Hey everyone, I've commented on this sub about this build before but I thought I'd make a new post, and see if anyone else has tried a build similar to this.

In short, this build is based on stacking a lot of abyss jewels. This in combination with Shroud of the lightless and Lightpoacher gives us all the damage we need, and the majority of life (defence). This is a build focused on just mapping, I'm mainly doing legion or deli maps quickly and easily. It is possible to use this as a template and make into it a build that can do pinnacle bosses as well, but I don't think it's worth it as you can get better bossers at that point.

This post is quite lengthy, so here is a quick showcase of the current state of the build.

Damage

We use Ethereal knives as our main skill, as with the circle enchant the play style is in my opinion the nicest out of all phys based spells. We convert all the damage of EK into elemental damage instead, to more easily scale it, and to fully utilise our phys as extra elemental damge scaling.

Lightpoacher gives 5% of phys added as extra damage of each element per spirit charge, and you get 1 spirit charge per abyss jewel affecting you. In my current setup this is 16 abyss jewels for a total of 80% of phys added as fire, lightning and cold damage. We convert 100% of phys damage to elemental to better utilise elemental scaling and to ignore phys reflect.

Shroud of the lightless gives us 4% elemental penetration per abyss jewel for a total of 64% penetration, with an additional 18 from Trinity support for a total of 82% penetration for all elemental damage. With this amount of penetration we can practically ignore any resistances on monsters, as they would at most be 8% resistant against our damage. This amount of penetration also has great synergy with the elemental mastery "Hits have 25% chance to treat Enemy Monster Elemental Resistances values as inverted", and is the reason why I have decided to not get any exposure, or reduce enemy resistances in any other way. The way this mastery works is that if we take a monster with 90% all res as an example, 75% of the time they would have 8% resistances, and 25% of the time they would have -172% resistances. It is of course very rare for a monster to have this much resistances, but it should mean that on average enemies will have 0% or less resistance to our damage.

Defence

Don't get me wrong, this is not a tanky build by any means, but it has ended up being able to take far more hits than I had expected. You might notice on my level 99 tree that I have taken a total of 8 life nodes for 69% (nice) increased life, but we have still ended up with a total of 6390 life. This is because of the mod on Shroud of the lightless giving 3% increased maximum life per abyss jewel, giving us an additional 48%. We don't get a lot of life on gear, but we have 15 abyss jewels all giving flat life which also helps out a lot.

I mention our life specifically as that is basically our only defensive layer. This might sound bad, but we have ways of making our life pool go further than your average build.

By combining Dissolution of the Flesh with petrified blood we not only get the 30% more life, but we also split the damage we take. If you don't know how Dissolution of the Flesh works, it reserves your life pool when you take damage, which is usually quite troublesome. However, petrified blood prevents 40% of damage, and deals it to us over time instead. This means only 60% of damage taken is reserved, with the rest dealt over 4 second. So our 6k life pool can take a roughly 10k hit, which there aren't many of in maps.

So how do we counter the degen from petrified blood? 2 ways, first we pick up 20% recoup on the tree. This is not 100% mandatory but I did die a few times without it. And with the keystone Youth. Eternal youth halves our life regen, and leech per second, but makes it so energy shield recharge applies to life.

If you've ever played an ES build you know that recharge is quite strong, but is stopped whenever we take damage. With Dissolution of the Flesh however, we never actually take damage, instead our life is reserved. And the degen from petrified blood doesn't count as damage either, meaning our recharge has 100% uptime. Recharge is based on 33% of your life, so I effectively have 33% of my life regenerated per second. (or 66% of my low life pool)

Dissolution of the Flesh also negates the big downside of being on low life, as it will still reserve life above 50%. So we get all the benefit and none of the drawbacks.

Jewels

Our abyss jewels focus on life, crit multi, and then a mix of avoidances, phys damage to spells, cast speed, or movement speed.

This build is fully immune to the following effects:

• all elemental ailments (through stormshroud)
• bleeding
• corrupted blood
• poison
• burning ground (from pantheon)
• hinder (not important)

Which is not only a huge defensive boost, but also negates the main drawback of running Dissolution of the Flesh.

How do we keep up our spirit charges?

Credit to this post as that's where I first saw it, and I would recommend reading that post as well. But in short, we give spirit burst, which is the skill that uses up our charges a mana cost, and then we make sure we never have enough mana for it to trigger.

Budget My current build is probably closing in on roughly 100 divines total, which definitely isn't cheap, but you can definitely start this a lot cheaper if you wanted to.

The easiest way to do this is to skip the expensive flasks, and go for less sockets or worse rolled abyss uniques. 100% effect on the belt isn't necessery but saves you mods on other jewels.

Instead of stormshroud you could do the jewel that instead lowers the duration of ailments, which has great synergy with the boots. This won't make you immune to ground effects however.

You can get started for a lot less, but I'd recommend the build from 30+ div to get started.

Current setup There are a lot of ways you can upgrade the damage on my character, but I feel like my damage is more than enough, and movement speed will have a bigger effect on actual clear spead. This is why I run awakened chain, death rush, and haste. I currently only have a level 3 empower, level 4 would be a 10% damage increase, which I don't think would ever actually be noticable.

You might also notice there's a snipers mark in my gems. This is because I used to run occultist instead of assassin. But I realised the 40% more damage from snipers mark is completely unnecessery, and I would rather have a bit more crit and move speed.

I feel like I need to mention kaom's spirit, as everybody loves running it right now. It is great, and berserk would be a lot of more movement speed for the build. But with eternal youth I don't think the minimal rage regen would be better than the consistant explosions we get from asenath's. If I had an explode bow I would consider this, and I am currently farming to get a mirror explode bow, at which point I might try it out. Otherwise another great option would be conversion gloves with an abyssal socket.

The ascendancy is very flexible, I feel like for EK specifically scion is the best, and I've currently landed on Assassin and Deadeye. Assassin as we need either a Shadow or Witch ascendancy to give us easy access to Pain Attunement, recoup, and the op caster mastery. Out of the 6 available on the 2 classes I think assassin is the best. Deadeye gives us some much needed dexterity, and tailwind, and a little bit of damage as well.

Why not Blade Vortex? I just don't really like the skill. You can absolutely do it, and probably get more damage, and even bigger explosions, but to me the playstyle isn't quite as nice. I am planning on making a new abyss stacking character once I get the explode bow which will most likely be some form of BV, either another scion. Or if I can figure out a good way to get triple exposure, I would do elementalist. There's this Crouching tuna video with a BV scion that you could look at as a blueprint if you're interested.

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