Poet's Pen CoC Poison DD Ashes Aegis Melding CI Necro

obligatory sim 29/30 video

https://pobb.in/oPBQR9aG6VjC (multiply by 5 for woke cascade on single targets)

since Ashes of the Stars is so fucking expensive i figured i'd squeeze every drop of value out of the tacky seashell necklace i could. i wanted to do something with CI/Aegis/Melding and a bunch of auras, i wanted to do something with poison, and i wanted to do something prohibitively expensive and needlessly complicated.

the core mechanic of this build uses Poet's Pen to trigger Unearth (level 28), spawning corpses for Power Siphon - Cast on Crit - Detonate Dead to explode, converting its damage fully into chaos and poisoning.

i will not go into detail on Aegis/Melding/CI since they're well covered elsewhere. i opt for glancing blows since i can get a clean 75/75 without rumi's and i can use the resistance from the Sanctuary wheel to cover for the fact that the suffix situation in my gear is a fucking nightmare.

the tree is a disaster too. at one point we were stretched all the way from Glancing Blows to the Shadow power charge & jewel socket. 6 PCs ends up being fine with forbidden power forbidden jewels to hit crit cap with flasks up (which is nice and easy with flagellant across the board). this is a build that really benefits from being as close to 100 as possible... and actually hitting 100 is a free 8% more dps from the extra level on poet's pen.

i paid extra for Impossible Escape (Imbalanced Guard) for the 3% max res instead of a 3% Megalomaniac because Eagle Eye is an excellent node for us. accuracy is hard to come by and i spent 5 points on fusillade for a long time until i picked up the Precision notable to free up some dex and i was able to drop it. transcendent spirit is an option but jewel sockets are at a premium and we're getting other goodies from the accuracy nodes we pick up... but it probably has a place in a min/maxed version of this build.

i'm wearing a bunch of uniques mostly so i could chuck spares into corruption chambers because i'm a gambling addict. the Incandescent Heart + Eber's Gaze combo is really, really nice for us since we're actively scaling chaos damage, -res is enormous, and there's all the other nice stuff incandescent does for us too. 25% less damage from elemental hits when you're already at 90/90/90 is just mean, but more importantly it helps us survive penetrating hits which otherwise eat through us like paper.

i abuse a 4L of Enhance - Divergent Plague Bearer - Divergent HoA - Anomalous Withering Step for 93% generic chance to poison (anointing Toxic Strikes to hit 100%), 38% dot multi while infecting, and 14 wither stacks instantaneously. and there's space for 6 other reservations, Discipline (anomalous) - Defiance Banner (anomalous) - Determination - Purity of Ice - Tempest Shield (divergent) - Precision (anomalous). with some crazy corruptions, and two -mana cost prefixes on our rings, we can squeeze all these reservations in without anointing Charisma so we can get Toxic Strikes for the dps. rounding out our links, Anomalous Flame Dash and Anomalous Second Wind are good for 5 charges of flame dash with 50ish increased distance, to make up for not being crazy zoomy.

the gloves have temp chains and a ring has despair, and these two curses are worth an insane amount of dps. going from sirus to a normal enemy in PoB - which triples the effects of hexes and removes 25% chaos res - also triples the damage. it's a very capable bosser (only uber elder was a bit tricky with all the degen, but i did it on a much earlier version of the build as well) but really shines mapping and doing content like expedition, abusing chaos pops which also poison to clear even the toughest crowds of sentinel-empowered whatever. i generally don't like bossing with poison anyway because phase changes are inherently more annoying on builds with damage ramp, but the option is there.

the guts of this build are really similar to phantasmal cremation, which wasn't originally my intention but every iteration got it closer. you scale unearth as close to 30 gem level as you can and start blowing up corpses, which gives you some ramping speed from corpse pact to do it faster. poet's pen doesn't hit nearly the same speeds that selfcasting unearth can get with 3 cremations down, but poet's still generates enough corpses and poison DD turns those huge HP pools into damage much more efficiently than cremation does.

at any rate i'm planning on switching to a faster bosser to start grinding some of these challenges, so i wanted to share the results of some of my mad science and see if yall had any better ideas for the build concept than i was able to steal from poeninja come up with entirely on my own.