Squishy build or strong build, either way he’s in the way and to progress you will need to overpower him. He held me up for a while, and that certainly is frustrating, but persist and you will overcome.
My own build is kind of meh – heck it’s full on meh right now – but I got past him through persevering, blind luck, and altering tactics until a successful strategy was hit upon. My squishy low DA/OA Warlock did him with Pox, Solael’s Flame, Doom Bolt and a randomized kiting pattern – that dude can’t dance, so show him your moon walk and reap the benefits.
I’ve been farming for gear for weeks and have had nothing appropriate drop for this character. Sounds easy to say to apply these augments or components to upgrade OA/DA but everything in this game comes with tradeoffs. If I apply an augment or component then I lose another so there goes some resistance that’s required. If I had to guess the main problem for this fight, it’s fire resist. So, in addition to the 130% required to get to 80% that I probably need another 30% beyond that to counter his resistance reduction. The problem is that it’s not just fire but chaos and physical resists. You shouldn’t need the best gear in the game or specific classes to be able to beat a REQUIRED quest line boss.
I’ve been revered with every faction before even reaching level 100. The only enemy reputation that’s not nemesis is Cronley’s Gang which seems like it takes 10x as long as any other faction for some reason. I don’t see any of the faction gear as an upgrade at this point with maybe the exception of the Elite Malmouth Dread Casque. There’d be a bit of irony if this was needed since you have to defeat this guy before you get to Malmouth again. I also kind of like the 42% increased poison duration, the extra poison damage, and the +500 health of my current headgear but could see giving it up for +3 to doom bolt. Is there something specific that you’re recommending?
I spent a couple hours on this boss last night and got to a point where I got so disgusted that I just gave up because I was making no real progress. Thankfully, I don’t actually NEED him now. The only way I initially got passed him was when I was using a lightning build and I think I managed to pull him via Wind Devil and attack from outside the room or just managed to keep coming back and eventually got him down via Wind Devil/Storm Totem while continuously running.
If you are really struggling with a Boss. There is nothing wrong with replacing some Acid or Pierce resistance (as an example) on augments or gear for more Fire or Chaos in this case if you need it and then swapping back after the encounter.
Same goes for items like Flamedrinker Ointment that increase Fire resistance, the Royal Jelly salves that can increase health regeneration or other nice effects like % health/energy or you can even straight up pop Aether Clusters that give you a large amount of damage absorption for 8 seconds.
You have multiple resources, if you are having a hard time, use them so you can move on instead of being stuck in one place.
If I had to guess the main problem for this fight, it’s fire resist. So, in addition to the 130% required to get to 80% that I probably need another 30% beyond that to counter his resistance reduction. The problem is that it’s not just fire but chaos and physical resists. You shouldn’t need the best gear in the game or specific classes to be able to beat a REQUIRED quest line boss.
It’s partially Fire/Chaos resist (as he is capable of debuffing your resistances) but Physical also plays a big role as your defences to it aren’t stellar either.
I suggested looking at faction gear for the expansion factions because you’ll be surprised at how much they offer in the way of resistances and other bonuses. They are really solid and easy to acquire gear pieces. I apologise if I’m repeating myself but I really do recommend looking over them if you haven’t.
You do not need the best gear in the game to beat him. I’ not being rude but some of your gear, component choices and build aren’t great either. Besides that, Ultimate is meant to be a real test of character builds but more-so Ashes of Malmouth, as well, I suppose because it comes after the Loghorrean.
I switched builds from Lightning to Vitality about a month ago. Every item drop of green or better is in Item Assistant. There are 68 lvl 94 Legendaries, 31 lvl 84 Legendaries, and about 26 duplicate drops. I’m trying for better gear but just haven’t been too successful. I’ve looked at all of the faction gear and started with most of it after switching to Vitality since my lightning gear was no longer appropriate. It’s taken this long to get my devotion constellations leveled and I’m still a half level away from max on most of them.
I’ve been valuing skill points, vitality dam/decay, acid/poison, and chaos dam in that order while trying to maintain 10K health and 80% resistances with gear choices. To be honest though, gear selection hasn’t been a problem because nothing great has dropped. I’ve also been trying for treasure troves for recipe drops but not a lot of luck there either. Suggest some specific gear choices that are easy to get that are objectively better than what I have and I’ll go get them. If feedback is constructive, I don’t consider it rude. I’ve got to work with what’s available though. At the moment, it’s seeming like creating a new character might be easier than salvaging this one.
With respect to Ekket though, he shouldn’t be as difficult as he is since he’s REQUIRED and there are bosses after him that are obviously easier.
To be honest, I think the devs purposefully designed each boss to be challenging to one kind of build or another. A build that cruises past Ekket, might find it difficult to fight the Titans. Really, learn from builds that are posted in the forum by veterans. Learn how the synergy forms between gears, components, skills, augments, devotions. The only thing that sticks with you is your choice of class. Every thing else will and should change during gameplay, until you reach level 94 when you can equip those powerful legendary sets and make your final build.
@Delta. Try something like this. I’ve tried to use components that are fairly easy to craft or ones that you will probably have from drops (such as Chains of Oleron) but they can otherwise be replaced by other things.
Everything is overcapped by at least 10%, if you use potions such as Flamedrinker Ointment, you can handle resist reductions of around 35-40 (except for Pierce which lacks a consumable and Bleed whose consumable is unreleased and harder to make :p). Other than that, around 220 more OA and 160 DA, more stun resistance and a bit of armour absorption. Your Dreeg Eyes will do less direct damage (through Vile Eruption) but this is compensated by making your Doom Bolts stronger.
Edit: Made a mistake with the girdle prefix. Corrected the link to work without it. That said, if you craft a belt with resists that help, you can shift some things around for more OA/DA/other stuff.
If i may add, Vile Eruption for transmuted DEE is virtually no-factor dps wise, one should spec out of it alltogether imho (1 hard point at most for increased devo proccing probs but thats it).
I never had any problems with him. Gabal’Thunn the visage of madness is harder than him by far let alone Grava’Thul the voiddrinker chthonic nemesis. What is your fire resist and chaos resist? What is your armor rating, armor absorption percentage and DA at? Do you have any ADCTH?
I just saw your message but am at this build currently: https://www.grimtools.com/calc/m23w0k42
This has me maxed on the skills: Sigil of Consumption, Doom Bolt, and Wendigo Totem.
I’ll have to study what you did with the components/augments to see how I can incorporate the OA/DA additions that you did.
It seems like it would be. It adds 6044 damage non-DOT to each DEE cast (1758 acid, 4230 vit) based on the in-game tooltip and is an AOE. DEE itself just does 9372 and most of that is the poison DOT. I don’t understand how they did the math for this since the grimtools calc shows 81 acid and 93 vit for vile eruption at level 14.
Eliminating all but one point in Vile Eruption would give me 11 points to play with but I honestly don’t see a better place for them. If the tooltip isn’t lying the the difference between 3 skill points and 14 skill points in Vile Eruption is 1809 -> 6044 or 4235 damage.
I was hoping that the damage of Second Right might go to spells but it only goes to the weapon which can indirectly affect Blood Burst but nothing else. Solael’s witchfire will affect all vitality spells but the 74% increase amounts to 4% overall damage increase for Vitality due to diminishing returns. I guess at the moment if I had to place them somewhere else it would be Aspect of the Guardian. What’s your suggestion?
I’d try and figure out how you’re getting the damage for Vile Eruption but I’d need more details like your exact % bonuses (they’ll be kinda off from grimtools values as it uses average values for items) and where you’re getting the damage value (I’d assume from the tooltip in the mastery window).
As for where to put Vile Eruption’s points. I’d put them into Blood Burst or a few into Aspect of the Guardian if you need the extra Acid resistance.
First off, the dps calculation on the character sheet is literally the last thing i would trust out of all things even remotely related to GD including the chances of Zantai would finally give us podzemele bagels.
On a serious note, lets do a little bit of math.
Let’s call Vile Eruption’s all-time damage value X.
Transmuted DEE has a cd of 4 seconds, make it 3.5 with cdr, and it has a +125% total damage modifier so VE will deal 2.25X damage every 3.5 seconds.
On spammable DEE it deals 1X damage/cast, and it can be casted at least 3 times/second with 0% extra casting speed (3X/second, more than 10X in a 3.5 second span. Capping/almost capping casting speed takes that more than 20X in 3.5s, and this right here is a quite cautious calculation.
In the light of this, if VE for transmuted DEE would deal any reasonable dps it would throw the untransmuted one kinda off the charts, which is not the case at all of course.
All in all, transmuted DEE is all about the (poison) dot, since the cooldown is not reducing it’s dps while the the total damage bonus is more than doubling it.
On the other hand, spammable (untransmuted) DEE is about the flat damage (including VE) since you can spam it magnitudes more times over the transmuted one’s cd period which the 125% total damage bonus horribly fails to compensate for.
All off this is by intended design imho.
Hope i didn’t make some terrible mistake in the calculations and made some sense, i’m not a math prof after all.
Imo he is getting easier by the day. Probably even needs a buff same with other story bosses: Cronley, Darkvaleboss, Smuggler pass boss, Aetherial barn boss among many others
The numbers I used for Vile Eruption were the in-game skill description ones. There’s no damage meter/log to look at in this game so it’s really tough to see what’s happening. The Vile Eruption numbers change based on whether the transmute Focused Gaze is taken.
Without the transmute, they’re:
741 acid
1880 vitality
With the transmute, they’re:
1751 acid
4230 vitality
This is how the game is breaking down DEE if assigned to mouse button.
Without transmute:
5000-5047 Total
29-38 phys
1385 acid
2228-2259 vitality
46-53 chaos
1280 poison
32 vitality decay
DPS: 9280
With transmute:
11568-11674 Total
66-84 phys
3288 acid
5012-5083 vitality
102-119 chaos
3027 poison
73 vitality decay
DPS: 3158
So DEE without transmute as a machine gun type of attack isn’t getting nearly as much damage added to it but does higher DPS but still not close to any melee weapon.
I took out all of the points from Vile Eruption and tried them in Blood Burst but was getting lower DPS with untransmuted DEE. So, I’m not sure what to think except that I don’t like the lack of tools or broken tools to determine damage.
This is because your casting speed is low Untransmuted Dreeg’s Eye wants as much of it as possible as with any other spammable casting ability like panettis.
I took out all of the points from Vile Eruption and tried them in Blood Burst but was getting lower DPS with untransmuted DEE. So, I’m not sure what to think except that I don’t like the lack of tools or broken tools to determine damage.
Blood Burst is for transmuted Dreeg’s Eye for increasing Poison damage (can later be Vitality Decay w/ conversion).
I suggested it because you seem to be sticking to a cooldown-caster with transmuted Dreeg’s Eye, Doom Bolt and Sigil of Consumption.
I’m going off of this version of your build for numbers as it the last one you posted.
There will be some discrepancy between what I work out and what you have as grimtools does not use the exact % damage rolls on your gear.
14/12 Vile Eruption deals:
81 Acid damage
93 Vitality damage.
Acid damage
[spoiler]For % bonuses, you have:
547% from passive toggleables
14% from Blood of Dreeg (Aspect of the Guardian)
243.1% from Spirit
15% from Terrifying Gaze
50% from Focused Gaze
This comes to 869.1% Acid Damage to Dreeg’s Evil Eye.
81 + 869.1% = 784.971
Finally, there is the total damage modifier on Focused Gaze:
784.971 * 2.25 = 1766.18475 ~ 1766 Acid Damage. Close to your 1758.
[/spoiler]
Vitality damage
[spoiler]For % bonuses, you have:
1621% from passive toggleables
14% from Blood of Dreeg (Aspect of the Guardian)
243.1% from Spirit
This comes to 1878.1% Vitality Damage to Dreeg’s Evil Eye.
93 + 1878.1% = 1839.633
Finally, there is the total damage modifier on Focused Gaze:
1839.633 * 2.25 = 4139.17425 ~ 4139 Vitality Damage. Close to your 4230.
[/spoiler]
I could say the same thing about Lunal’Valgoth, the Steward of Darkness. In one playthrough my Blademaster died 3 times in a row on Elite before I could kill her (and I had not died once during the Theodin Marcell fight later). Simply put, she has terrifying bleeding damage and probably reduces resistances too, and her attacks are hard to avoid due to many being area-based, plus she is fast and keeps up with you. But, same enemy gave me no trouble at all for my pet summoner Cabalist. Different enemies are harder for different characters. I learned the hard way not to hit Skeletal Knights with my Blademaster and suffer my own super high poison+bleed damage reflected on myself, or to quickly kill Skeletal Priests with my lightning+cold ranged Druid before they can cast protective spells on Knights and Revenants that make them super resistant to elemental damage.
