Flameblast Zealot [2.0, cheap] - ZO, CI, EE, Ignite

Hi, welcome to build guide/description. As usual, this build works well with low budget and would (IMO) shine with high-end gear. Since I've been playing PoE, I wanted to exploit Zealot´s Oath potential..

Making a build means to solve both damage and survivability issues in various situations. The main survivability problem of Flameblast is that the character needs to stand still for significant amount of time. Ive decided to solve it with lots of HP and regen, in combination with CwDT setups and flasks. Damage problems of ignite builds are (given by how ignite mechanics work) highly resistant enemies, which is here solved by altering enemy resists. This happens automatically while you cast Flameblast

TALISMAN EDIT:

12/7 tree: looks like we lost 10% increased AoE but gained another 2% regen, which is pretty nice.
12/10 patch notes:
20% more damage of flameblast
non-legacy blood dance regen reduced to 0.5% per frenzy charge
cooldown on burst damage skills of monsters will help survivabilty by a lot (I guess)

VIDEO

Twinned Jungle Valley of Elemental Weakness
Canyon with lots of magic Sea Witches
Some Cells with Beyonds
Zana Jungle Valley - Monsters curse immune while me dual cursed, but still doable just fine

DAMAGE and MECHANICS

How the ignite works – Ignite is an on-hit effect, status ailment, dealing burn damage (= fire damage over time), which is 20% of the initial hit per second, for four second. When the hit is dealt, initial burn damage is set and then altered by all applicable modifiers. Burn damage is being affected by actual enemy resist at any time

* flameblast initial hit has the following properties – spell, fire/elemental, AoE
* flameblast ignite has these properties – fire/elemental, AoE, burn, DoT

this implies that we prefer generic modifiers that apply to both initial damage and burn (fire/elemental, AoE) over the ones applying to specific damage type only (spell, burn, DoT)

Ignite and enemy resitances - Lowering enemy fire resistance is the most effective way to increase ignite damage, thats why we use Elemental Equilibrium with dual curse (Elemental weakness, Flammability) and increased curse effect. All these effects are applied simultaneously and automatically using CwDT+Curse on Hit setup.

Increased curse effect is very important to kill unique bosses. They are usually highly resistant with reduced curse effect on them. Increased curse effect stacks additively with their reduced curse effect making them much more vulnerable


proliferated burn is based on initial damage on original ignited target, so if you have highly resistant ignite monster standing next to ignited non-resistant trash mob, it will recive higher burn damage from proliferate, than from ignite on it.

My build´s theoretical damage - My build has 113% lowered enemy resists (on enemies that are not curse resistant) from (lvl19) dual curses (with 40% increased curse effect), thus with EE, the maximum I can get on enemies is –163% fire resist. there is more to get from Ele weakness quality and curse level. Curse immune enemies die just fine with only EE on them, with occasional exceptions, who are high HP/resist rare mobs with regen, leech, soul eater etc .. I also use manually casted ball lightning to put EE on occasional enemies who refuse to trigger my cwdt


DEFENSE

first of all, CI problem is stun, and you cant afford being stunned (or stunlocked) while casting. Stun immunity (eye of Chayula) is mandatory

another problem of CI is freeze duration. Auxium belt makes the duration to be determined by 65% of ES instead of life. You got plenty of ES, so the freeze is basically a non-issue

All you need is to survive for around 2.5 seconds until you cast and set off the flameblast. The main defenses are high ES and regen. I got 8% regen from the tree, 1.5% from Vitality aura and 4% from frenzy charges (6% with high end gear). It is easy to get ~9k ES with low budget gear and medium level (85). I assume 12k ES could be reached with high budget gear and high level character.


Once you take ~2.8k damage, cold snap proliferation is cast to prevent damage and to give you some time to regen. low lvl cwdt ball lightning with blind can also reduce the damage you take

when facing a dangerous group, I pop up the flasks. Granite of iron skin gives me around 8k armour, which is very effective against many small hits you are facing. I also use all three elemental flasks, with bleed immunity, shock immunity and curse immunity


for extremely dangerous encounters, there is Vaal discipline, which rises ES and regen to absurd level

you cant facetank all, there are some situations that require carefull approach and kiting

PLAYSTYLE

1) Approach the monsters and start casting flameblast near you.
2) Use the flasks while casting
3) low lvl CwDT procs very soon applying both the curses and EE in radius around you. If you take some more damage, monsters get frozen by cold snap proliferate
4) Once you reach 10 stacks of Flameblast (or your ES drops too low), move a bit to release the blast. Everything should be dead very soon. if there is something left, use manually casted ball lightning on monsters who burn but refuse to proc cwdt/ee again
5) repeat. due to high HP and regen, you can kite/tank the bosses. Non-unique monsters should all die with only one blast (with exception of occasional rare high-hp/resistant curse immune monsters)

what can kill you

dangerous situations are the ones where there are many relatively strong mobs around who are able to hit you fast. typical example is opening a strongbox with magic monsters mod, or many Act 4 monsters with Aura rares etc. Use vaal Discipline in such situations (or pick the more careful approach), the duration is short, but you only need around 2.5 seconds to remove the threat

bleed, corrupted blood – staunching mod on one of the elemental flasks is mandatory

bearer bloodline mods on large packs – pay attention

you cant facetank all, there are some situations that require careful approach and kiting

TREE

Keystones - Chaos Inoculation, Zealot´s Oath, Elemental Equilibrium

tree focuses on energy shield, life/mana regen, fire/elemental damage, AoE and Curses

unique jewels: Energy from within to transition spare %life mods you get from regen passives (Quick Recovery and Combat Stamina clusters). I also use survival secrets to boost mana regen and damage

rare jewels: fire damage, ES

CI transition – before, after (lvl 70 - 91 points)
lvl 85 (107 points)
lvl 95 (117 points)

options to consider (points 108-117) – there are energy shield nodes, but Id consider flask passives, flask duration would be nice and extra armour and max resists from granite and elemental ones too. I cant tell for sure whether it would be better for overall survivability than extra 18% increased ES from three ES passives. there is also 4 point Breath of Flames cluster for fire/burn damage, chance to ignite and ignite duration, but damage doesn't seem to be an issue

MY GEM SETUPS

Flameblast + chance to ignite + AoE + Elemental proliferation

CwDT (lvl 1) + shock nova + (q) Curse on hit + Elemental weakness + Flammability + (enffeeble - see "high budget" gear section for details)

CwDT (high lvl) + Cold snap + Elemental proliferation + AoE (or Controlled Destruction when Talisman patch is released)

CwDT (lvl 1) + ball lightning + blind

Vaal Discipline + Increased duration

Discipline, Vitality, Clarity, Flame dash, Ball lightning

gem quality priorities - curse on hit (curse effect), flameblast and AoE (their quality increase both the initial hit and the burn damage), elemental weakness (enemy resists)

options to consider: if you insist on using 5L/6L on flameblast, you must use two different cwdt curse on hit setups in 4L, one with shock nova, one with ice nova. Make sure that the ice nova one is located so that it goes off first and not increase monsters cold resist (because of cold snap). Youd have to get rid of ball lightning + blind cwdt to free up the slot and use high lvl cwdt + cold snap + ele proli in 3L

GEARING

my budget: medium to low

weapon: Doryani catalyst
amulet: eye of chayula
rings: resists, es, stats and mana regen if needed
belt: auxium
boots: Blood dance
other: ES (top priority), resists/intelligence if possible (5-linked later with Vorici)
*I bought all the rares for 1-5 chaos (second week of Darkshrine league)

low budget:

weapon: rare sceptre with elemental/fire damage (beware +fire/cold damage to spells mods, they'd brake EE functionality)

high budget:

both eye of chayula and blood dance corrupted for +1 frenzy charge

very high ES gear with resists, so that you can use doedre ring for the third curse (enfeeble in cwdt/coh 6th link)

Consider: The Vertex unique helmet has nice ES (but again no resists), and putting Flameblast in it would greatly help to solve mana issues, as well as increase level of Flameblast/chance to ignite/ele proliferation

LEVELING

AoE, ele proli are rewards for killing Malachai on Normal difficulty, so you can start playing with final 4L flameblast setup. It doesnt work too well until you use EE though. note that cwdt would proc much less often in lower difficulties. In ~beginning of merciless you should be able to play effectively with cwdt coh flammability

bandits: point, point, frenzy charge (Kreytin)

MAPS

there are not too many bad mods:

reduce/no regen – unplayable
ele reflect – carefully playable
curse immune – much lower effective dps, doable, some rare/unique mobs are hard to kill
blood magic (obviously)

Talisman/Ascendancy speculation

* new Controlled Destruction support gem would be nice to support cold snap (or even flameblast but I prefer leaving it 4L)
* mechanical/balance changes to skills can improve the build or destroy it (not too likely), we will see, I will update the guide soon after 2.1 is released

Ascendancy speculation: Two of the witch subclasses have not been announced yet. I believe there could be some curse related thing. Like additional curse, curse effect or „Curses are applied to curse immune monsters at 50% effectiveness “.. would be nice.. If not Im pretty sure there will be something AoE/elemental damage related at least

thanks for reading. you can post feedback or ask questions if you like

guide finished

fixed video and added new ones

damn nice guide, detailed and well written
i always wanted to try a ci build with regen

what bothers me a bit is the proliferation gem
is it really useful?
havent heard of it since the nerf and it has been pretty much dead (for a reason)
maybe it gets a buff ^^

thanks

"

prospecial wrote:

what bothers me a bit is the proliferation gem
is it really useful?

its so useful that it would not work without it:)

* how else would you apply burn damage (or cold snap freeze) to all targets? 100% chance to ignite? max crit?
* it leaves burning corpses that proliferate burn to enemies who were originally not in hit radius (came later, or spawned via fracture or beyond)
* proliferated burn can deal more damage to nearby resistant enemies than the original ignite on them
* it effectively increases blast AoE

"

havent heard of it since the nerf and it has been pretty much dead (for a reason)
maybe it gets a buff ^^

dunno, I dont follow the latest fashion news:) but from my point of view, the nerf was justified.. It used to be crazy OP, now you have to put some effort in Ignite specialization to make it work

What do you think of for this build? I'm running talisman hardcore, and while it's a nice item the idea of being ignited doesn't sound HC friendly. Just curious if the gains outweigh the risk.

So curse on hit and CwDT seem to no longer work together... Rather unfortunate because that was a big part of this build.

edit/ nvm...
missread cold snap description

I haven't played in a while(over a year), is Infernal Mantle still viable for this build, and how does my old gear look these days? I'm lvl84 atm.

I'm probably skipping the +1 curse(personal preference), and wouldn't Holy Fire at the upper left corner of tree be pretty good for only 4 points(+70% burning damage)?

I'm very interested in playing your build because flameblast looks like a very cool spell but i'm very new to the game and to the skilltree i just needed the



lvl 20 :

lvl 40 :

lvl 60:

lvl 85+:


or something like that

+ an ability what u should start leveling with when u begin