[1.1.9.7] Daega's Oath Poison Retaliation Sentinel [Crucible, SR75-76]

[thepowerofmediocrity]

Retaliation, particularly DoT retaliation, is something that’s limited to a few gear selections, but once you put it all together, allows you to kill enemies simply walking up to them and letting them hit you. Burn Retaliation has the drawback of not having any resistances whatsoever, and once I saw that the bulk of Poison retaliation comes in the form of the Daega’s Oath set, I was set to build the remaining pieces and try to get something decent going.

GRIMTOOLS

Retaliation stats with passives & Blood of Dreeg only

I’ve taken practically all the gear pieces that provide Poison Retaliation [Dreeg Venomspine Girdle, Venomskin Legwraps, and Mythical Venomspine Greaves] and combined them with the Daega’s Oath set to stack the retaliation damage as high as I could. Ascension, Messenger of War, Phoenix Fire, and Stone Form all add more retaliation damage making the values much higher than what is shown in the picture.

The main damage-dealing sources of the build are transmuted DEE and Aegis of Menhir. Bramblevine provides a whopping 50% RATA to DEE at the cost of 2 additional second recharge. Since this is a DoT retaliation build and not a pure Acid retal, we forego the Sentinel set for a Ravna’s Claw to stack more retal to Aegis, and between Vire’s Might, Dreeg’s Afflicted Spines, and Plague Rot from the amulet, you have enough going on that you won’t mind the extra cooldown on transmuted DEE.

A big weakness of the build is a lack of OA - without Ascension, you’re looking at 2,750 OA with all passives and Blood of Dreeg active, and that’s with Agressive prefix on the Belt and “of Attack” on the medal. In that regard, it’s very reliant on Ascension to provide those juicy DoT crits.

Performance:

[1.1.9.7] Daega's Oath Sentinel Crucible [7:28]

SR:

It’s very easy to die to Hero chunks if you Vire’s Might right into them, so it’s much more effective to kite them with your two hard-hitting DoTs and Vire’s Might through them into empty spots. Still, it’s relatively easy to make it through SR75-76 without dying, just don’t make bonehead plays like I do and feel like you have to facetank everything. Yes, you are retal, but the Poison lasts long enough that you can take a minor hit, apply the retal DoT, and avoid the bigger, major hits.

I defeated SR 80 to unlock SR 75-76 waystones, but there’s no additional rewards for going to 80.

[LordThundyr]

Dreeg’s Machine Gun

I am a bad player. I play very casually, don’t follow build guides, mostly play SSF, and my 50+ year old twitch reflexes more closely resemble those of a sleeping cat’s tail than those of the cat itself. As a result, my characters die a lot and I don’t get out of most builds what others would (assuming I even have the gear those builds use - I don’t even have all the blueprints yet after 3000 hours!).

A while back I was looking for something new to play and had always wanted to try out a purely retaliation-based caster. I did some theorycrafting for an SSF build (MIs, crafts) but discovered I had a Sentinel approaching level 100 in a bad retaliation build with over 80 deaths lol, and figured I’d respec and have some fun testing this fast-casting DEE retal build. Some more deaths and improvements later, I discovered quite by accident that my build had set a new damage dealt record (for me, anyway) of over 1 million damage. This is the only build I’ve piloted to safe clears of SR75/76, the only one I’ve used to kill Ravager.

GRIMTOOLS (1.2.1.2)

That was when I found this old post by thepowerofmediocraty and figured I should provide an update, since my build is really quite different even though it uses the same pair of main skills (DEE and AoM). After all, if I can play this to SR75/76, then it basically can’t fail, right? I imagine that there are many differences between 1.1.9.7 in the OP build and 1.2.1.2 that may inform the ease with which things happen.

Principal differences:

No slow speed DEE. I could only find about 177% casting speed, and I’m not smart enough to know whether 200% casting speed on a poison/acid build is even a good idea. I mostly thought it had to be better than chugging along attacking once every other second with each of my 2 skills…

Completely different Devotion Tree. My “old” build used the more “classic” Stone Form proc on Obelisk of Menhir, but I wanted something different with higher blocking/defences, and therefore I never went deep into Primordial. Instead I took Affliction and Hyrian, which provide a lot more armour and blocking potential, while still boosting retaliation.

Corruptian over Ravna’s Claw. I didn’t like the wait period thanks to Bramblevine nor the necessity for a dump into Cunning. “Buying” Corruptian also guaranteed I’d have what I wanted (buffs to DEE) rather than trying to farm some appropriate affixes off a boss some distance from a waypoint.

Ronaprax’s Sting. Easily farmed in Old Arkovia, it brings %WD and %retal to both main skills and is surely BiS for the build.

Farmed Creeping Rings with casting speed. Those in the grimtools are the ones on the character. Took 60-90 mins of running Vinelton to get those, and there are far better combinations in GDStash than these.

No Vire’s Might. Too risky for me; I don’t mind walking and the character melts packs perfectly fine to not trouble the SR timer.

Mythical Touch of the Living Grove. I’m a bad player. Better players would use Vilescorn Bracers.

Almost no points in DEE. Retal damage FAR outweighs whatever the skill brings imo, so I put the points to better use in Oathkeeper for stronger passives.

More defensive. Can facetank quite while most of the time, 82% chance to block with 95% recovery and absorbing over 11k with Absolution up seems pretty good for when you’re swarmed. 61% reflection resistance also seemed kinda important along the way.

Maybe I’ll post a video or two later. Comments and criticisms welcome.

EDIT: I made a mistake above with Ravna’s Claw. The added cooldown to DEE comes from Bramblevine. What I mostly didn’t like about Ranva’s is that it only buffed Aegis (and needed cunning), whereas I’m going for a spam-cast DEE build so it didn’t seem to fit.