Hand of Chayula Chaos DoT Lich
This is probably a bad idea, and it might be way too clunky, but hear me out:
You take Explode and extra curse from Lich. You take Whispers of Doom on the tree, now you have 3 curse limit.
Your main damaging skills will be Contagion, Essence Drain, and Hand of Chayula.
Socket 3 curses into Hand of Chayula plus Decaying Hex. Now each curse will do 8% of your int as chaos damage per second, turning it into a chaos dot that works with Contagion.
Gameplay will look like this: Hit a monster with Contagion and ED from range, then dash to the pack with Hand of Chayula (using weapon swap for this). The 5 dots should be enough to melt the first monster hopefully, which will then proliferate through the pack. Since curses are also proliferating, you can actually get Lich explosions to chain, hopefully pretty far.
This does depend pretty heavily on what new supports are announced. Hopefully chaos dot gets some love.
My only concern is the clunkiness of a 3 button playstyle, and potentially mediocre single target.
Comments
slow map clear and dreadfully slow bossing. What made ED shine in poe1 during its prime seasons was the health regen that made it super safe. There’s none of that. So now you have to maintain those 3 uptime skills for pitiful damage while trying to survive chip damage and 1 shots. Just try ED right now it’s godawful
I feel like Hand of Chayula is limiting your effectiveness by needing to be in melee combat, and when using Lich this prevents the OP "Eternal Life" node so you are especially open to damage.
IMO Hexblast would be strictly better here with Blasphemy since you can stay at range and prolif that way. But like you said, the new supports may change all that.
3 button play style is BASED. It should be the goal. Poe1 exists and is not being dropped. They can’t keep the standard at both multiscreen clearing AND meaningful tactical combat.
I hope they do go the full arpg soulsborne route (to put it very bluntly) and just increase drops to match pacing so progression speed isn’t reduced by 2000%
If you like the chayula's hand playstyle, you can also use that same setup with impending doom instead of decaying hex. Get all reduced skill effect duration + reduced curse duration nodes on tree and stack int for mana. You can either go the, hopefully now nerfed, archmage route or pick extra chaos damage. But damage is not great you reach max 500k dps with current mana stack level :/