The Shattered Spirits Curse Spell Desecrator

T800+, innit.

Introduction

Pushing tiers is one of the main objectives of Chronicon's endgame. Only a handful of builds across all classes are suited for that task, and most of them rely on specific item and rune synergies to obtain that status. For instance, the Templar's Hammerdin works because of the synergy between Caine's set and the Blazing Hammers rune. Likewise, the Warlock's Plague Mage build would be a lot weaker if it weren't for the set's great synergy with the curse spell package. Obviously, this doesn't take away from those builds' endgame viability, but it does lock them into certain setups and puts a very clear ceiling on their capabilities.

The Desecrator build is very interesting in that regard; the set is very much viable for pushing even without relying on specific item or rune synergies, because a lot of its power comes from its own mechanics. That being said, if there -was- a setup which could add to the Desecrator's own strengths, its endgame capabilities would skyrocket. The build that I'm about to elaborate on is just that - an attempt to combine the Desecrator with the curse spell package, which just so happened to work out.

Introducing: the Shattered Spirits Curse Spell Desecrator.

Equipment

In the following 2 sections, I will go over the setup I'm currently using. After that, I will go more into depth about certain choices and potential optimisations, but if you are simply looking for a competent build without having to worry about any details, feel free to ignore everything after that.



Crown of Innate Probability is everything this build could ever ask for, bundled into one item. Not only does it provide 20% to Damage Reduction, it raises the proc chance of Desecration, Outbreak and Corpse Shatter to 100%. The latter is required to make the Shattered Spirits setup work in the first place, which makes this item irreplacable.

Murmur is a legendary helmet which increases the duration of all curse spells by 300%. This translates to a x4 damage multiplier in combination with the Death Speaker rune, which makes it an incredibly useful rune for this slot. That being said, using Murmur over Life Guard leaves this build with only 79,5% Damage Reduction, so unless you can get your Vestige's barrier to at least 1,5M points, I'd recommend using Life Guard instead.



Cosmic Cape is our main source of base damage. Mana stacking also provides great synergy with Ring of Pure Energies and Vestige of Lost Souls, both of which this build uses. Regarding the mana conversion rate, I'd recommend having at least 1,5M points worth of barrier, preferrably 2M once you get past T600. Dealing damage requires the character to be alive, so survivability should always take top priority.

The Anomalous Rune of Shattered Spirits is one of the namesakes of this build. Here's the theory behind using this rune: once the first monster is killed, Outbreak will spawn Spirit of Torment on every surrounding monster. Those spirits - thanks to the mastery perk Chilling Haunts - will then apply Bone Chill to those monsters and kill them. This will trigger Corpse Shatter, which will then spawn 2 additional Spirits of Torment. Those spirits will haunt another enemy, apply Bone Chill, kill it, trigger Corpse Shatter, spawn new spirits etc. Ideally, the Warlock would only have to kill the first group of enemies on a map, and the spirits will take care of the rest. While this is certainly gimmicky, it is also an incredibly potent strategy, as Outbreak and Corpse Shatter (and therefore Spirit of Torment) scale with monster HP. Putting aside the first group of monsters, your anomaly clearing speed would remain the same in a best-case scenario, whether it be at T600, T800, T1000 or something far beyond that. Of course, it doesn't always work out that way, but when it does, it will be more than worth it.

The +Poison Damage gems are used because our power skills feed off of Blood Curse's and Flesh Rot's damage, which are both poison skills.



Star of the Pure in combination with Vestige of Lost Souls drastically increases our survivability.

The Anomalous Rune of Splitting Throws makes our main attack skill Screaming Skulls spawn additional skulls. Since one of our main sources of damage is stacking Desecration Weakness, it is important to put those stacks on enemies as quickly as possible, and this rune helps a great deal with that.



With Crown of Innate Probability being a must-have for this setup, using Desecrator's Face becomes unfeasible. Therefore, the other 3 set items have to be used to obtain the ability to stack Desecration Weakness, Desecrator's Work being one of them.

The Anomalous Rune of Putrefying Poisons is needed in combination with the Death Speaker rune to stack Blood Curse and Flesh Rot without actually having to use those skills. Plague and Affliction both have DoT effects and therefore cast one of each stack on monsters in set intervals. This makes it possible to spam Screaming Skulls while simultaneously accumulating curse stacks.



Much like Desecrator's Work, this item is required to obtain the set bonus.

Vestige of Lost Souls is a true legendary armor which drains 15% of the Warlock's maximum MP every 5 second to generate a barrier based on the drained amount. This rune is the sole reason this build can facetank bosses and large groups of enemies. And since that is the most efficient way to play a Desecrator, this one is another must-have.



The last item that's required to obtain the set bonus.

Death Speaker is a true legendary staff which makes all curse spells that do not have a DoT effect deal bonus damage based on the remaining damage of DoT-based curses. The former refers to Curse of Terror, Curse of Woe and Curse of Reckoning, while the latter would include Blood Curse and Flesh Rot. Apart from the Desecration Weakness stacks, this is one of the build's main strategies for generating high damage output.



Stormchasers makes using the Twister enchantment on the weapon worthwhile. When the Warlock is surrounded by at least 5 enemies, it becomes quite easy to maintain 15 twisters at all times (even without speccing into Critical Hit Chance). This makes the item an almost guaranteed 300% bonus damage provider.

The Anomalous Rune of The Sentry synergizes with the curse stacking skills Plague and Affliction. With this rune, it is possible to maintain the maximum amount of 4 Plagues. It is also possible to maintain 2-3 Afflictions, which translates to an additional 2-3 curse stacks per second.

The Interrupt enchantment is extremely important because it gives the Warlock a chance to avoid taking damage. 5% might not sound like much, but considering the attack rate of this build, Interrupt is very easy to proc.



Ring of Pure Energies increases our MP by 200% and is therefore beneficial to both Cosmic Cape and Vestige of Lost Souls. And really, that's all there's to it; its bonuses to damage and barriers make it a better choice than any other ring for this build.

Death's Bond is a legendary ring which automatically casts Curse of Terror, Curse of Woe and Curse of Reckoning once per second so long as one of these skills is on the Warlock's skill bar. This rune provides three instances per second which benefit from Death Speaker's damage bonus, and rounds out the curse spell package.

Skill & Mastery Point Allocations

Since Blood Curse and Flesh Rot are automatically applied, there's no need to waste skill points on either of them. Plague is maxed out to allow 4 Plagues to be up at the same time. Infection and Bursting Boils are maxed out because 34 skill points have to be spent to get to Infected Spirits. While the difference between rank 1 and rank 3 Infection (or Bursting Boils) is negligible in the grand scheme of things, it is technically more damage, so this is where the extra points get dumped. Affliction for additional curse stacks and to get access to Fueled By Disease, which is crucial for getting to that 9-frame attack animation. 3 points into Outbreak for obvious reasons, and of course one point into Infected Spirits to make Outbreak trigger Spirit of Torment.



Ritual of Tongues being maxed out is expanded on in the build analysis. Corpse Shatter and Spirit of Torment make the build, so they are obviously maxed out. Maxing out Frozen Veil is an easy pick for increasing survivability ever so slightly. I decided to spend the remaining 2 points needed to get to Lich Power on Cold Death; Bone Chill and Death's Breath don't affect damage output, while the Murmur rune does provide a 10% chance to cast a random curse on an attacker - which could be a frost skill, in which case Cold Death would trigger. Lich Power for survivability reasons.



For this build, the 10% bonus to Damage Reduction is the only useful option on this tree.



Screaming Skulls is used over Hand of Death because it generates ~9-10 times the Desecration Weakness stacks, which far outweighs the benefits of having Hand of Death stacks for Death Speaker. You can either max out on both Undeath and Vampirism and only put one skill point into Screaming Skulls, or max out on Screaming Skulls and only put one point each into Undeath and Vampirism. I decided to go for the latter, because HP and Health On Hit matter very little with this build. And once again, even though it is pretty much negligible, maxing out on Screaming Skulls does technically lead to a slightly higher damage output. A single point into The Dark Side to cap Overpower, and obviously 3 points into Desecration. Only one point into Soul Feast because the build doesn't care about healing very much. Two points into Shadow Armor to cap out resistances. 5 Points into Ritual of Banes to increase survivability; even though curse spells make up most of the damage, the skills which the Warlock actively uses are mostly bane spells. One point into Sudden Death because it effectively reduces monster HP by 15%. And finally, one point into Masochism, maxed out Dark Pleasure and one point into Dark Souls, because there's 5 skill points left and this way, some more damage can be added.



Taint and Death Chill are maxed out to increase the proc chance of both Outbreak and Corpse Shatter to 100%. Ice Gibs would raise Corpse Shatter's damage by 100%, which in turn would raise Spirit of Torment's damage by 100% when caused by Corpse Shatter. However, the first batch of spirits will very likely be spawned by Outbreak, which is why I picked the Angered Spirits perk over Ice Gibs. Spirit of Torment Synergy could be replaced with Corruptor Focus; the former plays into the gimmick, while the latter improves the Warlock's own damage output, so really it's down to personal preference. Ritualistic Occultism synergizes with Ritual of Tongues, which I will touch on later. Ritual Affinity was chosen on the Demonologist mastery over the Reaper mastery because this way, one more point can be refunded from the Pyromaniac perk. Only one point into Deathblow, because this build has such a fast attack rate that a higher chance to trigger Sudden Death is irrelevant. Instead, it makes much more sense to put an additional 14 points into mana. Speaking of which, all excess points should obviously go towards the Mana perk in the Class Mastery.



Finally, this is what the skill bar looks like. The scrolls and codex on RMB are Soul Warp for mobility, the ones on SPC are Lightning Wyrms for pulling enemies.

Hardcore Viability

To be perfectly honest, I have yet to play this build on Hardcore. However, I do have a Softcore character at M2100+, that uses this setup exclusively and has yet to die. Things that are dangerous to this build are enemies with Flailing or Blizzard affixes and the Bazzda bossfight. As long as you're careful around those enemies, you shouldn't run into any problems with your HC gameplay.

Build Analysis

First of all, let me address the elephant in the room: This build only has 22% Critical Hit Chance. This is due to the mechanics of the Death Speaker rune. Curse of Terror, Curse of Woe and Curse of Reckoning only gain the damage bonus -after- a critical hit. An example: Let's assume that the base damage of the aforementioned skills is 1M each. Let's also assume that the current Death Speaker bonus is 1T damage and that our Critical Hit Damage stat is at 200%. If Curse of Terror performs a critical hit, the 1M points of base damage would be affected by the Critical Hit Damage multiplier and go to 2M. After that, the 1T bonus damage from Death Speaker would be applied, meaning that a critical hit would deal 1,000002T instead of 1,000001T points of damage in this case. This is too little of a difference to justify rolling Critical Hit Chance over something like Overpower or Mana enchantments. The only reason to spec into Critical Hit Chance would be to obtain a bigger bonus from Stormchasers, but that is unnecessary when 5-6 enemies is all it takes to have 15 twisters active.

However, this raises another question. Having 5-6 enemies around at all times isn't much of a problem in Random Anomalies, but what about Dungeon Anomalies, where there's a boss fight at the end of each dungeon? As it turns out, boss fights are indeed extremely inefficient with this build. Not only because of our lack of twisters, but also because Shattered Spirits - one of the build's greatest assets against large gatherings of enemies - is borderline useless there. At the same time, Shattered Spirits is still useful in the first 3 rooms of a dungeon, so what's the best solution to this problem? The answer is quite simple: gear swapping. Once the Warlock gets to the boss room, some items can simply be swapped out for ones which are a better fit for a boss fight.

For starters, let's get rid of the Shattered Spirits rune. Since this build has a Greater Rune slot available, Tongue of the Deceiver is a great option to increase damage output by another 50%, seeing how curse spells are this build's main source of damage. Switching to a Cosmic Cape with the Deceiver rune on it just before a boss fight makes a lot of sense.
That leaves the issue with Stormchasers, which is much harder to resolve. For starters, it is necessary to know how the amount of twisters correlates to the Critical Hit Chance at 340% Attack Speed. In testing, it seemed as if every 20% added to Critical Hit Chance increased the average number of twisters by 4. At this build's base value of 22%, there was an estimated 4 twisters on average, 8 at 42% and 11-12 at 62%. Of course, this is in no way based on empirical evidence, but rather a case of occasionally checking the number of Stormchasers stacks during a boss fight and going "Yeah, 4/8/11-12 seems about right." at the end. Either way, having Stormchasers boost the damage by only 80% is unacceptable, especially when that bonus is additive with other damage bonuses. With that in mind, there's 2 ways to potentially fix this.

One, reroll the Mana enchantments on Crown of Innate Probability and Desecrator's Touch for Critical Hit Chance ones. This reduces the Warlock's MP - and therefore damage and barrier strength - in return for increasing Stormchasers' buff to 220-240%. Unfortunately, there's no other feasible way to increase Critical Hit Chance, which makes it impossible to consistently get an even bigger buff, but it's already a much better look than 80%.

Two, abandon the idea of using Stormchasers entirely, which would allow for a plethora of changes. First of all, Twister could be rerolled to Enrage. Enrage may have an even lower chance to trigger than Twister, but only needs to be triggered once every 5 seconds, whereas Twister needs to be triggered as many times as possible within 3 seconds. The extra attack speed then translates to extra damage. Second of all, with Twister gone, there is no longer any need to run Stormchasers. Instead, Hydrascale Boots and even Battle Boots become very attractive options, though the latter make the build a bit clunky. Third of all, thanks to that new pair of boots, it is now possible to drop Lich Power while still maintaining the same amount of Damage Reduction. This frees up a skill slot, which is where Ritual of Tongues would come into play. Fourth of all, Enrage affects the breakpoints for Attack Speed. With the build currently sitting at 340%, it is possible to replace 2 +Attack Speed gems with something else, like +Damage gems. And fifth of all, with all the previous changes in place, this build has slightly higher Damage Reduction and MP stats than the Stormchasers version. It could therefore get away with slightly weakening its barrier. That woud mean upping the mana conversion rate on Cosmic Cape, which would then translate to even more damage. This is optional of course, but definitely a valid choice.

So, where does that leave us?

Setup Against Bosses & Conclusion

The maths behind comparing the 2 versions is somewhat convoluted, so I will spare you the details. Just know that the average damage output is roughly the same for both versions, "average" meaning that it's entirely dependent on Twister RNG. I personally value consistency a lot. Therefore, I went with the Enrage build, which could look something like this:



Same item, except for the rune. I just left the mana conversion rate at 50%.



Different gems because of swapping to Enrage. I picked one +Critical Hit Chance gem to make doubly sure that Enrage is always active. Using another +Damage gem instead is also fine.



Same item, except for the epic enchantment which is now Enrage instead of Twister.



Hydrascale Boots over Stormchasers due to the abscense of Twister.



Ritual of Tongues over Lich Power for additional curse spell damage. The loss in Damage Reduction is mitigated by Hydrascale Boots as well as Ritualistic Occultism boosting the effect of Ritual of Banes. The use effect of Ritual of Tongues doesn't matter, so I changed my keybinding accordingly.

As you can see in the gameplay video, I also swap out the Spirit of Torment Synergy mastery perk for Corruptor focus before the boss fight. Seeing how Spirit of Torment is not really useful in this instance, the 25% damage bonus to Blood Curse and Flesh Rot is much more important. Everything else with regards to items and skill and mastery point allocations remains unchanged.

This concludes the guide. Now all that's left is for -you- to put this build together yourself, and then enjoy your endgame ride. Have fun!

[TMaz94]

Casting Soul Warp = Casting Soul Warp, doesn't matter if it's a codex or not. So yes, you still get the Evasion bonus.

And the only skills that matter damage wise are Flesh Rot and Blood Curse. Shadow/Frost Affinity don't interact with either of them and therefore have no value to this particular setup.

[Double Dark]

Does Soul Warp in a spell codex actually proc evasion? I don't see the reason to level this skill otherwise. I'm also working on figuring out why you don't have Shadow Affinity or Frost Affinity, but I'll assume there's some sort of Poison conversion rune.

[Double Dark]

Kinda early on in making a Warlock build and am liking Desecrator. Still got a long way to go to make anything close to this. For the early build I dropped Screaming Skull for Bone Storm and replaced Lich Power with Death Knight. I'm also wasn't the biggest fan of Spirit of Torment or Infected Spirits but I think I have enough mastery points to make them work now.

[nowhere man]

Oh thanks! That build looks fun. Thank you for sharing.

[TMaz94]

From what other people have told me, it seems to be more of an issue with my PC. Desecrator builds -can- get a bit laggy because they do so many attacks per second and the game has to calculate a lot of stuff; but apparently, it shouldn't be as bad as in the video.

[nowhere man]

Do you have an old pc or that slowdown is a technical issue from the game?

[HVS]

Thanks for the explanation, I think I'll try experimenting a bit to see if I can squeeze some damage in without reducing the survivability too much. Thank you for the guide, looking forward to your other builds.

[TMaz94]

@ HVS Glad you liked it!

The Death's Bond and Splitting Throws runes are irreplacable, and Shattered Spirits is almost like an instant-kill mechanic when it goes of. Running Ritual of Desecration makes no sense outside of boss rooms.

As for boss rooms, losing Ritual of Banes makes you take 48% more damage. If you try to mitigate that (e.g. by swapping out the Murmur rune on the helmet for Life Guard, or adjusting your mana conversion rate on Cosmic Cape to strengthen your barrier by 48%), those attempts usually lose you more damage than you could get back from the Desecration rune.

The only possible way is to run a glass cannon build, where you don't care about the loss in damage reduction and pray that you survive still. I haven't tried that yet because I wanted to make the build tanky for the purposes of the guide. Feel free to test the waters! Definitely a great alternative as long as you can stay alive.

[HVS]

Hello, I like your guide, but I have a question, do you consider ritual desecration rune to be good? Or is it too risky to use it?