Ziggy on Herald of Agony and Pathfinder:

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SIQI a écrit :

Alright after watching the video.

Assuming Ziggy had the virulence ascendancy passive allocated in the video.

To keep nearing 20 stacks it seems one would need to inflict about 2 poisons per second.
To keep nearing 30 stacks one needs about 4 poisons per second.
To keep nearing 40 stacks consistently, one needs to inflict about 8-10 poisons per second.

Keep in mind that in the video Ziggy is not going thru maps. You can get a fairly good shot of the crawler's mortar damage with high stacks when he gets towards the end of video with the crawler fighting kitava's heart with some resist chaos mod.

The power level looks to be about that of a buffed out flame golem with added damage, except unlike the flame golem the aoe is really high due to pathfinder node and so all barrages hits the target.

I am guessing the barrage skill itself also has a natural cooldown of 6s like the flame golem. This can be seen most clearly in 2:00-2:09 of the video where it starts the barrage at 2:02 and doesn't fire another one until 6 seconds later.

My guess is the herald going to be best as a supplementary skill particularily with viper strike since the crawler can clear trash but viper strike has the real dps needed to melt boss (not to mention poison proliferation might make it alot more viable for clearing packs even without the crawler).

For cheap starter weapons one can try quill rain or wasp's nest, and then transition to a gg rare late game.

A question I got on mind is whether or not Master Toxicist's Chaos Skill AoE affects the poison proliferation radius if one was using a chaos skill like viper strike. I'm guessing it should since ele proliferation is also affected by aoe increases.

But the new ascendacies don't affect the crawler or do they because it gives AoE directly to the spell that Herald of Agony is and so the crawler gets it too? Now I am confused of how you can affect the crawler?

EDIT: Herald has 3 tags: Spell, Herald, Minion. I'm positive it doesn't scale with any AoE from the tree. And the ascendancy says: "chaos skills have 50% inc aoe" and the herald has no Chaos tag as well.

After putting more thought into it I think Occy is the best for this. The CI synergy, curses and chaos buffs just flow too well.

I created a post on the witches forms to discuss more theory-crafting specific to Occy and from what we know so far.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2200222

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gandhar0 a écrit :

Can see it used with a BV Occultist as well for a walking simulator explode (Profane Bloom) build.
The Herald buffs the explosion's chaos damage so it may be 30% of max hp when the herald is max. level.

the herald does not buff the explosion's chaos damage. herald only gives you chance to poison, and more poison damage, and the buffs to the minions.

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FCK42 a écrit :

I find it funny how everyone is going batshit with their speculations about how it'll be with minion nodes. Honestly? It won't get that much power from them. There isn't all that much minion damage on the tree, compared to other sources of damage. And at gem lvl 1 and 40 virulence stacks it already gets 400% increased damage, 80% increased attack speed and 80 to 120 flat phys.
Last time I checked, full on minion investment on the tree resulted in about 200% increased damage, probably less. So honestly, while at very high virulence, it won't make too much of a difference.

i agree with this. just take a look at necro ascendancy and some minion nodes. they're so spread out and useless for this minion its pretty nuts. this little guy doesn't need resistances and hp at all. it only needs damage which they tree won't provide you with very easily. you're better off stacking phys and chaos dmg throughout the tree.

necro is also a terrible ascendancy for this little guy. you don't need zombies or spectres or skeletons and it probably doesn't get any bonuses to those specific things.
i'd like to attempt a build surrounding this dude, but ya im sure the aoe attack has a cooldown to it.

anyway, you'd be able to seriously ramp up some base damage on this guy, which would get insane bonuses and it really wouldn't take a crazy investment. your biggest issue would be your defenses like ways to leech and stuff.

I think this herald was made for the one thing poison builds tend to struggle with: fast clearspeed. It takes a bit (not too long really, but still a bit) for poison to ramp up. Against single targets with high amounts of life, this usually results in some REALLY impressive DPS once you got some poison stacks on the enemy, but against normal enemies the damage over time aspect can be quite the hinderance.
This is where I think the agony crawler fits in perfectly. In the first place, there aren't all that many good aura/reservation choices for life based poison builds. Sure, you can go with haste, grace or even determination, but only haste is an offensive aura and its powerlevel is... kinda low to be honest. Blood rage outperforms it in most cases. Other than the auras? Heralds? The elemental ones are pretty useless for a classic poison build, and so are the elemental auras. They DO have a use with Volkuur's, but that's it. The last option is a blasphemy setup, but you could get lvl 21 despair aura from witchfire brew aswell.
The new herald fits perfectly. MORE poison damage and some poison chance, opening up more choices on the skill tree in some cases. On top of that a minion that gets stronger the more poison you apply per second. It has HUGE coverage and some pretty high damage on high virulence (which you should have while clearing), giving you some much needed frontloaded damage. On slower builds it'll probably fall off a bit against boss fights, but even there it'll be a nice addition.

TL;DR: It's nice to finally have a reservation that is tailored towards poison builds, as there wasn't one before. On top of that, it'll help out poison builds with one of their weakspots, which is fast clearing of large packs, especially for melee poison builds.

I agree with you FCK42 but from a different angle, poison does suffer for clearspeed but its because the damage is simply not there, it does fine on bosses because assassin bandaids it with making the poisons last 15s instead of 2.

Personally I think they need to look at ailment scaling itself, bleed needs it too but i'm certainly pretty excited to use the new herald even if it feels like a sloppy fix.

Big issue about poison you cant survive , adding more dmg is just pointless. One more power scale to glass cannon and with pathfinder you cant even get that assasin hp recovery even more deadly.

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canjp a écrit :

Big issue about poison you cant survive , adding more dmg is just pointless. One more power scale to glass cannon and with pathfinder you cant even get that assasin hp recovery even more deadly.

You know, there are these really weird things called "Life flasks" that you can use to restore some of your lost life. I heard that Pathfinders in particular tend to get more use out of them than some other ascendencies.

life flasks have been suffering in this game for a long time considering most damage you receive is in enormous spikes that kill you usually before you can even hit a life flask, let alone let it heal you over time.

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xMustard a écrit :

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gandhar0 a écrit :

Can see it used with a BV Occultist as well for a walking simulator explode (Profane Bloom) build.
The Herald buffs the explosion's chaos damage so it may be 30% of max hp when the herald is max. level.

the herald does not buff the explosion's chaos damage. herald only gives you chance to poison, and more poison damage, and the buffs to the minions.

Right. I just checked the PoEWiki again and poison is chaos damage over time.
I somehow didnt noticed this small but important detail.

"most damage you receive is in enormous spikes"? Citation please.