Settlers of Kalguur Kitava's Thirst Corpseblaster Leaguestart Build Guide! - Path of Exile 3.25

Forward - I forgot to talk about Cooldown Recovery in the video build guide. Please consult that section in the notes for an important note about how one very little mod makes a surprising impact due to server tick rate nonsense. IMPORANT NOTE - We lost a lot, the expected nerfageddon to DD skills has come, but it mostly targeted Unearth/Desecrate, which means monster corpses are still just as strong. That means clearing DPS early is still top-tier. General updates have been made to the PoB, but I cannot stress enough that until we get into the game the number cannot be 'ultimately precise'. That said, the build will still be just as tanky as it was before, if not more, and it will absolutely get you through the first couple weeks of the league comfortably and ensure your start both smooth + fun! Pre-Launch test was done with a Level 1 Unearth for viability reasons, no Desecrate Brand and with over 200% Fire Damage removed as well. Despite all of this, the build cleared a rare, corrupted T16 with ease. ================================================================================================================================================================================================== ================================================================================================================================================================================================== ================================================================================================================================================================================================== Preliminary Note - DPS is 'conservative' for Settlers of Kalguur with a very reserved guess on corpse life. it's expected that there's more than 5 'instances' running at a time. We DO reach maximum corpse consumed benefit from Corpse Pact, and it's possible the post-20 gem scaling on Unearth has changed, meaning that with endgame levels of investment the gap between Necropolis and Kalguur is actually much smaller. DPS for Kalguur should probably be revised to ~3-4 Million until we can experience the full fallout of the changes. There may be things from the mechanic that help make up for what we lost. Our largest single target DPS loss comes from Desecrate changes via our Desecrate Brand setup. !!!Detonate Dead Note!!! - We're scaling the Corpse Explosion Component. Spell Damage DOES NOT affect this. Fire Damage, Elemental Damage, Area Damage, Damage, and Minion Damage (Spiritual Aid) do. LEVELING 1-50 It helps to have Detonate Dead of Chain Reaction ready to go, as this is a very nice leveling skill even when it's self-cast. If league starting, Detonate Dead will do, and the improved version can be farmed from even the first labyrinth. That said, it's actually Volatile Dead, it being the old way we played this build, that's best until you get the transfigured chaining gem. In that setup, you run Volatile Dead, Detonate Dead, Combustion, and Fire Penetration together. Simply get Unearth at level 10, slap on Volley + Lesser Multiple Projectiles, and go to town. You can drop those supports for Greater Multiple Projectiles at Level 38, but otherwise most of what you do here is up to you, so long as your Skill Tree is ready at 50 for the switch. You *may* be able to switch earlier than level 50, but at level 50 it's extremely likely you'll be able to hit the 100 mana per cast breakpoint Unearth requires for the build to 'begin'. The links used for your initial setup are in the 'Skills' tab here on PoB. (Labeled Level 50 Unearth Links) We use Determination with Eternal Blessing, as we need our Mana Pool unencumbered. Vaal Molten Shell is amazing the moment Determination is running, and gives us the ability to wade confidently into a shitstorm when the time comes. Mana Regen - This build needs a lot of Mana Regen. If you can get Mana Regeneration Rate WITHOUT increasing our Maximum Mana, it's a valuable stat. Not ultra-necessary long-term, but some is required. LEVELING 50-68 From this point onward, you're crusing and probably having a blast. You will need a mana flask early on, and for quite a while beyond too for whenever you really 'commit' to blasting a tougher target. So long as you have Aetherwind Gloves, (Aetherwind Gloves come from Ritual, so you'll have to trade for one or go without if you haven't acquired a pair. Leyline Gloves *can* be acquired in Act 2 at the Rituals Encounters there, but they're not common. On Trade they may be inexpensive.) and the 10% Refund Mana Cost Mastery, as well as Essence Glutton from your Ascendancy, it's going to feel really smooth despite mana because you just absolutely demolish the entire campaign with this setup. Keep an eye on your Mana Cost as it WILL continue to rise, and the goal is to keep it as close to 100 without going under. Switch the increased mana cost nodes to reduced when the times comes, and spec out of excess mana nodes that don't have reduced cost on them later. We get enough Mana otherwise to make Mind Over Matter do what it needs to, and we don't benefit terribly overmuch once our mana consumption is manageable. The following Ascendancy nodes to pick up are Plaguebringer and Corpse Pact, which take your damage and give them the base scaling they need to really take off as time goes on. They also bring no small amount of bonus survivability to the table, and lump in attack speed to make even Shield Charge smooth + fast, so that's nice. MAPPING START (68+ / 72 Recommended) Mapping starts with some immediate changes to gear that may or may not be immediately available (such as in a league start scenario). Get a weapon with the 'Trigger a Socketed Spell when you use a Skill, with an 8 Second Cooldown' fast, as you'll need it to make your Uber Lab Ascendancy (Mistress of Sacrifice) function. This lets you approach block cap, and acquiring enough sources of Offering Effect (Minion Offense Mastery, Eldritch Implicits on Chest/Boots) will bring you to the ultimate 75/75 Attack + Spell Block cap. Socket Bone Offering into your weapon, and you will have 100% uptime. I also socket Flammability and Wave of Conviction in for a bit more automation on Curses / Exposure. Long term, Wave of Convction is switched to a second curse of your choice, like Elemental Weakness, as you get Fire Exposure through Awakened Fire Penetration. You will want to attach Desecrate to Arcanist Brand either now, or even a little sooner. This gives you more corpses to work with, and the corpses may even be stronger because they scale to the zone level (up to 80 at level 20), which is a notable improvement over a baseline Level 20 Unearth gem. It's not necessary for clear, but can help a lot with single target. Early on, Annointing Sanctum of Thought is ideal, as with a reduced critical damage mod on your shield, this largely eliminates major spikes in gameplay that undermine the effectiveness of your block + recoup. Speaking of recoup, do not skimp on this! It's your regen, and it's more effective than you might think, as recoup occurrs from all damage taken, even though it applies to only life. With 50% Life Recoup and 22% Mana Recoupe (Achieved via Mana Mastery + Ring Crafts), you'll find that your regen in combat is actually absurdly high. The EHP isn't reflected in PoB from these stats, but some nodes are over-valued as well. To get an accurate feeling value, make sure you invest in your recoup nodes before getting to red maps. Crit Reduction, Block, and Recoup are what make you extremely tanky on a budget. During this time, you are still using the 4-link gloves setup, but should be conscious of the eventual 6-link setup to come. This 4-link setup is generally just fine for mapping all the way up to T16 maps, and will kill story Eater/Exarch, but will lack the punch of a build that can juice maps and fly through them effortlessly. The 6-link setup comes when you can afford a Level 3 Empower AND Level 3 Enhance, which both run for significantly less than a single Divine Orb total if you buy them corrupted (A week into the league usually, at least). You then pair these with the usual Greater Multiple Projectiles and Archmage, as well as Inspiration. When it comes to Inspiration, use the level of the gem that gets you closes to 100 mana cost without going under. Keeping the mana cost at 100 while raising your mana pool makes the build more consistent, so keep up on that for a smooth experience, and so that you have mana for Mind Over Matter to actually contribute! League Mechanic (Kalguur) - Unknown! Obviously, we don't have the league yet. The build is survivable, so exploring the mechanic once it gets going should be relatively safe. Bosses will probably be 'doable' because you can out-tank them. The new weapon runecrafting stuff may open up an opportunity for a superior weapon, but that will be a difficult craft, as you may need to get the Betrayal trigger craft as a natural modifier, and that in itself requires an expensive Veiled Orb and complex crafting methods. If this will be worthwhile will depend on what crafts are discovered, and how they interact with crafted modifiers. !!!COOLDOWN RECOVERY!!! - This is a weird one, and one I forgot to mention in the build guide. The bare minimum "5% increased cooldown recovery rate" mod you can get on your boots eldritch implicit is very important, due to weird, technical server mumbo jumbo that has to do with cooldowns. Your DPS will be significantly more consistent at higher cast rates with this one little stat, so make sure it's on your boots as soon as you can get them, and then never remove it! ENDGAME (90+) Detonate Dead in Kitvava's Thirst does a great job maintaining damage all on their own. Getting Detonate Dead of Chaining to 20% Quality is a HUGE AoE Boost, so run Lab to get that done early if you haven't already. Likewise, Unearth to 20% Quality is massive for our damage via Corpse Life. A Descecrat Brand becomes extremely useful even after the nerfs to spectre pool shenanigans, because it gives us more corpses to consistently chain through, and the base-line level of these corpses is 80. Watcher's Eye offers many, MANY good mods for our build, but the two I'm most concerned with are 'Reduced Damage Taken from Critical Strikes while Affected by Determination' and then also '#% Chance to Recover 10% of Mana when you Use a Skill while affected by Clarity'. The Clarity mod takes our mana uptime and makes it INCREDIBLY STABLE. These two mods together weren't particularly expensive for me, and aren't in general, so you will likely have decent luck acquiring a jewel with both (unless this build gets more popular, sorry). Getting the Determination mod lets you change your Annoint from Sanctum of Thought to a damage-oriented mod like Divine Judgement, or if you have Awakened Fire Penetration, you can grab Whispers of Doom and change Wave of Conviction to Elemental Weakness in your trigger weapon.. If you are wondering 'How are you running Clarity while also using Eternal Blessing?', the answer is, Eternal Blessing only stops you from reserving something else with MANA. That's a neat little bit of tech to keep in mind for the future ;) Recoup - We take these nodes because, with Mind Over Matter + Energy Shield, they're insane. It gives Life Recovery for ALL damage taken, even if it doesn't take from Life. This means we top off very quickly after taking huge amounts of incoming damage. I still run 2 Life Flasks because of Bleed Immunity and Poison Immunity. Poison Immunity is very useful at all stages, as DoTs are the thing that creep up on and undermine your recoup best. !!!GEARING CONCERNS!!! We want Life + Resistances Capped, but some things are a bit special for specific gear slots... We need Strength (155/158) and Dexterity (100), alongside the usual Resistances. We get a fair amount of Resistance from the tree to help with this. Shield - GET REDUCED DAMAGE TAKEN FROM CRITICAL STRIKES! Affliction League really highlighted how good this stat is. Get this mod and annoint Sanctum of Thought early, and you'll find things much, MUCH more manageable. Additionally, you want as much additional Block and Spell Block on the shield as you can get to achieve Block Cap. Weapon/Amulet - Physical Gem Levels, NOT Fire Gem Levels We are scaling the 'corpse' explosion of Detonate Dead, not the base fire explosion. To this effect, we want Unearth to go up in levels. We want Unearth to have additional Quality%. We won't know the level of our Bone Archer corpses until actually logging in, but +54% corpse life is a huge improvement regardless. This isn't as important while mapping, as you'll get strong corpses from the enemies to blow up, but it makes a huge difference against stronger enemies + bosses. For our weapon, because we have Spiritual Aid, you can use Essences of Fear to craft %Minion Damage and guarantee a functional damage mod for Detonate Dead. Getting this with a +1 Physical Gems Mod on an Oscillating Sceptre frees up Elemental Overload, and gives you back some skill points to apply elsewhere. Nexus Gloves - No Eldritch Implicits, Craft Yourself with Armour Essences! Nexus Gloves are used for their implicits. If you try to add one with the Eater/Exarch currency, you'll remove the baseline one. Additionally, these gloves need an Armour roll, either from an Essence while making them, or crafted on afterward. This is because we use the Armour and Energy Shield Mastery that reads '100% Increased Armour and Energy Shield from Equipped Body Armour if Equipped Helmet, Gloves, and Boots all have Armour and Energy Shield'. Gloves, Part 2 - Remove Nexus Gloves! Yes, Nexus Gloves go away, but only once you have the Mana Mastery, the Watcher's Eye Clarity Mod, and most importantly, the Essence of Insanity mod on your Amulet. This allows you to switch to whatever you want for gloves, so long as it still gives you Armour + Energy Shield, as these three pieces together stabilize your mana completely without the need for a Ritual base. I highly recommend going for a Temple Mod pair of Armour/ES Gloves, as the Damage With Hits Against Chilled Enemies mod is a very large bonus to %Damage. Body Armour - As much Armour/ES as you can get on the base as possible! We have decent Energy Shield uptime, we run Determination. We take the Life Mastery that gives us '15% Increased Maximum Life if there are no Life Modifiers on Equipped Body Armour'. Suffixes can be whatever you want, but Life Regeneration is a Life Mod, so be aware that that bricks the Body Armour for our purposes. Eldritch Implicits should avoid Life Modifiers as well (Yes, these count! You can reroll them, though). Determination Effect and Offering Effect are both very, very good. Strength, Dexterity, Resistances (Chaos + Elemental), and Phys Damage Reduction are all very good as well. !!!THE NEW SHIT!!! - THE GRAVICIUS MOD IS GONE! This is bad, but there are now Eldritch modifiers that grant physical damage taken as an element have arrived. This opens up a potential triple-prefix for Armour/ES on an even stronger base, which means a greater amount of Armour + potentially a higher physical-boosting Eldritch implicit. Until we know if it's Eater or Exarch, you may have to make up the difference of some lost Offering Effect. Ideally, this would be swapped with Determination Effect, as that has lost some value regardless due to the aura changes. Boots - Free Square Get whatever you can here alongside Movement Speed on an Armour/ES base. The only thing that really matters is that your Eldritch Implicit for Cooldown Recovery is there. If you go with unique boots, you want to get this CDR from somewhere else (belt, maybe?). Jewellery - Resistances and Life | Cast Speed on Rings are a must in a min/max situation, Armour on Belts is great. Strength + Dexterity need to reach their aforementioned values for all of our skills to operate at maximum efficiency. This is much like Boots, where you're just looking to fill in the gaps. Amulet must eventually become an Essence of Insanity craft, preferablly with decent life and +physical/all gems, as this opens your gloves slot to be significantly stronger in turn. On Rings, you are most concerned about having an open prefix so you can craft the +Mana/Mana Recoup mod. Kitava's Thirst - Corruptions There are lots of decent Corruptions for this helmet. +2 Fire Levels is best, with +2 AoE close behind. We don't get a massive benefit from this, but it's there, and the base is cheap. Gem Levels on Detonate Dead both gives a little extra base Corpse % Scaling, as well base AoE Radius. A +4 Helmet would be good, but don't prioritize this as the value just isn't there compared to a much cheaper +2. That would be a very, very late optimization. Jewels - Watcher's Eye has been talked about, but it's Reduced Crit Damage w/ Determination + Recover Mana when you Use a Skill w/ Clarity that we want. King in the Mists is back, and he drops a renamed version of The Perandus Pact. At the time of this writing, that jewel doesn't exist in PoB, but the fire version is what we want. At the top witch jewel slot, this gives 100+% Fire Damage. !!!GOING FORWARD!!! Getting a +2 Phys Spell Skills Weapon, and a +2 Phys Amulet are all on the block, with varying degrees of really fucking expensive. Corpse scaling tapers off at Corpse Level 86, so getting there with Unearth may be impossible now. Unearth may also have had it's post-20 scaling changed, but I'm too small a creator to ask GGG a direct question. Settlers of Kalguur will have to be explored to see what exactly will be the result of its addition to the game. Any decent source of corpse levels pumps things back up to where it was, and possibly even pushes it beyond that. I will likely be streaming Path of Exile, and even though I am too hyped about Melee to play the Corpseblaster (also, it's been like 3 leagues in a row now), I will be happy to help people out as they run into issues with the build, whether that's because changes turn out to be different than expected, or because you want to pick my brain as you make changes and experiment on your own. Don't be a stranger! (Cardboard Bastards on Youtube is where I stream. You can also whisper 'Winkers' on PoE to ask questions. Really, I don't mind, although I may not be in a position to respond all the time. Hopefully I don't regret saying this... lol) Found a way to improve the build? Shout me out on Youtube on the Build Guide video and I'll give you a mention for next league when I remake this guide (assuming it doesn't get nerfed into oblivious, of course...) Alternatively, if you make your own guide with your owns twists, I'd love to hear about it.