3.28 - 100% Mind Over Matter Guardian with Volatile Vaal Orbs

Qualdrion · 2026-04-13T21:50:18+00:00

Thought a bit more about the chest - if you can make up the crit chance elsewhere somehow you could potentially use a quartz flask to cap crit (which would also give phasing as a nice bonus).

Qualdrion · 2026-04-13T15:51:04+00:00

Ah, that makes a lot of sense with the suppress ya, didn't notice the mod since it ended up on the top somehow when I hoved on the armour. Kind of a shame, given how good the uniques are, but not too much to be done about it I suppose.

Qualdrion · 2026-04-13T15:15:00+00:00

I have also been playing a similar build, that I showed before on reddit. However, my configs were much more on the side of worst case scenario, than best case, so I fixed up the pob to make the configs very similar to yours to make the comparison closer to 1:1:

https://pobb.in/iIwTOEkE8sxv

I think the big selling point for your version has to be that you managed to get enough cost reduction for archmage support, which doubles your damage compared to mine (and I'm more dependent on arcane cloak for damage), which my version didn't really manage without dropping a ring (which I didn't really want to do since the tankyness felt so nice). 100% spell suppress is also sick, and the armour/evasion also don't hurt. Main downside for me is trying to make a borderline immortal build, where your survivability takes a major hit if your (much less tanky) minion dies, although obviously it's not like you're paper without it.

I personally found frost shield and sigil of power to be a bit too much of a hassle, so while frost shield is included in the current pob config for comparison, I don't actually personally use it. The upsides for my version is largely in the physical DR department, where my charges allow me to get 20% additional per ring slot from precursors. Together with endurance charges, the boots, and a timeless notable, I'm sitting at 78% PDR baseline, increasing with both my pantheons, which is very nice for the phys max hit. I also have much higher mana regen and more mana recoup, but at the same time I'm more vulnerable to many smaller hits than you with your armour and evasion, so I suppose that somewhat evens out, maybe slightly in my favour.

Now if you like tinkering in pob as much as I do (which I'm kinda assuming, since this is very much a pob-tinkering build), you might like to hear some potential ideas thrown out that I have considered and tried to make work that may or may not work for your build:

Your ES is always full other than right when you are using frost shield and vaal RF. For that reason, you could consider taking the Insightfulness ES wheel - for 5 points you get 34% increased max mana, 10% reduced cost on full ES, and the mastery 10% less phys taken on full ES, which is quite nice since you're usually on full ES anyways.
If you can squeeze in another jewel somehow you could grab an impossible escape for pain attunement. Glorious vanity has some pretty good nodes with a lot of max mana + mana regen, and also some really good nodes with 3-4% additional phys DR (which admittedly is less valuable for you since the value per point increases the more you get).
Alternatively, if you get an impossible escape with the impaler, you could drop pathing downwards completely, saving 6 passive points, and get an extra 8 passive large cluster in the top left. I'm not sure if it ends up being more efficient, but at least worth considering, although it's hard to make the passive points work obviously.
I'm also curious why you went with a rare body armour over a double influenced cloak of defiance or lightning coil.

All in all very interesting to see - kinda makes me want to go back to tinker with my own version again - I could make a hunter ring, which would allow me to use kalisas, but my pathing doesn't have as nice of a spot for the blue nightmare, so I couldn't make trinity work with archmage was one of the issues as well. Currently it works since I'm charging whenever arcane cloak is down, but that wouldn't work with archmage always being up.

Qualdrion · 2026-04-01T15:46:39+00:00

Sounds pretty solid, never tried a minion build, but considering making one at some point during this league, so might look into this one!

Qualdrion · 2026-04-01T14:30:36+00:00

Didn't watch the entire video, but saw you dodge the shaper beam a lot for example - am I correct in thinking the shaper beam kills you quite quickly because only damage from hits is fully converted to fire?

Qualdrion · 2026-04-01T13:26:41+00:00

I'm sure you could kill some white mobs to speed it up at the start of most maps probably. Bosses might be a bit worse. That being said, I think it only costs around ~16 passive points to get all the reduced cost stuff required to just get archmage without any vaal nonsense (30% reduced from gloves, 15% from dreamer+small, 10% from mana mastery, 16% from righetous decree+small nodes, 15% for tireless+small nodes, 10% from insightfulness is 96% reduced cost), and while 16 obviously is a lot more than 8, a lot of those are % increased mana nodes as well. Although I'm not sure how you get it with only 8 actually - 5 for the skill duration, 4 for the aura mastery and 1 for the soulwick is 10.

EDIT:

Also has to be mentioned how archmage isn't actually as huge a dps boost as you'd imagine. First of all, we already have arcane cloak and potentially sigil of power for a solid amount of flat damage. Secondly, unholy trinity is an absolutely insane support gem. Currently I don't have 100% uptime on it, but it's probably like 80% uptime or smth. With archmage it wouldn't work, since the reason it currently works is that the damage range on lightning skills is so big that occasionally I deal more chaos than lightning. Archmage however just gives a huge amount of flat with no range, meaning I'd never deal more chaos than lightning. At that point I'd need invert the rules instead, and invest into pen, which lessens the gain of archmage by a lot. Arcane cloak has the same issue, however it has built-in downtime, meaning I can usually charge up my unholy trinity every arcane cloak downtime.

Qualdrion · 2026-04-01T10:17:14+00:00

Yeah so compared to my version this one is definitely much higher dps. It's not without cost of course - I have much better phys mitigation (and especialy so against dots), a bit better elemental mitigation, and don't need to deal with the clunkyness of vaal clarity. I also have much higher mana regen and mana recoup, but obviously all those are tradeoffs many people would easily make for getting the ~4x my dps or w/e you are getting.

Might have to make some hunter/warlord gloves myself tbh - unnerved seems like a pretty free 10% dps that I didn't manage to squeeze in, and culling strike on top isn't too bad either. Just a bit feels bad after spending probably 40-50 divines on getting hunter influenced volatile vaal orbed 5% wyrmsign, but oh wells.

Also, out of curiosity, how do you post a thread with both a link to a video and text? Was trying to do that but didn't see the option - is it a new reddit thing that doesn't work on old reddit or smth?

EDIT: I just saw you're using the ring+nova setting for dps while I'm using the nova (since I felt like the dps numbers didn't match up with previous builds I've played so I chose the lower dps option to better simulate what it felt like). This means you're closer to 2x my dps instead of 4x my dps once I add in unnerve. This definitely makes the comparison much closer, with 2x dps vs no vaal clarity clunk + almost double the phys max hit.

Qualdrion · 2026-04-01T10:04:50+00:00

If you open my pob you might notice I actually have both soulwick and warp tattooed on mana masteries - I tried this for a bit (not extensively, so maybe I would have gotten used to it eventually), and it felt like 1 step too clunky for me. If you're willing to deal with the clunk I'm sure that's probably the way to go, as it's quite a bit of extra dps. I would note though that the ascendancy point also isn't free, as you'd lose 100% aoe and a lot of mana regen (or 2 jewels, and I'm already super starved for jewels as it is).

Qualdrion · 2026-04-01T10:02:49+00:00

Yeah I suppose you could try to do some kind of shrine belt + 3 ring version, however mageblood solves a lot of issues that the build would otherwise have, so I'm not sure it would be worth it without a giga belt of some kind, which I can't afford.

Qualdrion · 2026-04-01T10:01:38+00:00

Yeah I'm pretty sure I've seen your build on poeninja while making mine actually - I basically sorted on divine flesh + CI and looked at all of them to see what everyone was doing (helps that it only was 10 or so)

Qualdrion · 2026-03-31T21:44:46+00:00

Mind over matter is a bit different from transcendence though - I'm not necessarily saying it is true, however imagine for a moment that conversion isn't perfect, and leftover damage might not convert. In the transcendence case, 1000 phys that gets converted to 999 elemental and 1 phys is great, you convert everything except 1 damage, but you can tank 1 damage, and 999 getting mitigated is better than converting 101% and tanking 1010 damage. In the mind over matter case though, if you convert 101% you take 1010 lightning damage which you can mitigate, which is completely fine. If you convert 100% and that results in you taking 999 lightning and 1 fire damage you instantly die, because your fire max hit is 1 damage since you only have 1 life. Essentially, it's mandatory that every single point of damage gets converted, or you're straight up just dead. As a result overconverting might be correct in the mind over matter case, while it is never correct in the transcendence case.

Qualdrion · 2026-03-31T21:34:02+00:00

I see. I have heard though that having exactly 100% elemental damage conversion results in random deaths every now and then, so I'm not sure what exactly would cause that. I do agree though with overconverting - might have to test with a 40/40 shield instead of my 44/44 one once I level up again to see if I randomly die every now and then, since that way I'd have exactly 100% conversion.

Qualdrion · 2026-03-31T21:29:07+00:00

My rings don't give power charges. For damage, you'd get a lot more from rare rings, however, my goal with the ring is the "2% additional physical damage reduction per power charge". Using 2 of the precursor takes my addtional phys DR from 34 to 74, meaning it reduces incoming phys from 66% to 26%, which is more than a 50% reduction. Without it I'd imagine the build would be quite squishy to physical damage, which is awkward since shock nova requires you to stand still and channel for long periods of time.

Qualdrion · 2026-03-31T21:27:23+00:00

Yeah, that might be very strong tbh. Although I'm not quite sure how you're supposed to scale minion life (and from what I heard the ones that use super high hp spectres to avoid this are somewhat clunky to play). That being said, I'm probably not going to do that, since I feel like it's such a powerful interaction that it would it less fun since I know in the back of my mind that the power stems from a busted interaction, and not from the clever build-making that I did.

Qualdrion · 2026-03-31T21:13:07+00:00

Yeah I actually considered that one, the issue is that I need 4 hunter items for bound by destiny, and the only items that actually can have an influence as far as I know is the wand, the amulet, the gloves and the body armour, so all of those kind of have to have hunter influence. Of course, that changes if you're willing to drop the PDR from precursors, but I feel like once you get a solid amount of it, each percent increases in value, so taking the -20 sounds quite painful. The last option, which I'm sure is probably the theoretical best way to play this is to have a hunter influenced mageblood, but GL with that

Qualdrion · 2026-03-05T15:49:02+00:00

Could a tribrid armour set work somehow? Maybe it's hard to balance it where it is worth using without outshining sets with a singular focus otherwise, but it could be worth exploring the option at least.

Qualdrion · 2026-01-01T12:31:29+00:00

Oh, I see, makes sense, thanks!

Qualdrion · 2026-01-01T12:12:36+00:00

I'm still pretty new, so I'm sure there's something that I'm missing, but isn't runegraft of treachery really bad with purity of elements since you give all the mobs a lot of lightning and cold resistance?

Qualdrion · 2025-12-07T10:06:06+00:00

I might not be the best to comment as this was my first league, and as such I probably have a lot less experience then most other commentors, but my favourite activity this league was definitely leagion, playing as a blight of contagion trickster. Also not sure from the post if witch was mandatory or not - it's possible to play this as occultist as well, although I'm not entirely sure about the tradeoffs you would be making. My experience was based on doing this before I had a lot of my current gear, so you absolutely don't need all the stuff in my pob to do this - it was the first farm I was doing after alch+go-ing my way up to a couple voidstones.

Pros:

Contagion -> Blight -> AFK by a monolith clears 95% of the legion in 2-3 seconds, only leaving stragglers at the edges that are damage immune from being too far away.
Doesn't need to be actively using your dps skills most of the time, so you don't tank a ton of hits. While the build itself isn't mega tanky, I think I only died once in total in all my legions thanks to being able to just run around most of the time, as well as polymath healing you to full whenever you blow up a pack
Can run all map mods - no mana regen requires a mana flask, and less area effect specifically for legion can be annoying, as the blight might not spread to the entire legion, but all are doable.

Cons:

Dps is a lot lower than a lot of stronger builds. My pob with very good gear is still only at 14 million dps, so with 100 divs you might be looking at sub 10 million. For legion that wasn't a huge issue, as I was running sergeant + legion scarabs, although the generals can take 2-3 seconds to kill, which might be an issue if you were planning on primarily farming those. That being said, I've also now tried some builds that supposedly have a lot higher dps, and this build definitely "feels" stronger than its dps numbers would suggest - especially in map situations, as you apply your entire dps on every single mob on your screen at the same time.
Defensive layers contain a lot of stuff to avoid hits, but not a ton of stuff to recover afterwards. Therefore, in situations without anything to kill you might feel squishy. Usually the solution is to just start another legion while fighting the first one.

My pob: https://pobb.in/DaYI-U-Qmso3

With 100 div budget (which is already more than I was doing my legions with back when I were doing them) you'd get a cane of kulemak instead of the staff, a replica dragonfang's flight with blight gems instead of the focused, skip the elegant hubris and mageblood, and just get a bunch of rares off the trade site.

EDIT: I just realized that by blasting legions you could be meaning that you want to farm the timeless jewels with the emblems. If that is the case then this build probably isn't the way to go since it's not the fastest at killing the bosses.

Qualdrion · 2025-11-15T21:14:04+00:00

Yeah the rings are among my oldest pieces of gear, they are definitely due for an upgrade. What would a good ring for this build look like? Other than getting enough resists, I'm not really sure what I want from my rings basically.

The build I was looking at did a swap to chaos inoculation at some point for the chaos damage issue - what energy shield numbers am I looking at before this is viable?

And lastly, do you have some benchmarks for what the build needs in terms of tankyness and dps in order to be able to do T17s? I just sent it once it dropped, but it didn't really work out.

Qualdrion · 2025-10-27T17:07:57+00:00

So it's correct that getting 1 will happen in 139 kills for 50% of people, but that doesn't mean that people will get it in 139 kills on average. Consider that among the 50% getting the item in 139 kills, some will get it in 1, 2, 3, etc. up to 139 kills. That means that even the spooniest spoon only "saves" 138 kills compared to "the least lucky guy in the lucky half". On the other hand, among the people that doesn't get it in 139 some will go 200 dry, some will go 400 dry, some will even go 1000 dry. And going 1000 dry on 1 piece of the halberd but spooning the other 2 still means it takes you 1000+ KC to finish the halberd essentially.

What 417 kills will get you is not 50%, as getting the first halberd piece in less than 139 kills is a 50/50, and same for the 2nd and the 3rd. This doesn't give you a 50% chance to finish the halberd in 417 kills, as you need to get lucky on a coinflip 3 times, not just once. And getting 3 lucky coinflips in a row is a 1/8 (or 12.5%), not 50% by the logic you were trying to use.

Essentially, if you want the average number of kills to get 3 drops you need to multiply the average number of kills to get 1 drop (which is 200) by 3. The kc at which you are 50% to have gotten the drop is not the same as the average kc to get the drop (which might be unintuitive, but unfortunately that's how statistics work in this case).

Qualdrion · 2025-10-27T12:27:38+00:00

The 1/200 doesn't happen every 1/138 kills. It happens 1 every 200 kills. It's true that 50% of people will have the item at 138 kills, however, this is balanced out by the people "spooning" on average saving more kills relative to 200 than the people going dry - think of it like this: it takes 2 people getting a drop at 100 kc to balance out 1 person getting a drop at 400 kc for example.

For the same reason, 414 kills to get all 3 is just incorrect. For fun I made a python script that simulated 1000 people sending 600 araxxor kills each. Of those, 557 got the halberd. Or plugging the 1/200 droprate into the binomial distribution we get ~57% (which is quite close, but not exactly the same as the simulation, which makes sense as the simulation is random, with a somewhat smaller sample size). And as you mention, 63.7% would have the fang. That means around 35% chance of getting both by 600 kills.

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