3.26 - CATS Leaguestart - Soulrend of Reaping Mines Saboteur

CREDITS Hearing about the new "mini nimis" sabo ascendency made me want to play CATS immediatly. I failed mostly at creating a build tho. L (Lixx#7470 on discord) was kind enough to work something out and share it with me. This is LARGELY based on his initial work. For the most part, my adaptation is just weaker. You find his original pob here: https://pobb.in/BWISXdSgLUhw WARNING This pob is my actual leaguestart plan. It is a meme build. I do not recommend starting it. You will, most likely: - struggle with mana (might not work at all) - die (a lot) - deal no damage (maybe a little damage) - play rolling magma for a really long time COMFY > PERFECT Trees, Items and Skills are designed to be accessible and comfy, as much as I could. This makes the build feel better to progress, but usually weaker and straight up worse. I prefer comfy. Starting with the "Aspirational" Loadout, it gets expensive and the "unrealistic" one is for ideas only. MERCENARIES They might be useful, they might not. We will see. At the time of writing, I'm sceptical if their benefits always and easily outweigh the heavily MORE monster life that they probably bring with them. Same for them actually surviving if you outsource critical parts of your build to them. We will see, let's plan without any of it. LEVELING Mostly stolen from Goratha and adapted to fit the CATS tree better later on. He also explains the mechanics very well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sajuVJMDUHk Best way to level aka. "can i level this with x": yes, you can. the actual best and fastest way is probably econc trickster into a giga respec after you got 2 void stones and are mid 90 with gear prepared. but, srsly, who wants to do that.. Notes: - Self cast Rolling Magma into Rolling Magma mines at 31 after first lab - Mule Templar for ele prolif - Kill Alira - Jade Amulet and Heavy Belt for attributes - You can skip the "Dark Arts" wheel and mastery and go directly towards "Snowforged" if you don't care about using Whirling Blades (just use two goats horn wands instead) - If you go for the dual wield mastery, make sure to get a fast dagger and thrusting one handed sword and swap to two goats horns on single target until you have the fire spell craft on your melee weapons - swap to wand + shield with shield charge at some point and respec the "Dark Arts" wheel. this does not need to be done right at 31, but probably latest after A5 (USE GOLD AND SAVE RESPEC POINTS) - mana flask that is not removed if mana is filled helps a ton, can also try to work in some clarity or drop arctic armour - total mana and reservation might be a problem depending on cast rate (try to feel out if you are actually prefented of throwing more mines due to reservation/mana) - Volley might be better than minefield - no idea if 4 or 6 hits are actually realistic in the configuration, change it to what you believe is fine ROLLING MAGMA MAPS The only goal here is to gain xp, complete some atlas and to acquire gear needed to do the swap to CATS. I'm prepared to play magma until early level 90. Notes: - you can take "Calculated Risk" ascendency instead of "Pyromaniac" if you feel like thats a good idea (pls don't) - the fire mastery if probably debatable, if you take it (like in the pob), make sure you have some chance to ignite as your crits wont do that for you - Don't overinvest in the magma gear unless it is also useful for the CATS transition - remember to actually level the gems you need later - gem levels are the biggest scaler for CATS. it is adviced to level more of the gem to corrupt them to 21/20. CATS Thats why we are here, to fill the screen with CATS, while not dying constantly and somehow doing at least a bit of damage. Swapping: You don't need all those exarch/eater implicits to swap. basically just the pierce stuff (either as craft, implicit or on three). ideally implicit AND craft so you got two. Somewhere between 84 and 93 seems like a good spot. You will probably immediatly do less damage and swap to a objectively worse build. I don't recommend swapping too early. Make sure you have all the pieces in place to do one big swap. The trees are designed to use relatively few respecs (30 total). Make sure to not waste respec points early (use gold instead) so you have the ones from campaign here. Pierce: You need at least 1 source of pierce. Multiple are better for clear. We solve this on gloves. You can also get it from the tree at "Piercing Shots". Scaling: Basically gem levels and crit multi (after chance). This causes mana cost and therefor mine reservation to rise quite a bit and cause problems. Mana issues: You will constantly be battling mana regen and reservation issues for the rest of the league. Possible extra solutions involve mana regen from merc or them providing grace as an aura (let's see how viable all that merc stuff actually is). You can path to a mana mastery and take 10% less mana cost. You can get the Sublime cluster jewel node that provides 50% increased grace reservation efficiency. If the minus mana cost ring/amulets crafts are gone (betrayal rework), this entire thing is pretty much dead. Swapping amulet to dragonfang gives reservation, but looses the -7 manacost. A enduring mana flask will probably be your friend. To some extend, clarity can be used and adjusted (i kept it level 1 in pob as a reminder) Annointing "Dreamer" can help out a ton and might be worth it. Having mana on gear is actually quite useful. Flasks: With the mana and crit flask, it seems difficult to fit a quartz. Also seems more difficult to fit reduced effect of curses. Both things hurt quite a bit. Same with freeze. So arctic armour and brine king come in handy. Wither: Withering Step for quick application and wither totems are your options early. Having constantly 15 wither is kind of a dream there (adjust config if you want to see the difference). Later this is solved with a Despair "Balance of Terror" Unique Jewel. Maybe a merc can help out as well. Allocating "Corruption" in the top of the tree looks very nice in pob if you have 15 wither. Depending on how much wither you actually getting, this becomes way less attractive early on. Winddancer: Depending on evasion and content and all that, winddancer might not be worth it. Keep in mind ot check that from time to time and remove it if it's not useful at a given time. Especially early this should very well be the case on bad gear. Annoint: "Successive Detonations" is a very cheap annoint early that frees up some points. "Sovereignty" (reservation) can help quite a bit with reservation issues (is with 4 silver quite a bit more expensive) "Dreamer" can help a ton with mana Melding or more frenzy charges seems nice as well. Reaping vs. Spiral: Reaping has significantly more base damage and damage effectiveness. However, spiral has build in pierce and CAN SHOTGUN. There might be a world, where, depending on gear and content, it is beneficial to use spiral instead. This is probably (if at all) only true quite far in endgame. Pantheon: Upgrade your pantheon. Especially Brine King to solve freeze. The small one is flexible and i like the bleed one. Speaking of bleed. Please get a jewel that makes you immune to corrupted blood. It's a corrupted implicit. I take this over ANY other jewel early. Cooldown Reduction: I've been told that 2% on an abyss jewel +20% quality on automation gem reach a breakpoint. So, let's just take that for granted and do that. Endurance Charges: We take a chest with searing exarch implicit that gives us an endurance charge every 15 sec. combined with the charge mastery that increases charge duration by 100%, we have infinite endurance charges. can do redblade banner weapon swap to initialy create them at the start of a map or boss or something. or just let the appear. overall quite a bit of invest for 3 charges, but ye.