Blade Blast Bladefall Poison Assassin Ascendancy, Bandits & Pantheon Powers
ASCENDANCY
The most optimal way to play this build leaves very little choices when it comes to the Ascendancy nodes, which I will cover in this section of the guide.
MY PREFERRED SET-UP
The ascendancy nodes are listed in order of importance (and tied to the way you need to travel to access them).
- Noxious Strike
- Mistwalker
- Toxic Delivery
- Opportunistic
Noxious Strike
Noxious Strike vastly increases the efficiency of your Poison damage output. It also allows you to recover life when you kill an enemy that is poisoned.
Mistwalker
Mistwalker makes it so that on critical strike, you have a 50% chance to gain Elusive. This prevents you from taking any extra damage from critical strikes, as well as initially giving you 15% chance to dodge spells or attack hits. However, this defensive surge decays over time until the buff expires. Once expired, you are then able to get the Elusive buff again. You also gain attack & cast speed as well as movement speed in this node, increasing your generic clear speed by a lot.
Toxic Delivery
Toxic Delivery is the next node in line! Poisons that you inflict from critical strikes deal 50% more damage, which is absolutely crazy. It also increases your critical strike chance per Poison affecting an enemy, up to 2% and gives you 20% of your Physical Damage as extra Chaos Damage against Poisoned enemies. Since we are creating a chain-reaction of explosions with Blade Blast, we are initially applying poison on enemies in the first explosion and every explosion after that will then deal a significantly higher amount of damage with this node.
Opportunistic
Opportunistic is mostly taken for the significant clear speed increase this brings to the table. For 4 seconds after killing an enemy, we get 20% increased movement speed. We also deal more damage against single target Unique or Rare enemies, as well as taking less damage from those targets.
BANDITS
You will kill all of the bandits, as they provide no significant gains worthy of losing the skill points for.
PANTHEON
As with most builds these comes down to a matter of personal taste. I for one, love adding the upgraded Lunaris Major God to avoid chained projectiles, as I can then completely ignore that modifier on maps when I have an army of minions at my command. However, this build does not use any minions that can be hit with projectiles so I tend to lean towards Brine King Major God.
I usually pick the Shakari Minor God pantheon to mitigate Chaos Damage, as it is a resistance very few builds bother to even think about.
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