[2.0] Low Life Righteous Fire Burn Build (Tri Curse on Hit + EE +5 Jewels)

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From the tree:
213% Maximum Energy Shield
260 Intelligence
6.2% of Life Regenerated per Second
70% Increased Burning Damage
22% Reduced Mana Reservation (+50% less from Mortal Conviction)
48% Increased Aura Effect
5 Jewel Sockets

Perfect jewels: 4x 8% Maximum Energy Shield / 16% Fire Damage / 12% Area Damage / 12% Damage over Time + 1x Energy From Within)
Energy From Within goes in the node directly below Melding (Life/ES wheel between Shadow and Witch, just north of the Conduit keystone). This turns a 15% max life + 25% max ES wheel into a 40% max ES wheel. The jewel provides an additional ~10% max ES. It's great.


+1 Additional Curse

Bandits: Passive, Passive, Passive

Keystones:
Zealot's Oath (Makes the build possible, converts life regen to ES regen)
Resolute Technique (Allows our cyclone to always hit)
Elemental Equilibrium (Allows us to deal more damage by adding cold or lightning damage to our attacks)
Blood Magic (Allows us to access Mortal Conviction for more auras)

Weapon: Pretty much essential. The Vaal mod helps with EE, but it's not necessary. If you can't get the Vaal mod, you could drop a curse and replace Doedre's Damning ring with any ring that deals flat cold or lightning damage. Also, you get physical to cold conversion while Taste of Hate is active, so if you're smart with your flask use, conversion on your weapon is really just a convenience factor.
Vaal Discipline / Empower / Increased Duration (RRB) -- This is a panic button as well as a boss killer. ES goes from 9,866 without Vaal Discipline to 15,654 with it. Regen/s goes from 1465.1 to 2324.6.

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Shield: Leo's Reduced Damage Taken from Damage over Time allows us to run RF with a high ES shield instead of Rise of the Phoenix. Use the highest ES shield you can find with an open suffix mod.
Summon Flame Golem / Flame Dash / Faster Casting (RBB) -- I found Flame Dash to be the best movement skill for this build, though I don't use it terribly often. Flame Golem is there as a free damage boost. Chaos Golem would also work, as would swapping faster casting for minion life if you think your Golem dies too much.

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Chest: Shav's is obviously the best choice. Lorica might work too but you'd lose a considerable amount of ES. Dropping links means you drop fortify, or drop your curses one by one. Not ideal.
Fortify / Life Gain on Hit / Cyclone / Curse on Hit / Elemental Weakness / Flammability
Cyclone is the best skill for getting into RF range and applying curses in one motion. Elemental Weakness and Flammability are the best two curses to use in your 6L because the level on vulnerability doesn't matter for DoT damage, meaning you can get vuln from a vaal implicit on your gloves.

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Helmet: The Vertex has a decent amount of energy shield, and gives +2 to your discipline and vitality (+1 from the helm itself, +1 from the +1 to empower).
Vitality / Empower / Purity of Ice / Discipline (RRGB)
Gems in the Vertex can be shuffled with gems in Voidbringers as necessary. Due to the Vertex's +1 to all gems boosting your empower, auras in the helmet will get one extra level compared to those in the gloves. Once your auras are boosted to level 23, they will no longer grant a higher max res. Before that, you might choose to focus on putting your purity of fire into your Vertex. The colors I have are mostly out of cheapness; I don't want to color my corrupted Voidbringers to swap my purity of ice into them.

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Gloves: Voidbringers are another unique with a good bit of ES that gives gem levels, this time to our purities. Ideally you probably want RRBG to stick purity of Ice in there, but I haven't found a need for the last socket in my Vertex, so for now purity of ice goes there.
Purity of Fire / Empower / Purity of Lightning / ???? (RRB?)
If we had more hotbar slots I'd use a portal gem. We don't. :(

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Boots: Rare boots with as much ES and res as you can get. You can opt for movement speed on your boots, but since movement speed is a prefix, you'd lose out on some energy shield for it (flat ES, % ES and hybrid ES/stun recovery are all prefixes).
Increased Burning Damage / Righteous Fire / Increased Area of Effect / Concentrated Effect (RBBB)
Classic RF links. Do note that quality on these gems (minus RF itself) does more for RF than it did pre-2.0.

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Belt: ES and resistances. Not much else to say. Doryani's is nice but you'll need fire res unless you switch something else around.
Rings: Doedre's Damning allows us to run a third curse, and the vaal mod is great for low life builds, whose low maximum life makes it easy to be frozen. Shavronne's Revelation regenerates a boatload of energy shield. Legacy version is awesome, but not required.
Amulet: I'm currently using an Araku Tiki with +1 max resist instead of a Shaper's Seed, because the 1% max res difference is an easy sacrifice to make for an additional max res.

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Flasks. Fairly important. Also pretty self explanatory. Taste of Hate is good for a build with high (82) max cold res and little other physical mitigation. The same applies to the granite flask. The quicksilver flask is good for covering more distance with cyclone. Important suffixes are all there. Ample prefix on quicksilver, where it allows for an extra use. Perpetual elsewhere.

With Vaal Discipline active: 15,654 ES, 2324.6 ES regen/sec.

+ Damage (video might come soon, but it chews through bosses pretty well)
+ Survivability (High ES, high ES regen, high max res)
+ Three curses + Elemental Equilibrium
- Small AoE (next three levels, if I get them, will be the witch AoE nodes)
- Can't run certain map mods (curses, half/no regen, shocked ground is doable but not easy)
- Somewhat lacking vs. phys damage (fortify, taste of hate, granite flask. No dodge, no armor)
- Expensive. Legacy Shav's Revelation (I paid 25ex for it and it's about double that now), 6L Shav's (found this, linked it myself), Curse on Hit Voidbringer (paid 15ex for those)

A cheaper option to buying Voidbringers with a curse implicit is to drop Fortify in your 6L Shav for Vulnerability. However, you lose the survivability of Fortify and vulnerability has the same level of DoT effect for every level so you gain nothing by cursing with level 20 rather than 10.

Ichimonji
Ichimonji is an alternative choice. The buff effect will boost your maximum ES (by boosting discipline) and depending on your gem levels, may boost your max res by one. However my damage dropped noticeably without catalyst and the ES boost was less than 200. I do not, and would not use this item, but the option is there. Note that you cannot Vaal damage conversion implicits onto swords.

Doedre's Scorn
Doedre's Scorn might be an alternative choice. I bought an 18% roll and tried it, lost a considerable amount of ES (over a thousand) and didn't really notice a difference in damage output. I'm honestly not sure it even works properly (might be an on hit effect despite the wording), or maybe I'm just unobservant.

Shaper's Seed
Shaper's Seed vaaled with +1 max resist is the absolute ideal for this build. A Shaper's Seed or Araku Tiki with "Enemies can have 1 additional Curse" corruption is IMO not quite as good, but would still allow you to drop Doedre's Damning for a more respectable ring (40ish flat ES + Elreon's maximum 20% mod, as well as some resistances).

Redbeak
Redbeak gives 100% increased damage when on low life. This applies to RF. This build can't really be called a budget build, but this could be considered a budget option. You'd have to get elemental damage in some more traditional way (I'd say use +1 curse amulet, drop Doedre's Damning for a ring with ES and elemental damage) since swords cannot get damage conversion implicits. They can, however, get +1 to weapon range. Redbeak also has a small amount of life gain on hit.

I am currently experimenting with the idea of dropping Doryani's Catalyst for Ephemeral Edge.
This sword gives a lot of ES (figures below). I initially thought there was no way it could be worth it over Doryani's Catalyst. The relatively low increased damage on my tree means that Doryani's Catalyst's almost 100% modifier provides a much greater effective boost than it would for most builds. However, I failed to consider the rolls on my jewels in this assessment, so it seems somewhat more likely.

Due to the very specialized nature of this build, this switch required me to find another source of applying EE. To do this, I switched my +1 max res Araku Tiki for a +1 curse Araku Tiki, then equipped a ring that adds flat lightning damage, as well as provides +38 flat energy shield and 17% maximum energy shield.


This, along with the Ephemeral Edge itself, brought my ES total from 10,934 to 12,170. With this increase in ES, I can then attempt to reoptimize my tree by dropping 3 energy shield nodes for Skittering Runes to increase my damage output by scaling my curses. This leaves me with 11,742 ES, still considerably more than before I switched to Ephemeral.

EDIT: Initial testing seems to result in a very noticeable damage increase. This is exciting stuff.