An idea to make pestilence a poison, corpse, and bone build.
Pestilence Master’s Shroud
(2) Set:
- Each corpse you consume fires a Corpse Lance at a nearby enemy and Corpse Lance gains the effect of the Shredding Splinters and Ricochet runes.
(4) Set:
- Each corpse you consume reduces your damage taken by 2%, up to a maximum of 50%. Lasts 15 seconds. In addition each enemy hit with Bone Armor, Bone Spikes, Bone Spear, Death Nova - Bone Nova, or Corpse Lance - Blood Lance has a 10% chance to cast Bone Armor - Dislocation.
(6) Set:
- Each corpse you consume grants you a Splintered Bone charge that increases the damage of Bone Spear, Bone Spikes, Death Nova - Blood Nova, Bone Armor, Bone Spirit and Corpse Lance - Blood Lance by 1,000%, up to a maximum of 10,000%. Lasts 15 seconds. In addition, Corpse Lance, Corpse Explosion, Revive Minions, Command Skeletons, and Command Golem damage is increased by 5000%
This change provides twice the damage from Corpse Lance at 2 piece immediately with Ricochet, but also applies a slow to enemies triggering Bane of the Trapped and Krysbin’s. This would also be the first poison ability, but you could override the poison by selecting something else (such as the Blood Lance rune) when you put this on your bars.
It provides the same survivability buff, but will also allow for a 10 stack of Bone Armor to be accrued without the need for Bone Armor to be on your bars, for a further 30% DR (which is much needed).
The free Bone Armor dislocation will also aid in providing Krysbin’s stunned enemy procs, as well as a 2nd type of poison damage (Corpse Lance being the first unless you put a non-poison version of it on your bars).
Then we get the major damage buffs. Rather than a single 3300% Bone Spear (I believe this stacks to 50 for 175,000%) you would get a 10,000% bonus to all casts of all bone abilities, creating much needed flexibility when using this set.
This will be combined with a flat 5000% damage bonus to corpse abilities (counting skeletons and golems as corpses in this case), which would for instance give your corpse lances a 10,000 * 5,000% damage boost (500,000%)
Being that this is essentially about 125% more than a single Empowered Bone Spear, it’s not actually as overpowered as it might seem (and obviously the numbers can be tweaked), but it would apply to everything and with enough corpses (Land of the Dead for instance), this could absolutely wreck.
The best part about these changes is that we can run pet/minion builds, simulacrums, cold, poison, or physical, bone nova and the benefits apply to all of them.
You could even run a primary attack build using Bone Spikes and gain the damage bonus with the free cast Nova’s with that.