Velyna's Herald of Agony Champion (PoE Necropolis 3.24)
Introduction
An absolute beast for endgame bossing, this Herald of Agony build synergizes with Storm Rain to hit high levels of damage and survivability. Storm Rain’s hit rate stacks Virulence with ease and gives massive sustain through Life Gain on Hit, while still allowing mobility. Not the fastest mapper but clears near anything, I have personally completed wave 30 simulacrum with him.
Below is a video guide I made for Youtube. This is a good place to start and goes over gearing as well as Pros/Cons. The PoB’s and guide may be more current so make sure to check!
Overview
Pros
✔️ Insanely Durable – Don’t worry about taking a hit. Fortify, spell suppression, tons of ailment avoid and near-instant life recovery will keep you healthy. Just make sure Storm Rain is hitting things for Life Gain!
✔️ Highly Automated – Nearly everything we use is triggered. Storm Rain, Convocation, and Flame Dash are the only buttons besides flasks.
Cons
❌ Leaguestart Transition – The finished build cannot be played without uniques, so I have provided a PoB to leaguestart as Poisonous Concoction. It farms smoothly and the transition is not hard.
❌ The Agony of Herald – There are a few situations where HoAG can be annoying, it may not always attack what you want it to and can get blocked by terrain. It is ultimately a minion build although it barely feels like one.
How Does it Play?
Just dodge and shoot arrows while things die around you! All you have to do is keep Storm Rain centered on mobs and the build handles the rest. As you hit and stack the Virulence buff, your minion will increase in power until it mows down multiple packs with one AoE.
Damage and Defensive Scaling
The best way to scale damage is by raising your Virulence cap, or increasing the level of the Herald of Agony gem. Medium cluster jewels with Pure Agony each raise the virulence cap by 5. Minion damage and minion attack speed also add damage
Defense layers include Fortify and stun immunity from ascend, insane life gain on hit, spell suppression and elemental ailment avoidance. If you have storm rain fully stacked it is possible to tank some serious damage.
Resources
Crafting and Upgrading for Beginners
Using this Guide
All the info required to hit endgame is contained in this guide or the Path of Building imports.
Pobs and Skills
Gear
Ascend and PantheonThe build is designed to work through stages, explained next to the imports. The same page contains leaguestart tips and gem setups for leaguestart and endgame.
The gear page contains info about the endgame setup, links to help you search for items, and sometimes crafting tips as well.
Leaguestart
- My Leaguestart PoBs go step-by-step to place your talents during act 1-10.
- There is also an act-by-act guide for which gems to use, you can find it on the Skills page.
After the campaign get your lightning/cold/fire resistances to 75 and get life on every slot. You can wear a blue ring if it has life and resistance, that’s fine. Also start shopping for uniques.
The leaguestart is meant to grind out immediate upgrades in early maps, some builds can push into reds immediately and some not. Grind where you are cozy while upgrading.
When you can easily farm low maps, start looking to buy items for the next stage.
Midrange/Transition
Some builds require a transition stage because levelling with our desired skill is not viable. If transitioning is required there will be a list of items to gather before doing it, and then you build towards the next PoB like always.
You will probably unlock most of your atlas while gearing out this stage, so don’t be afraid to spend on incremental upgrades. The faster you kill monsters the faster you make money.
Midrange will add more expensive uniques and any build-defining items. Usually not much crafting yet, but all rares should have the required life/resists/attributes plus good other mods. Flasks should also be decently rolled.
Check the gem setup in PoB, it usually changes slightly from leaguestart.
Endgame
Pushing past the final atlas bosses and into the post-campaign content, this is where you add those final millions of DPS to finish off the build.
Upgrades will become more expensive overall, and may require some basic to intermediate crafting. If a difficult craft is required, instructions will be given on the Gear page of the guide.
The cost of this stage is different for every build and changes with every patch. If a build is generally very cheap or very expensive I will mention it in the Pros/Cons section.
