[2.0] Incinerate Totems - IW/RF - 20k TT - 275k effective DPS on 1 EX Budget - Atziri Viable

2.1 UPDATE COMMING SOON!!



Ever since the flame totem hype at the start of 2.0 I quickly realized incinerate totems were superior and proceeded to make an incinerate totem character. I made this character as a preparation for the 1m race (where i ended up playing SRS). The goal of the character was to be cheap, run every map and atziri viable. I gave myself a 1 ex budget (which was 70c at the time) but ended up spending under 50c. This was enough to give me a 19.9k dps tooltip, which translates into well over 250k effective DPS.

I never intended to write a guide about the character, but i've seen several incinerate totem builds who perform similar or worse on a much, much higher budget. This motivated me to write this guide, and show there is a better and cheaper way.




Pros:
• Totems
• Run almost every map
• Extremely Cheap
• High Damage
• High mobility
• Reflect is a joke
• Totem costs 29 mana per cast (lol)


Cons:
• Totems
• No life leech
• Requires you to be moving a lot
• Some maps mods don't allow you to run RF (blood magic, reduced regen, -max resist)







Start by leveling with flame totem and firestorm/incinerate/fire trap. Try to get 2 sceptres with +1 to fire gems and place your flame totem with 2 dmg supports and your primary damage spell in the other. I was using clarity and heralds as my auras.

At 40 points you can finally pick up Ancestral Bond. You can drop your primary DPS source and can just drop your totems. It is recommended to use your flame totem until you get your rain of splinters. Once you get your rain of splinters switch over to incinerate totems. Recommended links: Incinerate, spell totem, faster casting, faster projectiles.


At this point you picked up most of your DPS nodes and a good amount of life. At this point you should be able to get your rain of splinters and playing incinerate totem. Once you make your switch to incinerate totems drop clarity and start using anger. Your incinerate totems will cost so little mana you no longer need clarity.


Once you get to 95 points you finally got all the passives needed to start using righteous fire. Be sure to avoid any ES on gear, as it increases your life degen. If you start using RF at this point you will suffer a small degen, but that wasn't a real problem for me personally. Once you get a level 20 purity of fire (level 19 + 1 from black sun crest) this will be completely gone.


This is my current build. Recently i had a slightyly more offensive build, but I respecced into this build. My life stayed pretty much the same, but I lost about 700 tooltip dps, but my armour went up for 2k to 3.3k and 13.5k with granite up.





6L - Chest


4L - Helmet

NOTE: Place in Black sun crest for +1 gems, swap Anger for Arctic Armour and Herald of Ice for scary phys maps

4L - Boots

NOTE: Elemental weakness needs 20% quality to be as good as flammability, elemental weakness is better in group play

4L - Gloves

NOTE: immortal call is not as op as before anymore, but still good to deal with burst phys damage

3L - Shield


3L - Weapon



Normal: Oak (life)

Cruel: Alira (cast speed)

Merciless: Kill all (passive point)



Tabula Rasa - Easy/cheap to get 6L, must have!

Belly of the beast - Amazing chest, needs to be 6L, can give anywhere between 700 and 1000 life with the amount of flat life we get (from strength), depending on gear and talents. Also offers a decent amount of armor. It being ar/ev means you only need 3 offcolor gems rather than 4 with a pure armor chest.

Rain of splinters - Adds 2 projectiles to your totems, must have!

Rise of the phoenix - Allows you to use Righteous fire - must have!

Doon cyebiyari - Adds and scales with strength - Heavily recommended

Black sun crest - Adds +1 to gems and increases strength - Heavily recommended

Alberon's Warpath - Increases strength by 17% - Recommended

Spire of Stone - Adds survivability to totems and prevents them from getting stunned, not well tested but runs feel smoother, a well rolled rare jewel might be better

Rares: Get life, strength, resistances and armour, followed by faster casting and spell damage













You are able to place down 2 totems, which essentially doubles your tooltip damage.
On top of that incinerate damage can be multiplied by 4, because of how to skill works.
This means that you can multiply the tooltip damage by 8.

This means that with our 19.9k tooltip damage you deal effectively 158.2k damage.

On top of that you have 81% fire penetration, 44% from our curse and 37% from fire penetration.

If we increase our 159.2k dps with the 81% damage from fire penetration we deal 288.1k effective DPS.



Tabula rasa can easily be farmed for free in the aquaducts a4m with divination cards (Humility) and it is suggested you do so while getting ready for mapping, it took me from lvl 62 to 73 to get all 9 cards.

3c - Rise of the Phoenix
2c - Alberons war path
3c - Black sun crest
6c - Doon cyebiyari
12c - Rain of splinters
23c - 2 rings, 2 jewels, gloves, amulet and belt, 2-6c ea

Total cost: 49c

fixed some errors.
ill prolly add a proper level breakdown tomorrow

What's your phys defence? It seems quite low.

"

Blackdepp wrote:

What's your phys defence? It seems quite low.

I got kinda greedy and skipped over most armour nodes so far, and my tabula can still be replaced with a better 6L chest. There is definately room to get a lot more armour.
The reason why i got greedy and skipped armour is because it felt like i didn't really need it, immortal call helps you deal with burst damage while a decent amount of armour, enfeeble, granite flask and high mobility deals with the rest. I can also swap anger for herald of ice and arctic armour if a certain map has a lot of phys dmg. The stats shown in the screenshot were more than enough to farm atziri if that counts for anything.

The character could become pretty tanky with gg armour, but since I restricted myself to a 1ex budget this is as far as i could push it, a 2k armour chest instead of a tabula could easily push more over 8k armour with a few more armour nodes, its just that the budget wasnt quite there

Looks solid, might try this to make currency in the next season

"

zenixmoo wrote:

Looks solid, might try this to make currency in the next season

I would recommend you do, i designed this entire build around being very strong early on in the league. Only items you absolutely have to buy are rain of splinters and rise of the phoenix, the rest of the items can be bought once you have the currency required, they dont make or break the build

Added a proper leveling breakdown

This is probably the best totem build stats I've seen for such a low cost, I don't know how you did it but good job, I'm contemplating trying it in the upcoming 5 week event.

That being said, you might wanna down-hype the effective DPS prediction.
Meaning most mobs with 0 fire resist would effectively die just as fast with 50k or 500k DPS.
While the rares/uniques/bosses with a high HP pool almost always have a decent fire resist to boot.

Fire pen will most likely bring their resist to zero, making the effective DPS 160k.
While a resistance reducing curse with it's lower effectiveness vs higher rarity monsters will be a slight to moderate DPS boost depending on the mob type.

Real world effective DPS in my estimation would be 180-220k, still probably the best one can get for such a low budget.

Thanks for posting your build. I like it and will try something similar for the next league.

You are right to some degree Catharsis, that rares and bosses often have resist, but it is hard to give an accurate estimation of howmuch elemental resist you should use in your effective damage calculations, or to establish an unwritten rule for everyone in the community to use. It simply makes more sense to use a baseline of 0 resist.