u/CoulntFindGoodName

So i've not seen to many people talk about just how versatile the new huntress ascend actually is. Most of the focus seems to be on companion stuff or twister (which I just think is worse than abyss lich twister). I think this ascendency is very very strong for a generic projectile attack build because of the Stag ascendency nodes.

A lot of people seem to think that you need to travel a lot to get the vivid stampede to trigger but one you get the second ascendency node, you get a vivid wisp at the end of the stampede duration. The skill reads that when you attack, you consume all your yellow wisps and get that many stags in the stampede so this means that with the second node for the stag, you can essentially have at least one stag jumping around at all times so long as you're attacking quick enough after each stampede duration. So you'll have this thing jumping around, doing a good amount of dmg and applying big shocks. You can also save 3 wisps before you fight the boss and then try to hit them will all 3 stags for big overlap dmg. Another thing that they've not specified is how they interact with walls and with the secret free node that we get when we allocate a node for all 3 wisps. If this skill behaves similarly to shock nova of procession when being shot against a wall (with the stacgs just jumping in place until they've done 4 stomps) or depending on the behaviour of the stags with the secret node where they seek out enemies, it could be possible to have the stag aoe's dmg overlap multiple times on a boss or on a big pack and deal insane dmg and inflict shocks with massive magnitude. Overall, these two nodes seem very very strong for lightning skills.

My idea is that one could make a pretty good spear/bow build with this ascendency by taking 2 stag, 1 owl and one bear node with the secret node. This gives the additional damage reduction and life regen from the bear and the extra dmg and evasion from standing on the ground generated by projectiles empowered by the owl skill. My first idea is to just make a generic lightning spear build. Are there any other attack skills that could work well with the stags?

I'm very much looking to try to build around the new rf unique staff and while we don't have the patch notes I wanted to see which of the ascendencies would work best for this skill.

There are 3 main things I think we're looking to scale with this skill: aoe, minion dmg and minion command dmg if the command is actually good dmg for bossing (which seems to be the case from the showcase). The ascendacies that to me seem best for this purpose so far are abyss lich, regular lich, pathfinder disciple of varashta.

Abyss lich seems the most promising to me. This staff having huge reservation efficiency is crazy for abyss lich. The main thing we're using this ascend for is sacrificing skeletal arsonists with umbrel well to get massive aoe. With bones of ulr, darkness enthroned with the reservation efficiency we idol and some spirit investment, we could easily get 200%+ aoe or even 300% +. If we have too much aoe we could instead sacrifice frost mages for a ton of es. To scale the dmg we can use either the new minion dmg rolls on rings from the breach tree or evergrasping rings (with ci they have no downside), and the tree + jewels.

Disciple of varashta to me seems to be the second most interesting ascend for this skill. It allows us to get an extra minion lvl from a focus for more dmg and there is some very good synergy between the crow skill and the djinn. They're both essentially permanent minions that don't die and which benefit from minion dmg and minion command bonuses. If we can get the crows to crit, the sand djinn will provided a very good combo for bossing. We could also scale the dmg on the crow and the djinns with muster (but I could see it getting hit in the patch notes). The main thing this ascend lacks is aoe which could hurt it in the clear department. Thankfully it's probably one of the tankiest ascendencies in the game so it probably doesn't mind getting closer to rf mobs.

Regular lich seems good as well mostly by stacking mana to get more unholy might effect I.e extra dmg as chaos for the crows. Pathfinder is mostly interesting to me cuz of the speed. Being able to sprint around and not get heavy stunned with your rf makes up for the lack of aoe that other ascendencies provide for clear.

Do let me know if anything that I've pointed out here is wrong, if there's any other interaction that I've missed with these ascendencies or if there's some other ascendency that I'm overlooking.