I recently bought the game and I’m a bit overwhelmed by all of the gearing and customization options. I have some questions about DoT caster builds:
A - Poison/Acid
B - Vitality/Bleed
After doing a little reading the Conjurer specialization seems like it would be a good candidate. For the Poison/Acid I believe Dreeg’s Evil Eye is the way to go (going to checkout Tridord’s build). However, for the Vita/Bleed build idea I was thinking:
[shaman]
- Devouring Swarm
- Grasping/Entangling Vines
- Wendigo Totem
- Mogdrogen’s Pact
- Heart of the Wild
- Oak Skin
[Occultist]
- Bloody Pox/Wasting/Black Death
- Curse of Frailty/Vulnerability
- Sigil of Consumption
- Possession
- Blood of Dreeg/Aspect of the Guardian
- Doom Bolt
- Solael’s Witch Fire/Second Rite
I’m going to need a spammable nuke spell to couple with the DoTs. I haven’t worked out the specifics of point allocation or considered gear and devotions yet (still researching).
1 - Would Savagery + Tenacity of the Boar work as a spammable nuke with a wand and caster off-hand for the Vita/Bleed build idea?
2 - Would a either or both DoT builds be viable for beating the game in the highest difficulty?
3 - Would Dreeg’s Evil Eye and/or a Vita/Bleed build be newbie friendly?
4 - Would the DoT builds be very squishy?
5 - Is gearing caster DoT builds difficult?
6 - Will I have enough points (skills/devotion)?
1- Savagery is an auto-attack replacer, so yes, of course you can spam it.
Is it a good idea to go melee with a vitality wand? I have no idea. There’s probably a way to make this work, but it would be very gear dependent.
2- Both can beat ultimate, but both are gear dependent to a certain extent.
3- DEE is quite easy to build (it’s more about direct Acid damage than DoT poison) problem is the energy consumption/management that can be tedious untill you get the right gear.
Bleeding/vitality : a bit less “1st char friendly”. Skeletons being resistant to bleeding and Act4 Voïd-leech being resistant to vitality/life leech. But nothing you can’t overcome with the right skills/devotions/gear.
4- Not really. You can put the minimum points in Spirit and Cunning to meet the requirement to equip your end-game gear, all the rest being into physique, you should have a solid HP base.
5- Gearing is ok, you have some pretty nice epics and empowered epics to get you through normal/elite.
End-tier gear however is not so abundant. There are a few items and you will end up farming for them.
6- I have no idea what you have in mind. You can always plan ahead with GrimCalc
I would advice you check The Build Compendium if you haven’t yet.
There are some youtube video arround, so you can see what the builds’ gameplay look like.
Vitality Caster is one of the best starting builds, finished ultimate with self found gear at 77 mostly facetanking with 37 stat points unassigned. Least gear reliance, lots and lots of aoe, nearly all attacks, procs and devotions heal, low energy consumption mage, built in debuff but kill speed vs certain mobs in ultimate is slow( Leeches, Hulks, Aether Towers) I just ignore them and move on, hail Solael!!
Poison caster starts out with extreme damage and the DOT ticks get ridiculously high as you progres but come ultimate survival and energy require a lot of good stuff, start praying to dreeg
Thanks for the quick replies.
@Psyclown:
I just noticed an item that dropped on my starter experiment char, its title is a wand but its actually a 1H mace and not an actual wand. I thought Savagery was like Dreeg’s eye (a projectile). I guess the Shaman projectile is only Devouring Swarm, but spamming it doesn’t seem like it would be effective, unless I can scale it up to monstrous levels. Savagery is off the table because I’m not looking to take the melee path with a DoT caster.
For item #6 I was referring to pushing enough points into the bottom bar to unlock possession and then enough points on the other bottom bar to Blood Pact (I forgot to list it) and dumping points in the various skills.
I checked the compendium and found “Ultimate Vitality Caster” build and Tridord’s build is a Warlock, which is ok with me.
@Dekaron:
It would seem that the enemy vitality resistance reduction from both shaman and occultist would break enemy resist or even push them into the negatives with enough points pumped into skills. However, the vids from the Vitality Caster build support your claim that certain mobs are a slow kill.
@GeneralCash:
Tridord’s build uses a Warlock (Occultist/Arcanist) and what you stated is an Occultist with NightBlade (Witch Hunter). Is tridord’s build wrong?
Warlock is defensive & mage type while WitchHunter is more glass canon & hybrid
Vitality damage is not big on raw numbers as the skills already benefit from heal, fire&forget and aoe to maintain balance. I have killed aetherial nemesis with 0 stun resist and 40% lightning resist after he debuffs in 3-4 minutes but it takes likes 10 minutes to kill some void leech type of hero/boss
Apart from vit caster, Retaliation Warder and Conjurer Summoner are also great for starting out as a first char even though they are not DOT builds
It’s more outdated than anything else. Back when he made it, Arcanist was the best support class for most builds and Witch hunter suffered from a severe lack of OA.
With the nerfs to Arcanist and the OA bonus available trough Blood of Dreeg, the sheer offensive power of a secondary resist reduction seems to be more valuable than the 25% crit, 10% OA bonus from Arcanist. The best thing about Arcanist is the skill cost reduction.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a DEE warlock and it is good, but not nearly as good as it was.
Damn I have no gear and I was going for DoT caster warlock but I’m going to have to chase Witch Hunter. The game play from Caedas’ “Handmaiden of Dreeg” looks so much like my old WoW rogue in PvP (pre-2008 rogue). Going to make a female and name her “StickNMove”. Thank you for suggesting the idea.
Reflect is a mega pain with poison damage and the absurd durations