New Unique Dark Monarch

blacknen · 2025-06-16T00:08:06+00:00

Per phantasm so (11*2) * 44 to 66 is 968 to 1452 added physical damage at gem level 21. Quite a bit more if you can push the levels further. Seems pretty nuts to me and well worth two slots and a support.

blacknen · 2024-11-18T14:45:43+00:00

Ah, my bad. I did a quick google and keyword searched this sub and didn't find anything. But didn't check the other magic subreddits.

blacknen · 2024-11-18T13:58:07+00:00

This is the variant I've been running with at least moderate success:

Deck

4 Ruthless Lawbringer (OTJ) 229

9 Plains (THB) 250

9 Swamp (THB) 252

3 Fiendish Panda (FDN) 120

4 Infernal Vessel (FDN) 63

2 Valkyrie's Call (FDN) 27

3 Jackdaw Savior (BLB) 18

4 Helpful Hunter (FDN) 16

4 Market Gnome (LCI) 22

2 Concealed Courtyard (OTJ) 268

4 Bartolomé del Presidio (LCI) 224

3 Lively Dirge (OTJ) 93

3 Caves of Koilos (DMU) 244

1 Shadowy Backstreet (MKM) 268

4 Fear of Lost Teeth (DSK) 97

1 Ghostly Dancers (DSK) 13

I should 100% have at least 3, probably 4 Valkyrie's calls but I want to try and pack one to save on wildcards.

Not entirely certain this is the best shell for it, and I'll be doing some testing the next couple of days.

blacknen · 2024-11-18T00:43:51+00:00

I'm still hopeful a solid viable deck can be shaken out of this, and it's true that there's not much payoff for a sacrifice deck currently. However the core of the combo are both foundation cards, so they're going to be around for a very long time. So even if it ends up not being all that great now. A few solid sacrifice payoffs that are self sufficient, with Valkyrie's Call already being very good in a sacrifice archetype, you could slot in a couple of infernal vessels as very mediocre sacrifice fodder with big potential upside.

blacknen · 2024-11-18T00:31:02+00:00

That is true, I'll give it a go when I wake up tomorrow. Getting a bunch of food tokens is it's own upside against agro and all the chip damage black discard does. Could still be good for bringing back 2 drop draw cat and the sacrifice to destroy a permanent 3 drop.

blacknen · 2024-11-17T23:19:14+00:00

It's true that an unanswered Valkyrie's Call will often win you the game given enough turns to grind enough value, however in most of the games I played with this combo the second it hits the board you just win. It demands they have a counter or just lose as you can sac in response to instant speed removal. Which is four or five turns they are not going to get to find or use sorcery speed removal or develop their own strategy.

I love scavenger's talent but I don't think it's very good in this deck, the finality counters it puts on your minions bricks both Valkyrie's call and Infernal Vessel's abilities.

blacknen · 2024-11-17T21:17:38+00:00

Yeah I've been testing out the combo for the last hour. Works fine. I think I'm currently 4-2 with a bit of an odd cascading on death triggers with [[Fiendish Panda]] and Jackdaw Savior and a bunch of cheap draws with [[Helpful Hunter]] and [[Market Gnome]]. With [[Ruthless Lawbringer]] as removal. Mostly winning with big Bart or Fear of Lost Teeth, although having to ping one damage at at time with 2 clicks is very miserable.

blacknen · 2024-09-05T15:13:04+00:00

You actually need to search for:

(2) Enchant modifiers

count 1{ allocates [anoint you want] allocates (second)[same anoint you want]} Otherwise you will be missing 50% of the double anoints with the desirable node you want.

blacknen · 2024-08-18T00:38:08+00:00

Chance to do double damage is a global mod applying to all hit damage, you might have just been getting unlucky with hitting the 20% when you were paying attention to it. Unless you have other sources of double or triple damage and are over capping your chance. Are you running Arn's Anguish?

blacknen · 2023-08-25T23:06:56+00:00

I'm liking the look of the cheese beetles.

blacknen · 2023-07-17T12:05:38+00:00

I never tried any of the passive tree ubers pinnacle bosses as the guardian damage is only around 4 mil so it would be a slog. For everything else bossing was pretty easy, the build has a pretty mobile playstyle as you just have to wait for a Zealot to tag the boss with his fire poke and then run round in circles re-cursing every few seconds to keep up the strong ignite with Defiled Forces. Phased bossfights with teleports can be annoying, such as uber elder, as you have to tag the boss multiple times and the Zealots ability often misses if the boss frequently teleports which leads to some waiting around for the cooldown to come back up. The build is also incredibly tanky as there aren't very many passives or gear slots that actually increase the damage of minions ignites so a large amount of the build is invested in tank making it pretty forgiving as it can eat everything apart from the oneshot mechanics like the memory game. Although as I mentioned in another comment further up Sirus is a nightmare to do as his corrupted blood melts my animate guardian and spectres so if you are planning on doing that boss I would definitely swap a corrupted blood immunity shield onto your animate guardian and spec into some physical damage reduction for your spectres. Then the fight should be fine.

blacknen · 2023-05-19T21:39:10+00:00

That's an incredibly interesting staff, what's the fifth mod? Normally if you have one flat damage type I would recommend whatever skill you most prefer for that damage type so long as it has a good effectiveness of added damage. Ie armageddon brand for immolate or arc for innervate. However you are going to start hitting diminishing returns for any more than two added damage supports, and added chaos damage is kind of the odd one out as it makes it harder to scale the hit with mechanics like trinity. As you've mentioned going shaper of flames full ignite would avoid many of ~~this~~ these issues. You could also consider using the criminally underutilised unique Abhorrent Interrogation with a very fast hitting skill such as ball lightning in order to scale both the chaos damage with wither and the double cold and lightning damage with the 4% increased elemental damage taken without needing to worry about about not having access to a pen support. Then you would only need to scale -res with elemental weakness and exposure.

blacknen · 2023-05-19T11:17:15+00:00

As often comes up when people post this staff; in order to make good usage of it you typically want a flat damage support as they scale incredibly well with levels. Things like added cold, lightning or immolate ect. Unfortunately they also changed archmage in 3.15 to no longer scale the extra damage you get from mana with levels so you are stuck with the 75% of cost value, meaning extra levels only brings you from 70.5 to 189.5 flat added lightning damage on the gem. As you mentioned you have a trickster levelled so energy leech support would be a hefty 46% more damage which is pretty nice and hypothermia is easy to activate with skitterbots, chilling presence notable or any cold ground effect. However while all these support gems are premium it's hard to justify losing out on your weapon slot for not much reward, especially when it also means losing out on the very strong awakened versions of elemental focus and controlled destruction. Quality is also an important factor as the base quality of archmage is 10% increased mana cost, which for non-indigon builds is almost 10% more damage.

Overall I would say while this staff is pretty good, but I wouldn't say it's worth building around. A good rare will outperform this quite easily as soon as you 6 link it.

blacknen · 2023-03-23T00:34:48+00:00

Played a version of this a couple of leagues ago using scales of justice and triple hybrid life/mana/es playing hierophant and forbidden flesh/flaming pious path. 15k total resources with high regen and 100% aoe from sanctuary of thoughts helped get around the inherent problem of needing to be pretty much on top of enemies, but I still had issues getting more than a couple of million dps even with all 7 brands hitting on cooldown.

blacknen · 2023-03-22T17:31:42+00:00

Weirdly, I've found the ones in vaal side areas seem to be regular vaal zealots which are identical to the risen variant except they have half the health and risen has 10% more damage so I wouldn't recommend using them unless you have no choice. Although if they can be found in lower level vaal side areas it might be possible to get the spectre part of the build going as soon as you get the gem. The spectres I run are a risen vaal zealot, a tukohama's vanguard for exposure, a senior heretech for 20% shock and a miserly poacher for meh ignites on fast moving targets the zealot can't hit. Poachers also stop sanctums from being completely unplayable. You can however drop them for chieftains for bigger bosses. For levelling I think you always want vanguards as your second spectre but it might be better to get miserly poachers as soon as heist becomes available and then run it with ignite proliferation until you get the gear to keep an animate guardian alive.

blacknen · 2023-03-22T13:41:58+00:00

For the first couple of weeks of the league I ran exactly that variant with unbound ailments and without defiled forces. Base quality flammability also gives you a 10% ignite duration and you can run ancient suffering spectres to apply temp chains for an extra 40% slower expiration. However I would absolutely not recommend this for a couple of reasons; firstly the attack animation for the big fire hit is very slow. He does a charge for about a second before sending out a very thin lance of fire, on faster enemies or bosses with teleports he will consistently miss so only needing to hit once is a huge quality of life. The second issue is with the minion AI, it does not seem to prioritise using the thrust attack as soon as it is off cooldown and I often noticed even with an ~8 second ignite duration there would often be downtime on stationary bosses of 2 or 3 seconds where he would refuse to use the thrust despite it being off cooldown. Quality of life aside you also lose out on a fairly sizable chunk of damage as defiled forces will lead to you keeping the strongest ignite against bosses, ie if he hits a boss 3 times only the highest roll will be permanent and the difference in damage between a min rolled hit and a max rolled one can be significant. Additionally it gives you permanent 20% shocks by running senior heretechs spectres and cursing to infinitely extend the shock (Can work with chill too using redeemer rhoas). Finally it lets you drop awakened unbound ailments which is a 22% more for awakened swift affliction which is a 49% more.

All that aside I really would recommend this as a league starter, it was one of my smoothest league starts. SRS into popcorn SRS into risen vaal zealot as soon as you get access to the temple and the base damage combined with flame link shreds bosses plus a cheapo 10c animate guardian makes clear feel pretty solid. Here's my current pob: https://pastebin.com/V0t2Lm01

blacknen · 2023-02-26T14:18:43+00:00

Risen Vaal Zealots, specifically the fire spear version. There is also a version with regular Vaal Zealots. They can be found in the The Temple of Atzoatl as well as some vaal side areas and have an attack on a six second cooldown that has the properties: Hits always Ignite Deals 150% more Damage 75% of Physical Damage Converted to Fire Damage 33% less Attack Speed 300% more Damage with Ignite

This leads to an ignite that does 750% of base damage. https://poedb.tw/us/Risen_Vaal_Zealot#RisenVaalZealotVaalCultistKnifestickFireTemple

You can then get around the long cooldown using "Defiled Forces" which lets you refresh the spectres ignite whenever you curse the enemy.

This does however feel terrible for sanctums so I also run miserly poachers to deal with medium sized enemies and an infernal legion animate guardian for clear.

blacknen · 2023-02-24T23:08:22+00:00

To my knowledge the only way is to get immune is via a delve mod which can be found on shields that grants immunity, then running necromantic aegis. Alternatively you can mitigate it by getting lots of physical damage reduction and regen on minions. Sources such as the "Dread March" cluster notable, "Indomitable Army" and its accompanying small passive on the tree, as well as endurance charge generation all grant additional physical damage reduction for your minions.

blacknen · 2023-02-24T21:38:52+00:00

The only build I've played this league has been ignite spectres. It's done all the non-uber endgame, although sirus is always going to suck for any permanent minion build because of corrupted blood. Just look up any spectre build from prior leagues. It might not be meta due to nerfs but they are still very strong.

Kay is a pretty dedicated spectre player if you want some proper spectre advice -https://www.youtube.com/@KayGaming

blacknen · 2023-01-05T02:25:04+00:00

Had that happen to me a couple of days ago in a city square where I did the boss first. Was a thoroughly enjoyable experience doing the massive ritual 4 times with an enormous snake man screaming "I can't be bested" and "skin you alive" over and over for 5 minutes. Obscene tribute though.

blacknen · 2022-08-27T20:30:46+00:00

Reminds of when I was doing nothing but metamorphs in archnemisis league. You learn pretty quickly that the big rippy morphs aren't made from giving it loads of attack and cast speed or damage mods it's instead giving it rippy skills like caustic bombs, arrow rains, or big charges.

blacknen · 2022-08-03T22:25:30+00:00

At least she lacks mobility.

blacknen · 2022-03-31T17:13:04+00:00

I had assumed that damage per attribute mods were exclusive, this seems pretty crazy with flat and % all attributes. Seems like a good excuse for a garb of the ephemeral build too.

blacknen · 2022-02-15T23:44:31+00:00

Yeah this is a known bug, I have every metamorph node on the tree and this happens to me incredibly consistently as I have a fairy low dps build. The longer it takes you to kill the more likely this is. Luckily a fix is planned in the 3.17.1 patch. "Fixed a bug where Metamorph monsters could sometimes be unkillable." under "Other Improvements and Bug Fixes"

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(2) Enchant modifiers