I thought “looks like fun, let’s play around”. I did a quicksearch on internet and stumbled upon this video Harbinger of Stars Meteor Build Showcase: Upcoming Unique For Last Epoch 0.9! - YouTube which encouraged me further to try something. I really enjoyed the idea of playing the vilatria downfall set as I felt that all these green items in my stash were mostly underused.
I’m not a great player, and I need my builds to be tanky enough to accomodate with my overall bad placement and slowish reaction time therefore I had to find a way to give me a more comfortable buffer than what was shown on video, especially f I wanted to drop the shield. Coming from my old low life EQ bear and having already an exsanguinous / 15% last step of the living right at my disposal I decided to give it a try, especially because the set wants us to stack int already, and therefore ward retention.
Current setup
Ideal (?) setup
Overall thoughts
I have currently 1675 hp at level 83 which translate in ~3500 ward unbuffed. Flameward is providing ~1000 ward on the click of a button, with all the other nice defensive benefits. With the TP buff, I’m around 3800 ward maintained.
Passive node “Lost Knowledge” in sorcerer is really helping with the ward regen as I still manually cast meteor a lot (tp on ennemies - flameward - cast meteor - spam mana strike - recast meteor). The proc from the belt is nice but I feel not that reliable.
I’m able to do do corruption ~120 without it feelng too much of a chore, but I can’t really say if this is really scalable or not. I did not atempted any dungeon.
One very big issue I have is that I can’t spec in “Rift Bolt” for lightning pen, as it comes with leech and that’s bad. Like very very bad as I found out that when you leech and your health goes up, your ward goes down as it seems not to be generated anymore by your chest and boots.
Overall I don’t know if it is really strong or not, but I found it quite enjoyable to play so I decideto share it there if anyone would be interested. Also, you may have some thoughts about improving the whole thing, and I’m obviously open to any feedback .
The belt is basically a noob bait and a very mediocre item in general (after the nerf). It LOOKS like it can be a build-defining unique, but in reality, if you manage to build a setup that allows a lot of procs – it’s actually REALLY hurting you instead of helping. Because the proc is not considered a “CAST”, therefore it doesn’t interact with anything that triggers “ON CAST”, such as “Lost Knowledge”, etc.
But on the other hand – it still drains mana, and A LOT of it, if you proc it often. And you aren’t getting anything in return except damage (and it’s not even some extremely overpowered dmg at that).
On the other hand, the stats themselves on the belt are not bad – fall speed and +1 is nothing to sneeze at. So, if you can find a belt with some decent LP on it (like +2 at least, which shouldn’t be extremely hard, considering that it’s a common item) – use it. Otherwise drop the belt and get some decent exalted piece instead.
Another point is Exsanguinous. It’s just bad in general and it’s terrible on Sorc. If you want a ward build (and you clearly have very nice Ward Retention) – get Twisted Heart and boost cast speed and spell leech. It gives MUCH higher amount of effective HP (almost double, compared to Exsang, with the same Ward Ret) because you aren’t a low health anymore (AND you get very decent bonus stats with Heart, like +1 elem skills, +% Health and Cast Speed).
As for Mana Strike – you are not a Spellblade. You can not realistically scale attack speed by a lot, without significant losses in other areas. So, this skill is not really for you.
Get Lightning Blast instead. It deals massive single target dps with very low investment, and it only gets better with Vilatria’s set, because of the huge base damage that you get from set bonus.
And you’ll get a very good and reliable low-cost spell to proc Twisted Heart with.
Thank you for your feedback, I definitively overlooked this relic which seems very nice indeed. I do envery much enjoy the concept of lowlife build, but indeed the interaction with leech seems to hurt it a lot. Removing the belt well… I do agree with your point but then you end up with just a self-cast meteor build, which is a bit sad in my opinion, especially if you remove mana strike meaning that you will not have the mana to really spam it anymore. Obviously with my current set-up I still self-cast it a lot, so you may say that it would not be a big difference.
About the belt, I did found a interaction that make it marginally more usable imo, with a hammerthrow smite proccing build so that you can keep your mana as low as possible to ensure maximum Devotion amulet value. Also it makes it make a it a better visual mess
Dread has a youtube video going over how bad Exsanguinous usually is. He talks about Vessel of Strife as the replacement. Instead of life stacking, you go for regen stacking.
The on cast thing is not entirely true, there are some things that do actually proc from the meteor belt. It’s just not consistent. You can put a point in craterborn for example for the 15% cast speed buff, even if you never manually cast meteor. There are also some skills that actually gain synergy from meteor not counting as a cast, like arcane ascendance.
As for the build itself, I’ve been trying to make the meteor belt work on sorcerer as well, doing something similar with mana strike. It’s your only option to really generate the mana you need to keep up with meteor procs. Lightning blast won’t help you at all and focus feels too slow in comparison. One problem you have with the lightning staff is that you can’t put attack speed on it because it’s a set item, so I switched back to void instead.
You could try going for Mana tunnel on teleport instead of all the ward nodes to get a free meteor cast and get the proc chain going. You could also get permanent stun immunity from that branch, which helps a lot since you’re kind of stuck in melee range.
I really agree, but just to take into consideration that I try to get atm, I killed Julra maybe a dozen time (that’s not an easy thing sto do and not that quick) and still haven’t seen one vessel, so don’t think about LP
btw same things for gloves on Julra, so maybe I am really unlucky to start with!
actually u right but it’s even worst it’s appear to be bugged atm so it’s really dosent drop at all…anyway like I said you farm so much exlat on the way that a snctum run is always good even without Julra
.