The Worst (Viable?) League Starter Ever - 3.19 Oni-Goroshi League Start Guide to Suffering

by agentyoda4 years ago20

DPS: 1.39M
Effective HP: 49.3K
Life: 4.35K
Level: 100
Min budget

Overview

The Worst (Viable?) League Starter Ever - 3.19 Oni-Goroshi League Start Guide to Suffering is a Path of Exile Chieftain build by agentyoda, made for the Kalandra league (3.19). It is centered on Cyclone and plays as a dexterity, attack, area, melee archetype. In Path of Building it reaches 1.39M DPS with 49.3K effective HP, 4.35K life. Suited for: Abyss, Mapping, Bossing. Key uniques include Oni-Goroshi, Taste of Hate, Abyssus, Oni-Goroshi, Cloak of Flame.

agentyoda's Notes

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This build is attempting to maximize the buffs given by Her Embrace (from Oni Goroshi) by adding physical damage and "gain % Physical Damage as extra Fire Damage" modifiers and stacking increased Fire Damage/More Fire Damage modifiers. Two strategies for defenses: 1. Regular defenses, stacking Life, Strength, and resistances (problematic with Abyssus helm, Her Embrace degen) 2. Converting physical damage (mostly Hits, also degens) into elemental damage and then utilizing Transcendence to apply stacked Armour to elemental Hits on top of resistances. Ditching Strength stacking for more points for Life. 3. Drop some damage mods and focus on stacking Energy Shield alongside Life. Lack of "% Life Gained as Extra Maximum Energy Shield" mods does make this more difficult, esp. since we cannot get Corrupted Soul from the keystone directly. Current gameplay concept: Cyclone for clearing maps real quick, Blade Flurry for bossing. Toss down Totems for BIG damage boost (over 100% More damage total). Use Infernal Cry both for a nice damage boost on attacks (Combust) + Explosion clear. Concerns: 1. How clunky Totems might be to use & whether we can really do OK damage without them. It seems to be a solid 4mil damage against non-bosses, 3mil against Pinnacle bosses, without Totems, but with Vengeance (triggers every second or so when hit) and Combust (from next 6 Attacks after using Infernal Cry), and slain enemies will explode afterwards, so clear should be solid even without Totem spam. 2. Life. We have quite a strong Elemental defensive build - 60% resistances + our 30k Armour applies to all Elemental Hits. High Chaos res plus solid 5.5k Life pool takes care of smaller degens, and Life Leech will overcome the Her Embrace debuff. We also convert 70% of Physical Damage from Hits (40% for DoTs) into Fire Damage, so we have some good phys. mitigation as well. That being said, we have no Block, no Spell Suppression, no Evasion, no Charges, and no Energy Shield (besides maybe a little on the Hybrid item set), so I'm unsure of how much survivability we really have. However, new tech discovered: we can get a second phys hit taken as ele conversion on our Watcher's Eye; add in Taste of Hate's 15% phys hit taken as ele, and we can get the last 30% we needed for full conversion. Full conversion means we take no phys hit damage, which in turn ensures we can't bleed. Being immune to Corrupted Blood as well, and there are very few physical DoTs which can damage us. This basically entirely negates Abyssus' problematic increased physical damage taken modifier, which in turn maximizes our Armour value from Transcendence. Overall, we're looking exceptionally tanky. Besides versus Chaos damage, but we can scale Chaos Resistance to 75% - even at 35%, we can use the Soul of Arakaali to keep 75% resistance against chaos DoTs. Maybe if we get immunity to poisons from somewhere (like the Ring corruption), then we'll be sufficiently tanky against most things. We can work to avoid the rest (like big chaos Hits and the like). Also, we can spend 5 points to get Fortification on Melee Hits (up to 23% Less Damage Taken) as well as 8 points for Forbidden Flame/Flesh combo. We can get big damage from that or more tankiness (like 25% Less Damage Taken via Indomitable Resolve). Notes: Vengeance damage calculation seems to be bugged, as it's multiplying its damage by attack speed, even though it has a 1s cooldown. So I don't see how it would trigger more than once per second. The actual damage is likely closer to a third of what Vengeance shows in Full DPS. Besides that, and the question of Totem uptime, the rest should be accurate. Unless enemies do a lot of Blocking or are super spread out so Combust/Infernal Cry never get good work in or something like that. Leveling seems fine - strong, even! - starting from low levels, actually, able to sustain without much problems as long as we grab Vitality, grab some Fire Resistance/Life Regen on the tree, and then eventually pick up the Fire Resistance Ascendancy node. See leveling trees and gems for a guide (which doesn't even take items into account, so it'll be even easier than what's shown). We may yet make a real build out of this. Simple gameplay, though a little more active than just holding down left click: can either find space for a Guard skill (like Molten Shell) and stick it on left click (a good idea) and then Cyclone for Q or use Cyclone for left click. Then use QWER or WERT for, respectively, Infernal Cry, Ancestral Protector, Ancestral Warchief, and Vaal Ancestral Warchief. You click QWE (or WER), you spin, you click QWE/WER, you spin, etc. If you find something tanky, you press QWR/WET instead for Vaal Ancestral Warchief for bonus damage. Need to test, but seems simple enough mindless Cyclone gameplay, just with a few more buttons every so often. With Molten Shell's Anomalous 20% quality and 28k Armour or so, we can actually tank Memory Game (failure) with it active. Just barely, with Transcendence non-STR stacking High-End gear & tree. Same for Uber Atziri Flameblast. We can tank Shaper Slam and Shaper Balls without it. In fact, we're very tanky against all physical damage, which is somewhat ironic, given we're wearing Abyssus. Overall, this looks pretty fun and interesting, but I am concerned about damage given the investment - gems are all Awakened, for example, plus High-End gear is expensive, plus all this high end stuff only nets us a couple million DPS total. Plus the actual Cyclone damage is only a little over a million, and even then only with both Totems up! So it's definitely on the weaker side. Some test gear/gem setups need to be looked at to see whether this scales from white maps to red maps naturally (because our leveling examination showed a pretty clear and easy progression from level 8 to level 70+ white maps). If not, then this would not work well as a league starter. But if it can do so at least relatively tanky, then we can get to red maps and farm safely, get better gear, and scale into our late game quite heavily tanky build. From what I've read, 2mil single target is solid for T16 bosses, 1mil+ for mapping. We have both of those even with weaker gems. I'll test early/mid tier gear as well, but I suspect it'll be fine, as our gear isn't super high scaling DPS-wise. For a bit of extra damage, we can throw in an Overcharge Arc CWDT link to try and get some free shocks for free damage, though since Arc doesn't scale off of Fire Damage, some finagling may be required - such as getting Iron Will, perhaps? But now that I think of it, we deal no Non-Fire Damage, right? So I don't think we can apply shocks besides Skitterbots. Expense-wise, it seems like the only actual expensive item (in Sentinel at least) would be the Watcher's Eye (and even that isn't super expensive, since double Purity of Elements phys taken as ele mods are not desired much. Maybe more expensive for also getting a good 3rd mod, but we're not even taking that into account so far. Only possible problematic thing is: Militant Faith going up in price; Cloak of Flame/Abyssus becoming more rare and/or more expensive; the Watcher's Eye being very expensive for good rolled mods (which we do kind of need to finish off our phys to ele conversion, though a few percentage points still keeps us really tanky); and Rare gear pieces. Especially Rare gear with all the resists and Life which we like to have. That's basically my Medium-Tier gear setup. Only other expensive part would be the cluster jewels, though that's more for red map tier damage, as it accounts for fully 45%. I don't think it'll be more than a couple hundred chaos in total for everything (except maybe the cluster jewels/Watcher's Eye), and we will get lots of it through our own mapping/leveling through white and yellow to red maps. So cost-wise, we're looking solid. We have over 500k solid DPS for clear on rather cheap mapping budget as well as good early mapping tankiness, and we scale into nice damage and solid tankiness end-game as well. This looks viable at all stages of the game, which is insane to me, even with level 80 and 90 passive trees. The cluster jewels and Grand Spectrums are a big damage jump, and the Watcher's Eye/Militant Faith are a massive survivability boost.

It's said that glory is found through suffering. Then it only makes sense to choose the most painful and horrendous league starter to attain the greatest glory possible! (Surely that's how it works.)

So here's my simple guide to the worst league starter—Oni-Goroshi Cyclone/Blade Flurry/VENGEANCE, starting from level 1.

(This is a serious build, by the way, which I will be league-starting, even if it's playing into memes, so plz don't remove mods)

I'm sure it'll be worth it KEKW

Create 4 or so characters. Start the game and kill Hillock. If he's not Uber Hillock (dropping Oni-Goroshi), then log out before going into town. (If you go into town, you can't farm Hillock, which means you can't get Oni-Goroshi the 'natural' or 'masochistic' way.)
Kill Hillock over. And over. And over. Let your rage consume you. FEEL THE HATRED OF TEN THOUSAND YEARS (of killing Hillock)! Do so while cycling through your characters, since it takes time for the zone to reset after you log out on a specific character. Probably do this for around 15+ hours until you find Uber Hillock.
Finally find and kill Uber Hillock and obtain Oni-Goroshi.
Equip Oni-Goroshi onto a Marauder; we'll be going Chieftain.
Now it's time for our GLORIOUS EVOLUTION into ETERNAL GLORY, by which I mean leveling using only Oni-Goroshi. Only Oni-Goroshi. My build guide includes no gear, no clothes, no rings of power—just you, your sword, and slowly, gloriously burning to death. LIKE THE MARTYRS GLORIOUS IN THEIR DEATHS FOR ALMIGHTY GOD! (The benefit of this, of course, is that any gear you get is an added bonus—and thus is not necessary. The build just works off of the passive tree and skill gems and main hand weapon!)
You'll use some gems (Molten Strike into Cyclone for Oni-Goroshi damage + Vitality gem to regen Life and Precision gem so you can actually hit things with your sword) and you'll take some passives on your Passive Tree, but nothing else is required. I already did all the mathemagic, so none of you need to worry. That's why the "Level 10" gear set is just the sword and nothing else. You may need to use some Chromatic Orbs to reroll Oni-Goroshi's socket colors to fit our supports better, but that's not super required either.
You won't die to "Her Embrace" with this build. For the most part. Between levels 10 and 20 might be sketchy, but once you get Vitality (gem reward once you reach The Lower Prison and talk to Nessa), you're set.
At some point, you can get VENGEANCE against Hillock by equipping the VENGEANCE gem. It auto procs when you're Hit and actually scales really well with our build, even getting to nearly half of our Cyclone damage. And since you're here for the suffering, you expect to get Hit a lot.
Proceedeth unto ETERNAL GLORY by leveling up to 70 using the passive tree and gem guides (shown for every 10 levels). You'll be keeping the same gear, though (hence why I only have a level 10 gear guide—it's just Oni-Goroshi). White maps through yellow maps is actually pretty survivable + solid damage—looking at around 100k+ damage on white maps, still wearing only Oni-Goroshi. If we throw on some basic gear (see the Medium-Tier gear set), we get ~300k damage on Cyclone plus max resists & around 10k max hit taken for phys/ele/chaos. Plenty fine for white maps.
But does this scale into red maps? Oh yes it does! It scales right off the cliff through your six portals! No, I jest just a little bit—we have a rather special setup which we plan to build into. We take the Abyssus helmet for big damage, but then all physical damage from hits will be taken as elemental damage (via a number of things: Purity of Elements Watcher's Eye (2 mods req.), Cloak of Flame, Taste of Hate, Tasalio from ascendency. Then we grab Transcendence with some Armour stacking, and we have some pretty absurd tankiness: over 100k max hit and effective Life for everything besides Chaos. If we throw on our Molten Shell, we can even tank 1 Hit of Memory Game (though according to PoB's calculations, you need to tank 3 to survive it, which we cannot) if we use the High-End Gear. Plus High-End gear nets us 3mil+ mapping and 4mil+ Guardian/Pinnacle solo target (really closer to 5mil+).
Re: cost of gear: Medium-tier gear should be real cheap, if you even need to buy it. Most gear pieces are literally just Life + resists and nothing else. High-End gear is more expensive: basically tosses on one or two extra mods to the Life/resists from Medium-tier. These are assumed to be average tier rolls. To make the build's tankiness work, we need: 2 mod Purity of Elements Watcher's Eye (equivalent ones were selling for like half an exalt last league, so not super expensive), Militant Faith - Maxarius (literally was 5c last time I checked lol), and Taste of Hate (also just a couple of chaos), and Cloak of Flame (might be more expensive from the changes, but probably still cheap? Since it's a lower tier unique with higher drop rate). Survivability is quite cheap for us. For damage costs, it gets a bit higher for some, still low for others: we scale crit a lot via 3 Grand Spectrum Cobalt Jewels (couple of chaos), Abyssus (1c max), and cluster jewels (these would be the only expensive part potentially: 1 large Attack cluster, 1 medium Fire cluster, and 1 small Determination reservation cluster). So in total: almost all gear is just some chaos. It's very cheap besides a couple of damage spikes. I doubt the prices will change much, but given all the economy shakeups this league (RIP my beautiful Exalted Orbs; I always exalted whenever they dropped, but no longer!), we never know for sure.

Gameplay: we cyclone, we occasionally drop Totems, and we click Infernal Cry when we want big pack to go boom. If you want a more thorough explanation:

Simple gameplay, though a little more active than just holding down left click: you can either find space for a Guard skill (like Molten Shell) and stick it on left click (a good idea, so it auto procs for free) and then hold down Q for Cyclone.

Then use WERT for, respectively, Infernal Cry, Ancestral Protector, Ancestral Warchief, and Vaal Ancestral Warchief.

You hold Q until you hit a big pack. You click WER to throw totems down and infernal cry, you spin, you click WER again for another big pack, you spin, etc. If you find something tanky, you press WET (meaning you press T instead of R) for Vaal Ancestral Warchief for bonus damage.

Path of Building: https://pastebin.com/vC4VPicm

This build actually took a lot of work, and I'm pleasantly surprised at how tanky it looks and the damage it scales into, even though it's the most meme build I've ever made (and I've made a number of meme builds - just look at my Crusader themed build).

I will probably be league starting this, unless they reveal something in the next week that changes my plans (or some random redditor comes along and points out something I missed, messing up the whole guide). I'm considering streaming or documenting this journey of suffering, though I doubt anyone is interested in watching Hillock die all Friday night lol. Let me know if y'all have any questions.

Don't start this, by the way, if you're looking for a fast clear or a meta build or anything really strong. It's none of those things. It's not even a trap build—I've been very honest in my PoB calculations. It's just designed for suffering. BUT THIS SUFFERING WILL BRING ME GLORY!

EDIT:

Review of the build: I posted my review of the build in the build thread here. As expected, it wasn't a very good build, lol. It requires a costly gear upgrade to move from early maps to late maps/bossing, so you'd be stuck farming early maps for certain key components (the costly one being the Watcher's Eye for our damage conversion—the build simply can't handle physical damage, and also needs pretty high level to have the passive points to get all the Life increases we need). But if you can get those gear upgrades, then it probably isn't bad at higher tiers of maps.

Main problem is getting the 10+ Divines needed for the Watcher's Eye (see example Trade search query here). I was surprised at how much the price jumped for those mods; when I checked for those mods in Sentinel, they were well under an exalt, so I thought I'd be able to farm for it pretty easily even in white maps, but now they're like 20x times what they were last league. Probably because we're early in the league, and those mods got a lot more valuable thanks to the Cloak of Flame buff & perhaps other conversion strategies that players are using now.

I didn't want to try and farm early maps for like 10 divines, given I still haven't even gotten one to drop yet, so my little experiment ended there. Leveling was quite a breeze, though. Not much gear required besides the sword. Though optional gear is cheap: Cloak of Flames for easy survivability, and maybe some Life/resistances on whatever you can pick up off the ground.