[3.14] Int-Stacking Min-Max Wander Guide | Information for multiple Ascendancies | Raider Showcase

Getting stunned causes loss of control of the character.

Whether or not the character does get stunned when hit depends mostly on its total life pool and how hard the enemy hits.

CI reduces the total life pool to 1, which makes it easy for enemies to stun on hit. Even though range and ES offer some defence against this guaranteed Stun Immunity is preferred.

To achieve this one can play an Ascendancy that offers it (Occultist; Ascendant Occultist) or stack stun avoidance via Jewel Implicits or Explicits on Abyss Jewels(new with Ultimatum League).

For more details look into the gear section of this thread.

Elemental Ailments are deadly

- Frozen has an similar effect to getting stunned
- Ignite deals damages and disables ES recharge
- Shock is a massive damage multiplier

There are two ways to become immune to Elemental Ailments:

The first is an ascendancy that offers this (Raider, Elementalist, Ascendant-Inquisitor)
The second is by stacking elemental ailment avoidance on gear.

For more details look into the gear section of this thread.

With 50Mio DPS single-target both Sirus A9 and Maven A9 can be instantly phased before mechanics can kick in.

Stats to stack:

- Intelligence
- Attack Speed
- Critical Strike Multipliers
- "More" Multipliers

Penetration/Exposure and other means that cause the enemy to take increased damage are exponentially valuable for the build since they will scale the gains from Intelligence in a multiplicative fashion.

That being said - diminishing returns apply to any one of these stacked stats making a good mix more valuable then overcommitting on one stat alone.

These are threshold numbers to safely survive boss mechanics such as Mavens "Cascade of Pain", Sirus Meteor Shower/Labyrinth Slam or even hits from bosses and rare mobs at delve depth 1k+.

Intelligence Stacker should have a fairly large ES pool but have little physical mitigation. The large ES pool allows to survive most one-shots; however to truly make the most out of it, it is best combined with other mitigations so consecutive big hits are survivable.

- Evasion/Dodge is a strong defensive mechanic with a large ES pool - where most evasion/dodge characters can feel very "hit or miss" this defence is exponentially stronger when big hits are survivable by default. Block can serve a similar function.

- Recovery rate/sustain is mandatory for this defensive interaction since the ES pool needs to be replenished quickly.

- self-casting

- curses
- marks
- exposure abilities

- uncontrollable conditionals

- cwdt
- slow triggers
- minion setups for de-buffs

Self-casting abilities does interrupt gameplay which means it will cost dps as well as recovery. It is a hassle to do besides.
Uncontrollable conditional de-buffs are most often not applicable when needed or do not affect the intended target.

Ascendancy: Offence | Defence | Speed/Utility
Assassin: 4 | 4 | 4
Raider: 4 | 5 | 5
Elementalist: 5 | 2 | 3
Scion: 3-4 | 3-5 | 3-5
Occultist: 3 | 1 | 2-3

General: Gets Elusive for free and thus frees up a prefix on boots.

Offence: Assassin is a solid choice offering good consistent damage due to its high critical strike chance.

It doesn't get a lot out of items such as Bottled Faith but has good damage and caps its critical hit chance without it. Its clear-skill often does hit the hardest out of all the ascendancies - though all ascendancies clear multiple screens in front of them easily.

Still, the Assassin is the best at that and its natural crit cap enables it to cause various elemental ailments from small sources of damage more readily.

Opportunistic is a bit of a mixed bag - while it is numerically strong it is disabled in encounters you would want it most: The Feared; Uber Elder and afaik even Maven (due to her brain) tend to have 2 or more unique monsters on the screen. In these circumstances it switches over to its defensive benefit.

Defence: Crit Immunity is solid. The Solaris pantheon gives a fairly strong crit defence to all ascendancies though. Elusive and increased effectiveness of it pair up well with a big ES pool.

The Defensive Layer of Opportunistic is strong, though as conditional as its offensive counterpart and might be considered unreliable for either.

Speed/Utility: The increased Elusive effect is a bonus to movement speed.

General: Gets Phasing, Onslaught and Elemental Ailment Immunity for free. This frees up multiple affixes/talent points on the tree.

Offence: Raider is a solid choice in terms of damage. Its main benefit is screen-wide exposure without any conditional ties due to Avatar of the Veil as well as its high attack speed.

Defence: The tankiest version of the build. Innate 15% Dodge/Spelldodge (which stacks with Elusive) and the very strong Avatar of the Chase ascendancy notable give the Raider a 90%+(!) chance to not be hit.

This means that as long as 20k+ES are enough to survive a hit the Raider will typically have recovered before the next attack can land. This is due to the entropic and deterministic nature of evasion.

After you got hit by a mob with a 10% chance to hit you, the same mob will miss its next 9 attacks before it can hit you again.

Speed/Utility: Unsurprisingly the Raider is the fastest ascendancy out of the five and with free phasing + exposure offers the most utility/ease of playing.

General: Does get Elemental Ailment Immunity for free. This frees up multiple affixes/talent points on the tree.

Offence: Hands down the most dps of all ascendancies.
Its buffed Exposure and very strong Confluence put it about 20% before other ascendancies in terms of raw dps.

A couple caveats apply though: A big part of its damage is tied to being able to inflict exposure.
This is only possible to do unconditionally via the Heraldry cluster notable.

The range of exposure offered by this notable is not very large (about the same size as Bottled Faiths effect) so most likely not applicable for clear - but very strong for bosses.

Defence: The defence of the Elementalist is lacking comparatively - a Chaos Golem gives solid ~15% phys mitigation and that is about it.

The Elementalist is also notoriously socket starved which makes it hard(er) to fit other defensive mechanics into it.

Its Elemental Ailment Immunity is also tied to its Golems and it can happen in very rare circumstances that two of the Golems go down at the same time, leaving the Elementalist vulnerable to Ailments for 4 seconds before they get automatically re-summoned.

Speed/Utility: The ascendancy offers no inherent movement speed and its dependency on both Golems and a Herald (for Heraldry) leave it starved of sockets and thus utility.

General: The most flexible ascendancy. Does get Elemental Ailment Immunity for free and can choose from a number of other benefits with her second Ascendancy.

Offence: Overall solid. It depends on which Ascendancy besides Inquisitor is chosen. If opting for something offensive like Assassin/Deadeye/Raider/Elementalist its damage can be very comparable to both Assassin and Raider. It probably wont reach the same highs as the Elementalist unless one goes for Berserker and Berserk-Burst.

Defence: Same as its offence its defence is highly dependant on the chosen second Ascendancy. Gladiator offers a lot defensive benefits such as free blind as well as 15% Block/Spellblock.

Speed/Utiliy: Again it depends on which Ascendancies are chosen. Inquisitor offers good dps and ailment immunity (more on that in the gear section) and any of the others can offer variety of boni to cater to different niches.

General: Does get Stun Immunity for free which does free up jewel implicits and can get elemental reflect immunity instead.

Offence: Probably the weakest choice in terms of offence - a second curse is okay but Malediction and an additional PowerCharge are numerically just not as strong as what the Elementalist/Assassin/Raider can offer.

Defence: Maledictions debuff is the only defensive Layer of note on the Occultist. It is conditional and non-automatic. The Energy Shield regeneration offered is a bit of a meme ever since it got nerfed from 30% to 10%.

Speed/Utility: The second curse can be utilized for temporal chains or enfeeble. It doesn't offer anything in terms of speed.

Weapon:



The core of the build.
The currently best wand in the game is Tempest Barb and held by MaiCedere and up for Mirror Service. It recently got recrafted and updated with an Aisling slam for penetration instead of the older version I have. Both are perfectly fine though, obviously.
The second Wand is the ideal 'league' wand that doesn't feature a synth base.

Shield:



Atziris Mirror offers effective Curse Immunity which is huge QoL. It has more Intelligence and all-res then a rare shield could have and also offers a healthy amount of evasion which translates to a surprising amount of effective health. Unless someone is going for Approach 4 (see above) I do not see a reason to not use this shield.

Helmet:



A rare helmet with T1 Intelligence, elevated %Intelligence, +1 PowerCharge and high Energy Shield is the best choice for this slot.
I prefer this Helmet with an Abyss socket since it is both the numerically strongest option for DPS and ES and can also pack utility like 30% Stun Avoidance if needed.

The helmet can be mirrored at TFT.

Armour:



A rare armour with Essence/T1 Intelligence, T1 %Intelligence and as much effective ES as possible.

In STD legacy ES Armour reigns supreme on this slot.

In league the best armour to craft for this slot would be a Hunter/Crusader armour with %Phys taken as Chaos as one prefix. Phys taken as Chaos on a CI Build is an incredible defensive option that numerically actually rivals the best legacy ES armours in terms of effective HP. It certainly is better then a hybrid ES prefix.

Legacy Explody Chests are not recommended. The Build does not scale enough physical damage or converts physical damage to make the explosions chain on its own. For pure corpse removal a small bit of cold damage on a Ring or Abyss Jewel is sufficient.

Gloves:



Pseudo link gloves enable both a single target and a clear skill to function at full effectiveness without the need to swap gems.

Ideally with elevated mods; they can be mirrored from TFT.

Take note that currently Increased Projectile Speed is a support that offers very little.
In the Ultimatum Patch Notes GGG pre-emptively curbed a number of strong and hard to acquire stats like Area of Effect - and weirdly enough Projectile Speed. This leads me to believe that Projectile Speed might get buffed/changed in the future.

The recommended enchant is either Fury or Spite.

Fury offers an ignite on bossing targets for Cinderswallow without needing fire damage on gear.
Spite offers a strong slow on Enemies.

Boots:



Boots offer most movement speed related benefits for the build. Tailwind and Elusive/50% Ailment Avoidance are the two main benefits of this item.

As described above ascendancies that want Ailment Avoidance get up to 50% here which is very strong. Other then that Elusive and Tailwind are useful for all builds.

Pierce is not recommended as a stat since it can be aquired with alternative quality on Kinetic Blast

Amulet:



This slot is one giant monument to attributes and the stacking of it.
The currently best amulet for this slot is available at TFT called Plague Scarab.

Rings:



Synthesised Rings are BiS due to %increases to Intelligence as well as offering an increase to the maximum number of Power or Frenzy Charges.

They can also be utilized to grant Onslaught or Intimidate if needed.



Belt:



I enjoy the 'Flask Charges gained on Crit' mod quite a bit ever since it got buffed. Increased ES Recovery is a fantastically strong mod that acts multiplicative with leech, regen, recovery (i.e. from Cinderswallow) and flat ES gain on hit. I can't recommed it enough.

Synth bases exist and are typcially crafted with tripple attribute suffixes which can be really good.

The choice is typically between Flask on Crit + Abyss Jewel vs more Int from a Synth base. Both are good options; I prefer the Stygian but it is up to individual taste.

Other options include Headhunter for very dense content or a Torrent's Reclamation for going fast. Ideally with %Int corruptions.

Jewels:

Large Cluster Jewels:



The notables on cluster jewels fix up accuracy, resists and provide both mana and life(es) leech.

Small Cluster Jewels:



A very solid way to stack attributes and resists.

Unique Jewels:



Those are pretty self-explanatory for the most part.

Split Personality is very efficient for the Raider to offset its sub-par starting location.

The Watchers Eye is best used for defensive mods at a high investment level since it offers mods that cannot be found elsewhere. An ideal third mod would be faster ES recovery rate while affected by discipline.

Timeless Jewel:



This provides us a source of Intimidate as well as Double Damage on notables in the area. It also helps with Strength requirements of our gear.

Abyss Jewels:



Blind on Hit can be aquired here.

There are 4 main ways to build an Intelligence stacking Wander in principle:

1. stacking large cluster jewels with 12nodes without notables for large attack speed or spell damage gains; often supported by the Crown of Eyes unique helmet
2. pathing down to the Point Blank Keystone
3. running large shield-attack clusters with 8nodes and 3 notables
4. picking up glancing blow and/or block related notables for a rare shield with ES recovery on block


This thread will focus on variation 3. though I will briefly touch on the other approaches:

Approach 1:


Approach 2:


Approach 3:


Approach 4:




Different Ascendancies have different requirements as far as Stun and Ailment Immunity are concerned (see above).

1. Stun Immunity/Avoidance is covered by Jewel Implicits and Abyss Jewel Explicits for all Builds that require it from gear.

2. Ailment Immunity/Avoidance is covered as follows for all Builds that require it from gear:
- 50% from elevated shaped Boot explicit (suffix)
- 20% from Belt Labyrinth Enchant while Elusive
- 30% from Elegant Form 2Point Cluster Jewel / Synthesised Implicits on Belts.
- more can be acquired on the talent tree though the opportunity cost can be high and it is not recommended.

- One noteworthy exeption is the Scion-Inquisitor who can benefit from the elevated consecrated ground crusader mod on chests to be permanently immune to Elemental Ailments.