Hey all, I've been experimenting a bit with an 'immortal' scion[pathfinder/gladiator] Aegis Aurora build take on my CF KB (corrupting fever/ kinetic blast )Glad.

pob : https://pastebin.com/TGP3r7sQ

I've been playing the Gladiator CF KB for a while with great success for farming nem3 and the like, but I've gotten increasingly annoyed with the occasional wipe especially with my shitty internet connection lagging me out in the middle of a pack and of course stopping=dying.

###^This ^lead ^me ^to ^fuck ^around ^with ^my ^Scion ^and ^came ^across ^this ^interesting ^setup ^:

• max attack and spell block due to gladiator ascendancy and tempest shield and glancing blows, with +5 to max attack putting us at 80% which can be scaled to 82% with the Block Mastery

• heal 4% of life on flask use from Pathfinder ascendancy + 5 flasks with 'gain [x] (ideally over 5) charges when hit'

• Glorious vanity Doriyani = Corrupted soul for 15% of max life as ES and a big boost from Skin of the Lords = about 2k ES and 4-4.5k life

• Aegis Aurora for amount of armor healed as ES, since we are stacking armor with determination and flasks you have around 70-80k armor most of the time, so you heal almost all of your ES back in one hit (or 3 out of every 4 incoming hits)

• all of those combined means that basically almost every time you get hit you are either recovering a massive amount of life or a massive amount of ES or both.

• since we are running magic flasks entirely, you can relieve a lot of pressure from gearing (for example i use amethyst flask to cap chaos resist) since they basically have 99% uptime, and you can be basically ailment immune since you get shock immunity from tempest shield, freeze/chill burning, bleeding from your flasks. Corrupted blood you can get on one of your many jewels

• of course, we also cap endurance charges easily with Enduring Composure, have a shit ton of armor, and we take Prismatic Skin to bring ourselves to 79/80 all res and 84/5 Cold res, which pairs great with a Sapphire flask for damage taken as cold. this means we dont really get one shot by anything (though I havent tried shaper beams and the like yet)

I can finally stop for a breather in the middle of a map no matter how many mobs are in my face, in fact, usually the more the better (T15 Silo example at level 93 while im lagging out to all hell and cant move)

The rest is a pretty straightforward KB CF setup putting us at between 3.5-4.5m dps depending how optimized you build, This is plenty for most farming strategies and can do bosses alright (but I wouldnt push something like wave 30 simu with this)

###Some 'abnormal' changes with this CF setup and notable interactions :

I opted to use Poet's Pen instead of a normal phys wand, this way you can socket in an exsanguinate which will proc with every KB attack, this has several benefits, notably:

• the damage output comes out on top for single target purposes
• having a spell that doesnt require your CF buff to be up in order to output damage, you can still kill things even in the off chance that your CF buff went down occasionally
• more life spent on attack to more easily keep up your CF buff since you are spending life for both KB and Exsanguinate on every hit
• it's much cheaper, and you can even find one with a good scourge like Culling Strike or +50% global phys damage relatively cheap if you get lucky

I have switched from Flesh and Stone to tempest shield to cap spell block since its not mandatory as opposed to a normal Gladiator where you need it to keep up your Challenger charges, however you can probably change the two on occasions if you dont feel like the spell block is a huge deal and you want the damage output (in dense mapping situations it's really not a big deal to expect to be ES healed just from capped attack blod)

Its possible if i invest further into mana reservation that I could fit both, but I doubt it. I havent tried an enlighten 4 setup and a helm enchant yet, so maybe it could work.

Room for improvement

There might be some better options in the tree, so i'm open to suggestions, as for gearing, its possible that a nice rare influenced armor with stuff like aura effect, life and maybe a socketed gem level or gem level corrupt will be much better for this build overall, so I'm looking into that

As for DPS, you could probably squeeze in Reap to the CF links to boss with but I just find it too clunky, if that fits your playstyle go ahead.

Im running a poor's headhunter (replica) with inspired learning since im mostly farming and its working out great, but there may be opportunity for changing those out to something else and running a bossing setup. (for example, running Coward's Legacy belt with unnafected by vulnerability watchers eye, and having Pain Attunement on Skin of The Lords will have a big DPS boost for your exsanguinate)

I cant for the life of me figure out yet how to get frenzy charges on this build (Blood rage is annoying as a hybrid life/energy shield build, but i might have to give it a go since most of our ES recovery comes from blocking anyway and not recharge), though that may be enabled by a rare armor with the redeemer(?) mod for some extra deeps.

As for gladiator bleed pops, I dont really feel like they are missing - But i will experiment with Haemophilia gloves to see if it feels good. Historically i would have preferred attack speed gloves for KB, but since mobility isnt that important since staying still doesnt kill us anymore, the extra pops might make haemo worthwhile for mapping (especially if you have some headhunter stacks for attack speed anyway)

Any other thought anyone might have for improvement are welcome, happy to push this build further.

I'll try to post some more videos later when my connection stops fucking about.

Edit : adding video of clearing nem3 t14 tropical island, which luckily got kosis, omniphobia and that fat scourge guy to spawn all in the same map, so you can see facetanking each.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7J0OBT5wU8

I've also made some changes to add Haemophilia gloves (not in the video above, so clear is much improved from that with the bleed pops) which seem to work pretty well, a vuln on hit one is only around 1ex and frees up your ring slot so that you are not limited by getting a vuln curse one, making it cheaper to round out your missing resists etc.

I've found a skin of the Lords with glancing blows which let me pick up some more points and changed the watchers eye along with armor mastery for reduced damage from crits to round out to about 0 added damage, making you less susceptible to bursts from incoming crits