Poison Blade Vortex Assassin Gear, Jewels & Flasks

TbXie

268

Summary – TL;DR

As per usual, nothing matters more than capping your Elemental Resistance before anything else. This means modifiers on gear are subordinate to Resistances as long as you’re not capped. Since you’ll be running a decent amount of Unique items, it’ll be important to look out for a lot of resistances on your rare pieces!

We’re providing you with an extensive analysis further down the page but chose to start off with an overview / recommendation.

Our recommendation:

Item Slot Item Name
Head The Devouring Diadem The Devouring Diadem
Amulet Impresence (Chaos) Impresence (Chaos)
Chest Kintsugi Kintsugi
Gloves Slink Gloves Slink Gloves with high Life, Spell Suppression & Resistances
Boots Two-Toned Boots with 30% Movement Speed, Spell Suppression, high Life & Resistances
Belt Stygian Vise Stygian Vise or Leather Belt Leather Belt with high Life Maybe Resistance or Flask Modifiers
Rings 1x Vermillion Ring Vermillion Ring – Life and Resistances – Attritbutes & a Circle of Nostalgia Circle of Nostalgia
Weapon 1x Cold Iron Point Cold Iron Point
Shield 1x Replica Mistwall Replica Mistwall

For crafting Rare items, you can check out all the affixes that can roll on an item base, depending on its level, influence, and many other factors, using our affix tool.

Armour Pieces

Helmet

The Devouring Diadem The Devouring Diadem is really important to the build. It allows you to reserve all of your Mana so you can use your Energy Shield to occasionally cast a Blade Vortex Blade Vortex or any of your other spells. Due to the Unleash Support Unleash Support, you don’t actually need to cast Blade Vortex all that often so you don’t need any other “sustain” than Diadem & Energy Shield Regeneration! It is important you get one with the tier 1 Ailment Duration modifier.

  1. #% increased Duration of Ailments while Focused (135+ Ideally)

You need to get one with an “Increased Reservation Efficiency” enchantment to one of your Auras in order to get all your Auras in. It does not matter which aura this is for, any of the 4 works.

Body Armour

Kintsugi Kintsugi is the BiS Body Armour when looking at survivability. It’s also not the most expensive of Body Armours, so it should be very acquirable! Due to the nature of the item and the way we built our character this helps you to not die when you occasionally get hit.

  1. +# to maximum Life (at least 72)
  2. #% increased Evasion

Gloves

Your first rare slot and as mentioned before this is where you want a lot of Resistances. Obviously, none of our pieces are acceptable without a nice Life roll and ideally, when you have some extra currency / luck to spend you would like them to be Slink Gloves Slink Gloves or a high Evasion rating item. Make sure to pick up Spell Suppression to reach cap too!

  1. +# to maximum Life (at least 75)
  2. +#% chance to Suppress Spell Damage (enough to cap)
  3. +# to Elemental Resistances (enough to cap)
  4. Total Evasion Rating on the Item

Gloves

Boots

Second item on our list of Rare Items! Ideally you want a pair of Two-Toned Boots as they provide up to 24% Additional Resistances which is really nice. Additionally, since we play an Assassin and we like to be fast, we really want to find high Movement Speed and Life.

  1. #% Increased Movement Speed (25+ but ideally 30)
  2. +#% chance to Suppress Spell Damage (enough to cap)
  3. +# to maximum life (at least 75)
  4. +# to Elemental Resistances (enough to cap)

Belt

This is a very versatile slot. I opted to suggest you a Stygian Vise Stygian Vise but a Leather Belt Leather Belt can also work. Just make sure you have a nice Life roll, some Resistance and ideally double flask modifiers. This makes it so much easier to always have Flasks up which is very vital to our build.

  1. +# to maximum Life (80)
  2. +% to Elemental Resistances (40)
  3. #% reduced Flask Charges used (16+)
  4. Crafted: #% increased Flask Duration


Accessories

Amulet

Impresence (Chaos) Impresence (Chaos) is a really solid amulet. It gives you a Free Despair curse which is a huge Damage multiplier, some Chaos Resistance, a Damage Reduction in Maddening Presence, Life, Chaos Damage and Chaos DoT! Overall, this necklace is heavily underrated and should be used more often for sure! Look for a nice Life roll more than anything.

Anoint

As of 3.13, Serpentine Spellslinger is by far the best anoint we can pick up. The 5% Chaos Resistance reduction as well as 8% DoT Multi is just ridiculously strong for a single anoint. Additionally, its super cheap of an anoint as well!

Rings

Depending on how good your gear is you can pick between a Resistance type ring (Such as Two-Stone Rings or Sapphire Rings for example) or the Vermillion Ring Vermillion Ring. Vermillion Rings are generally stronger if you can find enough Resistances on them / on other pieces of gear as they give you additional Life. Obviously, if you can’t find them with the correct Resistances, feel free to divert to Resistance bases.

  1. +# to maximum life (at least 70)
  2. +# to Elemental Resistances (enough to cap)
  1. +# to Intelligence (You need about 25-30 Intelligence on one ring to fix your attributes!)

I recommend using a Circle of Nostalgia Circle of Nostalgia for your second ring. While the implicit stats (which roll differently on each copy of the ring) can be beneficial (obvious upgrades that come to mind are Attributes, Intelligence, -Mana cost of Skills, …) the most important things to find here are Chaos Resistance while affected by Herald of Agony & Chaos Damage while affected by Herald of Agony. The Chaos Resistance is really nice since it counters the downside of your Coralito's Signature Coralito's Signature where as the Increased Chaos Damage is just a really big chunk of your damage.

Lastly, once you have all your stats and whatnot, I’m fairly certain you can be super fine mapping/bossing with a Ming's Heart Ming's Heart. This item DOES make yo ua significant amount squishier but it also gives you a ludicrous amount of damage in return for it. You can always test it out to see how it feels as I don’t expect it to be super expensive necessarily.

Weapon

This is another unique slot. The Cold Iron Point Cold Iron Point just is too good to pass up on. 30% more Damage from a Weapon is more than we can find on any type of rare so this item shouldn’t ever be replaced. Since it is generally relatively cheap outside of the first week of a League, you can try and find one with the implicit corruption “#% increased Damage over Time” which is a significant upgrade over the standard version.

Tip: Try to look for one that is corrupted with “#% increased Damage over Time” as that’s a lot better than the standard implicit which is critical strike chance.

Shield

Probably one of the coolest slots of the build! I’d love talking about this item for an eternity, but obviously no-one would want to read a wall of text about Replica Mistwall Replica Mistwall. The Replica version of a forgotten item really has showed us how good original Mistwall already could be. The Replica version however is one of the best Replica items that was released. Avoiding Physical Damage, 5% of the time approximately, on an item would probably make it usable by its self let alone getting a 54% Damage reduction against spells if you haven’t blocked Recently. Sure, this kind of gets diminished a bit by running Phase Acrobatics, but even with the “Less Block Chance” from Phase Acrobatics, this item is still insane. As a reference, if we remove it in PoB, we lose about half of our effective HP!

Flasks

I believe flasks are highly preference-based. One isn’t just outright better than another one for specific / certain builds. Obviously, sometimes, there’s a set in stone set of Flasks you should be using just because they synergize with your build so well. This build has a couple of those irreplaceable Flasks.

For starters, you can’t go without a Coralito's Signature Coralito's Signature. Ideally, you want one with 75% Increased Duration of Poisons cause as I mentioned before, Poison Duration scales your Damage quite nicely! Coralito’s gives you Perfect Agony during the effect though which accounts for half of your total Damage!

From here on out a lot of it is preference. I like running an Atziri's Promise Atziri's Promise though as it as nice Damage increase whilst offering 35% Chaos Resistance usually but since you pick up some Flask Effect nodes in the Passive Tree, it actually gives you 39% increased Chaos Resistance.

For your utility flasks, my recommended setup will have a Quartz Flask Quartz Flask, and a Quicksilver Flask Quicksilver Flask. I think a Quartz Flask fits the build very well as you’re trying to make sure to Dodge a lot and then survive the one shot if you get hit. Your last flask should most likely either be a Divine Life Flask Divine Life Flask as there’s not enough sustain to not run a Life Flask in this build.

Regardless of which utility Flasks you go for and whether you follow our recommendations or not, you’ll need to stick to the Suffixes we have picked for you (Staunching, Heat, Warding). The affixes on your non-unique Flasks can be changed around, but I recommend the following setup (based on the Flask duration, charges, and affix priorities):

Our recommendation:

Slot Flask
1 Chemist’s Jade Flask Jade Flask of the Impala
2 Divine Divine Life Flask Divine Life Flask of Assuaging
3 Chemist’s Quartz Flask Quartz Flask of the Owl
4 Atziri's Promise Atziri's Promise
5 Chemist’s Quicksilver Flask Quicksilver Flask of the Walrus

Be sure to check out our Flask Crafting Guide to learn everything you need to know about how to set up your non-Unique flasks.

Jewels

One of all your jewels needs to be corrupted with the “2% increased Reservation Efficiency of Skills” corruption! – This can be band-aid’ed with a cConqueror's Efficiency Conqueror's Efficiency while looking for a jewel.

Generally, I categorize these very nicely but since this build only picks up 2 Jewel Sockets and potentially an Abyssal socket through a Stygian Vise Stygian Vise we can probably manage by listing the things you want just here.

First of all, there’s a potential Watcher's Eye Watcher's Eye. Whereas it doesn’t add the most amount of Damage, it does give you huge Quality of Life. The modifier you’d like on it is “Damage Ailments you inflict deal Damage #% faster while affected by Malevolence”. It gives you about 10% DPS which is definitely not something to sniff at but it also makes it so your tiny Poisons that aren’t stacked will be killing monsters faster making it so you don’t have to wait for a second before stuff dies.

Otherwise, for your single jewel socket in the tree, you’re looking for a Jewel with #% increased maximum life and +#% to Chaos Damage over Time Multiplier. Those are by far your 2 most important stats. As a third stat you could go for stuff like “Increased Damage over Time”, “Increased Chaos Damage”, “Increased Damage” and so on but as long as you have the 2 most important stats, you’re good.

The Abyssal Jewel in the Stygian Vise Stygian Vise isn’t super big either for Damage. Make sure to buy one with at least 30 to maximum life and some “Global Critical Strike Multiplier”. These should be cheap and fulfill their role perfectly!

Cluster Jewel

If you are looking for the most optimal way to acquire your Cluster Jewels, or have any other questions whatsoever about them, such as how to craft or price them, we refer you to our complete guide on Cluster Jewels.

At very late game gear levels and high character levels it can be worth grabbing a Medium Cluster Jewel Medium Cluster Jewel with Haemorrhage & Overwhelming Malice as it also enables you to pick up a Small Cluster Jewel Small Cluster Jewel so you can get a Towering Threat notable for more AoE & Life!



Main Page / TL;DR

20
For any questions or support please join our Discord (PoE-Vault Discord)