ED/C litch help needed
Hi i have as many a ED/C litch and while i enjoy the spreading and huge es i have quite a few peoblems:
- dying in maps: while i have a huge es pool (11k) good recharge (1s delay 4k/s) and can face tank all T4 bosses. I die quite a lot in maps. Its a combination of a very long combo setup time to get edc out, DOT such as corrupted blood completely disabling recharge, monsters chasing me down at 2-3x my speed and many small hits giving me no time to get my es back: basically the dodgeroll into dodgeroll with recharge interrupting hits while being chased and unable to get the combo out since the 1.3 seconds it takes is most of the time enought for the horde to just eat my es and life fully.
- damage: i have the default +5 wand/+3 amulet/+2 foki setup with also increase to spell and chaos on them and tooltip of ED says 30k DOT part, but waiting for blue mobs to die feels like an eternity especially when i need them to die for the spread
- mana costs: nearly all my damage spells (effigy, curse) eat 50%+ of my mana (pool: 900+)
The character feels very good in expedition and somewhat ok in breach (since my damage is so very low that it doesnt rly get into motion)
I dont have a POB right now but the gist is my build is somewhat what lance is doing - i winged it but we endedup almost entirely the same. I dont have a +2-3 level jewel but my mana wouldnt allow that anyway. The only unique i use is atzidis distain helmet
Any idea what i am missing? Or what build i can re-roll into?
Comments
Hey, I'm one of the stubborn Liches who has stuck with ED/C through the endgame and have been cruising through content and would be happy to try to help out.
Your time to kill on packs definitely should not be that weak. With even moderate gear white enemies with your ED+Contagion on them shouldn't survive for almost any time at all. With baseline levels and +chaos/spell damage on your gear even rare enemies are unlikely to live for more than a couple seconds without the Chaos Resistant or Proximal Tangibility Modifiers.
It's pretty quick and easy to upload your build to https://poe2.ninja if you don't mind doing so as it would make judging what might be going wrong a lot easier!
I'm running a far-from-optimal 30ish div setup with a lot less ES and Recharge than you and have a very short TTK on enemies and no survivability issues outside of Simulacrum. If you do upload your setup I'm happy to look through when I have time but if you don't want to I'll also post my own build and you can see if there are any passives, item affixes, or support gems where you could be picking up some more damage or survivability! Feel free to ignore my 5th linked support gem on each skill as none of them are necessary to effectively clear t15+ and pinnacles.
https://poe2.ninja/profile/character/13mcx1sg7742r/sunshoes-1838/Phaerlina
Some of these might also be obvious but I wanted to ask based on your post:
-
Are you resist capped? This is the answer to "why am I dying" posts more often than it should be.
-
You mostly mentioned your difficulty pack clearing but also referenced your Despair and Dark Effigy mana costs. Are you needing to use these to clear normal packs? While Dark Effigy can sometimes help with huge rare packs both skills should be mostly unneeded to kill non-bosses and are unlikely to leave you with enough mana to properly use your important pack clearing abilities.
-
Are you running any mana on kill jewels? While initial mana costs are high, the speed at which ED/C clears out hoards of enemies generally lets you sit at full mana outside of boss fights, which are unfortunately a spam 2 simulator sometimes.
-
Are you specced into Event Horizon? Very specific question but I've seen a few Liches not realize that it does not interact the way they think it does with Eldritch Empowerment and accidentally completely obliterate their own survivability.
-
Are you getting stunned by enemies? Most enemy types shouldn't be able to chase you down as effectively as you describe. If so there are some very easy to reach stun threshold based on ES nodes in your starting area of the tree.
If you do decide to reroll to a different Lich setup instead of improving on your current build, the Storm Mage Lich has a lot of versatile gear options depending on your budget and while it doesn't have the extremely satisfying visuals of your entire screen dying in purple agony in a blink, it is exceptionally more viable for bossing and has a much easier time reaching high levels of survivability.
You have 20 movement speed which gets reduced to 16 after armor. That's the problem. Get some better boots.