Igniting wandering spirits

Acolyte
1

This is a pretty cool interaction between items. I definitely recommend this for people who like playing around with item and skill interactions. Damage, survivability and playstyle are all there.

Summary
We spam wandering spirits, but scale their ignite on hit and ignore their poison damage. We use reaper form and spell leech to stay alive and hungering souls to melt bosses.

Key skills
Wandering spirits - ranged, indestructible, applying ignites at distance
Reaper Form - good mobility and doubles your health pool, plus boost to spell leech, damage and defences. With all our regen and leech we are almost always in reaper form.
Hungering Souls - crappy targetting, but at close range, this is your boss melter. I just took the standard fire nodes and damage over time nodes.

Other skills
I use reap and transplant for AOE on mobs, mobility and superb life regen, with a bit of mana regen, then I use blood golems for even more life regen

Key Items
Torch of the Pontifex
Soulfire
The Invokers scorching grasp
Maehlins Hubris - turns all bleed chance into ignite chance

Other items
Calamity - nice buff to hungering souls damage
Woven flesh - nice buff to spell leech

Passives
Lich for the spell leech. Take Vitality, intelligence, spell damage and spell leech nodes, as well as Lich passives for bleed chance and damage over time.

Some numbers
I have crappy gear, level 61, and crappy idols, but this will have to do as I rarely grind far into endgame.

Life = 900. Almost permanent reaper form and so far not getting taken out of it by any monster damage, but only at low monoliths.
Ignite damage = 188
Ignite chance = 290%
Hungering souls tooltip damage = 18K per soul
Leeching about 25% of damage on hit, 15% of all damage.

No shown in tooltips

  • extra 120% ignite chance from bleed chance (via Maehlins Hubris)
  • extra 160% ignite chance from soulfire
  • cremation damage from torch of the pontifex
  • All the poison and ignite damage from the wandering spirits
  • large buffs to damage from being in reaper form longer

Other things to test

  • Aura of decay for the bleed chance there and more poison
  • various allocations of points in hungering souls - the 3 minion option should give much higher damage.
2

Is there a buil planner for this?

3

I would be interested in this aswell. Ty for sharing this build with us.

Lama is right, a build planner would makes things easier for us.

4

I was previously ignoring the build planner because I didn’t notice the skills and passives options!
Uploading the build is difficult to find it, so I had to recreate it.

2 Likes
5

If you play that character last then exit the game (to menu or whatever) then go to the build planner & when you go to upload your character sort by date modified, that’ll put your last played character at the top.

https://imgur.com/9TXVyBD

2 Likes
6

I really like the idea! But I feel like it will be hard to cap your resistances with so many unique items; in particular, the rings are very nice but not completely necessary for the build to work, so you will probably need to replace them with rare rings with resistances later on. As for the Torch of the Pontifex, I have no idea just how good it is compared to a rare wand/sceptre/staff, so I can’t say for sure, but a 1H weapon could allow you to use a catalyst or shield with resistances as well.

7

Don’t forget the new patch that will make this idol choice impossible.

8

If you’re going for a spell ignite build, Torch of the Pontifex probably isn’t a bad choice, it has decent ignite chance & increased fire DoT. You could get higher ignite damage (up to 192% with a t5 fire damage prefix on a staff) but lower ignite chance (96% t5 on a staff), but you could also get a DoT prefix on a staff for an additional 192% damage. So a staff would be able to get you up to 384% increased ignite damage & 96% ignite chance compared to up to 170% ignite damage & ignite chance with the unique. Though the unique also cremates dead mobs (not sure how much damage that does) as well as has a 10% chance to summon a minion on cremation.

If you went with a wand/catalyst you could take the Symbol of Demise node for 50% increased DoT, and you could have up to 438% ignite damage and 52% chance to ignite as well as having 3 slots for resists as well as some additional Int & Ward/sec.

IMO, if you’re not going to go with the Torch of the Pontifex, a wand/catalyst would be the higher dps option (since you’re not going for spell hit damage).

9

I usually much prefer to cap resists than build damage, but these uniques waste zero stats, so I like using them and not having to search for and craft rares. What I’m really hoping is that the Warlock tree and maybe new uniques allow this to eventually be an all unique build. It’s also nice to have a little stash tab with the key uniques you wouldn’t otherwise use, and know that will get you past the early monolith without any crafting dramas.

What’s been really nice is reaping through mobs then spamming hungering souls on big boys so fast that they don’t get off their big damage. To do this, it helps to have the damage from 2 X invokers scorching grasp. The spell leech so far has made this a super safe playstyle, which should last until oneshot territory, when yes, the rare rings would be way better.

Do you mean symbol of decay?
I wonder if making a ‘proper’ build, then you’d likely get way better stats using these passives, but also with the almost ubiquitous exsanguinous + Last steps of the living combo, then using ‘hollow lich’ and all the low life nodes?

1 Like
10

I’m not sure I’d agree with that. Take the amulet for example, it only has 2, IMO, useful stats out of the implicits & 3 affixes. I don’t think the mana added as stun avoidance is ever useful & nor is the lightning explosion on being stunned. Personally I’d probably swap it for a Bone amulet (phys & necrotic resist) with fire pen & Ele DoT prefixes for more damage & then your choice of ignite chance (damage) or resists.

You could also swap 1 or both of the rings to Gold rings (ele resist) with Ele DoT & fire/DoT prefixes and 2 resists.

I’d also certainly take the Reaper passive since that gives you 10% cull on all damage you deal which is effectively an 11% more damage modifier against bosses & other chunkier targets.

Yeah, that’s the one.

That’s always an option but I do like seeing more “choices” that don’t involve those uniques.

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