[Ultimatum] PoE 3.14 Necromancer CoC Volatile Dead Tank Witch Starter Build

This PoE 3.14 Necromancer CoC Volatile Dead Witch Starter Build very Tanky with a high effective life pool (8k+), 75/50+ block/spell block, and excellent recovery mechanics. You can clear  red tier map on even extreme budget gear/League start viable.

Quick Jump

Pros & Cons

 

Skill Tree

Ascendancy: Commander of Darkness -> Plaguebringer -> Corpse Pact -> Mistress of Sacrifice

You may choose to take Commander of Darkness third rather than first if you don't need the resistances while leveling.

Pantheon: Lunaris and Gruthkul

Bandit

For bandits I recommend Helping Alira for the resists+crit multiplier
OR
Kill all for +2 Passives. This is best if you can cover your resistances effectively.

Passive Tree & PoB

Path of Building Link: https://pastebin.com/t6ZR8kXT

 

CoC Mechanism

First of all, here's a great post explaining Cast on Crit Attack Speed and Cooldown Recovery breakpoints in detail: Reddit Post

The short version:

We get more than 12.12 aps because of Corpse Pact and so need at least 14% Cooldown recovery rate somewhere on our gear. The "easiest" (albeit expensive) way is to use an Awakened CoC Support of at least level 3.

Alternatively, you can get it on boots or belt slot.

I find that a 1.25aps staff (Replica Duskdawn :P) with onslaught and tailwind buffs will leave us with only a little wiggle room for extra increased attack speed stats with a maximum of 14% additional increased attack speed before breaking the 15.14aps limit. So try to avoid getting too much or your true DPS will suffer.

 

Gems Setup

6L Main

NOTE: Desecrate should be placed FIRST in the gem link sequence so that it triggers before VD.

(Divergent) Cyclone - (Awakened) Cast on Critical Strike Support - (Phantasmal) Desecrate - (Divergent/Anomalous)Volatile Dead - (Awakened) Spell Cascade - Increased Critical Strikes Support/Hypothermia

Regarding Awakened Cast on Critical Strike Support:

If you have this of at least level 3 you will not need CDR on any other gear.

6L Notes

For your sixth you will want to use Inc. Crit Support until your Cyclone has high enough crit chance without it. Typically this will be after you get Replica Duskdawn or a high crit rare staff. An Attack crit chest would also help.

Hypothermia is a solid DPS support as we always chill nearby enemies via Corpse Pact Ascendancy.

Auras

Anger/Zealotry - Herald of Ash - Discipline - Enlighten 4

Precision(Max Level) in open socket (Unset ring for example)

Additional Notes on Auras

If you do not have an ES on Hit Watcher's eye, you can drop Discipline and do not need enlighten. If you can afford the Watcher's Eye you can probably afford the level 4 Enlighten. :P

You should be able to fit another 25% aura in place of Discipline. I like Flesh and Stone for the blind+mitigation. Can also use Aspect of The Spider in conjunction with Fenumus Spinnerets for cheaper ES on hit.

CWDT

Keep all spells at required level 38 or less.

Cast When Damage Taken Support (lvl 1) - Wave of Conviction - Combustion - Blade Blast - Culling Strike - Ball Lightning

Gems Explained

• Wave of Conviction for -25% Enemy Fire Resistance Exposure
• Combustion support to apply up to -20% Fire Resistance at gem level 21
• Blade Blast Unnerves Enemies for 4 seconds on hit causing them to take 10% increased spell damage. You can get gloves that Unnerve on hit which will allow you to drop this.
• Culling Strike: Self Explanatory :P

CWDT 4L, Max Level. Match linked spells' required level to the CWDT support.

Cast When Damage Taken Level 20-21 - Ice Golem - Assassin's Mark - Bone Offering

Movement + Utility

Flame Dash - Arcane Surge - Second Wind - Immortal Call - Smoke Mine

Advanced Setup

This setup is for those who have invested into gear that allows you to drop gems from sockets, thus opening up more utility. With Unnerve Gloves, Culling Strike from 2nd Cluster Tree, and/or Arcane Surge from Watcher's Eye, we can Add just a little more with our sockets:

Raise Specter

Specters can be used to add specific monsters to our desecrate pool. High life monsters add an insurmountable amount of damage to the explosions of Detonate Dead and Volatile Dead. Primal Crushclaw and Primal Blisterlord are the specters of choice. They have 1200% and 950% increased life respectively. These do not require links and will (mostly) never die.

Ball Lightning 

This is a surprisingly powerful spell to stick into your low level CWDT setup. Arguably better even to use over things like culling strike and blade blast for its defensive applications.

basically how it works is while you are taking damage it will shoot out and hit many enemies multiple times, igniting them (for more self damage) and providing massive recovery from ES on hit Watcher's Eye and the Recovery on Ignite. It will also apply any curse on hit, blind, and/or combustion debuffs to those enemies.

 

Gear Setup

Required Items

There are 3 uniques that you need to make the self-ignite portion of this build work (and thus the automation of CWDT skills).

Eye of Innocence: this is what deals damage to us to trigger CWDT spells

Ngamahu's Sign: this keeps us alive by fully mitigating the fire damage we take when we ignite an enemy by recovering that much+ at the same time. Look for 25+ life recovery roll.

Replica Reckless Defence, Sunspite

You need one of these two items to allow the fire damage from Eye of Innocence to apply ignite on us. The jewel is preferable, but the boots may be used until it is acquired as the Replica Reckless Defense is a Heist only drop.

 

When looking at rare gear to buy, here are some stats you will want to prioritize:

Dexterity, we don't need a TON of it but we also get almost none from the tree (Literally 20 dex from the tree), you need 100 Dex for level 21 Volatile Dead and 119 Dex for level 20 Precision. This means you will need another 66 Dexterity for Volatile Dead (incidentally this is how much you get from a max T1 Dex roll on a ring with catalysts) or 85 for level 20 Precision.

A non-corrupted Eye of Innocence will give you 24(28 w/ catalysts) Dex as well. So factor that in when buying/crafting gear.

Accuracy. Get lots of it. Ring, Helmet, and Gloves all can roll Accuracy. need to get to 100% hit chance.

Resists. Obviously get yourself res capped and get AS MUCH chaos resistance as you can afford. We are a little weak to chaos damage as we are a hybrid build.

Life. Duh. :P

Weapon

+18% Chance to Block Attack Damage while wielding a Staff
--------------------------------------------------------------------
+9 to Strength
+19% to Global Critical Strike Multiplier
+2 to Level of all Spell Skill Gems
26% increased Critical Strike Chance

The Best in slot item here is Replica Duskdawn. With it's massive bonuses to damage and HUUUGE base crit this staff outshines all the rest by a large margin. Its 10% base crit chance will allow us to drop the Increased Crit Gem from our 6L for another damage support (Energy leech or Fire Pen) This is a heist only item and typically quite expensive. Definitely endgame

Martyr of Innocence would be my next choice as it simply provides massive damage, block, and freeze immunity.

Regular Duskdawn is similar in damage to its replica counterpart, only lacking in attack crit. Also spell damage does not scale elemental explosions from an Explosion Chest/Inpulsa or our corpse explosions. It tends to be more expensive than Martyr and is not quite as good in my opinion, but still very usable if you happen to have one.

Disintegrator is another excellent choice but makes you susceptible to physical reflect and adds another degen

Note: this degen does NOT trigger CWDT as it is not a "hit"

Lastly, a decent rare will go a long long way. look for one with: Spell Damage, +level to all spells/fire spells, Crit Multiplier, Crit Chance or open suffix for crafted crit chance

Chest

+12% to all Elemental Resistances
---------------------------------------
+6% to Cold Resistance
+36% to Lightning Resistance
You can apply an additional Curse
19% increased effect of Offerings
Enemies you Kill Explode, dealing 3% of their Life as Physical Damage
Gain 10% of Maximum Life as Extra Maximum Energy Shield

Of note: this build pretty much NEEDS a 6L, so at bare minimum I would say: use a tabula or corrupted rare.

Beyond that, the next step would be an Inpulsa's Broken Heart for the explosions (Shock everything thanks to Corpse Pact Ascendancy), damage, and modest life that it provides.

A Hunter Influenced rare with Attack crit is also a good mid-game option.

The best end game piece is going to be an explosion chest from the Crusader Prefix. Now that we have Harvest again, here's a step by step explanation on how to get an end game top tier.

Of course any 6L unique chest can be used as we don't necessarily *need* the explosions. They are just very helpful for clearing out delirious maps and generally speed things along. 

Helmet

49% increased Energy Shield
+99 to maximum Life
+22% to Fire Resistance
27% chance to Avoid being Stunned
Warcry Skills have 26% increased Area of Effect
+15% to Cold and Chaos Resistances

A generic rare with:

Life, Resists, and an open Suffix for Stun Avoidance Craft (if you need it)

Other great stats to look for: Dexterity, Accuracy

Warlord Influence mods: Crit Multi, -9% to nearby enemy fire resistance, Increased Elemental Damage, +1 Maximum Power Charges

Hunter/Elder Influence Modifier: Adds Fire Damage to Spells

Maw of Conquest

This one is fairly cheap and has a very unique set of stats that synergize very well with the build.

10-20% of damage taken from hits is recouped(recovered) as life over 4 seconds. AKA: A nice chunk of life recovery to help against pesky DOTs and the like.

Unaffected By Poison: This allows us to abuse the Poison Sextant Modifier in conjunction with Golden Rule and chance to poison.

Helmet Enchant

Try to get "Volatile Dead Consumes up to 1 Additional Corpse"
This improves our ramp up time and DPS by a fair amount. It's not as impactful as you might think though since we DO have a 12 corpse limit on desecrate.

Other useful Enchants:

• 40% increased Volatile Dead Damage
• Consecrated Ground from Purifying Flame applies 9% increased Damage taken to Enemies
• 30% increased Assassin's Mark Curse Effect
• Smoke Mine grants additional 30% increased Movement Speed
• Wave of Conviction's Exposure applies -6% Elemental Resistance
• 150% increased Effect of the Buff granted by your Ice Golems
• Any Mana Reserve Enchant for Anger, Discipline, Precision, Herald of Ash, or Zealotry.

Gloves

+586 to Accuracy Rating
+80 to maximum Life
+46% to Fire Resistance
50 to 77 added Fire Damage against Burning Enemies
24% chance to Avoid being Stunned

Rare gloves with Life and useful stats.

There are a number of very useful stats that can be used here. The two temple mods for Fire and Cold resistance for example:

Gloves can also roll a substantial amount of accuracy rating and dexterity.

If you want to save a socket in CWDT you can go for Walordlord Culling Strike Gloves or Hunter Unnerve gloves.

And lastly, you will want to have an open suffix for 25% Stun avoidance craft if you don't have 100% already.

Boots

+66 to maximum Life
+39% to Lightning Resistance
+21% to Chaos Resistance
25% increased Movement Speed
You have Tailwind if you have dealt a Critical Strike Recently
Cannot be Frozen

If you do not have Replica Reckless Defense you will need to use Sunspite for the chance to be ignited.

Rare boots with Tailwind + Life + resistances + an open prefix for cannot be frozen craft(can ignore that stat with Martyr staff). I would consider this the ideal. If you can't afford tailwind don't worry about it too much, it's better to have boots with good stats than bad tailwind boots.

Fenumus' Spinnerets are great in conjunction with Aspect of the Spider for an excellent ES on hit recovery source. Excellent boots if you do not have Watcher's Eye with ES on hit w/ Discipline mod.

The Stampede are solid for the constant 50% movement speed while cycloning. I personally find them slow but some people like them. Big upside is the second anoint and travel skill cooldown.

Rings

Ngamahu's Sign. For the other ring, a rare with Life+Resists+Dex+Str and/or whatever you need. If you have extra curse you can get flammability on hit here.

Amulet

Eye of Innocence. Mandatory for late game setup.

Belt

Life+Resists+Whatever else you need.

You need a belt with 13% or more CDR% if you do not have a level 3+ Awakened CoC Support.

Flask

You want to make sure that you have Bleed (Corrupted Blood Specifically)+Freeze Immunity somewhere on your gear. If you don't have it, get it on a flask.

Quicksilver of Adrenaline

Cinderswallow Urn: This is a good damage boost, but mainly will make mapping so SOO smooth by granting onslaught and ES+Life on kill.

Diamond Flask, Bottled Faith, Atziri's Promise

Jewels 

Replica Reckless Defense

Best way to get chance to self-ignite. Spell Block is the more important stat as we should be attack block capped anyway.

Watcher's Eye

Because we can use either Anger OR Zealotry you can choose between those two auras for watcher's eye mods.

ES on hit with Discipline is an expensive BUT VERY POWERFUL mod to recover our ES more or less instantly.

Otherwise look for 1-2 damage mods across our auras:

Zealotry OR Anger

Precision (DO NOT GET ATTACK SPEED)

Glorious Vanity

Look for "Doryani" for the Corrupted Soul Keystone. THis is a HUGE buff to our eHP and allows us to take advantage of ES and Life recovery simultaneously.

Thread of Hope

This is another very big upgrade as it allows us to shave off a lot of passives to then invest into a proper cluster tree at high levels.

 

 

 

Cluster Jewels

Large Cluster

Conjured Wall, Mage Hunter, Thaumophage

Any one of the three suffix notables will place both of these at the front for some decent damage and a whopping 10% Spell Block. There are plenty of other options for a Large Cluster jewel if you don't care as much about block chance, but you can do the research for those if you want to here.

Medium Cluster

Wrapped in Flame

This one is a HUUUUGE damage buff and I would use this jewel for Wrapped in Flames notable alone.

Cremator

This is superb if you are not using an explosion chest. Corpse Removal=Good Stuff. If you have explodey chest pick one of the other damage notables. Smoking Remains and Cooked Alive are both good.

Megalomaniac
Adds 4 Passive Skills
Added Small Passive Skills grant Nothing
1 Added Passive Skill is Mystical Ward
1 Added Passive Skill is Overlord
1 Added Passive Skill is Surging Vitality

This is the best way to get the Overlord notable. Try to get at least one other good/useful notable with it. This is an end game piece for permanent fortify.

Excellent life boost and a good way to get some chaos res, dex, or other needed resists. This jewel socket can also be used for a generic rare instead.

Small Cluster

Adds 3 Passive Skills
Added Small Passive Skills grant: 4% increased maximum Life
Corrupted Blood cannot be inflicted on you
Added Small Passive Skills also grant: +5% to Chaos Resistance
Added Small Passive Skills also grant: +10 to Maximum Life
Added Small Passive Skills also grant: Regenerate 0.1% of Life per Second
1 Added Passive Skill is Fettle

Excellent life boost and a good way to get some chaos res, dex, or other needed resists. This jewel socket can also be used for a generic rare instead.

 

League Start

This build will be able to run maps very easily with just a tabula and rare staff.

Example of a SSF level 74 character: https://pastebin.com/ZMY4vfK5

Leveling with Stormblast Mines Orb of Storms until lv.24 get spellslinger

Leveling trees POB: https://pastebin.com/MdGD4wzc

This should give you an idea on how to progress the tree while leveling as spellslinger.

General Idea

For spellslinger you can start at 24 after the Tolman quest. Make sure you have alts to buy gems:

Spellslinger - Volatile Dead - Spell Cascade - Conc effect (4th Link)
Spellslinger - Desecrate - Spell Cascade

For wand attack you need to get a barrage from another player or after library quest.

Barrage - Faster Attacks

For extra damage:

Cremation - Combustion - Culling Strike
Spell Totem - Wave of Conviction

Make sure to have 2x level 20 wands from the vendor recipe. Ideally on Carved Wand bases (for higher attack speed, makes attacking smoother)

You need:
1x magic carved wand
1x orb of alteration
1x RARE Ruby Ring (make sure to pick up early essences to make a rare ring if no alchs available)

Make two of these, aug+regal if given the opportunity and then you can bench craft spell damage when that craft becomes available.

That should be pretty smooth sailing after that.

Socket Colors+Links to look for

B-B-B-G For VD
B-B-G For Desecrate
G-B for Cremation
R-B for Spell Totem + WOC
G-G-B for Smoke Mine+Flame Dash+Second Wind

 

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