[3.9] Bane/Blight Indigon Pop Occultist - Very fast, amazing sustain, beginner friendly

Welcome to my Bane/Blight guide. So, let me start with why I made this build, how it works and how is it different from all current Bane and Blight builds.

So first, lets start with core. The core of the build is mana. We stack around 2-2.5k mana and then utilize it for damage, survivability, damage mitigation, life sustain, casting our spells, well, we use it basically for everything. So how do we actually use it? Well, for recharging our mana we use Enduring Mana Flask. Enduring mod on mana flask makes the flask effect not be removed at full mana and allows us to queue the flask infinitely. We then scale this flask to some unreasonable recovery numbers with a lot of flask effect, flask recovery and reduced flask charges used, what allows us to regenerate really a lot of mana in short amount of time and at the same time it allows us to have our mana flask active permanently, even in very long boss fights.

Now, how does this transform to survivability and damage? We use Indigon helmet that transforms the insane mana recovery to also apply to health and also gives us damage based on how much mana we spent recently, and we spend really a lot of mana, so Indigon grants us a lot of damage. Then we use Agnostic timeless keystone what makes us recover HP based on 20% of our maximum mana when we are not on a full life. On top of all this, we use Mind over Matter that makes 30% of incoming damage to be taken from mana before life, giving us a lot of extra EHP. And thanks to insane sustain of life and mana, we also run Righteous Fire what gives us 40% more damage and we can have it up permanently.

So that is basically how the build works. We have decent mitigation, decent EHP, very high recovery, very high damage and on top I also grabbed Phase Acrobatics, Acrobatics and Blind to help us dodge most of damage.

Changelog



Pro's & Con's

+ Amazing clear speed - Bane covers basically whole screen, and everything else just dies from explosions
+ Very high single target damage for dot build (when buffed we reach around 8M single target DPS)
+ Very good lab runner because of the insane recovery we have
+ 224% increased movement speed (289% with Withering Step)
+ 8.1k EHP (5.7k life with 30% MoM)
+ 87% melee avoid chance, 87% projectile avoid chance, 44% spell avoid chance
+ 2 defensive curses (Temporal Chains and Enfeeble) with 45% increased curse effect
+ Enemies are chilled and hindered
+ Can do any content in the game (except Hall of the Grandmasters because some characters there are CI) - That means no worries about recharge, leech, mana leech, regen, any kind of damage reflection
+ Very good league starter as it works just on Tabula

- Blight playstyle can be sometimes pretty dangerous as we need to stand close to enemy
- For maximum damage and clear effectiveness we need 2 6 links, 1 for Blight and 1 for Bane
- Before getting explody chest we need to gem swap to double Obliteration wand for smooth clear
- The damage mitigation is not as high as on other builds and we rely mostly on recovery
- Sometimes we need to stop casting to reset Indigon in long fights because it can ramp up the mana cost way too high

Content done
- All guardians
- Atziri
- Uber Atziri
- Mastermind
- All elderslayers
- Shaper
- Cortex
- Sirus
- Delve depth 280+

My characters using this build
- Metamorph character

Path of Building

Path of Building is tool for PoE to plan gear, skill tree and calculate effective damage. It also contains Bandits choice. You can download it here. Then simply import below Pastebin URL.

Pastebin



Pantheon

For major god Soul of Lunaris is good safety pick for mapping and some extra damage avoidance. Another great option is Soul of Arakaali for some dot damage reduction (what also applies to degen from Righteous Fire).

For minor god Soul of Garukhan is great choice for even more dodge and some movement speed. Another good option is Soul of Shakari for some more dot damage reduction and poison immunity.

Ascendancy

Get Profane Bloom first. Then get Malediction and Void Beacon for some survivability and damage and finally get Withering Presence from Uber Lab.

Leveling and gearing






Media

Mapping
Toxic Sewer Lvl 92
Crimson Temple Lvl 92
Overgrown Shrine Lvl 92
Iceberg Lvl 92
Infested Valley Lvl 92
Dark Forest Lvl 92
Bone Crypt Lvl 92
Necropolis Lvl 92
Siege Lvl 92

Delving
Delve Depth 228 Lvl 92

Bossing
Lair of the Hydra Lvl 92
Al-Hezmin Lvl 92
Ahuatotli Delve Depth 278 Lvl 93



Misc
Awakened Spell Cascade

Added new gameplay vid:

Toxic Sewer Lvl 92

Added new gameplay vid:

Al-Hezmin Lvl 92

Playing this build and having a blast.

But sometimes i still get destroyed and oneshotted, due to the low ehp.

"

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Rhareg escreveu:

Playing this build and having a blast.

But sometimes i still get destroyed and oneshotted, due to the low ehp.

"

Glad you like the build. And yeah, stuff one shotting you sometimes can be pretty annoying, its probably pretty important to just try to squeeze as much flat life from the rare gear as possible. Also, I noticed that you are using Flesh & Stone, I was thinking abut doing that, but its probably not worth it, it reserves way too much mana, lowering your ehp by quite a bit.

I got corrupted blood jewel the other day and I was thinking about what to use as suffix instead, and then I remembered about this mod, its insane, I def recommend trying it out

Yeah, that mod is nasty. I have a cinderswallow with that mod. ;)

About flesh and stone - I think that the 35% (through essence worm) are still worth it for the blind/dmg reduction, isnt it? I just cant get a good armor with blind nearby enemies and blind is pretty much too good to pass up.

"

Rhareg escreveu:

Yeah, that mod is nasty. I have a cinderswallow with that mod. ;)

About flesh and stone - I think that the 35% (through essence worm) are still worth it for the blind/dmg reduction, isnt it? I just cant get a good armor with blind nearby enemies and blind is pretty much too good to pass up.

Ah right, just noticed. I opted for that mod on mana flask to have better uptime, but it looks pretty good on cinder too.

And for the reservations, well for example for me the aura atm removes 840 mana what is quite a big loss in EHP, blind is very valuable for sure, but im not sure if its *that* valuable (and its also only against attacks). For the chest, I just self-crafted mine with explody + blind base and just awakener orbed them and then suffix scoured, multimodded and slammed (i got farily lucky with having pen suffix and no prefix tho).

Added new gameplay vid:

Ahuatotli Delve Depth 278 Lvl 93

Small build update:

- Replaced Growth and Decay in final tree with Amplify and Blast radius

The reasoning for this is that the build do not needs that extra damage from growth and decay at all, and Aplify and Blast Radius are really nice boosts for clear speed

Anther update, this time big one

- Added leveling and gearing section
- Added leveling gear to leveling and gearing section
- Added gem progression to leveling and gearing section
- Added end game optimization to leveling and gearing section

With this section added I can safely say that the guide has all important pieces it needs, what is great. I plan to eventually add crafting section for quiver and bow and more end game optimization stuff.