[2.0] [Cheap] Marohi Erqi Burning Ice Crash aka Melee Flameblast
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0 Introduction
0.1 The builds general idea The Idea for this build is to move away from the fast hitting melee Meta and create a build that hits less often but very hard. This is achieved through the combination of Ice Crash, Marohi Erqi and the use of high fire damage to ignite enemies after the initial hit. If I had to compare it to something I'd say it plays like a melee Flameblast build that is more focused on being tanky. 0.2 Pros and Cons Pro -Great AoE Clear -Fast with momentum -Tanky -Cheap -Easy to level and gear -Room for improvement Con -Only decent single target DpS -Needs ~5s to build up momentum if lost -Slow hit speed makes it hard to play in certain situations (ex. Vaal smash, Dominus smash) -Needs to keep buffs up 0.3 Raw stats [Screenshots] Taken with 6 Endurance charges. No other buffs.
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  0 Introduction 0.1 The builds general idea 0.2 Pros and Cons 0.3 Raw stats [Screenshots] 1. Tree 1.1 Passive trees 1.2 Reasoning 1.3 Bandit rewards 2. Gear and Links 2.1 Current Gear 2.2 Gems and Links 2.3 Uniques 2.4 Jewels 3. Final thoughts 3.1 Gameplay 3.2 Some numbers 3.3 Leveling 3.4 Upgrades 3.5 Videos 1. The Passive tree 1.1 Softcore Hardcore (NOTE: This build was only tested in softcore!) Simply swapped out some damage and mana nodes to pump the defense up to 184% HP and 177% Armour. Full Tree (SC) Marauder version
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In all honesty the marauder version of this build will be better in most cases, I just started Scion mostly for the aesthetics and to be more flexible with the build. The marauder version simply fleshes out the whole scion start area to get more efficient life nodes and the witches fire damage wheel. Alternatively depending on your current situation you can get additional jewel sockets as they can get pretty crazy with this build.
https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwEAxthYYz38jM_2SF8_FCAaPu8OfLhQRyku5FHxrJd5Vw0JltIhlmw5DvJBns2RzoIHpzC77Z_L-OvqGHas9zLPfnKpfNmsqsT2WfPGriftffWvp58-GjhyDwxfBg4czj0PLdKQVXGFZp4Y19R8K1B8u3rm8xH60lOlCfYNzXflY_2xQhZvHRT-VFfiRtfjaiSqr40Sae0gGGUXHIKb4XO2hnF5mjuiAJZ0n98Es-98wGaPRpuh99esmPFsNthJGyqN7FU6WFXGg9t0VV8qrY3wHzbp 1.2 Reasoning General What we try to achieve here is a good mix between Fire damage, Burn damage and Physical Mace damage to push up our initial hit so we have to hit most groups only once and move on. Avatar of Fire AoF is used to achieve 100% Cold to Fire conversion when combined with the support gem and to convert the remaining physical damage to fire because we can make better use of it that way. Not being able to deal any other damage but fire is not a big deal as we don't need anything else. Unwavering Stance We NEED this because our attack speed is so low. I tried to play without it and got utterly frustrated because it is very easy to get interrupted while winding up. Resolute Technique As we are using Marohi Erqi this one is a no brainer. Skill it early to ensure a fun leveling period. 1.3 Bandit rewards Normal: Life (Oak) Cruel: Skill point (Kill all) Merciless: Endurance charge (Oak) 2. Gear and Links 2.1 Current Gear
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2.2 Gems and Links
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Ice Crash
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Ice Crash + Added Fire + Weapon Elemental Damage + Cold to Fire + Melee Physical.
Also a level 15 Increased Area of Effect through Marohi Erqi. While Leveling I advise you to switch out the support gems from time to time as they change in priority as you level up. For alternatives or a 6th link you can use: Increased Burning Damage for bigger burns and a more hit and run playstyle for bigger mobs. Fire Penetration for the same reason as Increased Burning damage, I have to test a little bit to see how much damage this one really provides. Concentrated Effect because it is another more multiplier on our skill however I don't like the idea of losing AoE. Herald of Fire
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Herald of Fire + Elemental Proliferation + Increased Burning Damage + Increase Area of Effect.
This setup is for clearing trash groups. Our overkill damage on white and blue mobs is ridiculously high so the moment we kill an enemy it ignites another enemy close to it and that burn proliferates in a wide radius. I have seen this proliferated burn killing some beyond bosses all on it's own because right before spawning a boss I killed a weak white pack. Vengeance
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Vengeance + Endurence Charge on Melee Stun + Curse on hit + Flammability.
We use Vengeance mainly for the Curse on hit part. As we have high damage and the implicit stun threshold reduction of our weapon Endurance Charge on Melee Stun is a solid choice here. Alternatively you can swap Endurance Charge on Melee Stun for Life Leech or put it into a 5L chest and use both. Leap Slam
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Leap Slam + Faster Attacks + Fortify + Endurance Charge on Melee Stun.
Leap Slam is used to move into a pack so we have a good position to bring down the hammer. While doing so we provide ourselves with the Fortify buff and refresh our Endurance charges. Warcries + Arctic Armour
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Enduring Cry + Rallying Cry + Increased Duration | Arctic Armour.
We use a 3L Helmet here with one extra socket so Arctic Armours Mana costs don't get increased by Increased Duration. Enduring Cry is simply used to get an initial burst of Endurance charges. Rallying Cry is used to keep our Mana up and provide us with a, sometimes huge, damage increase. We use Arctic Armour to make us a little more tanky and trigger the Life Leech on our belt from time to time. 2.3 Uniques Marohi Erqi
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This weapon provides us with two great things for this build.
High top end damage. The way burning works in PoE is that the strongest instance of burn damage is ticking at any given time. With this in mind if we chunk down a rare mob or boss as we keep hitting it our burn essentially gets stronger as time passes as several effect start to trigger including more damage on burning targets and our high top end damage occurring from time to time. Increased Area of Effect. This enables us to hit a lot of monsters at once and as strange as it sounds it enables us to kite a little if we really need to because our AoE is so huge. We can run away for a moment, turn around and hit the boss and stage two or even one of our Ice Crash will hit him due to the big radius. Mokou's Embrace
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This Ring gives us Chance to ignite, Fire damage and some attack speed while we ourselves are ignited. Nothing more to add or ask for here.
Dyadian Dawn Heavy Belt
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This belt just gives us another more multiplier for DpS in the form of our enemies burning down 20% faster. (Note: Enemies burn for 100% of the damage in 80% of the time)
The life leech on chilled targets is handy to have too as we use Arctic Armour Gang's Momentum
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These are used because of two reasons.
One is that we can make good use of having one Armour + Energy Shield item in our Arsenal to get the colors our Herald of Ash. The other is that the stats provided are actually not that bad. One downside to this build is that it is hard to get sufficient amounts of chance to ignite and Gang's Momentum is a nice place to compensate for that. 2.4 Jewels For Jewels you want the suffix "of Burning" (Chance to ignite + Ignite Duration) especially before you can afford to put your Herald of Ash into a 4L this helps a lot and even after it makes the build a lot more reliable. Other than that everything that boosts your initial damage is fine but what you would want in a perfect world is a jewel that has the "Flaming" (Increased Fire Damage) prefix because it boosts both your initial hit and your burn. Try searching for them on poe.trade I got some of them for under one Chaos Orb. 3. Final thoughts 3.1 Gameplay On the first two packs you need to build up a little. Use Enduring Cry to get as much charges as possible then jump into the middle with Leap Slam to get Fortify and another charge. After that you hit with Ice Crash and watch how everything burns to ashes. For the next pack you use Rallying Cry to get your Mana regeneration and damage buff. After that you jump in to get Fortify and refresh your charges. Now you are ready to go, kill the pack, pop a Quicksilver Flask, run to the next pack, jump in, Ice Crash and rinse and repeat. The only thing you have to worry about is to press Rallying cry from time to time but it has a duration of over 12 seconds so that isn't too much work. 3.2 Some numbers I just wanted to add some general numbers so you have an Idea of what the build is capable off. At the moment my unbuffed (no rallying cry) Ice Crash hits for 15k on average which is a pretty convenient number to do math. The DpS of my ice crash is 13k in the tooltip. Single target burn
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This one is simple, we just multiply the 15k with the base ignite damage (which is 80%) and multiply that with the total amount of fire, burn and elemental damage in the tree which is around 220% considering quality on gems and bonuses on jewels.
15.000 * 0.8 * 3.2 = 38.400 Adding in the initial damage we get 53.400 damage with one hit. That's pretty OK. For DpS this means we take the burn damage, and divide it by 3.2 for the burn duration which is shortened by our belt and add that to our base DpS. 38.400 / 3.2 = 12.000 That puts us at 25.000 DpS which is OK on it's own but not amazing. Keep in mind however that we get a lot of damage increases in drawn out fights where our single target DpS really matters. These include the damage bonus on ignited targets through our boots and passives and the -fire resistance through our Flammability curse. Also we get Rallying Cry which is at least 18% increased damage and we can safely assume that the actual burn damage we have while hitting a target is based on the top end damage of our Ice Crash which is about 18.5k. AoE burn
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Now this is where things start to get really funny. Our AoE burn is based on Herald of Ash rather than the ignite through our hit itself. So what does this mean? More burn damage!
Herald of Ash ignites for 137% of the overkill damage at level 20 so we assume it is 130% to have an easier time and compensate a little for me not including that it is only the overkill damage and not all of the damage. So here again we assume we hit for 15k and all of that is overkill damage (which is true most of the time because there is either one unlucky critter that got hit before or we procced Vengeance while jumping in) On top of that our HoA is supported by Increased Burning Damage for another 50% which brings our burn damage increase to 270% total. 15.000 * 1.3 * 3.7 = 72.150 This is a whole lot of burn damage for just one hit in my opinion. This also gets affected by all the modifiers I mentioned in the single target burn calculation except for the increased damage against burning targets as most of the time we don't hit twice. As mentioned elsewhere I have seen crazy things happen with this burn damage. Beyond packs and bosses spawning and just burning to cinders, Map bosses and Exiles I didn't even notice until I saw their corpses. 3.3 Leveling Leveling Items
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Geofri's Baptism is a great choice because of it's great base damage. I used it up to the point where I switched to my beloved Marohi Erqi.
Pyre is something I used through my early levels just to maintain the theme of the build as a burning build but to be completely fair you don't need it and it even hinders you from the point where you get your HoA to proliferate because it destroys the corpses of burning enemies. It was however very useful in the one month flashback league because of the nasty things that can happen with corpses. Other than that try to get your hands on good defensive gear and pieces with whatever you can find as your DpS while leveling is very split up between physical, elemental and burn damage. Passive Tree
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32 points
We grabbed enough enough life to be reasonably tanky, some Mana and Mana cost reduction to have an easier time spamming Ice Crash and Resolute Technique to compensate for our nonexistent accuracy. 50 points We focus on the templar area of the tree to get some more damage behind our hots. At this moment you are a very slow hitting version of a usual Ice Crash build but for leveling it is totally sufficient. 69 points This is the moment where magic starts to happen. All of our damage is converted to fire now and if everything went right we should have our Herald of Ash linked to elemental proliferation. Now or at the latest when we equip Marohi Erqi we start melting packs with one hit. From here on get more life and armour as you need it. If you feel comfortable enough go for damage. 3.4 Upgrades Taste of Hate would be a great addition to this build as it would push our initial hit by another 30%. Doryani's Invitation (Fire) is an option to get more initial damage and a more constant form of life leech. I don't know if it is the better choice here though because the 20% faster burn help with single target and that is what this build lacks as AoE is not a problem at all. 3.5 Videos Don't expect anything fancy for now as my PC is pretty bad and so is my internet. I'll try to get friends of mine to maybe record and upload some better videos. This is just meant as proof of concept so don't expect to get any enjoyment out of it. It is low quality laggy and not edited at all. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQCOWWf1cp-kxxm7C49uHSXF_io96nlv0 Last edited by Aireia on Oct 26, 2015, 5:57:56 AM
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Edit 1: Added some screenshots, crappy videos and a little bit of general math considering the burning damage.
Last edited by Aireia on Oct 25, 2015, 8:17:54 PM
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sounds interesting
it would be nice if you could add some gameplay videos [IGN] "Zealotchen"
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I am just about to upload some videos but don't expect anything fancy. Just some proof of concept Videos in low level maps with shit quality because my PC can't handle much more =(
Did some Gorge on the weekend (all mods except tempest and rampage) to see how my times went and I ended up with 5-6 minutes without shrines and strongboxes so I think that's not anything near amazing but pretty OK. Vids should be up in ~15 min so enjoy your eye cancer :D | |
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what about adding blood rage ?
[IGN] "Zealotchen"
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Well I could add Blood Rage but it won't grant me anything besides getting our onehit out faster.
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Hi there
first of all thx for the build, it is quite interesting, and I'm trying it as we speak :). A quick question, why, instead of avatar of fire and cold to fire gem, don't you use the Pyre ring ? Thank you again for this guide, have a good one! | |
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Sry thought this thread to be long dead and didn't check it recently. The problem with pyre is that it destroys corpses and we need those to proliferate our burn as just the radius of HoA isn't enough to clear well.
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Make sense!
Thank you :) |
