I want to start of by saying what an amazing experience this game has been, you guys are really nailing it and I can see myself pouring 1000s of hours into this game! With that being said, I have some suggestions on one of the builds I’ve been playing: Serpent Sting
My thoughts so far is that it is likely viable for 200+ corruption Emp Monos, but is not the strongest build, just in a good spot. The main things I would like to see changed however are:
Placement of Aspect of the Viper in the passive tree. I think it should be swapped with Aspect of the boar, or at least put earlier in the tree. As it stands, going poison means you get little damage from the base Primalist tree (its all Melee, elemental, and spell damage). You can start with on hit, but currently you get 0 poison damage until 30 points into Beast Master (25 if you count poison chance). The build was a very slow start, even with 6 Uniques stacked to level easier.
Changes to “Serpent’s Milk” amulet. It feels like this amulet was made for this build, but as it stands, I would never choose it over a decently rolled non exalted Rare amulet with Poison damage, resistances, and %pen or DoT damage. Once I got into Empowered Mono’s I had to start using “Bleeding Heart” for the Leech. Asking around, most people said you need leech for late game and multiple people agreed that even as full tank Bleed Paladins they couldn’t survive without the leech. Because of this I think the flat health Regen should be changed to Poison Leech (in the neighborhood of 2%-5% of poison damage). Also, I think the “Chance to poison on minion hit” should be changed to “Chance to poison on melee hit”. It appears the intent of the item was to make the player choose to spread his power with his pet, or do more player damage at the cost of pet damage, these changes would do that. This would also give the player the option to choose the “Bleeding Heart” Amulet for survivability (More leech) and more AoE (alot of my AoE is Venom Nova and Scorpion hits) or Serpents Milk for more single Target damage (Gaining %poison chance & Poison damage). Also the % Poison resistance is a little redundant since the build already gets 40% from the passive tree. Necrotic would be the best, since that is the resistance we cant choose as a blessing (Shared with poison damage/shred). I would like to see it changed to almost anything else or removed (If you had to cut power for the other changes I mentioned).
Let me know what you think or if there’s other questions/issues with the build!
I think aspect of the viper should not be available for shaman, Druid though I am not certain why they would take them. So a bit more in the middle makes sense (to me).
I also think Serpent’s Milk was for this build until I read that one line: -90% minion poison damage. Feels like this should be stated as “player” damage, not minion. As it is the player only really melee’s to get Viper up.
It’s used to get your companions to poison the boss (200% minion poison chance) to debuff it (poison’s inherent uncapped resist shred) without them doing lots of damage (90% less minion poison damage) so that you can do more poison damage (because of the minion’s poison stacks debuffing the target). You can use aspect of the Viper to get your & your minions attack speed and poison chance higher.
@Llama8 I haven’t seen a scenario (yet) where I can output more poison damage than a scorpion pet, though (not including usage of this or other unique items). Is it not the case that scorpion outputs far more poison DPS than the player or did I miss something (quite possible)?
This build is pigeon holed into polearms, while there is no good polearm implicit in the game to support this play. Id really like to see either 1 hand pole arms, or since the primalist holds and attacks using the 2 hander with a single hand, allow us to also use a shield with it. This builds AOE clear is weak (outside of everything being in a strait line in front of you), and could really use some love. Currently also playing this in empowered monos. Just feels like the build is missing something.
The best builds with this ability have almost no casted abilities outside of serpent strike and that feels bad/boring (yes you use maelstrom/ice thorns on auto cast). I watch streamers playing every day and the builds they play are just much more interactive. in terms of ability use, i think its close to warparth, but warpath is a full 360 AOE and it gives phasing.
I actually love serpent strike, but i think its missing some poison related AOE in the beastmaster/primalist tree as a whole. If that existed, i feel like it would be in a better spot (maybe poison maelstrom, or more meaningful poison ability conversion than what exists for beastmaster–the scorpian is super super weak. Looking forward to 8.3, love the game
Really depends if you build into the pet and pets poison damage or build into attack speed for yourself and poison damage. In my testing over the last 2 weeks, I’ve not been able to get the scorpion even close to the poison damage from serpent strike.
Even when buffed with Ettera’s, Frenzy totem, Entangling roots up? So far, scorpion takes down bosses in mere seconds breaking the phase transition some of them have. I’ll have to toy around more with it to see which feels better.
The Scorpion may well be able to do more damage than the player even with the amulet, but the amulet’s intended function (for a Beastmaster) is what I said above.
Have not tried the eterras/roots support for it. getting 25+ stacks of aspect of the shark and frenzy going as well as beserk if your using warcry gets the serpent strike pretty high. maybe ill try to go fully into scorpion only. Just wish the scorpion was more like the abomination in terms of raw power, with more power in its talent tree
I didn’t mean to move Aspect of the Viper to the Primalist base tree, just move it earlier into the Beastmaster tree
I think there’s a few ways to build it, but on the build I linked, I can get massive dot ticks (So far 1.85million is my peak) and most of that damage is me. My pet is ~6% of my overall single target damage (Highest dot peak with just the pet, with all buffs up was 115k) , I Just mainly use it for Venom Nova to help clear packs.
I agree the AoE is lacking once you get to empowered Monos, as Plague falls off. I considered trying to build with DoT instead of poison damage to see if Plague can work for AoE clearing, but I figured it would be a massive hit to the single target damage, and I would consider this build a “Boss Killer” style of build.
The overall point of the change to the amulet was: Players who want to spec into the scorpion should use something else, and players who want to be the bulk of their damage, should take the amulet. As it stands, if I wanted to do more damage, I would choose a stronger Amulet, and if I wanted more defensive, I would choose Bleeding Heart (Currently what I use for the leech). I just don’t think the amulet really has a place
