Fastest Built in the West - Lich Speedrunning in Monolith

Hey guys, after grinding with it for a while, I decided to share my version of a Lich speed running build which has been working for me quite well. With it, I finished the campaign in little under 3 hours and despite being a glass cannon built, managed to complete the monolith progression system(before nerf).

First and foremost this is a “lazy man’s” built, meaning that there is no/close to no crafting in it whatsoever. Here is a quick preview before I dive deeper into it:

Preview

First, the gear:
Gear

Since the whole purpose of this built is speed, roughly half of all movespeed comes from items. Here is a list of those items and how much speed they provide.
The Falcon - 15% movespeed if you have hit an enemy in the last 5s, plus dodge rating
Arboreal Circuit x 2 - 2 x 18 = 36%(bonus affix, summons taunt trees that help distract enemies)
Ward Tail - 10% plus bonus dodge rating
Chimaera’s Essene - 10%(while in reaper form) plus bonus dmg while transformed
Eterra’s Blessing - 33% plus bonus health and summon vine chance to slow down enemies
(Can be improved by swapping them for Last Steps of the Living for a total of 54%)
Wing Guards - 8% chance on hit to give you haste(30% MS) for 1s. This might seem underwhelming but when you have 30-40 wandering spirits all hitting enemies, that haste is almost constant until spirits run out of enemies to hit. It also provides a very good amount of dodge rating, 200.

The rest of the items are fairly straight forward, the weapon is the Plague Staff, best in slot for almost every poison/damage overtime built. The helmet and relic are the two items that you have freedom to craft whatever you want. I went with cooldown recovery and affixes boosting dmg over time. All of the idols are aimed at poison protection to negate the massive dmg that aura of decay do to you in a poison oriented built.

I would not go too much into passives and skills except post screenshots of mine since they are pretty straight forward. When it comes to skills, I am missing Transplant which is a great mobility ability, but even though I am not specked into it, once you activate aura of decay you can swap it with Transplant and effectively get to use a 6th skill even without skill tree.
All of my skills use trees that aim at maximizing the number of times you can hit the target. This is crucial because at 500%(approximately) chance on hit to poison, every extra hit I can squeeze in gives the target 5 extra stacks of poison.

Warning! This built is meant to leave enemies behind you that would eventually be killed by the wandering spirits that you also leave behind. It can be quite intense on your PC, I personally run the game for this character on lowest quality possible.

I have purposefully not picked up the passive converting leach into dmg because this built does not lack dmg whereas leach allows you to sustain lich form much longer. The second main point of this build is to abuse Reaper Form. I say abuse because I believe that its extremely overpowered, It gives a large amount of speed and dmg and second life. Sometimes, when you happen to lose reaper form early or enter a long monolith, all you have to do is stop and/or backtrack a bit until the 20s cooldown resets and then continue with another life.

Reaper Form and Wandering spirits, In my opinion, are two of the most overpowered skills in the game right now. In the perfect, temporary, circumstances this built can reach about 195% movespeed and manages to maintain an average speed of 140% while in combat.

Let me know what you guys think and in case you try it out, how you liked it. Here are the remaining screenshots.

Stats
Passives 1
Passives 2
Reaper Form
Aura of Decay
Wandering Spirits
Death Seal
Drain Life

PS: EHG, please don’t nerf it ;(

2 Likes

hi and thx for the build.
i was wondering why you take eye of damnation in the acolyte passive tree,when it says in the wandering spirits tree that infectious dead dont scale with necrotic damage increaces.

The main reason I took it is because it gives 36% damned chance on hit. Since this built has a ton of passives that boost general DoT effects, even the ones that might seem “insignificant” ends up doing decent damage. You can also get over 100% chance to damn on hit from your helm piece but those affixes are extremely hard to find.

Another aspect of damn on hit is that damn is a curse which compliments some skills that do extra dmg against cursed enemies. I can’t find exact information if it is a curse or not, but from the sound of it I think it is. If someone knows for sure let me know. On a lesser note, the necrotic dmg can help with drain life and death seal which remain to have an OK necrotic dmg.

Edit: I just noticed that I also used it to get to the last passive in the Acolyte tree since there were no other passives that fit the built any better.

aren’t bosses a problem with this build? always wanted to do a poison lich, nice build.

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