I've done a lot of testing by taking them off and putting them back on. If it's not intentional, it definitely feels like a bug.

[sonic wind]

Oh wait. Did you resummon them in between

try like, totally reloading the zone too

[random dome]

Yes, of course. I made sure to completely resummon them every time I equipped or unequipped the gloves. Still zero difference.

[sonic wind]

Last thing I'd say to check. Make a pair of gloves with like armour shred or some other ailment that you dont have a source of for minions and see if that works

and also check if it works for another minion type

its way easier to fix a super specific bug report than one that isnt

[random dome]

That is a brilliant idea

[sonic wind]

my gut is saying there might be some weirdness going on since blood spectres are a triggered minion skill, the stats from the gloves might be getting lost somewhere along the way

the list of things to test with this is honestly pretty long lol.

since theres that amulet too, but that might operate totally differently

not that you have to go through and test 100% of it ofc

[random dome]

I just tested it with Armor Shred, and it's not applying either. Only my Abomination is applying the stacks when it hits. Even with over 10 Blood Wraiths attacking the dummy right now, they aren't applying a single stack.

[wintry flame]

That would be a bug mhm

[sonic wind]

well there we go

Gloves must be wrong size for the wraiths. Their hands too small

[lost gale]

maybe that's why the 5k+ corruption pushing blood wraiths guy isn't using julra gloves

they seem obviously better than the falcon bleed gloves at first glance

[sonic wind]

If he was using them then someone would have to go break the sad news

[noble flame]

I thought they were working, but I've only been playing with attack speed and didn't really test much

Guess I'll swap back to Blood Roost

I suppose the good news is that the build can kill Uber with, effectively, no gloves on.

[kind mist]

and a bug that stops it from functioning sometimes