FEATURING: A brilliant eye-dea on how to get a-head of the game**
**I take no responsibility for that godawful pun
Stats with self-buffs active, including Dying God
Intro
Rotgheist has never seemed like the most popular set, but it did receive a new round of buffs in 1.1.9.2. So, I thought – why not give this a go? In addition, the old Rotgheist builds on the forum (the ones I could find, anyway) largely built around acid DEE, or vitality Primal Strike. But I couldn’t find one that featured vitality DEE/Vire’s Might together in one build: two of the set’s focuses.
Thus, my path was laid out before me.
Features
Pros
- EXPLODING BALLS AND EYEBALLS
- Smooth, fast gameplay
- Good DPS - all the stacking skill bonuses allow for some satisfyingly big crits. My highest hit on this character to date:
- Great lifesteal on both DEE and Vire’s Might
- Rotgheist is squishy, even with the health buff. This can contrast comically sometimes with the playstyle of this particular build - see the SR notes under the Kill Screenshots section.
- EXTREMELY energy hungry. Even an Arcane Spark is not enough in certain situations (trust me you do not want to run out of energy in say, the SR 80 boss room with the Iron Maiden on your ass. This is from personal experience). Taking Scales is essentially required.
Gameplay
Debuff with Curse of Frailty, slam into enemies with your ugly mug - I mean, your Vire’s Might nuke. Spam eyeballs. Rinse and repeat. Use Sigils of Consumption for healing.
Notes on Vire’s Might:
This underwent a great deal of testing. IMO, Rotgheist does not work well as a typical skater-style build despite having bonuses to Vire’s Might, the reason being that all the gear that gives cooldown reduction to VM is either blocked by the Rotgheist set itself and/or has conversions we don’t want. I tried, nonetheless, but the results were mediocre. Fully invested and converted Volcanic Stride (with the Lunal’Valgoth belt) did not make that much of a DPS difference from just full-time spamming DEE, so that was a bust.
Dropping Volcanic Stride and switching the skill over from “skate” to “nuke,” however, made a drastic difference. I’m talking ~8 sec faster dummy kills; it went from 25-26 seconds to around 18 seconds to kill the training dummies. And in the event that using VM constantly becomes too dangerous, you can still do decent damage by hanging back and only casting DEE, though of course the ideal situation is to use both skills together.
Devotions
Pretty typical vitality setup with Rattosh and Dying God. Bat/Ghoul for sustain, blabla. Originally had Revenant, but switched to Scales because of energy issues as mentioned (Scales is nice for vitality anyway, so no issues there at least). Included intermediate devotions that would boost cast speed, e.g. Jackal and Spider.
Leveling
This is an endgame build, and will work as advertised once you have the endgame Rotgheist set. For leveling, please head over to tqFan’s excellent beginner’s leveling guide for DEE sentinels.
Gear choices
Note: Gear was crafted for freeze resistance.
Note #2: I only use single-rare MIs in my builds at most, and my purples/blues are self-found. My Hallanx’s Head is actually kind of shittily rolled, with poor conversion and poor casting speed, so you might get better stats than me.
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Weapon - Pandemic got buffed for vitality DEE, and also now gives an extra -8% Vitality RR to the Guardians of Empyrion. Nice
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Offhand - Mythical Hallanx’s Head also got some nice vitality DEE bonuses. So, these two together are two natural choices for our build.
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Gloves - Went with craftable Emberguard Gauntlets for the built-in casting speed and phys res. You can use something else, ideally something which gives cast speed.
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Pants - Kuba’s pants for points to Tectonic Shift - goal is to softcap it at 12 points, after which the returns fall off.
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Belt - Mythical Girdle of Stolen Dreams, a good vitality belt with +1 to all skills in Occultist.
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Boots - Mythical Desecrator Treads, a solid option mainly chosen for the big slow resistance.
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Rings - Signet of the Fallen for -RR, Ring of Vile Intent for points to DEE nodes.
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Medal - Mark of Plagius, gives points to VM as well as adding yet more vitality damage to it.
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Relic - Eldritch Pact because it’s the only +1 to all Occultist Skills relic with any resistance on it, which we need to balance ours out. But it’s a good relic in and of itself… and the red ball proc visually complements our red eyeball eruptions well. Clearly, the most important part.
Kill videos/screenshots
Shattered Realm
The build is consistent in farming range (65-75), but turns into a squishball after that, probably because smashing enemies with your face generally isn’t the best survival tactic as a caster with less than 2k armor and decidedly unimpressive defensive stats.
Nevertheless, you can usually get some good results with kiting.
Note that for hard content, I recommend dropping 3 points from Tectonic Shift and putting them into Sigil of Consumption to softcap it. You will not be able to consistently use VM in such content (at least, not safely) and the healing will help more.
SR 85 boss room:
SR 80 boss room:
Ravager of MindsDidn’t post videos for the celestials because honestly they were just long, boring kite fiestas on this character. But they are possible.
Mogdrogen
Final words
Ty to tqFan (again) and Stupid_Dragon’s guides on game mechanics, specifically the one about secondary skill modifiers this time around- I am always learning something new about this game.