Hexblast Acolyte of Chayula -- Level 89 Build Overview and T16 Gameplay
T16 Gameplay Video (boss is +2 difficulty from atlas tree, enjoy as I dodge roll into breach rares and tank completely avoidable on-death effects and boss abilities. but hey I didn't die!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1K4E5N4dlrU
Gear, Passive Tree and Gem Links: https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/fs5vx0qf
I'll start by cheating and linking to the excellent Witch Hexblast guide posted a couple of days ago as it gives a great writeup of the skill itself and gems/supports, and my setup is basically identical. I do use Lightning Warp with Life/Soul Drain and Mana Boost for access to cull, a bit of mobility while mapping, and dropping shocked ground on very tanky rares or bosses that have friends. My aura setup is dual curse (Despair obviously, and Enfeeble is a huge bump to survivability) + withering presence / clarity.
I picked Acolyte cause he looks cool and I like chaos skills. If you want a meta-breaking build, this isn't it unless we get a surprise mega-buff this week (not impossible given the playrate of Acolyte at the moment.) That said, this ascendancy has some things going for it outside of theme for Hexblast -- the breach ascendancy nodes give us some much-needed mana sustain and lots of additional chaos damage, Reality Rending gives us a bunch more chaos damage with some occasional super-crits, and Chayula's Gift as our last ascendancy lets us fix chaos res much more easily. I did clear 4th floor of the Sekhema Trial on this character last night to pick this last one up.
Good spell and chaos damage nodes aren't easy to come by, so this build uses Maligaro's Virtuosity to give us a fixed +100% crit bonus so we can just take critical chance nodes.
I go evasion / ES with this character but defenses are on the weaker side right now, I think my next major upgrade will be a very large defenses chest to help get evasion to a more acceptable level (only at 50% right now). Enfeebling and Hindering everything does help us survive long enough to blast packs. There's a good chance CI might be the better meta approach to survivability right now but I think ES is likely to get nerfed soon.
Ask me any questions you have! Any feedback on how to optimize this more would be much appreciated too, I'm sure I'm missing tons of things.
Comments
Thank you so much. Can’t wait to get off work and check it out
Looks fun! Probably good bossing damage too? I saw a blood mage with 50k dps on hexblast.
I might of missed it but it looks like you need 150 spirit to run everything correct?
Felkin on YT has been building his Hex Blood as well, one of the key items that he talks about is Atziri Disdain for survivability. Like you mentioned, ES is probably the best defensive stat right now, and this helm gives you a ton of it. The only problem is going to be trying to make up the resistance lost on other pieces. Something to consider and try out if you haven't done so already.
Literal perfect timing, I just stumbled upon this concept in my head a few hours ago and was wondering how I should go about this.
I had this crazy stupid idea to utilize a scepter for extra spirit so I could run Mana Remnants with low hp minions to stack ES during boss fights, while also doing maybe a CI poison variant while utiling the right side of the Dex/Int starting area.
i’ve tried doing the curse build for chayula and i suck at it(just skill issue i guess or not my cup of tea play style) had to make a new monk and go to invoker. Would want to try chayula again if they would fix mana leech.
I run a CI variant of the build, works well in T15+
Boss dmg is a bit low compared to other builds but clear is nice.
Also I run Blink instead of a second curse because gotta go fast :D
Awww man, it doesn't have the purple beam anymore? I wanted to make this build
can we get more area of effect with this? seems fun and wont kill my framerate of my old 2060 lol
It looks like you're causing some kind of explode on death / chain reaction or is that just the effect of hexbloom? And how much of a hit did this build take after they nerfed hexbloom to only affect 1 curse instead of all applied?
Would you be able to make a levelling guide for this build?
Kinda nice, but I am sad that there is no use of the monk skills right now for any chaos based builds for chonk.