So Poet's Pen is ridiculously popular now and one build that seems to have made its mark is the VD/bodyswap which I find incredibly inefficient if you look at the casting cycle.

The base cooldown on poet's pen is 0.25 seconds or 4 casts per second per skill. With a 20% cooldown belt and 15% cooldown boots, you can get this up to about 5.4 casts per second. For the purpose of this example, we'll assume you have no cooldown gear.

Dual-wielding will cast the skills socketed in each wand in the socket order at the same time. Wand 1 = VD + 2 supports. Wand 2 = Unearth + GMP + bodyswap.

So assuming you're in the boss room or in your hideout and you have 4 attacks per second, the cycle would look something like this:

Attack
Failed VD casting attempt since there are no corpses.
Unearth (5 corpses)
Attack
4 corpses consumed for VD (with helm enchant)
Bodyswap (1 corpse consumed)

That's it. That's your cycle in a boss room. It means every cycle starts with no corpses meaning VD is missing out on a ton of damage. This is exacerbated when you introduce cooldown as you start to miss out on more damage per second. The same thing will happen on your first casts near new monster packs until you get aided by the map monster corpses to sustain your VD casts.

So with that in mind, the most efficient way of going about it is to either remove bodyswap while bossing which would drastically increase your VD damage (basically double it). Your cycle would be like this:

Attack
Failed VD casting attempt since there are no corpses
Unearth (5 corpses)
Attack
4 corpses consumed for VD
Unearth (5 corpses)
Attack
4 corpses consumed for VD
Unearth (5 corpses)
Etc (no going back to attack #1)

Or increasing your attack speed enough to cast both unearth and bodyswap 4 times per second (around 8 attacks per second (10.8 with 35% cooldown) which is a pain to invest in when you could be getting raw damage for VD).


For mapping you can use a second set of poet's pen with an actual non-corpse spell + lightning warp/reduced duration/swift affliction. It's faster than bodyswap and doesn't require a corpse.

Just thought I'd put this out there because most of the Poet's Pen builds I see on forum are trying to do everything at once without considering the numbers.

This post was edited by CMBurns on Apr 17 2018 01:52pm

Thats good thinking.

what skills would you rec. for the dmg pen?

cooldown huh? I see Jay Wilson works for GGG now

If you mean the non corpse-based map clear setup, there are several that are quite effective, depending on the damage type you have the most mods for. If you're going fire, Fireball paired with lightning warp in the offhand is really effective. Arc is great for lightning. I tried both and it clears t16 trash no problem.

What? No 6.66?

VD poet's is a boring build anyway, poet's pen discharger which is way more fun

hadn't thought about using lwarp to move through maps though

summon skellies + dark pact was funnier to play imo

pretty sure most people are already well aware of this, and don't use body swap for bossing.
I find gc to be nice as it provides some slow down.

It also does matter the order you put the gems in.

This is a Tommy post?