Hello mates
Please look at the build and tell me, if the concept if alright or not.
So far I have armor and boots, works nice so far (lv.72 Monolith, lv19 skills)
I think you are going to struggle with survivability. How much ward are you generating? That seems to be the only thing keeping you alive.
I like the concept of a non reaper form/death seal lich build, just not sure how good it will be.
Currently around 4000 ward, with quite good, but definitely not top tier gear
I am intrigued by this. How does it work with marrow shardsā¦it costs health but you have basically no way of gaining health back.
I think I am going to have to build this to try it out and see how it feels. I play quite a bit of lich but have only really played reaper/death seal.
Health regen.
As @BroncoCollider rightly pointed, the core mechanic of this is based on health regeneration. I have some amount of health regen, and Marrow Shards/Transplant costs a percentage of current, not maximum life - so at some point life spent equates to life regained from regeneration.
I just assumed from your passive tree with all of the reduced health regen/drain that you werenāt getting much to sustain, but yea percentage definitely helps.
But I see now that you are getting 39 so maybe not so bad. Like I said, I am intrigued. Will be curious to see how it does in higher level content.
Hm, Health regen is 39 according to your build planner. Also building HR in combination with Exang is working against the low life mechanic. The higher your regen, the lower your max ward.
I havenāt looked through all of your skilltrees. The combination of skills looks a bit all over the place. You donāt build much into synergies. The skills work all on their own. Spirit Plague and Wandering Spirits are DoTs. Marrow Shards are hit based, so are Bone Curse and Transplant. You use these skills as utility, which is ok for now. But when you go into higher difficulty content, the missing synergies might cause your build to fall behind.
The armour shred on bone course has no benefit for Wandering Spirits and Spirit Plague for example.
You should go for one route that is either hit based or DoT. Then you can focus on affixes that support your build style and donāt have to split. Focus is better than hybrid.
Donāt get me wrong. You did not mess up or anything. But you also wonāt be able to clear everything with this build.
There has to be some health regen, or the drain would bring life all the way down to 1. I assume that Marrow Shards canāt be cast when the health cost canāt be deducted. And itās unlikely that there will be a significant difference in max Ward with only 39 regen, IMO.
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Well, the roles of skills are:
- Marrow Shards - main damage dealer. Generating Bone Splinters results in many āhitā instances which benefits Bone Curse and Spirit Plague.
- Transplant - movement. Out of all skills I have little idea how to develop it; for sure Bone Armor stuff is worth taking, same for global damage increase, but after thatā¦hard to say.
- Spirit Plague - its core role is to provide ward on hit thanks to Putrid Recovery node, not to deal damage, although a tiny bit it provides helps to bring harder enemies down to kill threshold of Bone Curse. It has great range and instant cast over an area. Because there are many Bone Splinters generated by Marrow Shards there are, or I think it should be, many triggers of that node resulting in high ward generation.
- Wandering Spirits - their main role is also to provide ward on expiring, but they also serve as additional damage source, kind of bodyguards when I stay in place ex. looking at items, and moreover thanks to they synergize well with Bone Curse - their poison projectiles counts as hit, so they trigger the curse. I use them on autocast via numlock trick.
- Bone Curse - thanks to Oppresive Gaze it never expires, thanks to Brittle Bones it kills stuff faster so it is ideal against bosses or elites. Bone Splinters generated by Marrow Shards works exceptionally well with it thanks to Cursed Limbs node and piercing enemies - this way single-target restriction of the skill is negated, and moreover due to the number of shards the curse is triggered multiple times per single cast of Marrow Shards. Bone Curse, as I spotted, greatly shortens kill speed, but so far (Black Sun, Blood, Frost and Death timelines) I have no need to use it against common enemies.
So it is not like there are no synergies among my skills, but as I returning player from ~0.6.X times I might not have knowledge what are best combinations of skills currently.
About regen Iām going to go as low as possible, the current build in the link is in middle of transition from one I was using for campaign. It might turn out that no additional regeneration is required.
Why? You have health even when it gets rounded down to 0. If you have the Xitharaās amulet & Exsanguinous/Last Steps you can test it. Pretty sure itāll work.
Edit: Yes, it works fine with āzeroā health.
Huh! Iām surprised that works. I assumed that they wouldnāt want to allow you to use that combo to totally bypass health costs, and so it would be more restrictive than letting health costs go down to fractions of a point.
Itās very niche & requires 2-3 slots being reserved for uniques. Plus itās not as if itās game breaking.
Iām not saying they shouldnāt allow it, just that I didnāt expect them to because most other devs wouldnāt have. I think itās nice that they arenāt dicking a clever interaction just for the sake of it.
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Have you thought about changing marrow shards to soul feast? Naturally gives ward. and then you can go with necrotic damage. Then you wont have to worry about the regen, but you may have mana issues. Also thinking about maybe rip blood because you can turn that necrotic and gain ward. May play around with it once I level.
There is no need to change Marrow Shards to something other, as it works exceptionally well there, and the cost is negligible. I was thinking to include Soul Feast as ward generator, but abandoned it due to inconvenient usage - Spirit Plague works a lot better at this task. Same for Wandering Spirits, autocasting them is very convenient.
About Rip Blood I was using it in my leveling build, indeed it is good - I could spec Transplant to cast it on teleport use. But there is no place for 6th skill.
Rip Blood is good though, the mana cost is minimal (especially with a wand/staff) & can be specād to hit mobs twice in a much larger AoE than Marrow Shards.
Also, Soul Barrier isnāt going to be giving you any benefits since youāll always be under 50% so you can free up those 15 passives. Personally Iād take the 5 points in the Reaper passive for spell-based cull rather than cull a slightly higher cull on Transplant & then change Transplant to get more explosions. Iād also take Soul Maw for more % damage. You could then put points in Stolen Vitality/Bed of Souls for more hp, Necrotic Energy for more flat damage or Wands of the Fallen for more % increased damage. Iād also probably change the wand to a Profane Wand for higher flat damage & some % curse damage since your Bone Curse is probably not a trivial amount of your total damage, Iād also want to get chill chance on it. Youāll also want to get your crit avoidance capped.
Yea I got to about 40 last night and I was playing around with Marrow Shards and it felt pretty good since its pulling your health down which gives you more ward due to your items. Was just trying to think of ways to make your damage a little more consistent from a gearing perspective. Maximize the damage you are getting from all sources.
It is very good skill indeed, however Iād like to have a damage dealer which does not use mana, is a physical spell so it uses physical spell-related affixes on gear and idols, and also which generates multiple hits, therefore multiple Bone Curse triggers, per cast. Marrow Shards which explodes into bunch of Bone Splinters, and has chance to be double cast fits that role perfectly. Rip Bood can hit an enemy 3 times at most - initial hit + 2x Blood Splatter.
Yesterday Iāve made a test, and this passive does work for low-life build; it constantly triggered over and over. However, as it turned out that 90 ward each 6s didnāt make a big difference, so Iāve put points elsewhere.
So far culling provided by Bone Curse is good enough, I see no point to invest in that node.
Anyway, thanks to previous hints about life regen is not needed at all I managed to improve my design; itās very similar to what youāve proposed Llama8
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/NoXzXqbQ