Dark effigy totems

After watching a streamer "ripping" through content with these I decided to try them out . They absolutely suck compared to most meta skills . It takes mucho dinero to get these totems to do any kind of damage . After spending several divines the build does barely passable damage . The gem is bugged , quality doesnt work , and it was recently nerfed for absolutely no reason. I could buy a decent armor shield and shield bash with zero investment and do more damage. Trust me all these people posting dark effigy builds. The essence drain , contagion is doing the work and the totems are doing mediocre damage. I had a pretty cool theorycraft where i would do unlimited poison stacks with splinter of loratta and weapon swap dark effigy totems in to shred the screen . But the totems by themselves just are not good

messed with he totems and your right, its far more efficient to curse for 20% increased chaos damage with the support gem that spreads the curse when mobs die.

essence drain contagion are the only skills that feel like they are at where they should be. hexblast was nice but now its a pointless skill.

Totems are additional damage in the build. They blast only those enemies who are affected by contagion already. if properly done, they kill eveything including pinnacles.

I know exactly how they work but since they were nerfed is anyone shredding pinnacle bosses with dark effigy totems , or more likely essence drain /contagion doing the real damage . I am using splinter of loratta on weapon swap to put a ton of poison stacks on bosses/mobs and in theory this should shred content but the totems damage on there own is really mediocre

I found the opposite. They didn't do the best damage, but they shred bosses.
I ran with two of them. Where they shine is when you need to keep moving. Whilst you have aggro, they do the dps. Sure Essence Drain is pumping more sheet dps but calculate all the projectiles from two dark effigys. It's more.
Perhaps you didn't have the best setup, perhaps you did. I don't know.

My only problem was the setup cost so much mana with +10 skills that I was always using my mana pot. When it ran out in a fight I was left lacking and waiting for recharges.

I'll be honest though, the mana issue was too much. I switched and sold my DE gear and went with storm mages and they do about the same dps with less +skills. I'm still missing about 75% more damage with mages on the max end.

I would like to see more chaos debuffs and less mana cost on DE builds. That would make it worthy.

was this before or after the nerf ? they had there crit cut in half and other stupid nerfs. And are u talking shredding endgame bosses or early campaign bosses. I have taken several hc builds to maps in the last month and im telling you dark effigy totem damage is abysmal compared to any real damage meta skill and im willing to bet that any real endgame pinacle boss damage being done is mainly coming from essence drain not these totems

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Kennypowerz2000#8892 wrote:

was this before or after the nerf ? they had there crit cut in half and other stupid nerfs. And are u talking shredding endgame bosses or early campaign bosses. I have taken several hc builds to maps in the last month and im telling you dark effigy totem damage is abysmal compared to any real damage meta skill and im willing to bet that any real endgame pinacle boss damage being done is mainly coming from essence drain not these totems

After nerf. So I couldn't grade it in comparison.
I was talking about end game bosses. It was no serpent speed or anything, but faster than my minion build.
I wouldn't compere it to a meta build, as they are broken OP AF right now. Plus they are meta for that reason. I only grade it on safety and a fair speed to kill.

To talk about stats (from POB so take accuracy with a pinch as I found it's a hit and miss with POE2 as they are still developing it for that) I can tell you I had it pushing 5.5k hit dmg per projectile. 2.93 attacks a second. 4 projectiles. 2x totems. That puts it at just under 64k dps per totem. Obviously there is setup time so you can take out a percentage for that. Also consider the setup requires your chaos debuffs so you do get the benefit of ED/Cont/poison doing it's share as part of the setup. It's also dependent on how many Wither stacks you are getting to stick consistently.

Now this isn't crazy, it's nowhere near meta, but it's still more than good enough for all content. That being said, the mana issues made it intangiable for me personally. I do like the idea and if mana wasn't an issue (I couldn't fix it with my gear as it was all bought for many divines and I don't run high life so had no way to bump the 6% of life without a full gear rebuild) then I would have enjoyed it more.

Dark effigy is near half my damage on bosses for my ed c lich

Also incredible for rituals, I can just fire off one combo and wait for everything to die

well it seems to be a hard cap of projectiles or it's not working the way it should. I use all the proper auras, despair , withering. I have withering effect on jewels. My dark effigy is 6 socket. The plan was too use splinter of loratta with caltrops to put 20+stacks of poison on bosses/mobs. But there seems to be a max limit of projectiles per second. Because according to the reading on the skill 20 stacks of poison should do twenty times the damage of a normal dark effigy build. But it doesn't seem to work that way . Throw in the clunkiness of the build. The squishyness of the totems. The dps not showing correct on console . Im over it .Scratch it off my list of original ideas to try

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Kennypowerz2000#8892 wrote:

well it seems to be a hard cap of projectiles or it's not working the way it should. I use all the proper auras, despair , withering. I have withering effect on jewels. My dark effigy is 6 socket. The plan was too use splinter of loratta with caltrops to put 20+stacks of poison on bosses/mobs. But there seems to be a max limit of projectiles per second. Because according to the reading on the skill 20 stacks of poison should do twenty times the damage of a normal dark effigy build. But it doesn't seem to work that way . Throw in the clunkiness of the build. The squishyness of the totems. The dps not showing correct on console . Im over it .Scratch it off my list of original ideas to try

Poison stacks shouldn't cause extra Effigy projectiles, right? Poison is an ailment not a debuff. In other words, chaos DOT ailment damage, not chaos DOT debuff damage.

Effigy only adds extra projectiles per chaos damage over time debuff, which poison is not. Essence Drain and Contagion are choas DOT debuffs, which cause Effigy to shoot extra projectiles. Are there other chaos DOT deduffs besides these?

Curses linked with Decaying Hex don't seem to cause Effigy to increase projectiles either, as far as I can tell. If true, makes sense though as the Keyword "debuff" is missing from support description. In other words, Decay is just simply chaos DOT damage.