I'm on my 3rd character now because I just can't stand dying to oneshot bullshit in 100+ scourge stuff. I think people are mostly figuring it out and checking with PoE Ninja the consensus seems to be: Armor + Determination (47% of league were running it on PoENinja list, lolz) + Molten Shell. Evasion is just dead. Velyna just posted a video about how she built up max spell suppression and then converted it to spell dodge and then went Iron Reflexes and she feels that it's just a much, much better spot than even having the almost 70% evasion she had before.
I expect another tune up patch this week since they're fixing the conflicting Scourge affixes and hopefully they at LEAST do something about the arc boys. Having a spell you can't physically dodge cast by 10+ mobs at once is just no good. Especially with their inherent cast time of 1.16 seconds. Get any cast speed modifiers on your map and you're looking to get stuffed real quick.
Checking the builds Reddit there are some pretty decent off the radar builds. Elementalists who can stack armor seem to be in a pretty decent spot. Watched some guy (BurningBarney on PoENinja) with his Wave of Conviction self cast Elementalist tear through a delirium red map without a scratch. His gear was decent, but it wasn't like HH and +4 socket chest crazy.
Champions are in fact the champions of the league atm with inherent Fortify being so fucking good this league especially for non-melee. Think they just edged out Sabs for top Ascendancy yesterday because it's just such a damage heavy league right now.
I think they want you to put like up to 20 points specifically into defense nodes to feel like you're in a good place and for most of us we just can't. Not because we can't, but because we don't want to. We've been programmed to mash every % damage we can into the build to make 10m dps into 10.5m dps. I think if they don't take Scourge mobs or the mechanic down a peg people are literally going to be building a base of defense and then just trying to scavenge dps after. This will actually lead to poor build diversity because you're going to have to stick to omega high effectiveness skills like Helix because you'll be limited in the amount of increased damage you can get from tree.
What they REALLY need is more hybrid damage/defense nodes like the block/attack nodes. Increased crit = your spell suppression is a nice mastery, but you're putting 4 points into pure defense to get that and some of the suppression nodes suck ass. I'd love to see more evasion/attack speed, crit chance/armour, or block/damage type nodes put in.
If you want to know how to make money just run T1 scourged maps over and over (cook em while you do em) and don't be a hero. Watch the "take X damage upon entering nightmare" mod. Elemental up to 10k is fine, Phys beyond 6k is almost certain death for most characters unless you time guard skills. If you manage to hit scarabs/fossils/essences per scourge rare, make sure to juice it until you can't for big payoffs. There's probably a point of diminishing returns with cook time I'd guess around Tier 5 scourge, but I don't have hard numbers. Even in a lvl 68 map with the right mods you can pull something like 20 essences, 15 scarabs, and/or 20+ tainted currency.
The only downside to running T1 maps is the rare scourged drops maps/influenced items mods afaik. You'll want to run those in red tier so a bit of a gamble there. My friend has me come in after he's run a T14+ scourged map with influenced items to scavenge all the wake-bait and jewelry. The good news is there's plenty of wisdom scrolls now to ID everything in the zone itself!
