[UPDATE] Arakaali's Fang Occultist

Hello everyone,

The post is an update to my previous post asking for advice on defences. You can find it here.

In the post, I was given a few ideas and some food for thought. I've since then been figuring some stuff out and am working on some final little touches to my build but it's feeling really good right now. First off I would like to post a showcase to my build in action.

Wave 30 Simulacrum

I could potentially make the build clear Sim a bit better if I used a Divergent Melee Splash instead of my Awakened one, but the woke gem was super cheap and I figured it would result in a smoother mapping experience. But overall, my life basically never went below 70% in the entire 30 waves.

---------------------------------------------

So lets get down to business. My PoB can be found here.

It's set up to have full wither stacks, which are supplied by Withering Touch. At 85 attacks per second and the Ascendancy adding some stacks it's almost instantly going to be at max stacks.

There's Blind from a jewel in my belt. It's going to be at 7% chance per minion attack, which again, at 85 attacks per second is instantly up.

Two of the curses and the Flesh Offering take a second or so to come online so the result is I'm going to be at max PoB settings within basically a second.

The reality of the situation is of course, that the poison from my spiders lasts 17.5 seconds which means there's a ramp up time of 17.5 seconds to get to max poison count so the DPS is a bit misleading for this build.

That being said, I'm reaching 15.3m uber boss DPS with Melee Splash at 10 spiders, so 30.6m with max spider count.

Swapping to bossing gems, I'm reaching 23.2m uber boss DPS at 10 spiders, 31.7m if we add in Punishment, 35.3m if we add in Vaal Haste. All still at 10 spiders.

---------------------------------------------

Defensively, I'm sitting at 148.5k effective hit pool without Molten Shell up, with a phys max hit of 19.3k, fire and lightning at 28k, cold at 35k (due to taste of hate) and chaos at 32k all without Molten Shell up. MS would bring me to 295k effective, 33.8k phys, 55k fire and light, 69k cold and 68k chaos.

And these numbers are vastly higher when you start looking at white and blue monsters because Enfeeble scales way higher on those, than it does on rares or unique monsters. And on the topic of Enfeeble, I'm using it in Profane Proxy so it isn't exactly always on for every single hit I take but for stuff like Simulacrum, it's almost always on any monster near me. I'm still definitely suspect to getting offscreen hit by a projectile without Enfeeble helping me at all.

But for all those projectile things, I do have a very good ~70% chance to evade and 61% attack block, or then 70% spell block to deal with that stuff. As well as 100% spell suppress under almost every situation despite relying on my flask for the last 10%.

This build absolutely struggles with degens, I have a very low life regen of 201 and I have basically zero mitigation past 75% resistances for just about any degen. That being said, I am bleed immune, I am corrupted blood immune, I am ignite immune and poison hasn't ever felt like a danger whatsoever. Ground degen absolutely destroys me however.

Currently my only actually reliable form of life recovery is the 30 flat and 3% life on kill supplied by Vampirism. It cost me 4 points on the tree, but with all poison kills counting as my kills and Profane Bloom kills counting as my kills, almost every monster that dies does proc me the life on kill which keeps my life nice and healthy in almost all situations.

---------------------------------------------

All in all, I still have some extremely trashy items, I still need to work on getting a better Arakaali's Fang for some more DPS, I need a better Squire to bump up my block chance a bit and I'd love to get some life recovery on block if I can. But with the shield being so expensive and combining breaking one every time, I'm not going to even bother to try and do that. I'll buy one if I find one, otherwise I'll just have to live with what I have.

All in all, this is a very, very enjoyable allrounder build that basically makes a joke of the game. I'm very pleased with how the build has turned out. Very fast and smooth clear speed, kills any boss you throw at it and now after all the changes I've made it's also very tanky. I was hoping I could get more defenses out of the build but I think I'm getting close to the peak performance without turning to things like Aegis Aurora and I don't really want to bother with that.

---------------------------------------------

If you folks have any additional ideas for me, or any questions, be sure to let me know!