u/amitfris

Hey guys,

I'm really excited to share this build. I spent a lot of effort to make this work and the outcome is amazing.

I'll start with the incentive. I really like the RF playstyle and was looking for a new concept for a walking simulator type build. Then, I saw some clips using the new The unblinking eye helmet together with the perfect form and cold res stacking to make vaal cold snap really strong. Most of these builds take 4 points in the chaos bloodline and they are played as either elementalist (strong defense + offense) or gladiator (ridiculous block).

However, I like building my own niche, non-meta builds, and thought it would be good to try chieftain as you can stack fire and cold resistances to get more cold resistances. Boy, I didn't think it would be that good.

The unblinking eye provides crazy amount of damage. However, it has a pretty large downside. You can't have any physical mitigation. This is why most players played this with many layers of damage avoidance, including lucky block and spell dodge. However, while this provides a lot of defense against hits, these builds are usually very weak against dots. As a delve enjoyer, I decided not to go this route. The first change was going vestigial Alpha Howl with The unblinking eye modifier as an implicit. We are loosing some damage for sure but we don't have this downside at all. This opened a completely new way to play this build. Instead of going fully on damage avoidance, I invested into damage reduction (90% all res, spell suppression, endurance charges and a lot of armour). How armour you might ask? I actually take iron reflexes to convert all the evasion we are getting as a cold res stacker to armour, reaching absurd levels of armour for free. Since we are stacking both fire and cold resistances, we can use the fire mastery to get high life regeneration (more than 4K a second). I didn't die even once from level 85 till 96.

The funny thing is that even with the lose in damage from the helmet swap, we actually don't loose much of the damage overall. Since we don't block, we can use two nebulis with +2 cold spells, which is a huge increase in damage over other alternatives. Also, due to our high life regen, this build can easily utilize RF for more spell damage. We also have a lot of mana reservation (alpha howl helps with that) so we can use the two curses in a blasphemy setup, removing the need to use bane or a brand for that. This helps the feeling of a semi walking simulator. You need to click Pact of Ktash and Vaal cold snap every ~15 seconds but other than that you just walk and everything blows.

That is the final difference but maybe the most important one. When I started this build I thought about taking the resistance nodes from chieftain and then 4 nodes from the chaos bloodline. However, I realized something really cool. Most of the damage increases in this build are actually buffing general spell damage and not cold damage. This also affects the hinekora explosions from chieftain. This is a game changer for Vaal Cold Snap. This was so good that I decided to go all in damage, taking Priest of Kopec (not sure if anyone else is taking it) and just allow the explosions to take care of the AoE. So I'm not taking the bitter frost as most builds and I use bonechill instead.

PoB: https://pobb.in/c0kqN_mywYKF

I hope you'll enjoy the build. Ask me anything you wish to know.

Hey guys,

Sorry for the repost, I didn't attach the video to the post last time so I recreated it.

I always like building my own stuff in both PoE and PoE 2, and specifically I love tanky builds. There is nothing best than jumping into a pack of rare/unique mods (also ubers) and let them tickle you.

This league I decided to do this with reliquarian. I wanted to combine several buffs into one build revolving around Reliquarian (Section 1), Life + ES shenenigens (Section 2), other defenses (Section 3), damage (Section 4):

1. Reliquarian itself:

Dawnbreaker is just amazing and allowed me to get 100% elemental damage taken as Fire. You can combine this with Cloak of Flame to get 100% phys as fire as well but this is not the plan in this build. Here, we utilized this to take full advantage of Doryani's prototype. With 100% lightning taken as Fire, the chest has basically not downsides.

The black cane is a huge damage buff and people are building heavily into it. However, I had different plans for my gear. I'm using it for 11 phantasms, linking it directly to my storm burst. With the ultra high cast speed I have in this build, I reach 11 phantasms instantly. They provides a lot of damage but also some tankiness since they take hits instead of me. You can maybe try Fedlitas' Spike instead if you don't like using them. We don't really struggle with shocks in this build since we are hitting so so fast.

Presence of Chayula provides us two things. First, we are channeling all the time so getting stunned will be disruptive. This takes care of it. Secondly, while we have ~3K life, we are only using it as "mana" (see next section) so transforming it into ES really helps.

2. Eternal Youth + Zealot's Oath + ES&Life leech:

We are reaching above 300 str and int. This is required for Repetance since we want the iron will keystone and we can't directly allocate it since we convert it to Tempered by War (to reach the 100% elemental taken as fire conversion). Since we have high str, we have quite a bit of life. However, we don't really use this life for taking damage. The only case we actually take damage to our life is by chaos damage (caustic ground can be nasty). Presence of Chayula convert some of this life into ES and we still have ~3K life left. Here comes to cool part. We are leeching ES so so fast with storm burst that we never get physical/elemental hits to life. Therefore, we can recharge life instead of ES and use this recharge to cover the mana costs easily (with lifetap). We spend ~600 life per second but you will never notice it since we recharge 1.5k per second. For the poison hits, we also have Doryani's lession so basically you only care about caustic ground (I'm unaffected from desecrated ground from the boots). Since we don't really get hit to life, we use Zealot's Oath so we also don't notice dots to ES.

3. Other defenses:

We are standing still when channeling. This allows us to get endurance charges per second, use arctic armour to reduce physical and fire damage taken (which is most of the damage we take), use flesh and stone for extra defense and of course we have 90% fire resistance and relatively high armour. We also have infusion from infused channeling and 3K life + almost 5K ES. I'm basically tanking most hits (I did feared without even moving the whole time). We also have molten shell on cast when damage taken.

4. Damage (pretty high):

You would expect that with so much effort on defenses, the damage will be lacking. However, this is not the case for this build. With almost -200% lightning resistances, a lot of increased duration and cast speed and a perfect synergy with replice nebulis, the damage is really not an issue. Without punishment we have ~26M dps and this jumps to ~37M when the boss is on low life. I'm doing a beast farm since I don't really care about how much damage those beasts are doing and they melt in a 1-2 seconds in 95% of the cases. I added beyond since who cares, we never get close to die and everything dies super quick.

This is a really long post since I wanted people to get to know this off-meta build and have all the information they need to decide if they want to play it or not. I spent around 50div on this build but you can start it with much less.

Have fun:

PoB: https://pobb.in/rJ0D4ZRFp8fu

I've noticed something in the data mined information. You can now put mini nightgrip (4% instead of 10%) on any gloves and you don't have the downside.

So you can stack ward for both defensive and offensive purposes at the same time.

Any ideas how to utilize this? It's not a league starter as you need the belt but maybe a second character?

Hey,

I have a crazy idea but it might just work.

Raven's flock is cool in theory but the damage seems to lackluster if you don't invest mirrors into it.

I saw the Growing Peril passive node and I thought this might be a good direction. However, this won't work with Chalupa as you need the dot bonus to be minion dot and not regular dot.

Then I thought about a cool idea, what if I can make Growing Peril affect the ravens by just causing them to stack volatility. The core of the build is Necromantic talisman with Strugglescream. We can use this combination to annoit both Growing Peril and Unstable Bond (maybe event horizon and more). In theory, we now just need to kill and revive our minions really fast to generate volatility for the ravens.

The way I want to do it is using Raverie and Warding Rune of Nourishment. This will make life and ward replenish super fast and I can use Secrifice and Eternal March to revive them. We will try to automate this process somehow (not sure how).

The cool thing about this setup is that theoretically we can be ritualist to get 25% additional impact for the amulet + a ring + 25% for the rings which can be really good for minions this patch. We will also have Wildwood persistence which will make our (life + ward) recovery even crazier.

What do you think? Does this make sense? Will it work or I have a mistake?

Hey,

We don't know how the rune-forging will work but if we can extract the "1% more Unarmed Damage per 5 Strength" from Facebreakers and put it in Thunderfist, it should also affect the Crackling Palm skill. The interesting thing about this interaction is that this skill has a pretty high base lightning damage "(1—28) to (20—539) Added Lightning damage", providing you with a good clear speed.

Am I onto something?

Hear me out.

So how can we scale the damage from Facebreaker:

1. Strength - this can be stacked on basically all ascendancies.

2. More / increased damage modifiers - titan have some but also other ascendancies.

3. Flat attack damage (it doesn't have to be physical) - this is where Ritualist shines.

Why?

Unlike poe 1 where you have physical damage on other gear slots, in poe 2 you basically only have flat attack damage on jewelry and specifically rings. Facebreaker reachs a relatively low base flat damage which is scaled by strength. We also have some great strength stacking uniques like titanrot and black sun so we might need more sources of resistance.

Ritualist can have another ring slot and with the new types of rings added and tree stuff, this can be massive. Currently, a ring can have multiple mods giving up to 71 elemental and up to 32 physical damage, without the implicit value. Now, give it 25% more effect from Ritualist and you are getting pretty good extra attack damage. Not talking about suffixes for elemental resistances and extra strength.

Not sure about the other 4 ascendancy points yet but this can really be cool to build upon.

What do you think?

Hey everyone,

I saw a great youtube video by Forefinger404 regarding the new unique body armor Reverie and I started to think how can we use this for a damage as well as defenses. I have a feeling this body armor will be really expensive and rare so I wouldn't league start this but still.

I wanted to build a character focused entirely on creating the single largest elemental hit possible and translating it into a massive, boss melting Bleed-based skill.

Here is the mechanical breakdown of how it works:

1. Reverie grants the modifier: "Non-Unique Life Flasks apply their effects constantly." Our life flask becomes permanent, we get massive passive life regeneration and we completely ignore flask charge to get that buff.
2. Flameblast has a hefty 10-second base cooldown but a massive 75% MORE damage multiplier per stage (up to 10 stages). Releasing a max-stage Flameblast delivers one of the highest single-hit elemental damage bursts in the entire game. Flameblast's 10-second cooldown makes it clunky. but when linked to Atziri's Impatience, we can drastically scales our Cooldown Recovery Rate, eventually compressing that window down to a smooth 3-to-4 second, which means that we can constantly apply bleeds without losing damage. Because we only cast once every 3-4 seconds, Reverie's continuous flask effect snaps our health bar back to 100% almost the exact frame after we release the spell so that 25% life spend on the support is negated completely.
3. Blood Barbs from blood mage: This makes it so "Elemental Damage also Contributes to Bleeding Magnitude." Our massive Flameblast fire hit scales our bleed baseline completely. It also naturally Aggravates bleeds on cursed targets (dealing maximum moving damage even if they stand still).
4. Concoct support gem: Drastically spikes our damage multipliers by devouring life flask charges. We don't use life flasks charges due to Reverie. We can keep the flasks at full by using a combination of Gorge and Sacrifice with several minions. We need to apply this once every several seconds so this is perfect.
5. While clearing maps with a secondary skill (not sure yet).
6. Our continuous flask keeps us locked at 100% health. Because of the Sanguimancy node, every Life Remnant we walk over will overflow our health pool, making it very effective.

What do you think? Also, how would you approach the map clear?

The new raven RF staff has some issues for damage scaling. Both the damage over time and the command skill damage are affected by increase minion damage but that's almost the only stuff similar between them. The passive dot does not hit and there are not so many ways to boost general damage over time. It's also both physical and chaos damage which doesn't work well with things like withered and despair.

So I had an interesting idea, poisons. We can get to multiple poisons on an enemy and the passives that increase the number of poisons are actually beneficial to what we want to achieve, really short poisons. Assuming we can get up to 6 poisons with pathfinder, and the flock hits every 0.12 seconds, we can get all hit to poison if the poison duration will be shorter than 0.72 seconds (which is feasible). With pathfinder, we can also start from the sorc area and take many of the minion node.

With this setup, we will can use supports that boost dot damage and they will be effective for both the passive damage and the command.

What do you think?