I’ve been taking a look at the new unique Essence Weaver for my next build experiment. I haven’t really seen anyone give this a try, so I just want to see how it goes. While I’ll be mostly discussing my current build, I’m posting in general because obviously the weapon has some potential to be used in 3 different classes depending on what you roll on it and I wanted to get some thoughts/ideas on other potential variants.
The more generalized idea I have is that depending on the elemental roll you get on the spear, you choose a class that has the ability not that can directly use the element base, but which has an elemental conversion to it. So for example if you got lightning damage, you could do Sentinel or spellblade since both smite and frost claw can convert to lightning and then you get storm bolts also lined up with that. This way you get 2/3 of the procs in the right element. Unfortunately there’s no generic elemental or spell damage roll you can get on a spear. So while you will get the generic benefit from the affixes on the base item, you aren’t going to be able to seriously pump up all 3 of them with additional affixes. If you do want to just keep it generic, I suppose your best options are just melee attack speed, critical chance/multi, or armor shred. Otherwise, getting a damage mod that works on 2/3 just seems like the best we can do for a hit version of this build.
Some quick very jank planners for examples:
Paladin: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/oYGLlzDQ
Shaman: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/BjrkvyxB
Spellblade: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/A8mKDNkQ
HOWEVER, I will be talking about none of these specifically for now. I just leave them as a point of discussion. What I will be talking about is…
This: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/QebW6paB
I have been rolling A LOT of unique spear prophecies. There have been a lot of duds. I have some that are ok for cold or lightning, but nothing I’d be super happy to go out of my way to build around for now. What I have found that piqued my interest was the spear you see with T7 Ignite and T7 Bleed. Slap a Maehlin’s Hubris on that and we have a LOT of ignite chance to go with the increased elemental damage. So I thought why not? Lets see if I can ignite a bunch of stuff. So I did a little legendary crafting, swapped on random supplementary pieces of gear I had lying around, and tried it out.
I chose Paladin instead of Spellblade because… I already was a paladin and I didn’t want to level a spellblade or spend like all my gold respecing my runemaster. I haven’t really thought about it enough to know if Spellblade offered more or not.
We use the new smite belt and multistrike to get extra smites. And so far it’s doing ok. I’ve taken it to ~500 corruption and it’s been doing echoes and bosses without dying and it seems like more damage than my Shattered Lance build, so that’s good. I am kind of concerned by my apparent lack of survivability on the character sheet though. I don’t get much armor and my resists were crap without idols, so that left less room for things like smite related class idols or throne of ambition. I might just need better gear, but maybe I’m meant to drop some unique for an exalted with better resists/armor. idk. Quite frankly, I don’t know how I haven’t died yet. Watching my health yoyo is terrifying.
Also for skills, I feel like I’m supposed to dip into VK for the increased DoT damage from Abyssal Echoes, but I don’t really know what I’d drop for that. I like the passive stuff too much.
So aside from that, the question I would pose that is concerning me is this: How much is essence weaver even contributing here? Is most of the work being done by the belt and multistrike? Is this just a worse version of a build using Palarus, Aurelius, or smite on throwing hit builds? Does it do enough to justify itself as separate from those routes?
It can be a little hard to test something like this because of the random nature of the procs, but removing the belt and using a non-multistrike melee attack, one proc of the spear seems to apply about ~150 ignites. Now how many of those ignites are getting the more damage from smite vs the other two treeless spells? No clue. With everything put together, I end up stabilizing around 650-750 ignites on the boss dummy. So the spear isn’t most of the ignites, but it does contribute a non-trivial amount.
Anyway, what do you think both of the current build and more generally how you’d build around the item given various affixes you have available to you?
EDIT: As an update, I went and killed Aberroth with it a few times and it’s reasonably solid at that. It’s not gonna delete him, but it moves through the phases at a reasonably brisk pace compared to my other slower builds. You maybe end up having to deal with ~1.5 ability cycles per phase. The fight length ended up being about 2-3 minutes. It can tank through a lot of what my tankier characters can tank through, although it is a bit scarier on the move since it needs the healing from smite to regen. Honestly I kind of hate using Titan Heart. I get that it’s pretty good, I just don’t like not having any source of passive regen. I kind of wonder if there’s a ward version of this. The belt comes with a decent chunk of int if you roll high enough on it and at least one of the spells has int scaling. I wouldn’t go full in on it and maybe this isn’t for the DoT version, but it’s a thought.