I had not seen Serpent’s Milk showcased in a build before, and with the apparent lack of synergy of combining 200% Poison chance with a 0.1 Poison modifier for minions, it’s a difficult Unique to build around. This build uses the Thorn Totem node that grants 4% more mulitplier for every Poison stack on the enemy.
This build is run as a Beastmaster, as the most important passive is “The Chase,” which grants 32% Attack and Cast speed for minions. Aspect of the Viper passively grants 50% Companion Attack Speed as well. Patch 0.8.4 provided some big updates to this build. Firstly, Spriggan Form is a much better Totem/Mana generator than Tempest Strike, so we take Spriggan Form and focus on Ranged Vines with 100% Poison chance, and having Healing Totems take the Thorn Totem Tree and providing more Maximum Totems. With our Thorn Totem tree, that allows us 3 casts of Healing Thorn Totem for a total of 9 totems. Additionally, Spriggan Form grants us 3 Rage (Mana) for every Vine on the field, and we want to have maximum Vines up since they’re applying Poison stacks as well.
Since we’re in Spriggan Form practically all the time now, we replace Frenzy Totem with Summon Scorpion, and go for the “Poison Pool on hit” ability, as it grants an extra 40% Cast Speed to our Vines/Totems as well as additional Totem Poison chance. The only bad thing about our new setup is that we have no melee ability to proc Aspect of the Viper, but with each Vine having 300% Poison Chance with Serpent’s Milk, and with Healing Totem producing 3 Thorn Totems at a time with no worries about Mana, I think it’s much more worth it in the long haul.
Serpent’s Milk Beastmaster [0.8.4]
With the new patch, gearing up is easier to get class affixes to a high level, so I was able to get a T4 Adaptive Spell Damage. Between the Wolves, Vines, and Totems, the overall speed of this build is much better in Empowered Monos with much less danger of death than the previous patch. Once I get a decent boss fight, I will record it and have it ready to supplement the build guide.