yes, take the armor shred conversion, so it doesn’t affect you much since you are wanting to stack ward anyways.
cool! i’m gonna try it pronto!
Has anyone figured out a work-around for the wandering spirits bug making your character momentarily unresponsive? I’ve tried removing Spectral Purtrescense from the skill but it’s still happening.
AOD nerfed into the ground, what a shame…
I dont think it was a nerf so much as a bug fix and it was doing far far more damage than intended before the bug fix. It is now in line with how its supposed to function
Totally a useless skill now, regardless of what we characterize it under. There is no subjectivity to the uselessness of it now.
Yea my character when from semi god to simple pesant in a blink of a eye, shame
it is a problem that the skill isnt powerful enough to be used but it is an important distinction.
It’s an offshoot of poison being nerfed in response to minion poison builds and plaguebearer being too strong, which heavily damaged AoD because it has a set proc rate. When Spirit Plague comes out, provided the skill does as I think it does, this guide will likely transition into an overall Lich DoT guide.
When did they do that? A bug with Aura of Decay was fixed in 0.7.7e but I can’t see anything in 0.7.7 through to 0.7.7f that changes poison, apart from a minor nerf to Entangling Roots & buff to Mark for Death in 0.7.7.
0.7.7 contained more changes to monster health/damage reduction scaling, which is part of why some things feel far tankier this patch. 0.7.6 reduced the effectiveness of poison stacks. In culmination, AoD became far weaker.
As far as I can see, the health/damage reduction scaling was only on bosses/minibosses & that was a 40% reduction to hp & a 40% reduction to damage taken so that should (if everything worked) result in the same time to kill. They also increased the hp of mobs by up to 16% (hopefully starting at 0% increase around lvl 25 up to 16% increase at lvl 100) which isn’t a particularly big value, certainly it’s less than the 20% exponential damage reduction on the damage per stack (but interestingly that only hits a 20% damage reduction at 50 stacks, it’s a 10.5% reduction at 9 stacks & grows very slowly after that, to 24.7% lower damage at ~900 stacks).
So assuming you’re at lvl 100 (16% increased monster hp) & hit 50 stacks (20% less damage dealt compared to pre-0.7.6) it only takes 4 damage ticks longer to kill a 100k hp mob than pre-0.7.6 (10 ticks compared to 7 ticks), and because everything’s better with a spreadsheet (& tea):
Therefore I would suggest that the feeling of Aura of Decay doing significantly less damage (which I’m not denying) is primarily due to the bug fix in 0.7.7e reducing the amount of stacks (& therefore the “flat” damage as well as increased damage taken) as fast.
Plus you started your build in a much higher damage regime (prior to 0.7.6), did you notice the damage reduction in 0.7.6? Perhaps (as you mention here) being able to use a catalyst & take more “high DoT nodes” overshadowed the initial damage per stack reduction from 10% to 8%?
It may just be that the build was actually weaker on patches before .7.7 and I did not notice as much due to the strength factor of wandering spirits. When I first started the build, it was able to function fine without any supporting skills, and it is possible that I didn’t notice how much worse the standalone skill was until .7.7 due to spending prior patches testing other builds and putting AoD to the side.
Whatever the case, I can tell you that AoD, for whatever reason, seems to have lost far more damage than other skills in the face of gradual monster health/DR changes. I do not have a single other build that ended up suffering the damage loss my AoD build did with no changes in gear.
It’s really not useable, I have full damage passives built around AOD and the character is completely useless now. I will come back when they fix it, otherwise ill stay on POE. Thanks for the thread though, nicely done!
A bit of sad news to begin this new patch.
This build is now on hold until further notice. While AoD did receive a pleasant buff this patch in that it raises poison damage while active, that honestly made it even more of a supplementary damage source to plaguebearer/wandering spirits darts. Personally I think the skill needs to just be converted to a poison spell at this point, as otherwise it simply won’t be able to stand up with the excessive poison chance players can get now.
Don’t be too sad though, as I will be working on new build guides aimed at being beginner friendly to help new players get into the game! Hopefully one day I will feel like AoD is in a better place and maybe wandering spirits will have their poison darts nerfed or something. Until then, thank you to everyone that followed this build and provided feedback and made your own adjustments here and there!
I’m curious as to where this excessive poison chance is coming from. Plague Bearer’s gives up to 250%, up to 70% from Vipertail belt.
Another 130% from Lich, Wandering Spirit darts have 100% inherently. Reaper Form can push it even further if someone desires. The issue is AoD only benefits from poison chance if it has darts, and then AoD fires a dart at a frequency only slightly faster than a singular wandering spirit. Wandering spirits also put the player at 0 risk to use, compared to AoD needing an insane regen and poison res investment as well as being close-ish range. All of these things combined just make AoD unviable to use, and the damage it deals is not anywhere high enough to warrant its risk.
Was hoping for a revival when I read the patch notes.
AoD has received a massive buff with 0.7.8d, and I will be testing it out again in end-game content. Rejoice!
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Waiting for the results.