[Note: The name of this thread is an homage to Shtrak’s awesome “Real Hero” series. You really should read it, it is great!]
The story: I wanted to try and use the “Draalsting” unique spear, sitting in my stash for ages. Serpent Strike was a logical choice for it. But what else?
First I played around with totems (I really like Thorn Totem), but mixing it with Serpent Strike felt clunky. So I thought some more… And I came up with this absolute monster. Possibly my strongest build so far!
Without further ado, I am proud to present
THOXIC, a beastmaster from the wild north, specialised in poison.
Here he is, just after he totally obliterated Majasa (despite bad gear and low health):
All the campaign was a complete breeze. It is still early days, but dps is off the charts, superb survivability, and very pleasant to play.
Some explanations:
Offense:
Fury Leap in the middle of a group (or on a boss’ head). It automagically spawns poisonous vines. They are boosted by our Spriggan Form, and scale with our minions.
Slash around with your poisonous melee attack, Serpent Strike (it spawns a permanent serpent minion, stacks a lot of strong poison, and insta-kill enemies under 18% of max HP)
Want more poison? Don’t worry, the scorpion, her babies, and the serpent following you are bringing a lot of it!
Leap to the next bunch and repeat.
Important: just remember, this is NOT a facetanker, this is a minions + DoT build. Don’t stand still, hit once or twice then run around, otherwise you will die!
Defense:
Nearly permanent Aspect of the Boar for 30% damage reduction.
A further 16% against nearby enemies.
Good leeching.
Eterra’s Blessing heals, cures ailments, and spawns Healing Totems. (And can add some poison chance, because why not?)
We don’t use mana in the build, our pool is always full so we can spam 3-4 Eterras in quick succession at any time when in trouble.
Fury Leap doesn’t require a target, if you need to kite you can still make vines while running away, stopping pursuers in their track.
Uniques:
Draalsting + Vipertail: the build was created with them in mind, they are a huge boost. But not quite mandatory, as they don’t add new mechanics, you should be fine if you don’t have them.
Eterra’s Path: mostly QoL, it makes me run really fast and spawns some vines, cannot hurt (well, it cannot hurt ME. It certainly hurts the enemies, a lot!). I will probably swap them out soon for some high life boots when I find/craft some.
Bleeding Heart: not even sure I need it, leech from tree could be enough. Or I might try and craft some good Living Seed (relic with leeching implicit) and replace the amulet by a minion-supporting one. We shall see.
Weaknesses:
What do you mean, weaknesses???
More seriously, only thing to keep in mind: we have very little res and HP from tree. Gearing has to be very defense-oriented. But as the damage is already massive, this is not a big problem.
Note about 5th skill:
I chose Eterra’s Blessing because it brings huge survivability.
But if you have good gear and feel confident, both Warcry and Frenzy Totem are great options, and can support your minions very efficiently.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading and have fun poisoning things!
Maybe we will hear from Thoxic again after he grows up a little bit…
Have you thought about Serpent’s Milk? It’ll make your minions apply a lot more but weaker poisons which will stack the resist shred more quickly buffing your own poison damage.
Whether it’s an improvement or not would depend on how much of your dps comes from your minion’s poison & how much they would normally stack per hit, but you don’t seem to have massive amounts of minion poison chance so the +200% minion poison chance should be a fairly significant increase.
If you do find it useful, you could take some of the points out of Noxious Carapace in the Scorpion tree since the Scorp’s poison damage ill be minimal ~& you could try nodes like Acid Lob, Deeper Puddle & Pus Sacks.
Very interesting.
I’ve always been interested by Draalsting, but reluctant due to its reduced attack speed.
I have one only Beastmaster left, and I don’t want to respec him. I’ll have to level a new one to try this.
The Healing Totems in Spriggan and the ones in Eterra’s Blessing are probably not the same. Improves to them in Spriggan skill tree should not impact those generated by Eterra’s Blessing.
To be confirmed, because Vines from Spriggan tree and Vines from Fury Leap are the same.
Awww, too bad, the double synergy from Spriggan tree (vines and totems) was sexy looking.
Doesn’t matter much anyway, the only node I was taking was Guardian of Nature, and only because there are only 15 points influencing the vines and I have no use for the remaining 5.
But they should find a way to clarify in the toolboxes for all these interconnecting effects, at the moment what connects and what doesn’t seems to be sheer guess work (and extensive testing I suppose).
Edit: I edited the main post to remove totem/spriggan interactions.
That’s what they are progressively doing, by renaming several elements.
Skeleton Mages became Sekeletal Mages in order not to be confused with Summon Skeletons, for example.
If you take the passive that procs Thorn Burst when hit (Thicket of Thorns), you could put points into the armour buffing nodes in the Spriggan tree (Ironbark, Deep Roots, Eterra’s Bulwark & maybe Bulb Growth) for more armour.
And sometimes we fail.
I’m currently leveling this:
It works very well, he’s just wrecked the Wengari couple in Heoborea, but I’m already bored. I’m a victim of the another-idea curse. I have another idea I want to play.
Ah ah, same for me, as soon as a character reaches 60-ish level, I completely lose interest and start another one.
I call that “diminishing returns”: what I like is building skills, making meaningful decisions and see my character evolve.
Once all the mechanics are in place, I could become more powerful, sure, but it will always be by using the same skills and pressing the same buttons, no real changes anymore. Boring.
There are so many other paths to explore!
Strangely, of all the games I have ever played, the only one that got me interested in endgame was PoE. Not sure why.
I think because the maps are all different I wanted to visit all of them. And the completionist in me didn’t like blank spaces on the atlas screen.
In GD, Diablo, LE, and every other, I love playing the campaign with different classes and skills combinations but I have no interest in endgame.
I was not even able to finish the campaign, I got bored before, so I gave up.
I played a lot of Diablo 3 endgame, but I tried again recently and was not interested long enough.
I also tried in Van Helsing, but it did not last long.
Here, it depends. Sometimes I don’t want to hear about the campaign, and most of times I’m all about building something.
I hear Wraiths calling me…
And here i through i was the only one trying to build some poison BM cause it rocks !! like there is more than one way to build one for now im trying this:
I used spriggan for survability And yes this is a full minion damage build im here just to apply some serpent strike to invoke more little minion that will apply poison !
For now (i should precise that im not at this stuff level yet…) i have absolutly no pain clearing map … the minion are verry huge almost instantly depoping packs of mobs… Im trying to push this build and see what work or what dont but one thing is im pretty sure the stuff is on point ! we can do some Idol/blessing adjustment i think but thats it… The big change will come from skill tree and passive tree where im still trying stuff
