TbXie's Poison Blade Vortex Assassin Gear, Jewels & Flasks (PoE Necropolis)

March 24th, 2024, 22:42

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
Amulet	Replica Dragonfang's Flight
Chest	Kintsugi
Gloves	Asenath's Gentle Touch
Boots	Rare Boots with 30% Movement Speed, high Life & Resistances
Belt	Stygian Vise or Heavy Belt with a lot of resistances & a benchcraft
Rings	Ideally 2x Ming's Heart – Optionally a single rare to fix attributes/resistances
Weapon	1x Cold Iron Point
Shield	1x Replica Mistwall

Armour Pieces

Helmet

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 or any of your other spells. Due to the 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.

#% increased Duration of Ailments while Focused (30+ Ideally)

Body Armour

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.

Gloves

You’re using Asenath's Gentle Touch here to enable explosions. Since you’re converting your damage to chaos, they will get scaled by all of your damage with helps your clearspeed tremendously. Get a pair with Despair on hit once you can afford it as it will greatly boost your damage in combination with your anoint.

Boots

Second item on our list of Rare Items! Ideally , since we play an Assassin and we like to be fast, we really want to find high Movement Speed and Life.

#% Increased Movement Speed (25+ but ideally 30)
+# to maximum life (at least 75)
+# to Elemental Resistances (enough to cap)

Belt

This is a very versatile slot. I opted to suggest you a Stygian Vise but a 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.

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

Example Belts

Accessories

Amulet

Replica Dragonfang's Flight with a +3 to Blade Vortex gems roll is generally incredibly hard to beat. They’re usually pretty cheap so it’s nice to be able to fetch this item and be happy with it.

Anoint

As of 3.13, Serpentine Spellslinger is by far the best anoint we can pick up before getting corrupted Asenaths. Once you have the double-curse on the gloves, swap to Whispers of Doom.

Rings

In an ideal world, double Ming's Heart is the BiS. However, these come with downsides. You’ll put a lot of pressure on your other pieces of gear cause they don’t have resistances or attributes. If you can fix both of those problems, double Ming’s is incredibly potent.

Weapon

This is another unique slot. The 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.

Before getting the Asenath’s Gloves, Obliteration could fix your clearspeed as a placeholder for a while.

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. 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.

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 (Impala, Assuaging,…). 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 of the Impala
2	Divine Divine Life Flask of Assuaging
3	Chemist’s Diamond Flask of the Cheetah
4	Chemist’s Stibnite Flask of the Kakapo
5	Chemist’s 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
n jewels.*

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 we can probably manage by listing the things you want just here.

First of all, there’s a potential 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. Additionally, #% chance to Evade while affected by Grace is nice.

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 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 with Haemorrhage & Overwhelming Malice as it also enables you to pick up a Small Cluster Jewel so you can get a Towering Threat notable for more AoE & Life!