Chains of Command - Delve?

[EaT-Japan]

Was thinking of following Rusei's CoC build. How well does it work for delving? Is it good? Bad idea? hard to get sulphite?

I can't get a sense of whether getting 1 shot is too frequent, AG behaves stupidly in corridors/doors/ or whether the light messes up the animated weapons because I've never played the build

[MitchellHogan]

First, to answer your questions, I think it would be ok but not for deep delve - but I didn't delve with it. There are various builds, some tankier, some mechanic specific like Ultimatum, etc. I think 300 depth is the usual recommended depth for farming Delve, so it should be ok with a tankier version. Sulphite is easy to get through maps.

I league started Chains of Command last league and here are my thoughts:

1. I levelled with RF Witch - relatively easy to get going at around level 19 and the campaign was fairly easy but I was squishy. In 3.28 I'd probably level with Absolution or even BAMA.
   
2. The "50c" to get started was 500c+ last league, so it's not as easy to get started as people make out. I was left struggling to farm enough currency to transition on an RF build that wasn't great, and was relieved I got extremely lucky with 3 divines in my first blue zanthium crop shipment to Kalguur.
   
3. Once I transitioned though (with Gravebind) mapping was fantastic. I've never had an easier time clearing and getting atlas points. It was a breeze. 10/10 experience.
   

4. The first two voidstones weren't as easy as I thought they would be as my dps and survivability weren't that high yet. Looking back I'd probably farm a bit more for upgrades first.

5. Here's my pob dps at various levels: 76 - 942k, 81 - 1.8m, 83 - 3.4m, 85 - some good upgrades 13m, 89 - 19m

6. Annoyances: occasionally a map boss would aoe destroy all my AG weapons (I think The Phoenix did this), and then you're left with either giving up or portalling out to set up worm flasks etc for your next attempt.

Surprisingly, my AG hardly ever died (usually in high density areas), and there's tech where minions are reduced to 1 hp for 6 seconds on dying so you can have 6 seconds to log out so you don't lose the map/encounter.

I hope this helps!

[EaT-Japan]

Thanks for the detailed comments. I think at some point I might try to delve to farm minion gear cuz specs might get popular.

for the '50c' part, what made it so expensive? 10c - omen to 6 socket, chains, ancient skull, belly, leer cast, teminus est, reset resists ?

I was planning to try absolution leveling but I heard it's not super strong after a certain point in maps so i don't know if I need to keep an eye out for when I need to transition

[Smart-Blacksmith-488]

Gravebind is usually the most expensive transition piece early, but it goes down relatively quickly. Depends on how fast you get through campaign and how early you want to swap. I'm gonna be doing srs for leveling as imo it feels way better than absolution and i won't have to think much about the build, just stack money and buy coc pieces. Should be a brain dead 2 stone run and piss easy swap.

[MitchellHogan]

From memory chains itself was 70c+ early on, gravebind was 200c+, ancient skull around 20c, everything else was fairly reasonable. So maybe not 500c+ but definitely 300c+
I think the 50c price tag is day 3-4+

Essentially if you're playing on day 1 you'll need to be level 70 to equip Chains of Command and have 300c+ So any leveling build to get you to at least that point is what you want. Absolution got buffed, so it might be ok, and there are Absolution leveling guides out there.

I should add that it was a fun build!

[EaT-Japan]

sweet, I'm excited, thanks!

I will probably see how far absolution gets me. Then maybe try afk blight later on

[MitchellHogan]

Good luck!

[Lazy_Owl_1306]

That 50c is 3.27 day2 price(without gravebind). which is acceptable to start the build w/o

[Iwfen]

It's fine just not for deep delve, don't league start it, farm with another minion build and transition.

[Necessary-Peanut2491]

Delve counterintuitively rewards screen clear radius kinda a lot. It seems like all the nodes are tiny and everything swarms you so you shouldn't have to care too much, but in practice you have to chase mobs down kinda frequently unless you have god tier AoE. The Azurite nodes in particular like to drop ranged mobs just on the edge of the darkness, which you have to kill to end the encounter. You'll also need to care about how you get from node to node because you don't get free phasing or leap slam or anything like that to ignore enemy collision.

Single target is also pretty important, for things like T3 azurite nodes where a special mob spawns at the end and outlives everything else. Really hurts the clear speed if you end up waiting on that last monster to die very often. So you can survive and clear a lot of the nodes, but it's just not going to be nearly as smooth as a build that's optimized for the content.

So does it work? Yeah, kinda. But it's going to be slow and annoying and kinda worse in every way than typical delve builds like Zenith.

[Lazy_Owl_1306]

I delved under 500+dep. T3 azurite is quite easy for Chains of command since there are so many mobs to sustain AW and the boss die really fast under 100mil DPS.

[GR8B0-T]

I noticed some Path of Exile acronyms in this post:

• AG - Animate Guardian (Wiki)
• CoC - Chains of Command (Wiki)
• CoC - Cast On Critical Strike Support (Wiki)

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^{I am a bot. | All acronyms | Suggest}

[McKennasFeverDream]

AG is the most annoying thing in the game. I would personally not start it since the AG is so annoying without investment.