[3.7] Gladiator Max Block Herald of Agony starter to end game SSF HC viable

Here is a video for a max block Gladiator using Cyclone and Herald of Agony. Yes it took a nerf but it's not too horrible and this build is so safe and just became even more safe, with a low investment cost. It's a great league starter.

https://youtu.be/4lqqeWvhkes

Here is POB link: https://pastebin.com/zmgrZXAj

And here is my video notes. It covers 90% of the build aspects. I go into much more details around the 3.7 changes though and why we make them.

Core Agony Gems
Spoiler
o Herald of Agony, Minion Damage, Hypothermia, Vicious Projectiles, Damage on full life support (Crawler can’t be hit or damaged), Empower.
o Talk about difference from Maim and Hypothermia, Alpha Howl  the devouring diadem
o Mention pierce early on – Need to run pierce in early 4l with crawler till curse setup completed


Cyclone Setup
Spoiler
o Early game – cyclone, blood magic (wtalk about channel), poison, life gain on hit
o Mid - late game – cyclone, blood magic (maybe), life gain on hit, faster attack (Mortem Morsu is poison trigger)
o End game – cyclone, life gain on hit, fortify, withering touch (explain the damage increase)


Other Gem Setups - this has some more details in video as I cover new skill gem options such as frostblink
Spoiler
o Explain double curse and cover projectile weakness (lets us get rid of pierce on agony) Cast on attack setup. gear
o Tempest shield block chance (key since we not using fortress), chain so it will hit the pack, curse on hit, poachers mark.
o Convocation, hatred, generosity, enlighten – Explain why convocation (doors, proximity, stairs, positioning)
o Whirling blades, faster attack, flame dash – flame dash for gaps whirling for position / evade (could end up being changed based on new evade skills. ) So this was the setup, but looking to use frost blink instead. The chilled ground will mean we always apply the chill effect. Key for Hypothermia’s damage boost, Lets us look to maybe not use hatred, and take pride instead which would be a damage booster.
o Shock Nova, Projectile Weakness, Desecrate
 Shock nova so we can ensure everything around us is shocked, this simply boosts overall damage. Works with all damage types
 Projectile weakness allows us to get Pierce for all enemies around us, pierce support only lets us pierce 2-4 enemies (which is enough, but having all enemies near us always pierce and a free slot on the crawler is huge) we also get 19% more damage which is multiplier and 10% increased additive damage.
 Desecrate – We use this to ensure our helmet has corpse fuel. The diadem uses corpses to give us Feast of Flesh, which gives life, mana, and energy shield per corpse around us every 5 seconds this keeps our energy shield maxed. This might change in 3.7 depending on channeling levels. However, I doubt it will be low enough costs to work, without blood magic still.
o Other possibly setup is projectile weakness, desecrate, and flesh offering.
 Only problem with this setup is the double corpse consumptions leaves none, and you end up running out of energy shield which is fueling our cyclone cause of the eldritch battery from helm. If channeling Cyclone is low, we might be able to have desecrate still sustain both feast of flesh and flesh offering. Testing will be needed though.


Weapons progression
Spoiler
o Early game – anything you can hit with build won’t be making anything special till around lvl 34.
o At level 34 if you can get one cheap get a mortem morsu – great attack speed, and chance to poison at this point you can remove poison from your cyclone gem setup. Since you don’t have much attack speed early game I would put faster attack speed in with cyclone at this point. This will be your weapon through the entire leveling process into late game
o End game a claw with fast attack speed, and Trigger a socketed spell on use. Make sure the claw has a +life gain on hit, and not a %life leeched. We don’t leech we have no personal damage values, we just need fast attack speed and as much life gain on hit we can muster. Rest of values are pointless. If you can snag a few resists here great but not needed. While these can be slightly expensive since we don’t need anything really beyond the trigger effect it shouldn’t be too pricy. You can’t shift to this type of weapon till you have elder poison on glove though. Remember Mortem Morsu has been our means to poison this whole time.


Body Armor
Spoiler
 Get to 6l as fast as possible obviously. After that you will want to try and get into a +1 skills tabula, OR if it’s available and can be afforded, a Skin of the Loyal with 2 Red, 3 Green 1 blue
 A few things to understand: You need Skin of the loyal before you can take The devouring Diadem, and drop blood magic. Once again this is dependent on how channeling costs for cyclone play out in 3.7. This might not be a needed gear piece. There is a strong chance with the new channeling setup of cyclone, that we could run a +1 6l Coming Clamity However. That thing is going to be ultra-expensive. You will also probably be the one 6 linking and then double temple corrupting and praying. If you hit it though jack pot. So when your super rich and don’t know what to spend your mirror on there is a suggestion. Or just stay pretty cheap, and forget about it. Devouring Diadem and Skin of Loyal typically run about 1 ex each after a week or two in league, and you can use a +1 tabula which are around .7ex after a week or so to tie you over. Or not even worry about the +1 tabula. Till you get to T14+ you won’t notice the difference much. So a few options and all work.


Helmet
Spoiler
 Start off using an alpha howl it will help keep cost down, on the hatred, but you probably won’t get it low enough to run hatred and the agony setup with hypothermia, you can however run it with maim in the spot of hypothermia. That will get you your leveling / early mapping done.
 Once you get the Devouring Diadem, then you can finally give up blood magic on cyclone (same thing on channel costs will see). It gives us eldritch battery which lets our ES power our cyclone. Without Skin of the loyal though you can quickly end up running out of ES currently. I don’t see this being a problem in 3.7 though


Boots and boot options
Spoiler
 Windscreams – allows us to dual curse.
• We use poacher’s mark here which is key.
• A.) it gives us more life per hit
• B.) it gives less evasion – here is where you can go for / try to remove the Resolute Technique, not so much that we care for crits, but just cause we want the skill point back. I found it was possible to generally not use resolute technique, but decided to leave it as I didn’t want a clutch run of misses to kill me in a uber elder fight etc.
• C.) Crawler earns / gets Frenzy charges. Yeap since the crawler is killing the cursed monsters it gets the frenzy charge. This super boosts our Crawler.
• D.) Helps our crawler not miss something that does happen sometimes.
 Upgrade into WindShriek when you can. Gives your Curses more AOE which is helpful for your triggered curse.
 If you get a corrupted The Anvil with curse on it, then you can pick other boots I built this in the event and well it’s hard to get some stuff in events.
 Other possible boots
• Saqawal’s Talons – Mainly for Aspect of the Avian – and mainly for 10% chance for our minion to do double damage, if this hits on a tail spike this could mean a 4 million hit, depending on how you want to count the tail spikes dps.
• Bubonic trail 2 slot – so the problem with this build is you will be consuming all of your corpses around you quickly, great for DPS but will cause you to lose ES too fast and thus no be able to cyclone. I’ll probably test this though with cyclone being a channel now. The two slots means more Attack speed and more life and more minion damage.
• Garukhan’s flight, mainly for the dexterity so we don’t need as much on tree, also the immunity to ground effects is helpful as they don’t hit thus we can’t block. Ground effects like burning in a min/max resist can be really annoying, not a show stopper but really annoying. Especially if there is an AOE booster
• A really good rare pair of boots – This would be my choice if not running windShrieks. Getting max life, with 6% increased max life corruption


Other Gear
Spoiler
o Amulet
 The Anvil – it sucks it drains so much of our attack speed, but it does give lots of survivability it’s pretty important to have the max block chance increase, and the flat block chance is pretty needed since we have taken away block chance with not going the blocking claw.
o Rings
 Life and resists,
o Belt
 Resist life Stygian
o Flask –
 2 instant heal life potions with bleed and burning removal. Getting ignited can be quite painful if there is no monsters around to life hit from. It’s also useful when fighting the fire guardians. Keeps you from taking a dive at the end of each of the phases when they go poof and you are burning for high damage. Could swap this for a remove freeze and just swap to burning for those bosses, would free up quicksilver slot to have more speed.
 Rumi’s – is a must have, you need to get it perfectly rolled for Attack ONLY, since we are gladiator, our Attack Block applies to our Spell block, so we don’t need both perfect, because of this these are pretty cheap. Don’t sweat getting a 20 though, an 18 or 19 will be ok, but in a normal league a 20 is going to be pretty cheap.
 Silver flask – the onslaught helps us quickly build poison stacks on a boss fight or after a boss phase transition. Though it looks like some bosses will get a few mobs between phases now. 
 Quicksilver – I favor this one cause we want to move fast and cyclone slows your movement down. 30% at least currently, will have to see if that changes in 3.7 need the flask to make sure you keep moving quickly while cycloning around.
o Jewels – eyes
 You want as much life as you can get and 6% minion Attack speed, then squeeze any minion damage on you can.
 Since we take Spiritual Command minion Attack speed affects us. This means we get to double dip the attack speed bonus, our crawler gets it and we get it.


Which new defensive skill rework to use
Spoiler
• Steelskin – This will be a good choice early on but once we get our skin of the loyal, I feel molten shell will out perform
• Molten shell – Till we get skin of the loyal we won’t get to make much use of this. I’ll assume the armour it grants will get boosted by the effect of skin of the loyal which should push our armor up a decent amount. We will want to make sure we take a armor based shield, and if possibly armor based gloves to make the most of this option. If getting rare boots, armor based as well. Doing so should grant us a large armour pool to make high use of this. Which should provide some nice reflected damage. Looks to be able to provide around 2300 damage Shielded, which will be reflected at 90k damage back when it goes off. We get to keep it up for well almost permanent it will feel. Has a 4 second cooldown and a 3 second base duration. Now I say we will have it up forever, cause you have to remember, we block 80% of all attacks and evade 60% of attacks. We don’t get really hit that often, unless it’s a mega hit that sneaks through. This will be there to take that full hit and really give a huge boom back.
• Immortal Call is going to be useless to us, as we can’t really generate any charges especially endurance charges. So we would be stuck with the base rates. If we reworked the tree there are a few options to get endurance charges now, but it’s going to stretch tree a lot and we will probably have to give up a jewel slot.


As mentioned the video goes in depth. to all of the above notes / details but you can use the above as a rough guide.

Dernier bump le 7 oct. 2019 09:31:00
How it works the build in 3.7 with the nerfs?
Some nice ideas. Keep it up and would love to see some updates as the league progresses.
are you playing this atm in legion? advice on leveling?
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are you playing this atm in legion? advice on leveling?


@latterus14 I'm playing this build atm. Leveling seems fine with cyc+blood magic+poison+life gain on hit. Agony setup is HoA+Pierce+Damage on Full life+Vicious Projectiles or Hypotermia if you have enough mana.
Hatred Aura as well.


Lvl 59 SSF with 4L gear without problems. I'll update you if any changes ;)
Seeking to recycle my slayer, build seems great.
If I follow the gems link/gears on your Keeperofagony character on your profile, am I good still for 3.7?
(Seems so according to your video and POB, just making sure, since you didn't allocate his tree since reset apparently)
Also, what about the 62% cold res in the POB?
Dernière édition par Pr1d0, le 10 juin 2019 05:19:08
Have not been able to get a response from the original author on here or youtube but oh well. Here is my current setup. saving for the helm now. my damage is no where near his in PoB and im curious what else im really missing to get it there.
Dernière édition par latterus14, le 12 juin 2019 08:53:16
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latterus14 a écrit :
Have not been able to get a response from the original author on here or youtube but oh well. Here is my current setup. saving for the helm now. my damage is no where near his in PoB and im curious what else im really missing to get it there.


Pierce instead of empower playing quite a role I would say.
Char on my profile is following his build, I tinkered it a bit to be a bit more on the side of survival, I'm only like 500k dps behind compared to his POB on Tail Spike, but traded some attack speed and minion damage for chaos res and life.
Prolly gonna switch enlighten for Molten shell also.
It does the work pretty well I would say.
yea. Wont have the currency for a level 3 empower and the helm for a while so this may have to do for now
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latterus14 a écrit :
yea. Wont have the currency for a level 3 empower and the helm for a while so this may have to do for now


You can upgrade your gloves with:
[S] Socketed Gems are supported by Level # Poison / #% increased Damage with Poison
[S] Socketed Gems are supported by Level # Faster Attacks / #% increased Attack Speed
[P] Open Prefix to craft: Minions have #% increased Damage
[P] +# to Maximum Life

Options for others stats:
[P] Adds # to # Physical Damage to Attacks
[S] #% Chance to Block Attack Damage or +# to Dexterity or +#% to Resistance
Dernière édition par Diryam, le 13 juin 2019 08:48:46

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