Cheap LL MF Flame totems with ZO and ~8.7% ES/s

- Low Life
Going Low life gives you the ability to run numerous auras/buffs which helps compensate for missing stats from running MF gear while also granting access to powerful and cheap LL passives and items
- ZO with over 8.7% ES/s
Going ES gives you access to a much larger potential health pool when compared to life but not having access to potions can be very dangerous and make any kind of sustained damage turn potentially lethal were it would have been trivial before. While this is often solved with leech and vaal pact, totems are not capable of leaching, and even vaal pact doesn't help when there aren't enough monsters to leech off of. The idea is to achieve a high enough regen to attempt to mimic the level of regeneration you would achieve as if you had a life flask running all the time. This build achieves over 8.7% ES/s. At 5000 ES you'll have 435 ES/s and 696 ES/s at 8000 ES. For comparison an Eternal Flask(the highest recovery rate Life Flask) has a regeneration rate of 520 HP/s
- 274% increased ES
Using MF Gear and not taking CI takes out a large potential chunk of your ES pool so a large ES multiplier is important
- 5+ Endurance Charges and 45% Increased Skill Effect Duration
1 from tree, 1 from bandits, and 1 from a corrupted belt if you have access to one. Endurance charges provide a method of consistent physical damage mitigation when combined with Increased duration passives and greatly extends the duration and effectiveness of Immortal Call giving us a nearly 100% uptime while taking damage
- 18% Reduced Mana Reserved and 51% Increased Aura/Buff effect
18% Reduced mana gives us enough to be able to run two 40% auras on life and 3 auras/buffs on mana. Running a bunch of auras/buffs makes increased aura/buff effect very cost effective so you want to pick up a sizable amount

+ Very cheap and can be done mostly Self found
+ Flame Totem is extremely safe, there's nothing quite like Dominus using Hand of God on your totems instead of you
+ Can achieve a nice amount of MF with the right gear
+ Does well against persistence damage and DoTs
+ Doesn't have to worry about most physical burst thanks to a long CoDT IC(devourers are a joke)
+ Can achieve a much larger potential HP pool compared to life
+ Doesn't have to worry about reflect or Corrupting Blood
- Heavy chaos damage is scary, especially viper strike stacks, but Vaal Discipline helps with this
- Elemental burst damage can be scary but a large ES pool and Vaal Discipline helps with this
- Totems have trouble surviving in high damage situations (e.g. Titty bitches, merviel, minion instability), a 20q Flame Totem will help quite a bit with this
- As with any ES build, persistent freezing is scary. The only real answer for this is either Dream Fragments or Auxium

Bandits: Kill-Kill-Oak

For early levels start with lighting tendrils and switch to incinerate once you can use LMP at lvl 19. Switch to Flame totem once you pick up ancestral bond around mid 40's

Lvl 49 Tree before BM(Updated for 1.3)
At this point you want to be going hybrid with an ES chest and run clarity and HoL for auras

Lvl 76 Tree(Updated for 1.3) It should be pretty safe to go low life by this point and you should be able to run 4-5 out of the 5 auras, depending on your mana pool. Keep in mind that as your life pool gets smaller in comparison to the incoming damage, stun starts to become a real danger. I would recommend picking up Eye of Chayula pretty early.

lvl 94 tree(Updated for 1.3)

- Solaris Lorica or Shavronnes Wrappings(required): Shavs' would help a ton but isn't necessary for this build
- Eye of Chayula(Required): Stun avoidance is a necessity for any ES build and the pathing to unwavering stance is prohibitively expensive
- Redbeak(recommended): Powerful and very cheap unique and will take a pretty good wand to surpass it
- Wondertrap(recommended): +100% IR is great but i would wait till you can afford to drop some ES before running it
- Koam's Sign(optional): Probably not optimal in most circumstances but running 1 to further increase your physical damage mitigation and the length of IC is not a bad choice
- Heartbreaker(optional): A must have for groups and/or can be run in offhand for culling
- Wheel of the Stormsail(optional): Provides extra IR but i would only use it in your offhand for culling
- Divination Distillate(optional): Great all around if you can get it
- Andvarius(optional): provides a very large amount of IR but well rolled rings can ultimately achieve similar gains without the drawback. I would recommend using the exalts you would spend on one to roll an ilvl 75+ Gold Ring with alts until you get reasonable rarity rolls then regaling and master crafting it from there
- Dream Fragments(optional): Provides a lot of mana and a solution to freezing
- Auxium(optional): Provides a solution to persistent freezing and a sizable amount of ES
- Aurseize(optional): Sacrificing your glove slot sacrifices too much ES to justify without shavronne's Wrappings

- Discipline(on Mana)
- Clarity(on mana)
- Vitality(on life): can be replaced with an additional purity aura if you can't max your resists with one
- Purity of Fire/Ice/Lightning/Elements(on life)
- Herald of Lightning(on mana)

- Main(In order of importance): Flame totem -> GMP(LMP if you don't have it) -> Fire Pen -> Faster Projectiles(can be replaced by Added chaos/added lightning if you have projectile speed from weapon) -> Minion and Totem Elemental Resists -> Faster Casting/Increased Item Rarity

In a four link i find myself swapping in Elemental Resists during boss fights and high damage situations

- BM Auras: Vitality -> Purity of Fire/Ice/Lightning/Elements -> Blood Magic -> Reduced Mana

- Mana Auras: Clarity -> Discipline -> Herald of Lightning -> Reduced Mana

- Utility #1: Immortal Call(lvl 8) -> Increased Duration -> Cast on Damage Taken(lvl 7)

A low lvl IC is important so you dont have to take much damage to proc it again, but you want it to have enough duration to last a reasonable amount of time. This is just a compromise between the two, you can play around with the levels a bit more if you would like. If you're using a 20q IC you should use it with a lvl 1 CoDT

- Utility #2: Elemental Weakness / Enduring Cry -> Faster Casting -> Spell Echo

- Utility #3: Lighting Warp -> Faster Casting -> Vaal Discipline

- Flat Mana: Totems are expensive
- Mana Regen: Totems are expensive
- Intelligence provides good stats
- Lots of ES: The easiest way to get reasonable amount of ES on your gear is to alt a ilvl 72 base item until you get a good flat roll followed by regaling and master crafting the % increased ES
- Elemental Resists: the more MF gear you run the more you need from each gear slot
- Chaos Resists
- Increased Spell/Elemental/Damage %
- Cast Speed
- Increased projectile speed: if you get enough you can swap out faster projectiles
- Item Rarity: As much as you can get and are comfortable sacrificing stats for at a given time
- Dexterity: you'll run into a bit of a dexterity problem with this build, this can be solved by picking up a few 30 dex nodes that you pass by already if you can't get it from your gear

- Topaz with dispels shocked
- Sapphire with dispels frozen
- Ruby with dispels burn
- Amethyst Flask with dispels bleed/freeze/shock/burn
- Quicksilver with dispels bleed or move speed

- Monsters' Skills Chain x additional times: can be very dangerous, i would avoid
- Monsters deal x% extra Damage as Cold: i would avoid without dream fragments or auxium
- Monsters deal x% extra Damage as Lightning: I would avoid in most cases, shock sucks
- Players are cursed with Elemental Weakness: Doable, depends on you gear. If you have problems with overcapping enough you could consider running IC manually and using EC's to cap your resists for these maps
- -x% maximum Player Resistances: fuck no
- Players have Blood Magic: you have no life regen for casting and you have to drop to many auras
- Players recover Life, Mana and Energy Shield x% slower: Dangerous but doable if you drop clarity and bring some mana pots
- Players cannot regenerate Life or Mana: Dangerous but doable if you bring some mana pots and drop clarity

This is my gear and stats from a level 74 character(pre patch 1.3) that I leveled up in standard as a proof of concept for the upcoming temp leagues. My gear is far from optimal, my rarity is low, and my links aren't quite right yet but it should give you an idea
Defensive stats in merciless with 5 Endurance charges, Vitality, Clarity, Purity of Elements, and Discipline

Flame totem Stats without HoL and in a four link. Keep in mind that the tooltip for totems is very misleading as it uses the cast speed that is used to summon the totem in its calculation for the dps of the skill used by the totem(the bug is listed here: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/18346 as a known issue). This means that increased Totem summoning speed nodes will falsely show a higher DPS than you're actually getting. In this case i've picked up 14% increased casting speed for summoning totems and my actual cast speed increase is 23%. The cast speed its using in its damage calculation is 37% increased cast speed which means the damage tooltip is displaying 11.4% higher than it really is. Which means, in this case, my actual tooltip DPS should be 1387 damage per second. For reference to other flame totem builds, if i had picked all 65% increased casting speed for summoning totems my DPS would appear as 2120 damage per second


Flame totem Stats with HoL and in a four link. Since the damage tooltip is displaying 11.4% higher than it really is, in this case, my actual tooltip DPS should be 1582 damage per second. For reference to other flame totem builds, if i had picked all 65% increased casting speed for summoning totems my DPS would appear as 2418 damage per second

A video of a sloppy run through a level 74 maze map on my potato laptop(and dont worry i picked up all the items after i stopped recording):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykKoTmK9X5Y
The video lags out pretty bad during the vaal fight but i do kill him, you'll just have to trust me. I might try to upload a better video later

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgUAAnEDxgSzBVsGDgagCfYQzBRNFHEaOCW8J-0pTyoTKk0qjSu2LKcy0TWSNtg6WDrhPC09Dz8nRUdG10kbSsRKyE3jVcZY5VnzWitdxl5dY_1khG6qcql4aXrmeyB9U331gpuDOIuMjEaPRpBVm6GdgKIAo_KmV6cIp4SnlKyYrKq1BLXytoa3PriTwBrDE8QVxPbGrtH91HzYvdrd3QXd89-_4XPnauoY7DjsVe0g8B_xbPJF9q73MvfX-JP46_m9_gr-h_6P

http://imgur.com/qe9VuQH

http://imgur.com/4LZvLeD