Reaching far beyond the DoT DPS cap - Dark Pact Poison Occultist

PoB : https://pobb.in/C2ByUY3vxwRx

poe.ninja (may not be updated yet) : https://poe.ninja/challenge/builds/char/Noisnamalark/Squalapact

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Hello, I've been planning to make this character for the past few months, and I'm glad that it only took me around 10 days on a fresh league to complete it to a reasonnable level.

 

It's an Occultist built around Dark Pact, which is a skill that can reach insanely high base damage on high life Skeletons. In my current setup, my Skeletons have slightly more than 35k life, bringing Dark Pact's base DPS to 7k, or rather 21k since it chains twice on top of the initial hit.

Then, you scale it with the usual poison multipliers : wither and curses on top of damage and cast speed. Awakened Chain support is also a huge multiplier, and its « less damage » part only applies to hits, making it even stronger for a poison build.

 

Defensively, the character has a relatively high health pool and a high amount of armor and physical damage reduction, making it very sturdy against physical hits. Against elemental damage, there aren't many solutions since maximum elemental res are unpractical to get on that part of the skill tree.

Progenesis does a good job if you can afford it, and I was surprised to see how powerful Wellspring of Creation is. It doesn't impact clear at all since the Occultist's corpse explosions are based on monster life, and Dark Pact's single target damage is so high it barely matters against bosses.

 

From a recovery perspective, besides the life flask + Sorrow of the Divine option, the character is very good at using the 10% instant leech mastery. Dark Pact is fast to cast and get a lot of multi hits through chains, so it will consistenly hit a single target more than 50 times per second, recovering life and ES at an incredible speed. And despite being a DoT based build, the character has around 7M hit DPS, so we're actually getting some leech over time as well.

 

One good thing about scaling minion life for damage is that we also get an army of powerful and unkillable minions for support. Pale Seraphim spectres apply a nice debuff on rare and bosses, the Animated Guardian carries Leer Cast, Dying Breath and Garb of the Ephemeral for a good mix of offense and defense support, and you can also get a golem of your choice, Chaos, Stone and Lightning are all viable choices.

Those minions need to be supported by Meat Shield, so they consistently stay in the radius of your auras while also getting the abiltiy to taunt, reducing monster damage on you.

 

For clear, the character has a lot of cast speed and a decent amount of movement speed so it feels smooth to play despite being a 2 button combo kind of build, and the proliferating corpse explosions scaled with increased damage can melt an entire screen with a single DP cast as long as the mob packs are dense enough.

 

As for single target, I want to point out that the character doesn't just reach the DoT cap, it reaches far beyond. PoB indicates that without the cap, the character would have around 100M. What it actually means is that the character ramps up a LOT faster than your average poison build. Reaching DoT cap is not just a PoB thing with unrealistic uptime on your offensive skills, it's actually very achievable even during boss fights.

 

I'm having a lot of fun playing this character, and I'll probably try to push it to lvl 100. As a small disclaimer if you're interested in replicating it, I don't know how it performs while leveling since it respecced to it at around lvl 90, and it has some rather specific items (such as TC on hit Vaal Caress and Cane of Kulemac with specific mods), which are not technically required but still very important.

 

I'll answer any question about the character, and hopefully it inspires more people on picking underused yet very powerful skills. Thanks for reading !