3.1 Viper Strike Trickster(video guide)

Starforge is probably the best dps weapon to use outside of a GG rare. Other swords will work fine, and honestly i know claws or daggers would probably work better, but not by much. The great thing about starforge is it adds health, which we need massively in this build, and its insane dps is going to do work.


If you can get your health up without it on a chest, Dendrobate is the best in slot chest for dps. Cherrubim's is a good middleground and has good defensive stats, while Cospri's will allow us to dual curse. There's still flexibility here, but I would go with Cherrubim's until you have high enough health to run Dendro or Cospri's.



Same sort of thing again, all three of these helms are great, starkonja's provides more defensive stats, giving us health, while daresso's and rat's nest offer higher dps.



Impresence is awesome in this build. The defense of Maddening presence is phenomenal in those crazy abyss encounters and the damage is just awesome.


Our endgame goal with rings is to have steel rings with Deafening essence of envy crafts that round out our health/resists. master crafted chaos damage is a must for perfect GG rings, but keep in mind your defensive stats.


We want spiked gloves for that sweet melee bonus, and then just rounding out stats. attack speed is good, and flat phys is good, but again, health and resists take priority in this slot.


We don't need wed or anything else fancy on the belt, flask effectiveness/duration are good, but not necessary. focus on life and resists for the belt slot.


Boots are just there for life/resists/stats/move speed, in that order of importance.


My current gear:


We need our strength and intelligence to be at 155 for our level 20 gems(higher for level 21) so we need to round out our stats on gear to not waste points on the tree. My gear is nowhere near perfect at this point, but its enough to do red maps and farm up so that I can transfer into GG gear, and it gets my life (barely) over 5k.

Flasks:

Pretty self explanatory here. Panic flask, remove bleed/freeze, sin's rebirth and atziri's promise give us huge dps buffs, as well as a diamond flask. The roll's on these could be better, and I want a curse immune flask, but I've been focusing my efforts crafting on trying to get my steel rings going, so it's not a priority at this point. The build is working fine without these minor upgrades.

So depending on which chest you will use, there is some importance in where you place your links, if you're running dendrobate you want your single target in your chest and your clear in the sword, but if you're not it doesn't matter.

Single Target Viper Strike:
Viper Strike>Void Manipulation>Poison>Multistrike>Melee Physical Damage>Unbound Ailements
Clear Viper Strike:
Viper Strike>Deadly Ailments>MultistrikeMelee SplashAncestral Call>Unbound Ailements
Auras:
Haste>Blasphemy>Despair>Empower
If you're running Cospri's:
Haste>Blasphemy>Despair>Assassin's Mark(note: you need impresence for this to work!)
Other setups:
Cast When Damage Taken>Immortal Call
Ancestral Protector>Leap Slam>Fortify>Faster Attacks
Blood Rage
Ice Golem

https://pastebin.com/6GZBgw9d

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_ulSlSyuew

Now we all know why Starforge is good, I shouldn't need to explain it. But just in case:

No ele dmg...NO PROBLEM!
One of the highest reliable phys dmg bases in the game
Decent attack speed
%accuracy (after all we are going crit)
Life!!!!

So all in all, without super GG abyss jewels and being at the level cap, I see no reason not to use starforge.

So basically use edge of madness until you can get your hands on starforge, or you can use any good two handed sword with decent atk speed and crit if you can get it.

Ok ok, so slapping starforge on almost anything will be somewhat viable, but tell me Expo, what kind of dps are you cranking out here? Can't be that good, right?


Well....I mean it's nothing insane, but its pretty decent.



Now with Edge of madness I'm Basically doing about 3/4 of this damage, so at this point, as I said without way better jewels and lots of added flat phys/ele/chaos dmg on other gear, there's no reason to expend the effort when starforge easily breaks 1 million dps on viper strike when its not on shaper.

Obviously, we use lacerate as our map clear, and then we use viper strike for single target. The main point of the build is do some hits and then let poison do the work while you walk away. So far it's working out pretty good.

So what about the rest of the gear?

Wellllllll:



Rings:

End game BIS as I mentioned is going to be Steel rings essence crafted with Deafening Envy Essences. This can get pretty expensive. obviously what we want on the rings are:
% increased chaos damage
life
flat phys dmg
flat chaos dmg
resistances we need
stats if necessary.

Ok, so, about those stats I mentioned:

We need to hit 155 strength and 155 intelligence(especially if you're using dendrobate and want to push it as far as possible). But the main reason for this is for our gem requirements, and it's not easy to get that much strenght and int on the shadow tree. So that is something important to KEEP IN MIND.


on to jewels:



Flasks:


And now the moment weve all been waiting for:

Skill links:



Ok now we move on to ascendancy:



So we want swift killer first.

Second lab you'll get Patient Reaper.

Then we get walk the aether.

Last is obviously going to be Weave the arcane.


You can ALSO go assassin:



You'll want noxious strike first

Then get Unstable and then Deadly Infusion.

Finish out with Toxic Delivery.

These are very comparable DPS numbers. Again, its kind of up to you. I like the damage reduction and +max to both frenzy AND power charges of trickster, but its really up to you and your playstyle.

Skill tree:





This will get you up to level 85. From there it should be pretty simple to follow the pob, which i will include below with a level 100 tree.

Just note, the first thing you'll want to get after following the path ive laid out above will be acrobatics and phase acrobatics for higher level content, then you can fill out Vaal pact and life leech nodes, then finish off with the extra damage.

POB link:



For Bandit quest:

Help Alira or kill 'em all! Up to you, Alira is a great option, basically an extra jewel slot, but if you want the extra points thats good too.

So that's the build! If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to ask here, or send me a message. Hope you enjoyed!