[1.0.0.9] The Clairvoyant Warlock: Triple Doom Bolts and unending Devastation


Effortless Rashalga kill.

I’ve been interested in making a “signature” Warlock build for a while now, and Superfluff’s Doom Bolt Conjurer inspired me to put together the Warlock equivalent.
Thanks to JoV for suggesting several changes that significantly improved on my first attempt at this concept.

The basic concept here is to use heavy cooldown reduction and CD reset mechanisms to fully exploit Doom Bolt and Devastation for damage, while getting >50% Mirror of Ereoctes uptime.
Naturally full Clairvoyant set and Albrecht’s Duality are the core items here, providing a ton of relevant +skills, and converting Doom Bolt to aether damage.

GrimTools link:
http://www.grimtools.com/calc/lV7w5bVQ

Pros:

Zero MIs required. You can cap resists and reach acceptable core stats without any hard to find greens.
Excellent survivability. Overcapped Maiven’s, 20%+ phys resist plus always available Mirror and BoD make this build closer to a tank than a glass cannon.
Good balance of AoE and single target.
Great fun to play. One of the most involved caster builds for sure.
Can easily handle all of the game’s content. I have easily finished Challenger Crucible with no buffs and I am sure one could take this through Gladiator as it is.

Cons:

Completely reliant on Albrecht’s Duality and the Clairvoyant set. If you don’t have all the pieces with decent conversion rolls, you will not be very effective.
Can be awkward to play, requires good timing and focus to be effective. You will be using the whole skill bar.
Mediocre armor value.
Lots of unconverted and poorly scaled Vitality and Fire damage limit our damage output.

Skills:

Grimcalc with +skills and devotions:
http://grimcalc.com/build/1009-J4xS8C

Grimcalc without +skills and devotions:
http://grimcalc.com/build/1009-cFGJ2V

Stat distribution: 90 Physique

The core damage spells are Doom Bolt and Devastation. Cooldown reduction and resets give us a 3 second CD on Doom Bolt and frequent double or triple casts, and the ability to keep Devastation going more than 3/4 of the time spent in combat. Likewise, Mirror of Ereoctes and Blood of Dreeg are nearly always on hand for survivability.

We use the active from Haunt relic to debuff Aether and Vit resistance and as a convenient applicator of Arcane Bomb.

Callidor’s Tempest with the Wrath of Agrivix transmuter gives us a guaranteed Time Dilation proc and OFF helps us deal with trash.

Passive wise we use Star Pact for the cooldown reduction bonus, and overcapped Maiven’s gives us significant extra survivability.

Gearing:

The setup presented below requires no green items, and gives us up to 103% Aether RR combined with 50% CDR.

Equipment breakdown:

Head: Clairvoyant’s Hat (Leathery Hide/Mankind’s Vigil)
Chest: Clairvoyant’s Robe (Chains of Oleron/Mankind’s Vigil)
Shoulders: Clairvoyant’s Mantle (Silk Swatch/Mankind’s Vigil)
Gloves: Light’s Defender Gauntlets (Mutated Scales/Mankind’s Vigil)
Legs: Empowered Legplates of Valor (Scaled Hide/Mankind’s Vigil)
Boots: Golemborn Greaves (Mark of Mogdrogen/Mankind’s Vigil)
Belt: Phantom-Thread Girdle (Antivenom Salve/Mankind’s Vigil)

Main hand: Clairvoyant’s Wand (Riftstone/Outcast’s Wrath)
Off hand: Codex of Lies (Imbued Silver/Outcast’s Wrath)

Ring 1: Albrecht’s Duality (Corpse Dust/Survivor’s Ingenuity)
Ring 2: Band of the Eternal Haunt (Corpse Dust/Survivor’s Ingenuity)
Amulet: Empowered Devil’s Charm (Focusing Prism/Survivor’s Ingenuity)
Medal: Mark of Fierce Resolve (Arcane Spark)

Relic: Haunt

The components and augments shown here are obviously dependent on your item rolls. Better rolls can free up slots for extra health and armor via mutated scale or scaled hide.

Non-critical gear:

As a general rule, all but the Clairvoyant Pieces and AD ring can be substituted and the build will still function. I advise against changing the second ring, belt, medal or relic as those are BiS as far as I know.

Golemborn Greaves can be swapped out for well rolled greens like the ever popular Stonehide Exalted Streads of Whatever. This would improve resistances at the cost of movespeed and phys resist.

Empowered Legplates of Valor can be upgraded by using some well-rolled Sect Pants.

Empowered Devil’s Charm can be replaced by Empowered Essence of Beronath or The Peerless Eye of Beronath. It is chosen above those two for the 6% CDR it provides.

Codex of Lies can be replaced by Aldanar’s vanity. Codex is still recommended here because AV’s proc cannot be controlled and will be wasted 90% of the time. While the +skills on AV is useful, Codex of Lies provides us with an RR and DA debuff.

Gloves are the most flexible slot. The LD Gauntlets can be replaced by Voidsteel Gauntlets or any other high level Gloves that let you cap resists.

Playstyle:

Devotion bindings:
Doom Bolt - Acid Spray
Callidor’s Tempest - Time Dilation
Haunt - Arcane Bomb

Here Callidor’s Tempest is used as a 100% Time Dilation proc chance that is separate from our main attack skills. The typical combat sequence goes like this: Chaos Strike to target, cast Haunt, cast Devastation, Doom Bolt and Mirror, use CT to reset the Doom Bolt cooldown and bring Devastation and Mirror back for as soon as you need them again. OFF to be used to keep trash at bay or under your Devastation as you move.

If you don’t want to dedicate a button to either OFF or CT, you can get rid of one of them. However binding Time Dilation to OFF is unreliable against some bosses immune to freeze, and getting rid of OFF entirely saves only 5 skill points and can slow you down when wading through packs of trash mobs. I would recommend not to bind Time Dilation to Doom Bolt as having the reset on a separate ability affords you much better control.

It should be obvious here that Mirror enables you to facetank anything as long as it is up, though this is a cooldown caster and you can walk away from your target without losing DPS. Mad Queen goes down without risk in about 30 seconds but you can’t just stay up in her face unless you get lucky reset procs. You don’t need to kite endlessly, just play smart with your CDs.

There are no energy issues thanks to the granted skill from the Clairvoyant set refilling your entire energy bar on a low cooldown.

Leveling:

This build requires a level 75 Legendary item to work. Level as something else.

That’s it for now, enjoy :D.

Reserved just in case.

Nice… I have a similar builds months ago… might have to dust him off the shelves and see how i can update him… :undecided:

Thanks…

Hm. Looks good. I do have to ask… GrimTools shows maxed Occultist bar, but you don’t take anything after Doom Bolt. Just for stats? Also, thoughts on swapping the Amulet for Arcane Shard of Agrivix? Seems like you’d lose the Occultist +1, and the CDR, but gain Devastation Damage because you’d be converting the Fire. Might be an OK tradeoff.

Hey,

Glad you decided to post your own groove. Nice:p

I maxed the bar because it turns out that the old char I respecced to make this had both bars maxed instead of 50/32 like I thought. I figured that there wasn’t anything vital that needed maxing so I left it at that. You can take the points out and use them somewhere else if you want, it won’t change much. You’ll lose some hp and DA though.

As far as Arcane Shard goes, it’s certainly viable but the CDR from devil’s charm is very good (hence why it’s picked over the OA from Peerless Eye), as CDR is a self-scaling stat. The value of each point of CDR increases with each point you already have. Also Arcane Shard lacks the +Occultist and that means we can’t reach 22/12 Doom Bolt. It’s also much harder to find. So basically the extra Devastation damage is balanced out by lowering your Doom Bolt damage and the uptime of every other spell. I’ve tried both and Devil’s Charm felt better to me.

You could max Arcane Will, Fabric of Reality, and Conversion, (max with +skills at least). Would be a nice little buff.

Fun build. :good:
I d rather switch Codex of Lies for Tome of Arcane Waste =) For some free points and a spamable spell.

So you decided to go with LD gloves after all :slight_smile:

Build has spammable skill from Haunt relic, and managing CD of mirror, devastation and DB, dont leave you with much time to use some other skill.
For those reasons my variation of this build doesn’t even use transmuted CT, for triggering TD I use OFF.

Actually I’m still using Voidsteel Gauntlets on my save, but that’s because my resist rolls on gear favor them. On the GT with average rolls on every item the resist capping is much more efficient with LD gloves. They also give extra hp which is nice. If I could be bothered to do it I’d switch some components around and grab items with better rolls from the stash to get better hp and OA, and fit an extra Scaled Hide on my actual character. But the Voidsteel proc is cool and it works fine as is.

When I decided to post this I went with items that made the most sense to the average person. Also why there are deliberately zero greens, though the current items give phys resist that you don’t get from MIs.

And yeah I don’t think anyone who actually tried this would think you need an extra spell to use :D. This build is pretty messy to play as it is.

Yea, until you get use to it its complete mess but when you get used to follow skill using sequences its pretty funny with huge potential :wink:

Can you mathematically prove you’ll get “unending” Devastation?

That was hyperbole. At 50% CDR and perfect input there is a small (<1s) delay before you can cast your 4th Devastation and a more noticeable (~2s) one before the 5th unless you get lucky and one of your chance to reset procs takes place. I’m unsure if the CDR value on gear is an integer or a rounded float, in which case one could potentially squeeze out a few extra % of CDR and make the delays negligible

As it is however you can certainly keep Devastation up ~80% of the time, but in actual use it won’t happen cleanly due to the need to keep track of and use other spells.

If you want to get more CDR you can achieve 2% extra CDR by changing some gear ie. one ring to empowered star-fire (+2 to star pac), medal to empowered tempest sigil (+1 to star pact) and off hand to some sort that gives +1 to arcanist (AV or some other). In that case you could push star pact to 21/22 and achieve max CDR of 15% from it instead of 13% that you have on 17/22.

That’s way too much effort for that kind of return though :D. Ironically this build gets more CDR than TSS builds because those use Starfury Emerald which gives zero CDR.

Sigh, well i guess i can’t complain since i’ve enjoyed Clairvoyant caster for many patches now so even if they nerf it it’s fine

Nice job figuring this build out and impressive optimization

Score: 11/10 :rolleyes:

I got help optimizing this build, you should thank the usual suspects for that :D. I spent 10 days trying to find a way to improve on the advice they gave me but eventually figured that the problem had already been solved :rolleyes:. Otherwise the version I would have posted would have more paper damage but less tankiness and quite a bit less RR.

As far as nerfs go, the MQ kill times are average and there is no video of Gladiator being strolled through or Mog getting spanked, I think we’re safe :D.

Seriously though, I hope this build doesn’t get nerfed. It’s super fun to play and remains engaging despite how strong it is.

I never do that but I think I’m going to follow this guide to the letter because it looks pretty good.

Im glad that you know how nerf hammer works, so if you dont want it to be nerfed you know what you shouldn’t do :slight_smile:

P.S. CDR approach can also be used for some other builds to achieve great results.

Who says I haven’t started working on that ? :smiley: