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[Combat Routine] Ben's Totem Templar

B

benkoren

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Greetings.

I am releasing the CR I made over the last few days. Huge credit goes to pushedx and Apoc, who developed the Exile and ApocRanger CRs on which this CR is based. Now to the good stuff.

This CR is built around the 3 abilities:
  • Flame Totem
  • Frost Wall
  • Cold Snap

This CR works best when you have a lot of mana regen and a large mana pool. The more long-term mana throughput you have, the more damage you will do and the less damage you will take. I highly recommend running:
  • Ancestral Bonds
  • Clarity
  • At least 2 mana flasks
  • Reduced Mana on Clarity
  • Reduced Mana on Frost Wall

Goals
The Flame Totem can easily be switched out for any other totem, but the Frost Wall and Cold Snap logic is specific to those spells. The CR has a few goals:
  • Ensure we always have at least 1 totem up on our main target before we act defensively.
  • Ensure we always have enough mana to cast a totem. There should never be a scenario in which a monster is smashing our face and we are unable to cast a totem on them.
  • Frost Wall and Cold Snap are used defensively.
  • Act quickly. There's nothing worse than waiting to cast a totem on a monster in your face. This CR is very trimmed down in the interest of stability and efficiency.

Goals for the future:
  • Custom target priorities: place one totem on the ranged mobs and one on melee.
  • Totem hugging when life is threatened
  • Prioritize targets that are already in LOS and in totem cast range. This will solve e problem with the bot running into a pack of mobs to get to a yellow mob that happens to be out of sight.
  • Basic manual curse casting.
  • If no targets are in LOS but there is a mob within the totem cast range and one hop away, cast at the hop. (Effectively firing around corners with the totem)

Updates
If you are looking for bleeding edge updates, I've made the code repository available here: https://github.com/benkoren/BenTotem/tree/dev

Additional Builds
I am NOT going to tailor this CR for your specific build. I am making this to play my character the way I play it by hand - you should do the same for your play style. I am NOT an advocate of having one monstrous CR for all builds; it simply isn't tenable. If you don't like it, fork the repo.

With that, I hope you enjoy.

- Ben



Download
https://github.com/benkoren/BenTotem/releases/latest
 
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Thanks for the routine. Falls under the type of character I've wanted. I am curious though, can it work with ancestrial bond well or is it stuck to one totem only?
 
krone6 said:
Thanks for the routine. Falls under the type of character I've wanted. I am curious though, can it work with ancestrial bond well or is it stuck to one totem only?
Click to expand...
It is written with Ancestral Bond very much in mind. I have actually never run this routine without it. The logic is written such that there is always at least one totem on your target, rather than all of them. This means that if your char is bouncing between targets for any reason, it is much more effective at fighting at least 2 mobs at once.

Ben
 
Thanks alot for the effort you put into this CR, but would you be able to create a guide or a quick tutorial on how to setup this build? like BiS items, etc ?
 
I'm not going to lay out a full build guide - the PoE forums have a ton of good information on the subject. Posting a specific build on a bot forum with a game like PoE is a bad idea for obvious reasons; my vagueness is intentional. The main components to this build are a totem and frost wall. The totem could be any of them, but the default is Flame Totem.

Totem builds really do not have many gear requirements in general though. The only real deviation from that would be build/skill recommendations for making the bot run well overall. Rather than call them out directly and risk being targeted (this is a public forum), I'd rather leave this to be inferred.
 
benkoren said:
Yep, it'll work great with searing bond. Just change spellTotemSpellName on line 26 to searing bond.
Click to expand...

What about triple totem then? Seems it's built a lot smarter than I expected. I just didn't think it could handle such a spell. Oh, and I assume it curses if you use totems like flame totem or searing bond? I noticed Exile cursed on key monsters like an elite or boss which is fine since that's when I need it.
 
krone6 said:
What about triple totem then? Seems it's built a lot smarter than I expected. I just didn't think it could handle such a spell. Oh, and I assume it curses if you use totems like flame totem or searing bond? I noticed Exile cursed on key monsters like an elite or boss which is fine since that's when I need it.
Click to expand...
Triple totem will work well. Really the only situations the bot struggles (and hasn't been covered in the goals section above) is when mobs kill your totems faster than you can toss up a totem and a frost wall, such as the Arc casters in the Ebony Barracks. This is more of a downside of a totem build than it is the bot logic though.
 
How do you use Cold Snap defensively if you're running Ancestral Bonds? Through a trap? Do you use it to trigger Elemental Equilibrium?

EDIT: From looking at a noobs viewpoint at the code I assume through a trap.

This routine looks very interesting, going to give it a shot. Thanks for posting.
 
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j19 said:
How do you use Cold Snap defensively if you're running Ancestral Bonds? Through a trap? Do you use it to trigger Elemental Equilibrium?

EDIT: From looking at a noobs viewpoint at the code I assume through a trap.

This routine looks very interesting, going to give it a shot. Thanks for posting.
Click to expand...
I use it defensively through Cold Snap + Trap + Elemental Proliferation. No, I don't use it for Elemental Equilibrium. The problem with doing that is the cast time of Flame Totem - it's so fast that you wouldn't see a benefit.

Edit: Make sure you have ample mana regen for it to work well. If you have a small mana pool (perhaps through a high clarity level), you may want to give the dev branch a try. In there, I am trying loosening up the mana requirement before casting frost wall. I am liking it so far. Ideally your mana pool is large enough that you can pop two totems in a row and your regen is high enough that you can pop a new totem for every mob that dies plus some extra for walls. Personally I run a smaller mana pool than I like just to ensure I have a ton of regen. Also, it goes without saying, but some CoDT is always a good idea.

Edit 2: I know the title is Ben's Totem Templar, but the build just calls for anyone with ancestral bonds, not just Templars. Obviously this isn't just a Templar CR. In the future I might play around with some summoning logic. And possibly fire trap.
 
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On the dev branch, I've added some experimental targeting that is intended to prevent the bot from diving into a pack of mobs just to gain LOS on a yellow. I am doing some testing on this myself of course, but I'd appreciate some feedback on this if anyone can also test.

Edit: appears to be working exactly as intended. Still, feedback is always appreciated.
 
For those that tried to download the CR today and got an access denied message, it is fixed now. Please try again with the link main post.

Ben
 
I've been running it for a few hours now and I think it works really well. With Flame Totem that is, not so much with Searing Bond since stationary targets make the bot wait until the totem expires before creating a new one on the target. With Flame Totem it works really well however.

Then only odd thing I noted was a few times after running out of mana, the bot charged in and started melee fighting a couple of invasion bosses. Come to think of it I did have the Default Attack as a skill in the skillbar. Maybe that was the reason for the suicide attempt.

Will you add support for curses? I think that the clearing speed can be improved with the help of Flammability and HC survivability can be improved with Enfeeble.
 
yo, is there a way to make this routine use arctic armour? or would that have to be fixed in the exile.cs?
 
j19 said:
I've been running it for a few hours now and I think it works really well. With Flame Totem that is, not so much with Searing Bond since stationary targets make the bot wait until the totem expires before creating a new one on the target. With Flame Totem it works really well however.

Then only odd thing I noted was a few times after running out of mana, the bot charged in and started melee fighting a couple of invasion bosses. Come to think of it I did have the Default Attack as a skill in the skillbar. Maybe that was the reason for the suicide attempt.

Will you add support for curses? I think that the clearing speed can be improved with the help of Flammability and HC survivability can be improved with Enfeeble.
Click to expand...

Yes, curse support is on the to-do list. I'm. As for you diving into mobs in order to do a default attack, I haven't seen that because I don't have that on the skill bar. However, I can see why this would happen in looking at the logic. I'll get this fixed.

I know what you mean about Searing Bond. SB logic is a bit more tricky because you actually want to put your totem past. The mob, not just near it. I have played around with some code for doing this, but ended up running into too many issues with the bot trying to cast SB outside of reasonable bounds (into a wall, on an obstacle, etc). I. Other words, SB would require a bit more work.

Thank you for the feedback. It's definitely appreciated.

Ben


Edit: the default attack has now been removed in the dev branch. This should fix your issue. Please let me know whether or not this works for you.
 
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Any recommended build with this ? I was looking at the guys Templar Incinerate build on the official forums but I didn't think the bot could support that but it looks like its the same idea....
 
The popular Templar incinerate build is exactly what this CR is geared toward. The minor difference is flame totem vs Incinerate, but all of the logic is the same. The way he describes the use of Frost Wall and Cold Snap as being used to protect the totems is exactly what this CR tries to do.
 
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