"Thicket of Blinding Light" And the viability of reflect builds discussion

General
21

Yeah, a t7 Spellslinger prefix would help (-5 mana cost), which, along with the 40% reduction you get in the tree (hah!) would reduce the cost to 16.2. You could then spec into the rage on vine route.

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/BaeZ6VYB

I’d also go the bee relic route 'cause I’ve never used it before, the bees apply frailty for you & they get thorn shields along with your vines when you cast thorn shield so you’d get 2-3 times the thorn shield AoE per cast, which might make going the flat crit from spriggan better. :person_shrugging:

22

honestly legacy of a quiet forest is enough alone to sustain rage, since thorn shield even proccing maelstrom doesnt cost any rage I dont think.

23

yeah thats why my build on the post doesnt spec crit avoidance at all lol

24

It doesn’t, but Eterra’s Blessing does, at best 16.2 per cast of Thorn Shield, which is quite frequently…

I’d also probably change the idols from regen to haste on totem (for the large ones) or just replace them with more thorns idols. And tweak the blessings/affixes away from regen 'cause you’ll be getting a lot of healing (& spell leech from Thorn Shield bursts) from Eterra’s Blessing casts.

25

Yess, my previous versions of the build I included in my post tried to use eterras blessing. The investment required to hit sustainable rage with it is insane. I barely balanced it with:

t7 reduced spell cost on Hazelroot.
t6+ rage per second while transformed enchanted idol affix (5-6 idols with that on it)
all points in eterras mana cost node
Foot of the Mountains reduced mana cost
Legacy of a Quiet Forest

Its kinda doable, and this is keeping in mind that eterras procs of thorn shield so increases to cast speed require more investment to maintain its mana cost. But it requires you to take quite a few class idols, which means less 1x1 reflect idols so in the end I decided it wouldnt be worthwhile enough.

26

Your rage cost calc doesnt include the passive rage decay, which makes a disgustingly big difference in eterras rage sustainability.

Sadly with the bees, they dont get the multiplier to bosses that the body armour gives you. Though it is still a solid way to get free dps. I personally find id rather use Vessel of Strife in relic slot. There is easy access to regen for primalist and the ward is great for EHP, also if you dont go down the regen route, eterras would become your only reliable health recovery source, which as ive mentioned throughout this thread, is quite difficult to meaningfully implement.

27

Also thorn burst itself will do almost no damage, im pretty sure it doesnt scale with reflected damage, at least I cant see that anywhere on the planner, so the leech would be pretty terrible.

28

I had totally forgotten that! That would take the cost down to 15/14/13 depending on how many stacks you have.

Yeah & I’m not sure I can be arsed to calculate the casts per second to work out the rage cost, plus the rage generated per sec from vines.

They’re there for frailty stacks tbh for an additional 18% less damage taken.

It doesn’t, but it does get flat phys spell damage per attunement from Hazelroot & while it wouldn’t be hitting particularly hard, it would be hitting a lot since you get an additional thorn shield/burst from the relic plus 25% chance from Barbed Thicket, 22%-36% chance from Hazelroot, 30% recast from Bulb Growth. Though you would need to remove Introspection & “just” avoid casting on your minions.

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/ApZ9m2eB

29

If there’s only 61% increased cast speed & Thorn Shield has a base speed (casts per sec) of 1.467, then you’d get 2.37 casts per sec, for an Eterra’s Blessing rage cost of 35.4 per sec.

The belt gives you up to 20 every 3 sec (6.7/sec), the amulet gives you 12/sec at 6 vines & Garden of Rage gives you a 40% chance on melee hit to get 9 rage, so assuming 12 vines you’d need 4.7 vine hits per sec on average to sustain spamming Thorn Shield/Eterra’s Blessing. Given they have 1.64 attacks/sec (including the 12% from Creeping Underbrush) you’d need ~3 vines hitting something constantly to give you enough rage to sustain Eterra’s Blessing. So if you have 6 vines on a boss, that doesn’t seem too unreasonable assuming my maths is not wonky? Plus some extra to counter the rage decay.

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30

yeah seems about right, ive never used tears of the forest for rage gain in my reflect builds so that ontop of everything else could cover sustainability. Also for regular echoes, there will be downtime between packs which lets you recover a considerable amount of rage.

31

Yeah, and if you take 4 points in the reduced rage decay passive you should “only” need ~4 vines hitting a boss constantly out of 6 vines spawned to keep you rage positive on average & given you can have up to 12, that doesn’t seem unreasonable. On paper at least. As long as the vines don’t require too much time to resummon when they die, they’d get healing from Eterra’s Blessing to heal them frequently plus the heal aura from your Spriggan.

And you should be able to get ~0.5m thorns ticks from the chest on bosses/rares twice a second up to ~0.8m if the thorn shield recast/Hazelroot procs align.

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32

Yeah, that seems reasonable and crazy op. Surely there will be some meta build revolving around reflect at some point!

Sadly that means they might nerf the unique which would suck because its so cool as is right now, id be okay if it was just the boss multiplier part that got nerfed lol.

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33

Yeah, they could do with tweaking down the boss/rare multiplier.

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34

I’ve been thinking about this build too and I’m kind of torn on what to go for. Having seen the numbers, it seems pretty obvious just how much more damage the primalist version is. I actually briefly threw together a barebones version of the character on my offline save with whatever crap gear I had and I was getting something like 7000+ reflect on the character sheet from just spamming thorn shield. Meanwhile, full theorycrafted gear setup on the pally planner I have is like 4k. (Admittedly not fully optimized, but I’m not thousands off just from some number tinkering.)

But man I really would rather play the pally. I’ve tried doing the thorn shield spam thing before and it’s super awkward. Not sure if I can justify it though.

This is one of the setups I have:

https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/o3Nrrl0B

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35

very true. I like my reflect build being more of an “afk” playstyle, usually just use it for bosses and arenas, so spamming thornshield is fine when I dont have to run from pack to pack, but as an echo clearer, having to move through an echo while maintaining thorn shield stacks is a nightmare.

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36

Yay, @Dammitt’s fixed the thornshield % increased thorns calc!! Thanks mate!!

Fortunately that’s not going to be an issue with the chest, plus you don’t need max thorn shield stacks to clear trash, some pops from thorn burst does the job.

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37

Yeah, Thorn Shield is the main source of flat reflect. If you have 150 attunement and you get to 40 stacks (which is pretty easy to maintain, especially with bosses) that’s actually 10k flat reflect from it alone. And you’d hard pressed to push flat reflect on gear past 4k.
So Spriggan will always have about twice to 3 times the damage any other build can get to.

As Llama pointed out, in echoes trash dies from regular reflect. You’d only need to bother increasing stacks with champions, nemesis or mages.

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38

This chest piece sounds somewhat like the good old “Enemies die on sight” stat from Sacred (1) - except this one also seem to be a boss killer. Fun times! That reminded me I have to play that fantastic game again.

39

Where are you getting that from? I need to see some math. It won’t even do 1 million Dps and any build under 20 million Dps is bad. Decent is 30-50 million. The best Boss killers do 50-100 million Dps. (I’m sure new meta builds will do 150+ million with primoridial)

I don’t think you are aware of all the builds actual Dps numbers but if a build is not doing at least in the 25-50 million Dps range it’s not good.

My Auradin last season had 35 million Dps so great clear walking simulator in 1k+ corruption and still kill Abby in under 20 secs.

  • I already tried making some builds in the planner but we would need another skill for bossing. I would do FG Sigeon shield throw and have it auto proc so we have actual boss damage. Use Shield throw with the CD so it does 100% more damage also more richochet. Since reflect significantly buffs shield throw flat damage.

  • A pure reflect build will do Z dps on bosses but at least you can turn that reflect damage into shield throw damage, get 500%+ crit multi and make a build around reflect but the main damage is shield throw.

  • Last season my FG spine of malatros shield throw reflect build made it on Arena ladder so it should be a lot stronger now with thicket armor. I’ll try it again after I collect all the idols.

40

is this on dummy? because uberroth has about 50m health from what ive read, so 100m dps would kill ubberoth still in like 3-4 seconds including ward.

The thing you have to remember is the dummies dont have dynamic scaled DR, which is about 90%, so if you hit a dummy in a single hit for 10m, you likely will hit an end game target for 1m or a little less.

Reflect is DR ignoring, so it wont have the same dummy numbers, but has comparable real numbers.

For example, my 1000c build probably did something like 20k a hit on end game enemies, but attacked very fast, probably had 400k “real” dps but hard to calculate.

Reflect builds are actually going to be quite insane if they can be piloted well and heal properly.

For example, if you get to 200k tooltip reflect,(I managed to get 150k through thornshield spam, so maybe 200k is possible) And have a high rolled 400% more body armor, you will do 1m per tick to bosses. 200k * 5(400% more) = 1m, tick twice per second, for 2m dps on uberoth, if we consider with all ward he has 150m hp, then in 75 seconds he dies. if has 250m total hp, it still is going to take just over 2 minutes to kill him.

Even if we cut that in a 4th, rocking a measily 50k reflect tooltip it still does 400k a second, so around an 8 minute clear, thats not considering any extra hits you can tank to reflect more back to him.

The item either has some hidden downside we cant see on paper that makes it not work well, or it will be nerfed next season.

There is 100% going to be someone insane enough to make this kill uberroth for sure I can see it.

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