First attempt at a Poison Lich, so bear with me. L47, just finished up the first group of quests in Heoborea.
I’ve been trying to build a sustainable Auray of Decay without having to toggle it, and for the life of me I can’t do it for more than 15 minutes. I’ll get it setup just right, with a steady total of Health/Ward around 950, Poison Res overcapped @ 100%. After running a few quests, I’ll back to town, talk to the NPCs…then I’m dead again. Nothing has changed - gear, skill/passive points are exactly the same, except now I’m getting drained like a stuck pig.
I started this combo around L35, for the most part it’s been great. But for the last couple of levels it just it’s making any sense. I find that a complete respec of AoD will make the combo work again. But only for a little while until I’m dead again.
Is this combo just not viable? I’ve tried to find similar builds online, but they’re all L100’s, which don’t help me.
iirc the first 30 stacks of poison reduce your poison res by 2% each so you need to overcap 75%+60%
i m not sure how leech with poison works but in theory you need to leech MORE than the damage you receive. AND not only that, leech happens over a duration of time, not instantly so the amount of overleeching needs to be substantial.
you would achieve this by reducing dot damage, and improving your leech amount.
since you’re playing lich, you also need to consider a lot of lich passives penalize your regeneration and infact directly drain your HP.
so you’ve got a lot of things working against you.
personally i’ve tried to make it work but got lazy. in theory if you can make it work you’re be “immortal”.
perhaps make a Life based decay aura build? i dont know.
Yeah, I just deleted this build. After playing for 2 hours straight with no issues, I got killed by a melee attack, 8 full seconds after the POS monster was killed. After respawning, I can’t use AoD at all without dying immediately, so something is way off here. My usual trick of taking EXS off-and-on stopped working.
AoD from a “design” POV is meant to be toggled on and off. keeping on indefinitely requires a lot of investment. if you’re level 47 its easy to assume you’re lacking a lot of passive nodes and probably lack a lot of good equipment to make it work.
hmmmm… that said you kinda made me want to try making my build work lol.
Leech works against Exsamguinous, but yes, Aura of Decay isn’t intended to be on constantly. He could try getting more armour & the armour affects DoT affix but generally there’s not much that can be done.
If what you’re saying is true, then I should have been thwarted from the beginning, not randomly while in town talking to NPCs or after a rebirth. It’s almost like I was permanently afflicted with Poison stacks from the previous session.
Oh, well - learned something new today. It was a fun way to play while it lasted.
The way resistances work means that the more you advance in the campaign, the harder it will become.
Your poison resistance is capped at 75%. It doesn’t matter how much more you have, except for effects like shred.
After that, it’s further reduced by the area level up to level 75+ where you’ll have an effective resistance of 0%.
This means that early on your effective poison res was around 70-ish at area level 5, but as you move up in the campaign and the area level keeps increasing your effective poison res will decrease.
When you reach the end of the campaign your effective poison res will be around 25%.
That should account for the issues you’re having with AoD and being able to sustain it for less time as you advance.
I understand how the resistances work as you level, which could explain what’s happening. But the change is so drastic that I’m beginning to wonder when the resistance change actually occurs. To go for as long as I did yesterday without any issues (I could just stop for a minute or so and watch my Health/Ward balance at the same level), it makes me wonder if the game doesn’t realize that it needs to rebalance as the character levels in the same session.
I can’t remember how many levels I gained during the aforementioned session; enough to show a noticeable change in resistances, I would think. This is something I may revisit in the future.
One more thing: for those thinking of trying this, it’s not a key to immortality, at least not with the crappy gear I had.
The monsters gain pen based on area level. AoD is a source from you, and uses your stats, you dont get pen from the area level, so your own AoD shouldnt be fighting against effective 0 res.
Whats more likely happening is he is scaling damage, so his AoD is doing more damage to him. The damage dealt to you by your own AoD is done with your own stats. so getting 1000% inc poison damage means you will immediately take 11x the damage from your AoD.
AoD is a cursed ass skill because you cant scale your poison damage too much or you kill yourself, it has limited ability to stack poisons unless you get hit, and is overall just… way to hard to sustain.
AoD being something you toggle off and on means its not living up to its skill fantasy imo and needs a rework. it should straight up not scale off monster stats or player stats, and just default poison you.
its also highkey just not even lich-coded, hopefully a lich rework that is coming up is more then just a little love tap… lots of what lich did(self ailment, ward stuff etc) drastically overlaps imo with warlock. AoD as a warlock skill makes 100% sense, for lich it does not imo.
That is a very good point, actually. Yes, you are correct that area level does give enemy penetration, not actually reduce your resistance.
I don’t think you can increaase it to where it would one-shot you, though. That would require way too much investment and it’s likely not possible at all with the current gear/modifiers.
It also has a node to heal you for a % of your missing health, so it will eventually reach an equilibrium if you take it.
It won’t let you stay in Lich form indefinitely, though, since the Lich decay keeps increasing and will eventually overpower this.
1 shot? probably not, but it depends on your gear vs investment. like for example lich gets 150% damage for being on low life, if he is also turning off leech, and converting leech to % damage with lich, 10% leech = 100% damage etc.
1000% damage isnt off the table. if he lacks ward gen/life for LL ward, it could totally very easily outpace his ward gen. but yeah i dont buy “i toggle it on and instantly die”
But yeah basically the way he has chosen to build it is gonna be really bad, LL ward just isnt gonna be as proficient at tanking the degen as the % missing life recovered.
But other then getting literally 1 ticked, yeah skill is just too cursed. As far as I know its the only skill in the game to work this way, the other ways to self inflict ailments/debuffs dont seem to scale off the players stats, so not sure why AoD is that way. I know bleeding heart does not scale based on the players bleed stats, dont believe the ignited/damned items do either.
Dont know about self curse warlocks with the new swine amulet, id imagine if it scaled with player stats it would be a similar situation of very quickly killing yourself.
im guessing the distinction is that they are item based, so not “your skills”
if i m not mistaken, anything that buffs your poison penetration will actively work against you as aura of decay has you poisoning yourself, and your poison penetration will be used to your detriment.
AoD seems to work best as a leech build, not LL, I think.
I had a Lich that used channeled poison wandering spirits and AoD. It had the AoD node for healing from missing health. I managed to stay in Lich form for a few minutes, usually 1-2 echoes before I changed back due to health decay (or due to a big hit).
It was actually a fun build and I can’t wait to try it again when Lich gets reworked next season.
Agreed. Since I play SSF exclusively now, my gear was severely lacking. I really don’t like slow-building a new character, especially if I have to play a fairly different build type just to get high enough in level to switch over.
OK, here’s my new build, currently at level 44: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/A62vLKlA. Even though I’m sitting at 767 Health and only 33% Poison res, I’m able to take long naps in town without a care in the world. My Ward of 370, lower than my previous build, seems to be enough to keep the Poison degeneration from killing me.
Biggest differences:
No Poison Penetration
No Exsanguinous (or other gear like it)
I started AoD at level 35, seems OK so far. Gotta say that Rip Blood is actually not too bad; helps a lot when I’m in trouble.
