PoEVault's Corrupting Fever Champion (PoE Crucible 3.21)
Introduction
In recent years Corrupting Fever has been a steady choice among mapping focused players for leaguestart. It’s fast, relatively sturdy and not too difficult to get going. As a bonus it can be scaled into a true lategame monster if you are willing to invest, through a transition over to Gladiator.
In many ways it has a playstyle similar to that of bleedbow, where you rapidly spread a high damage DoT onto every enemy you meet and watch them explode.
We’re not a Gladiator I hear you say, how do we achieve explosions without explode chest, forbidden Flame and Flesh jewels or a spesific cluster notable? Haemophilia gloves is your answer. These babies will functionally do the same for us.
As spellslinger has been horribly nerfed over the years, we rely on The Poet's Pen to alleviate that issue for us. This can be a bit expensive on leaguestart, but the build does not need the wand until it is ready to move into red maps. That said we want to get this as early as possible.
Build Assesment
Pros
- Excellent clear speed and movement speed
- Very good Leaguestarter
- Fairly straight forward gear progression
- Long range playstyle provides innate safety
Cons
- Relies heavily on a few select Uniques. Some of these can be expensive early on.
- Namesake skill can not be played from the start and needs to be transitioned into
- Can feel a little clunky to level until midway through the campaign
Playstyle and Build mechanics
Corrupting Fever itself is just a Damage Over Time effect that is applied by other things. This means we need a delivery system, in order to get our DoT going on targets. This is where
Kinetic Blast comes in. It fires projectiles that explode on impact. Once we combine this with
Greater Multiple Projectiles Support, we have multiple projectiles fired in rapid succession that all explode on impact. Thus we very rapidly stack our DoT on targets and watch them explode through the use of
Haemophilia.
This takes care of our clear needs, and it does decent damage to single targets. But our single target damage would still be lacking if this was all we had going for us.
Through Spellslinger early on, and later on through
The Poet's Pen, we have
Exsanguinate and
Reap going off automatically when we attack with
Kinetic Blast.
Some of you may have noticed that Corrupting Fever only has a duration of 7 seconds. Pressing this every 7 seconds to refresh the buff would be incredibly annoying. Thankfully,
Corrupting Fever is refreshed when we pay a certain ammount of life. Thus we can keep it active by simply attacking targets with
Kinetic Blast linked to
Lifetap Support.
This means at the end of the day, that we are a one-button build while mapping. Exluding movementskill, ofc. Many people, myself included, value this highly.
Defensive Layers and Damage Scaling
This build utilises a combination of the core defenses in the form of Armour, Evasion and Spellblock. We combine this with high chaos resistance, a Glorious Vanity in the name of Xibaqua and decently high regeneration. Overall this package keeps us quite safe.
The damage is scaled entirely through Damage Over Time Multipliers, Damage Over Time and Physical Damage modifiers. We spread DoTs around, and things die. Very straight forward.
Passive Skill Tree
All our guides use Path of Building.
We have a simple guide for you that shows how to import the build into Path of Building, you can find the guide here(Path of Building Guide)”:https://www.poe-vault.com/guides/path-of-building
Path of Building
You can find the PoB here: https://pobb.in/K1erZ4V4vLNy
Ascendancy, Bandits and Pantheon
Major
Soul of the Brine King Immunity to Freeze and mitigates chill.
Soul of Abberath Provides immunity to burning ground and mitigates Ignite
Gear Summary/ TL;DR
Item Slot | Item Name | |
---|---|---|
Head | Rare ![]() |
|
Amulet | Rare ![]() |
Unique |
Chest | ![]() ![]() |
Rare/Unique |
Gloves | ![]() |
|
Boots | Rare ![]() |
|
Belt | ![]() |
|
Rings | Rare ![]() |
|
Weapon | ![]() |
|
Shield | ![]() |
Leveling
Unfortunately we cannot directly level our Champion with the skills the build is intended to play with. Most of them become available fairly early, but we sadly cannot access them until we are past Library as Gladiator does not get to have acces to all of these spesific toys. As a result, we level with physical damage skills until we can make the swap. Our choice here is, as will surprise nobody, Spectral Helix.