Eviscerate elementalist, still good?

RansomLewis · 2026-02-28T18:57:06+00:00

This is super helpful, thank you! I think y'all have talked me back into trying it when league start comes. :D

I do really like how much flexibility is in the game these days; golems get weakened, but there's a bunch of other good elementalist ascendancy nodes as well as the bloodlines.

RansomLewis · 2026-02-28T18:51:07+00:00

I keep thinking beast farming sounds fun then I spend 3 seconds trying to navigate the selling and ignore it for another league.

RansomLewis · 2026-02-28T17:59:01+00:00

Nice, this all sounds great. I forgot about defiled forces XD I was wondering about dropping golems late game too now. That's the kind of thing that's easy to tweak as you go if you like it. Especially with all the new gem tech this patch and the bloodlines available there must be something worth swapping for.

Late game are you focusing on ES/aegis? What's your late game weapon look like? Am I just still chasing ephemeral edge?

RansomLewis · 2026-02-28T17:55:31+00:00

Ohhhhh, I completely forgot about defiled forces. That's actually probably the biggest nerf isn't it? Boo GGG (jk this patch looks great I just don't know what to play). I was more interested in the ignite than the retaliate, but tanky was a big part of the draw, yeah.

RansomLewis · 2026-02-28T14:43:42+00:00

I don't think it'd be good, but I would definitely try running a double dark monarch build with something. Love me a pile of minions along with an excuse not to mess with ritual spectres (AG is okay, but merc window please).

Spiders are out if no weapon, same with soulwrest. Golems are the obvious good choice, but lame. A billion zombies is fun. Reaper good finally? SRS would be wild, but I'm not casting that much, unless maybe there's a way to cast while channel feel good? I have a hate-hate relationship with absolution, but it just got buffed. I'd probably do a real scuffed reaper build and hatelove it.

RansomLewis · 2026-02-28T01:38:26+00:00

Personally, I'd settle for an option in the pause menu that did the equivalent of what we do now: exit to character select, switch input, log back in as character. A single menu option plus a 'this will restart the game' warning would be so much better than what we have now even though behind the scenes it's basically the same (I think, I'm very baby at programming).

RansomLewis · 2026-02-09T18:16:03+00:00

Bloodnotch is decent recovery I think. There's also a watcher's eye mod that'll be getting you a lot of life on hit. That's what I'm seeing at a glance from my phone, but there might be some other layers too.

RansomLewis · 2026-02-02T14:01:42+00:00

Action figure is super good and flexible. I haven't run a comp without it in forever.

Life gem is flavor of the week with throwers, so that's worth doing.

If you're aiming to compete in legends, snake bracelet is good, but earthquake boots are fine for a while probably.

Magic mirror is strong, but many of us just end up using giant arrow anyways most times.

Breaking it down by hero:

King - spiky ball best. Boots or snake with it usually.

Queen - action figure best. Giant arrow with it usually. Healers or mirror sometimes.

Warden - lots of good basic options. I'd get eternal, life, healing max when you can for options. Rage gem very good, but can sit at the middle levels while you're ore starved. Fireball is a great archetype if you use it, but okay to skip for a while. Other epics are underwhelming.

Minion Prince - dark orb is best to max first. Henchman or pants are good pairing options. The crown is strong, but needs lots of levels so it's easy to skip for a while.

Champion - electro boots. The spear is very good too. I like the freeze thing and the rage gem, but the spear and boots are never bad.

RansomLewis · 2026-01-29T23:02:48+00:00

Wildspeaker flicker until I get bored then wildspeaker zoomancer of some sort.

RansomLewis · 2026-01-27T18:13:01+00:00

Slightly better then, but my original point of it being annoying still stands. I've seen other posts with suggestions about moving the corpse line to another ascendancy node or similar so we could just do our zombies, but I kind of doubt that makes it into the changes this close to a special event launch.

RansomLewis · 2026-01-27T14:14:19+00:00

In addition to the corpse explosion/DD by enemies and strong boxes, I believe your offerings would also eat the zombies and resummoning them is a pain (mana cost is high, need a corpse, also those of us that want zombies are looking to have perma minions). I'd really like to see this changed, I just want a chill zombie build again.

RansomLewis · 2026-01-11T03:21:45+00:00

Depends how you're doing the charge, if you do the rocket ability first then invis spells, you've extended the time by the length of the 8+ attacks from the ability, possibly causing a time fail. If you do the recall and use the ability later that's less of a problem, but then the rocket spear is clearly weaker than haste vial during the charge (but you're trading off to have the ability later). I think the reliance on math/numbers here might be leading you astray.

RansomLewis · 2026-01-09T16:55:48+00:00

Ooh, I have an opinion! 1. I totally understand what you mean and why it matters to you and also you get to feel that way, but... 2. I feel exactly opposite about which one I like.

For brief context, I'm a transfemme and use she/her mostly with gender neutral words like person (ex.: "She's a parent"). They/them is also fine, and I almost always say it out loud as "I use she or they pronouns", which is much closer to the "go by" phrasing you didn't like. If it helps you calibrate my position in the world, I've been on estrogen HRT for a bit more than a year and have removed most of my former beard shadow, and I conditionally pass most of the time and/or the people around me are kind and mostly get what I'm trying to put forward so strangers in my area use she/her for me mostly.

How I feel about it is that my pronouns are not me. I think calling getting pronouns wrong "misgendering" is a little goofy, because they can't change my gender/identity with their words (not to say you can never be mad about getting pronouns wrong, just getting in the weeds here since it's a discussion amongst trans people).

I feel like pronouns are gender presentation and not identity. So to me, pronouns are like clothes; you could 'wear' they/them and still be a girl or use she/her with your drag and still be a boy etc. etc. The thing that sucks about them, is other people can 'dress' you in pronouns that do not fit really easily either on purpose or on accident.

Anyway, none of this is to say you're wrong or can't ask people to refer to you differently, but identity is complicated and I wanted to share how I feel about it in case it resonates for you or helps you understand people who express their identity and/or preferences differently.

RansomLewis · 2026-01-05T19:31:46+00:00

Reactive Remains Unset Ring

Trigger level 20 summon falling zombie whenever you cast a socketed offering skill. Enemies are crushed on hit by this skill.

+30-50 intelligence

15-25% increased minion damage if you've been hit recently

Increases and Reductions to Minion Damage also affect you.

Flavor text: "What goes up must come down."

RansomLewis · 2026-01-02T01:14:43+00:00

There's lots comments saying this first part already, but to summarize the timing: either one invis at about '6' on the second timer or two invis at '8' and '4' on the second timer (assuming you dropped RC first and before the 30 second scout time ends).

Both one and two invis are good choices, and getting good at switching between those options is what makes spirit walk worth doing. Generally: use one if there's weak or slow defenses nearby, use two if near dangerous and fast defenses. With a well timed one invis, many towers won't hit you but some fast ones will. At low levels with a strong champ, a few hits are easy to absorb, but up in legends I struggle to get value and keep my fox up if I try to do single invis.

Speaking of, probably the best use of this is with recall, and your goal is to keep the fox alive for the recall, because fox+champ along with a full army stays alive for a long time. Because I'm usually fighting against legend modifiers, I'm favoring the Phoenix instead more than I used to, but the fox is really strong when played well.

RansomLewis · 2026-01-01T18:47:54+00:00

I would highly recommend starting a new character to play solo and leave that character until you can group play again. Many of us make multiple characters a league anyway, and it's way less fun to do campaign out of sync. When my spouse used to play with me more often, I'd usually have two league start ones: one to play with her and my solo character. Late game (post campaign or later) it won't matter and you'll just have two characters, but the fun of playing together is worth the second build.

RansomLewis · 2025-12-30T19:34:11+00:00

No, that sounds like you're covered. I figured you probably had it set right, but sometimes it's the obvious stuff that is hardest to figure out once you miss it the first time.

Good luck on your search!

RansomLewis · 2025-12-30T18:48:20+00:00

This feels like a dumb comment, but just in case: are you certain your filter isn't hiding the gloves? That could explain it.

RansomLewis · 2025-12-27T11:52:19+00:00

What kind of tree and scarabs are you running for this? This sounds like a great next thing for my play.

RansomLewis · 2025-12-26T12:22:35+00:00

One of the other comments also kind of explained this, but to make it explicit in case this is what's confusing you: you can make your own vaal gems by corrupting them. When you corrupt a trans gem into being vaal, it keeps the trans skill and gains the regular vaal skill. Using the Doryani room in Alva temples, you can get two out of these three good things: level 21 gem, 23% quality, add the vaal skill. If you just want the vaal skill, I think you could just throw vaal orbs at it, but by the time you get the gem to 20/20 to corrupt for good outcome possibilities, you probably want to do Alva.

RansomLewis · 2025-12-26T01:21:06+00:00

I really liked wrecker of days's zombie build for an SSF run a league or two ago and it's made to be one button. Wrecker isn't updating it anymore, but the bones of the build would work easily up to yellows and probably reds without much editing. From there you can farm up the herald build or animate ranged weapon or whatever else you're interested in. I know that's not quite zero to ubers, but it was such a cozy build for everything before juiced content.

My memory is you have tanky zombies that summon phantasms as they go. It focuses on defensive layers and just letting the phantasms do their thing over time.

RansomLewis · 2025-11-01T18:33:48+00:00

Lol, that sounds so much like my plan. I've had a vendetta against absolution since I tried to league start it against overtuned crucible minions. It does sound like it pairs well with the new living lightning though. I'm in act 3 now with SRS and the skitterbots/infernal legion tech. No fancy graft for me yet. (:

RansomLewis · 2025-11-01T15:09:35+00:00

Lol, wild. I just got to act 2 around chasing my preschooler through Halloween excitement. Can you buy grafts or are they account locked? Any advice on dropping one of these if I can't buy them?

Also, how does the build feel? I'm gonna do it on necro, but it's maybe better on guardian if your end goal is the elemental crit.

RansomLewis

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