Today, we're taking a look at Heronightmare's one-shot Ambusher Assassin. Welcome to Build of the Week. I'm Nancy from MmoGah.
How Does This Work?
Viper Strike is a classic skill that attacks with both weapons with a chance to poison enemies. This league, Viper Strike of the Mamba was released, a transfigured version of the gem with a very interesting twist. It dishes out much more potent poisons but doesn't allow more than one poison stack.
It also has an interesting property where it combines both weapons' damage when dual-wielding, but we'll discuss that more lately. So this means we're encouraged to funnel all our damage into a single huge slap, and Heronightmare has found many clever ways to do just that.
The first step is to reach the maximum critical strike chance. Say hello to Ambush. This beautiful skill teleports you to an enemy, blinding them and providing your next melee attack with a huge boost to base crit chance and crit multiplier.
More importantly, it lets us live out our Fist of the North Star fantasies. With Ambush, It's relatively easy to reach 100% crit chance.
It is so easy that we can even use Marylene's Fallacy. Even though this reduces our critical strike chance, we can counterbalance that on the tree without too much fuss. The upside is the huge critical strike multiplier from the amulet and culling strike.
In Hero's version of the build, they're able to reach over 550% crit multi. So we're aiming to kill things with huge poisons. But the problem is that damaging ailments in Path of Exile, such as poison, don't scale with a critical strike multiplier.
The solution is to pick up this Keystone, Perfect Agony. This increases our damage over time by half of our crit multi, around 275%.
Now for the real meat of our damage: Low Tolerance. This special passive is available only from cluster jewels, but it's perfect for us. It increases the damage of our poisons on non-poisoned enemies by 300%. Since we are only inflicting a single poison stack, this has no downside. Furthermore, there's no limit to how many times we can allocate this passive. So, if you find the right cluster jewels, you can have as many of these as your tree allows.
For our weapons, you might be imagining some mirror-tier physical and chaos weapons. But in fact, Hero is using two copies of a cheap unique, Rebuke of the Vaal. This typically has the highest total DPS of any one-handed sword in the game. The downside is that it's a mix of damage types, making it difficult to scale. In our case, elemental damage, meaning fire, lightning, and cold, isn't calculated for poison.
So, how do we get around this? The Affliction League introduced Tinctures, special flasks we can use if we've specced into the Warden of the Maji ascendency. These are essentially permanent buffs that can be enabled or disabled.
Hero is using Poisonberry Tincture, which makes all of our damage poison. Those big numbers from our sword are calculated for poison damage.
The cherry on top is that our primary skill, Viper Strike of the Mamba, deals the damage of both weapons in one strike. Technically speaking, instead of hitting and inflicting the poison with each hand separately, it calculates each hand's hit and ailment damage and then combines them into a single larger blow. So the poison we're applying scales off both weapons' combined base damage.
Furthermore, we can almost double our damage by using Alchemist's Mark. When cast on an enemy, this skill will create caustic ground when we inflict poison on them. This ground effect deals damage over time equal to 80% of the strongest poison on the enemy. And as you know, our poisons are strong as long as our enemies stand still. They're going to melt.
The last consideration is our ability to clear maps. We hit hard, but we have no AoE. For this, we rely on Master Toxicist. This spreads poisons we inflict to nearby enemies, usually enough to eliminate a whole pack with a single hit. At this point, we'd usually go into more detailed coverage of the build's offensive and defensive mechanics. But Heronightmare doesn't have any specific suggestions here. Instead, remember that once you have this core set up, everything else is up to you.
In the spirit of their guide, we'll leave it here and suggest the same. This diagram shows you the necessary currency items while everything else is flexible.
Conclusion
The build can be focused for more damage, higher defense, extra mobility, or whatever calls to you. Heronightmare has created a fun, thematic and powerful build. It's not the fastest mapper you'll ever play, but it is a great boss killer.