[2.0.5] Qwark's Crit Fireball build, great clearspeed and HC viable.

How does it work? Fireball is a projectile that explodes upon hitting something. It differs from other projectiles, like kinetic blast, in that it doesn't explode every time it pierces an enemy. Arctic breath shares that limitation.

The damage of this sort of projectile spells originally came from shotgunning. Shotgunning was the act of hitting the same monster with multiple projectiles, effectively multiplying damage X projectiles that hit.

The 2.0 patch removed that element and now we are left with projectile overlap. That is the projectiles exploding and a monster being caught between the AOE from the explosion of multiple projectiles. That's why you will see Fireball is very effective against packs, not so much against a single target if there's not a wall nearby.

Now, the reason that Fireball is not held up to high standards is because of the base AOE. it has a radius of 8 while Arctic Breath has 16. The exact same tooltip will have AB one-shotting 75 map blue packs while Fireball will struggle to do that in a 73 map and end up leaving 1-2 mobs alive on the sides as well.

Thankfully, 2.1 is coming and these issues will be alleviated, and there is more to come.

Let's start with survivabilty, what life and defences does this build have?

We start with 4.6K / 4.8K life WITHOUT jewels.

Add MoM, the Coke all spellcasters drink in this patch meta, for a total of 5.9K / 6.1K.

Sprinkle a hint of ZO which uses your natural regen so that you regen ES instead, which provides you with a 50% chance to ignore stuns as long as you were hit with some ES on you which, thanks to ZO, is almost always.

We support our ES pool with Enduring cry so you will almost always have 3 endurance charges.

Add a Granite of Iron Skin for 40% phys damage reduction.

Mix in a grape flavored Chaos golem for 4% extra phys damage mitigation.

Top it off with Whirling blades and Fortify.

And you have a total of 56% physical damage reduction.

You might look at my gear and ask why I'm using an infernal mantle and a consuming dark.

For the Infernal Mantle, there's really nothing that will give you such a great damage boost. This chest alone provides up to 550 ES, 35% fire damage ( 1,5/2k DPS ) and +1 gem level ( 1-3k DPS ). You get around the downside by simply not reserving anything past the 2 heralds. You might argue that a regular chest with Anger might give comparable damage but in reality there's a large difference as a 5L chest with Anger can barely come close to a 4L IM without Anger.

Doedre's Damning is used because I find HOI with Ice bite to be unreliable if you're not going at a sanic pace which is suicide in high lvl maps. You curse with Warlord's mark.

As for the consuming dark...

Now, before the 2.1 reveal, I thought the combination of these 2 uniques existed only for 2 things.

Immunity to reflect.
Hipsters wanting to run an all-chaos build just because they can.

However, there's more. Being a fire damage oriented build, you don't shock or freeze enemies. This makes the heralds rarely trigger and hit very few enemies, leaving you with barely any charges most of the time.

Converting 100% of your damage to Chaos ensures that the only type of elemental status you inflict on monsters comes from the lightning and ice damage from the heralds. So you hit lots of enemies.

But here's the best part. There were 2 very interesting support gems revealed for 2.1

Controlled destruction, 100% reduced crit chance for +25% more spell damage.

Void manipulation, 25% reduced elemental damage for 20% more chaos damage.

You can make use of Void manipulation because all your fire damage is converted to chaos, meaning you get an almost free MORE multiplier since 25% reduced elemental damage pales in comparison to the DPS loss 100%+ reduced crit chance is. Removing GMP from my gear ( to compare the effect of 27% more damage ) has shown that VM will be an increase of about 8k DPS, quite possibly even more. It's what could possibly see Fireball become better than AB with 1-2 threshold jewels. And AB in the current patch is very powerful already.

But why do we not use Controlled destruction? Because it gives 100% reduced chance to crit. Sure, you can say that the consuming dark has only 60% global crit and no multiplier compared to a rare dagger but we also don't know how the gem scales. At lvl 20, perhaps it's 200% reduced crit chance.

Not only that, but you bring back the problem of heralds not triggering due to ignites. Therefore, we go with VM, keeping in mind that we can pick up any new juicy chaos damage nodes as well.

When it comes to threshold jewels, I will make sure the build gets at least 2 of the fireball ones.

[2.0] Fireball - GMP - SPELL ECHO - INC AOE - FC - CRIT MULTI

[2.1] Fireball - GMP - SPELL ECHO - INC AOE - VM - FC/CRIT MULTI

Flame Surge - SPELL ECHO - CONC EFFECT

Herald of Thunder - COH - ASSASSIN'S MARK - WARLORD'S MARK

Herald of Ice - ICE BITE

Whirling Blades - FASTER ATTACKS - BLOOD MAGIC - FORTIFY

Enduring Cry - INCREASED DURATION - BLOOD MAGIC - INCREASED AOE

Summon Chaos Golem -

Unbuffed



Buffed

https://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAwYARXyXlxXn8Gtzs4w2pLFVS-WOYeKdYyaVXfIWv3DVDkiJ0xGWcFIHHn_GlS6TJ6Kj8NXviGwLUXTB80lRj_r5NyL0GoGCHuv1189tGaaZ2wvDCUmxl_QI9LmTUlPAVPIdl5U9X2pDvOpMs9AfIG6uswQH7-tQMEGWg9vbXgVC0PVVxiycOlgRLXyD6-4c3DLRmuCFMo8aRUdFncBmU1IEszwFogDvfJ_f8B-aO2jy7TyCm9Wm7DjkIjrYhXsabCcvZlQ26ffBkFUkqho4Fm_jag_EO3y4yg==