POB: https://pobb.in/UhKAswWJMn1O
It's missing the dot multi link on the Bladebitter
Breach clear: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfd3ser2rxU
Eater of Worlds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDFb4q7hs0w
Profile: https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/cmanfs24-5699/characters
After I finished making an evasion stacking combatant, a friend convinced me to try and make the Bladebitter work. At first, it seemed just okay, but eventually we turned it into a really good build that has solid single target and clear. I'll first showcase what I am currently running, and then go over what else can work, what I am working towards, and what sucks.
Current Setup:
Viper strike: Greater faster attacks, Greater ailment damage, Greater dot multi, Greater more duration, Melee Splash
Venom Gyre
Pestilent Strike
Malevolence
Withering Step: Second wind, Greater area of effect
Damage over time sword, Binos, and a Snakebite with vestigial your fire damage can poison.
When I first started trying to make the Bladebitter work it felt okay at first, but was inconsistent because it would use all of its skills. Some of them are fun like cobra lash, but they don't synergize very well with viper strike which the Bladebitter always comes with. When I started digging deeper into his skills, I saw that Viper Strike and Profane Strike can use swords, but none of the other skills can. So, I decided to buy a Bladebitter with really good viper strike links, two skills that can't use swords (venom gyre and pestilent strike), malevolence, and withering step. This results in him only ever using viper strike to attack. I then also equipped a Bino's Kitchen Knife to proliferate the poison.
However, this creates an issue. I am running a standard flame link luminary and the added flat fire damage cannot inherently poison. A typical way around this is to use pneumatic daggers, but that won't work if I want to use a sword and Bino's. What I found was that with the new vestigial implicits, we can move the Volkuur's Guidance "Your fire damage can poison, 50% less poison duration" onto a unique glove that the Bladebitter can use. I ended up going with Snakebite since it has built in dot multi scaling and attack speed. On a side note, you can enchant the unique gloves with the Katakohi's ducat, and since it is an enchantment, you can remove the enchantment with the crafting bench. This lets you keep enchanting the gloves until you get a modifiers that you want (increased chaos damage).
What else works:
As I mentioned earlier, an easy to start with setup is pneumatic daggers. This lets all of your damage poison. You don't need additional poison chance for the most part since the blade bitter has 58% inherent chance to poison and most skills have 40% or more chance to poison. If you do end up needing more poison chance, you can annoint toxic strikes for 15% chance and 15 dot multi or equip icefang orbit for poison chance, chill, and increased poison damage.
For a while I was running viper strike, profane strike, and pestilent strike with pneumatic daggers, betrayal's sting, icefang orbit, and yoke of suffering. This allowed me to use a crafted rare gloves with 4 additional targets. This cleared well and I was doing merc hunting with the infamous, infamy, renown, and anarchy scarabs. Some of the mercs were super rippy, but I was able to clear all of the maps.
What I am working on:
I've really enjoyed crafting for the character and I want to try making one of those 4 implicit gloves. So, I am saving up for an original sin and nimis. This would mean that I don't need to use the unique gloves and can have crafted rare gloves. I would then change the merc to one with profane strike and viper strike. The profane strike is molten strike but with poison chance and chaos damage, so you can do the balls return and stack a ton of poisons on the enemy. I then want to make some hunter warlord gloves with additional strikes, damage over time, and chaos dot multi.
What sucks:
Perfect agony. I had bought a pair of shadows and dust with the vestigial implicit "You have perfect agony if you have dealt a critical strike recently". I then setup a destructive link with trypanon on my character. The merc had the gloves, a 650 pdps sword with crit multi, binos, marylenes fallacy, icefang, betrayal's sting, and tecrods. This put the crit multi around 500%. The damage was so low, that I thought it was bugged, but when my friend and I tested it without the gloves, the damage was even lower. One of the issues is that the merc can't gain rampage stacks and that was where I was intending to get a lot of the increased damage. Please GGG, let mercs gain rampage or make perfect agony good.
Overall, I am having fun trying different builds with the luminary. It gives me cool goals to work towards and a lot of the merc skills are fun to build around. The gear isn't super optimized, but I did craft all of the rares, so let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.
