[DECEASED] Leech-based RF+Obliteration Slayer <ExtremelyCheap> All Content and HC viable.

Tier 15 No-Regen Mod
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9_C8OqT3lk

Random Sextant/Shaped Tier 10 with high pack density and Beyond
https://youtu.be/lwNzWiOBsrc

Chimera
https://youtu.be/BdRRvvz8XLw

Hydra
https://youtu.be/QhtCHHplM7k

Phoenix
https://youtu.be/MUAEZWd9XnE

Minotaur
https://youtu.be/ru3Yz0k9N1U

T15 Beachhead
https://youtu.be/S3N7ekEdm-Y

Uber Lab
https://youtu.be/VrqMLFQ-b54

That's all, lol.

So basically, you want to run through packs with Righteous Fire. Righteous Fire will clear out white and blue mobs easily, each having a 40% chance to explode for a quarter of their life from both Obliteration Wands. This damage is then amplified by your Hidden Potential (and other jewels), causing them to explode for enough damage to kill other white/blue mobs or cull them if they reach 20% or less of their life from the Slayer Ascendancy. This large damage then grants you life leech from either Warlord's Mark, or the Slayer's Overkill leech as to sustain RF. Since we're using monster's HP as the source of our damage to clear packs, this means that as we run into higher map tiers, a monster's increased HP pool will scale our damage with it, guaranteeing the same clear speed on all map tiers.

Leech Mechanics in Layman's Terms


This build extends its leech cap to 29%. Vaal Pact can double this to 58%. Leech stacks are created by the enormous explosions caused by Obliteration Wands, meaning that each leech instances will continue for ridiculous amounts of time, making it safe to run through maps without worrying about leech ending. Despite only having 75% fire resistances, Righteous Fire causes a degeneration of 22.5% life per second, which leaves us with much regeneration to second to spare (18% with an 80% Loreweave or Purity of Fire).

Elemental Weakness maps are not a problem since we're overcapped.

Because the bulk of our recovery comes from leech, "No Regen" map mods are a breeze.

"60% less recovery" maps will leave us barely enough to run RF, any slight degeneration can easily be outdone by flasks.

Minus Maximum Resist maps can reduce resists by up to -12, leaving us with 63% natural fire resistance, causing Righteous Fire to degen for 33.3%. This is considerably less if you opt for a Rise of the Phoenix on your weapon swap and/or the suggested Purity of Fire gem and is completely nullified by wearing a Loreweave.

Sadly, "No Leech" map mod is the only map mod it cannot run, due to obvious reasons. Hexproof is another mod to take into consideration. You will be able to clear the map, but will not be able to fight the boss normally since your mana leech comes from warlord's mark.

Take into consideration that 'some' maps will have more than one of these mods.
*Pantheon Reductions were not taken into account in these calculations*

You can get this build going as soon as you can equip the wands. However, you should not do this for Hardcore (or general play really), as it is extremely inefficient due to everything scaling along with monster life/level. I only tend to respec at 56 because I've played this game enough where playing a generic leveling build has become a chore that I want to end as quickly as possible. That said, you should really respec only once you've killed Kitava in Act 10 and have gotten at least 1 ascendancy, preferably 3 to start mapping. If you choose to do so, do yourself a favor and farm Blood Aqueducts until around level 70 before returning to finish the storyline.

So what can you do before you hit level 56? Well, I'm sure there's a large variety of options, I generally tend to adapt my tree in order to enable testing newly released gems just to make the leveling experience more tolerable. I'd strongly suggest you look for strong leveling builds with similar trees, but for the sake of your commodity, I'll provide you a bare-bones dual-wield tree:

Generic Dual-Wield Main Hand Melee plan for leveling up to 55

Use this jewel along blue items for leveling if you manage to afford it. This item is somewhat hard to acquire during the first two days of each league, but becomes absurdly cheap from the third day on.

Bandits? Kill 'em all.

You want to grab your Ascendancy Points in this order:


DON'T BE AFRAID TO TAKE RESISTANCE NODES FROM THE TREE IF YOU NEED THEM

6-Link - Single Target


4 Link - Righteous Fire

*You want to use Righteous Fire as your Vaal skill since you're already scaling duration for Blade Vortex*

4 Link - Mobility

*Keep Arcane Surge at a level where it will trigger with a single cast*

4 Link - Auras

*You can use the last socket to level a gem*
*An empower gem could help you get +1 fire resist*

3 Link

*CWDT Immortal Call is required to survive Porcupines or other physical damage spikes, flame golem can be swapped for whatever you want*

3 Link

*You only cast Blood Rage once, and it casts fast enough, so Faster Casting is not required*

Use your spare sockets to level gems for corrupting (Blade Vortex should be your priority).

Level 56 Start


Tree for ~96


DON'T BE AFRAID TO TAKE RESISTANCE NODES FROM THE TREE IF YOU NEED THEM

My sample gear is quite min-maxed, so use it more so as an idea of what you're aiming for. You can get away with rolling decent life on your gear and master-crafting resistances or vice-versa. Some examples include using a blue helmet until you can afford an essence-crafted one, starting off with 2-line jewels with life+damage or damage+damage, and grabbing a cheap 5-Linked white body armour and craft it for next to nothing to get you started:

Sample Gear

As with many other builds, this is hands down the best chest you can aim for. It will let you drop Purity of Fire in favor of an offensive aura, drop your Ruby Flask, and let you ignore -max resist maps. 80% resist roll is imperative, prioritize Life and Elemental Damage mods after that.


An Elder ring with "Warlord's Mark on Hit" will allow you to drop the Blasphemy'ed curse, making socket space in your gear, as well as allowing you to add in a 2nd offensive aura. Whether you keep it as a blue ring with +resists ontop to retain the 25% damage from Hidden Potential or as a yellow for a higher life pool and other goodies is completely up to you (and your wallet).

Hatred will grant you more Single-Target damage, while Herald of Ash will make your map clear more consistent. The moment you add either of them into your build is the point in which you have to take Elemental Reflect into account. It is totally up to you which of the two you want to prioritize.


A well rolled blue Stygian Vise with a good Abyss Jewel will provide a large improvement. Just scour any high ilvl Stygian you come across and craft accordingly. It's also worth noting that an Elder belt with the "increased life recovery" mod would provide substantial defenses as well as facilitate hard map mod combinations.


Atziri's Promise will take over the Ruby Flask, providing a large damage increase, Taste of Hate will do so as well while increasing your defenses against physical damage at the same time. It is up to you to decide whether you want an additional layer with Basalt Flask or a hint of extra damage through Sulphur Flask as the Life Flask and Swiftness Flask are both mandatory. I'd personally opt for the Basalt.


Although the damage is more than enough with the Obliteration wands as is (which is a nod to you console players and other lazy pc-players as myself who don't want to weapon-swap), you can go further off the charts by getting a set of meta-sticks to skyrocket your damage. Weaponswapping into a pair of these would also allow you to use
Fortify-LeapSlam-FasterAttacks or Cyclone-LifeGainOnHit-Fortify to min-max your defenses if you don't mind the extra task (or clunkyness).


Managing to craft a good Elder helm through essences and having it land on either "Supported by Concentrated Effect" or "Supported by Burning Damage" mods will allow you to socket Efficacy in your Righteous Fire for an additional More Multiplier as well as a longer-lasting Vaal RF.
*This helm is from a different ES build of mine, so its base and mods are not ideal for this build. I am using it only as an example to get the message across.*

Enchantments, Implicits & Bases
Two-Stoned Rings and Two-Toned boots are your go-to for resistances, this rules out vaaling them for implicits. You can play around with a very well-rolled Jade Amulet(dex) if you want to have a bit more life and a bit less damage than a Carnage Heart. Stygian, Leather, and Rustic Belt Implicits are all good for this build (in that order), don't bother vaaling. Obliteration wand implicits are good enough as well, unless you're min-maxing for something in specific, I wouldn't bother. You'll want scepters with high %elemental damage implicit or ele pen for your stat-sticks. The %spell damage implicit from Fingerless Gloves are your best bet, but you can also look into getting +gemlevel or %life from vaal orbs if you're using other bases. As for Helm Enchants, you'll want anything Blade-Vortex-Related, preferably %damage. You should aim for Armour-based helms, off-colored with the Vorici Jeweller trick.

Going for full Elemental Conversion will result in a far larger damage scaling from Elemental Overload (and shaper sticks if you opt for weaponswapping). It also allows you to benefit fully from The Wise Oak if you don't mind balancing your resists:

I'd say that the only downside to doing this is that you're exposing yourself more to Elemental Reflect given that Slayer covers Physical Reflect, but using Hatred and Herald of Ash already makes you vulnerable to it, so there really isn't much of a liability there. There are three ways to convert your damage:



In order to go for this, you'll need to use a combination of two out of the three. Using the "Physical to Lightning" support gem is generally the more advisable one, as it only requires a slot in your sockets. Using Hrimsorrow gloves will result in trading ~60 base life (about 120 total) and the loss of 25% increased damage from Hidden Potential from swapping a blue item out for the conversion effect, while Winter Spirit drops your tree path efficiency, losing 15% increased maximum life (about 220) while retaining the 25% damage increase from your blue gloves and Hidden Potential. Although it may be arguable as to what you should drop in the tree, my recommendation would be to sever the "witch" section of the tree immediately after Elemental Overload and dropping any 4% increased maximum life nodes (that don't lead up to anything big). I'd recommend going for well-rolled Hrimsorrows, but can see Winter Spirit being a good choice for the first few days of each league, as these gloves might be slightly harder to come by. Although it's not something I'd recommend, I should also mention that going for Hrimsorrows AND Winter Spirit would result in the highest (single) target damage output at the cost of the largest life reduction by making room for an additional support gem as well as converting entirely to cold, allowing for the use of Frost Bomb:

Generally speaking, I think this variation of the build can yield the highest amount of maximum life. Granted it's considerably more expensive, so perhaps it's something you can look into doing if you really want to push the build and have no interest in spending your currency elsewhere. By speccing into Spiritual Aid in the top left side of the tree, %increased minion damage applies to yourself. This can be one way to scale your Obliteration Explosions as well as the rest of your damage without having to be locked into blue gear and Hidden Potential.

You can opt for any of the highlighted minion nodes if you feel like you're not dealing enough damage or your explosions aren't chaining properly, but given that those nodes could be life nodes, you can expect a lower life total than you could otherwise have. The minion nodes near the witch area of the tree are applicable as well if you're near them, I just felt like my best way to go about it was dropping that whole side entirely.

A Bone Helmet's implicit mod will save you some money from getting a lab enchant, but you can expect attempting to craft an Elder Bone Helmet with Essences and having it roll decent stats AND land on "Supported by Concentrated Effect" or "Supported by Burning Damage" to be extremely costly; an Elder Bone Helmet base with high enough ilvl alone is worth at least 8 exalts. Your gloves can be crafted with up to 15%minion damage with Catarina, or in this case up to 30% from a Delve Fossil mod. This would lead you to having a maximum of 4 blue items at most: two rings, your belt and your boots. At that point it really isn't worth running Hidden Potential in my opinion. Given that Loreweave and Carnage Heart both give you attributes, I'd instead recommend stacking strength for Iron Will and higher life totals, while increasing your damage furthermore through a Cyclopean Coil:

As long as your lowest attribute is above 125, a Cyclopean Coil will provide with more damage than Hidden Potential's blue belt slot. A well-rolled Le Heup of All fits perfectly with what we're doing here. It provides attributes, high resistances which we'll need, as well as a modest amount of generic %damage increase. The %increase coming from Bone Helmet's Implicit, coupled with the open Jewel Slot from removing Hidden Potential should more than make up for the damage coming from two other potential blue item slots while resulting in a larger health pool. Jewel-wise, this setup allows you to snatch relatively cheap jewels with the following 3 mods:

You could ideally add %minion damage as the 4th mod to your jewels given that it's a prefix, but the value of said jewel would increase tenfold. While my gear is not something I'd consider "cheap" any longer, it is extremely far from this setup's potential peak. This is approximately what your gear would look like all together:

Coupling this with full elemental conversion is a possibility, but would require a combination of moving even more points to reach Winter Spirit, discarding %minion damage from your gloves for Hrimsorrows, or having to drop an otherwise good support gem for Phys to Lightning.

Well shit, a good friend lent me his HH to play around with. I wish I had more to say but it isn't really that special. HH is best in slot for just about any non-summoner build if it comes down to clear speed, it just feels like it puts you on a different layer of clearspeed that any build without HH will never achieve. That said, it won't help you against single target/bossing at all, so I guess It's technically not a best in slot.

An Inspired Learning Jewel can be used to simulate this effect at a lesser degree for a cheaper price. I guess you can also just use both if you really want to. Simply accomodate your passives in this area of the tree as follows to enable its effect:

Since this build centers on the use of blue items, using one of these early on can help you garner a good amount of additional currency without much of a sacrifice. I'm not an expert on Magic Finders, but I believe this amulet's yield is comparable to that of a Bisco's. Buying one of these is actually quite cheap as few builds are willing to accommodate for a blue item on your gear or simply prefer moving onto a Bisco's or Shaped amulet to rid themselves of the blue item.

You can further extend your Increased Item Quantity with as many of these items as you'd like, but bear in mind that including each of them will further hinder your damage output due to replacing a blue item and thus reducing the effectiveness of
Try to find your sweet spot!

Crit Blade Vortex
https://pastebin.com/PyHBPxzX

-"More damage, shatters(if you swap ele focus to something else while mapping), but more relies on flasks and can't enter boss with 10 stacks. Also, more expensive daggers. I included hatred crit watcher's eye, should be around 5-8 ex(build works fine without it tho). "

Crit Blade Vortex w/o Hidden Potential
https://pastebin.com/01TmcTy7

-"Same, but without Hidden potential. Explosions do about 150% of life here."

Crit Brutality Blade Vortex
https://pastebin.com/7y48j2Gp

-"8k life 1.4 mil dps (without killed recently). Disintegrator seems like a viable option for uberelder fight(the one and only fight in a game, where build can't turn on RF due to lack of leech)"

Non-Crit Brutality Blade Vortex
https://pastebin.com/YGeRMzsQ

What level should I swap into the build?
You can play the build from 56+, as soon as you equip the wands, but I'd recommend waiting out until ~68 (or whenever you decide to start with T1 maps for that matter). Specially if you're playing on hardcore. This is mostly because while you can run it since earlier, your damage per hit scales with monster level, so your leech stack duration will last longer the further up you are. Also, while doing quests/storyline, zones don't have as high a pack density, moreover, the map layouts can be a bit ass and have you backtrack a lot, so you could end up dropping your regen there and having to port back to town or wait until 1 life to turn off RF. An ignite-removing could help a bit if you choose to run it early, I ran it as soon as I hit 56 and didn't use a flask though. If you choose to do so, then I'd recommend overleveling yourself in Blood Aqueducts to around 70.

Do blue Jewels and Flasks count towards Hidden Potential?
Sadly no, Hidden potential only takes into account items in your character equipment panel, this means: Helm, Body Armour, Gloves, Boots, Belt, Amulet, Rings, Main hand, and Off hand.

What do you use Blood Rage for?
It's just there to generate frenzy charges, which each give a generic 4% more damage increase, so that's just a free 12% more multiplier from 3 charges to make explosions and RF deal more damage, making the build run smoother when clearing. This is why I chose to keep it on my obliteration wands, so that when I swap into single target for bosses blood rage turns off.

Why not Scion?
Most of the sustain comes from overkill leech rather than up-front explosion leech. Overkill has 20% leech which is a very large amount, which results in such long-lasting stacks. Getting such a high leech % off the up-front explosion would be rather troublesome, I believe a user mentioned some pages ahead about using a Vinktar's Flask for the high %lightning damage leeched as life + some corrupted jewel to convert it into %chaos damage leeched as life but that's waaay too convoluted and straight-out not worth it.

How does it hold up in group play?
The way monster life (and monster explosion damage) works mechanically with groups is as follows:

More players in the same group multiplies monster's base life.
Explosions deal damage equal to a % of monster BASE life.

This means you will be doing 1 player damage while monsters have multiplied hp. You can play this in groups just fine, but the explosions won't chain off as effectively. Being in a group of 2 is perfectly fine, should feel almost the same as alone (even better if with an aurabot I suspect). I can play in a group of 3 people and still chain off just fine, having to cast dark pact on rares occasionally. I imagine this to be the limit for effectiveness though, going in a group of 4, 5, or 6 will work, but you won't get any off-screen explosions.

Wouldn't The Retch belt work with this build very well?
I'll try to keep this as short as possible. I initially thought the same, it sounded so thematically correct, that I actually saved up for own one. Sadly, it wasn't very good. Investigating how it worked lead me to the following: When you're not a slayer, leech stops when you hit full life, so no matter how much damage you deal, you'll only deal damage equal to your missing hp (and deal little damage with the retch because of this). Since instant leech was removed, your damage with the belt is always gated by leech caps (refer to leech section of the guide). The way the retch works here is that it checks how much you're leeching, and then deals that much damage to 'tagged' monsters. In our case, A scion can reach the highest leech peak, 87% of OUR max life per second. As for 'who' takes the damage, the belt looks at 'tagged' monsters, these are the monsters you hit with attacks, spells, or anything. It then goes ahead and deals damage to every tagged monster equal to what you're leeching. This works mechanically, because every time an obliteration explosion goes off, a monster would become tagged and they'd receive the damage over time, the problem is the amount. 87% of our max life, even in endgame, is less than 7k damage per second. A blue item will increase righteous fire and explosion damage by 25%, and since the amount of damage you deal is far greater than your life pool (even more so considering monster life explosions), this ends up being so much more (think of your damage tooltips or forum titles with 200,000 damage builds, or even 1 million). Not only is the damage increase very small, but the item is ridiculously expensive. It is also worth noting that the DoT doesn't do anything for us, while increasing the brunt of our damage is better since the harder we hit, the longer we leech for. In short, I think this item is absolutely dead as of 3.1

Hi, I cannot guarantee I'll be very active on this thread, but will try my best to do so. I'd also like to thank user Kek_is_love who has done a phenomenal job theorycrafting and looking for different ways to push this build further. He has played the build nearly as much as I have, but is a more competitive (competent?) player than I am, so you might also want to hear his perspective. He often opts for multiple gear swaps for different situations, be it efficient clearing, magic finding or safer and stronger ways to handle bosses whereas I try my best to retain the 'lazy' playstyle that was originally intended. You'll see him post in the thread frequently so you can have certainty in taking his word on whatever doubts you may have.

If I happen to delay myself on updating this guide, just post your doubts in the the thread, I'm sure people with experience and understanding on the build will be more than happy to sort you out. This also applies to joining the discussion ways to adapt the build to the current league. I personally do not like stating changes as facts without testing them beforehand, which is why I tend to update the build during the middle~end of each league. I'll use 2nd post of this thread as a place to state things worth looking into at the start of each league.

I hope this has been helpful and wish you good drops and much fun!
Feel free to hit me ingame if you have any doubts and I'll try my best to help you out~

While Hidden Potential is still the right way to level this build up, and is very well capable of handling all endgame content, new crafting mods introduced this patch might make it even more enticing to drop this jewel in favor of better rares in an endgame variation. The new mods are:
"(37-43%) Increased Damage while Leeching" on gloves and amulets.
"(17-20%) Increased Damage" on rings.

One of the build's nuisances in its current iteration is the fact that you can't cast all of your Blade Vortex stacks out of thin air. This is mainly why the build is still tied to using warlord's mark in some shape or form. Blood Magic is something that could potentially sort this issue out:

The Blood Magic Support could technically be your 6th link on the vanilla Hidden Potential setup, but that would limit the methods by which you can achieve Full Elemental Conversion furthermore. The bright side to this would be that it would allow for Herald of Purity (after reducing mana reservation by just a little bit).
*Herald of Purity provides a smaller damage increase than Herald of Ash*

Another approach could be allocating the Blood Magic Keystone (and the precious life nodes behind it), but that brings other issues with it. You'd no longer be able to use Hatred or Herald of Ash barring gimmicks such as Essence Worm. Brutality could be one way to go about it, possibly using Vulnerability as a curse, but pure physical damage tends to scale terribly. It's worth noting that bosses have little if any physical mitigation, as well as this patch has introduced a Banner that could further push the damage on this method. Alternatively, you could scale Blade Vortex through Physical&Chaos as to use Poison with it, but you'd be missing out on Herald of Agony and Herald of Purity with the keystone. The poison mods are also relatively far from the core tree and your "hit" damage would be low to the point where leech stacks may not be very solid. The life nodes around the Ranger/Shadow side of the tree are also far from fantastic, but I guess you could at least get Acrobatics? All in all, I suspect the damage would be subpar but there might be something worth doing with Blood Magic.

I don't think any of these get anywhere near Blade Vortex, so would recommend against them, but here are some alternatives you could look into if you're looking for a different playstyle:

Firestorm

Magma Orb

Winter Orb