[2.3/2.4] Elementalist Vortex build, in-depth guide

2.4 Update!
Yeah, so as pointed out already, this build got a significant change in 2.4.

Quoting the patch notes:

"

Shaper of Desolation now grants different Confluxes over a fourteen-second cycle: Chilling Conflux for four seconds, Shocking Conflux for four seconds, Igniting Conflux for four seconds and then all three together for two seconds. Each Conflux means that any damage causes that Status Ailment. Elemental Conflux was too powerful. The new version requires more strategy (and doesn't need a kill to get started).

For reference, Shaper of Desolation in the past gave us a buff (20% chance on kill, 4 seconds duration) which made all of our Hits apply Shock, Ignite and Chill. It was basically a pseudo-permanent buff that let us apply Shock and Ignite to everything. It's only weakness was versus single target bosses, which there aren't that many in the game.

So... Whilst the change doesn't straight up kill the build, it does severely nerf it. All the core interactions are still in place, and it's even a buff versus single targets/bosses; keep in mind that we run a very strong version of Temporal Chains, which stretches the debuffs - their uptime will still be good. As for the clear speed: if you're doing content where you one shot the packs, then essentially nothing changed - you will still one shot them, with or without Ignites/Shocks.

What this change really hurts however is the clear speed on higher tiers. As soon as you dip into content where you don't one shot things with the Vortex Hit (and this expansion gives many ways to boost the tiers/levels of the maps/zones you do), your clears 'consistency' will flop, and will overall be weaker than before as you'll almost never have both Ignite and Shock. It's a direct nerf in this scenario.

My personal opinion on this build now? Don't do it. Not as Elementalist, anyway. There's at least one other Ascendancy that will work better for it - Pathfinder. It too has a way to get somewhat reliable Ignites and Shocks, and its damage mechanics are overall extremely similar to the ones in this build. I'd recommend to take a look at The Anomaly Tank build. It's not the same, but quite similar, and is definitely superior in its raw power.

Good luck :3

***

Hi! I'd like to share my Vortex/Elementalist Ignite build.

Currently, my character can clear all map tiers with ease. There's 3 map mods that are annoying or have to be avoided, one of which only spawns on high tier maps, and another is ignorable on low/mid tier maps. Reflect on a single rare mob does nothing against this build, and you're going to blow up most corpses which provides some protection against Detonate Dead. Overall, map clear is very solid with this build.

Regarding bosses, nearly all of them are super easy up to and including the Abyss Map boss (easy even if twinned with crazy mods). Colosseum Map boss is a bit harder, but is still doable even with crazy mods (but probably not twinned). Core mini bosses are easy, but Eater of Souls is hard due to this build working from melee range mostly (but still doable without crazy damage mods). Labyrinth/Izaro is easy with any buff combination, but you do have to play the fight, so Charges + another damage buff can potentially one shot you if you misplay and take a big crit.

The way this build deals with bosses in general is by having permanent Chill and a very strong Enfeeble and Temporal Chains, on top of a high HP pool and very good avoidance on the character. Ergo you still have to play the bosses mechanics, but they all become extremely easy to avoid (due to how slow they're casted), stop one shotting you, or even just miss. This is not as good as just one shotting or bursting a boss down and thus bypassing his mechanics altogether like the good boss killer builds do, but is still pretty decent. More about this later.

Price wise, the base version can be ran dirt cheap. I played only this build in Prophecy, and I started off running with just one 1c worth unique and 1c worth rares in all other slots. Self found might be doable, although that one cheap unique is a gigantic damage boost (but not an enabler). Mid tier maps were a breeze with this setup (I've done some T13-14 with a 4-Link Vortex too but it was messy). The full version will be pricey, but you can scale into it step by step, which I'll describe below.

Videos to showcase the gameplay, clear speed and to prove all of the above:
Gorge
Abyss
Labyrinth - timestamps for Argus and Izaro are in the description. Portals + Fonts this time, he seems to get Attack Speed from Fonts. I've had easier days
Slowpoke Piety - watch her cast the slowest beam ever for fun

Offense

The initial idea was to scale up both components of the new Vortex skill. The special thing about Vortex is that the Damage over Time effect scales with Spell Damage, which is the most abundant and common caster stat, and thus makes it possible to create an entire build which focuses on stats that scale both the Hit and the DoT portions (namely Spell Damage, Elemental Damage, and Area Damage). This "two for one" nature of Vortex is what intrigued me about it, but that was just the beginning of the scaling craziness.

Elementalist Ascendancy gives us the following:
- Shaper of Desolation gives us Elemental Conflux or, in other words, access to Shock and Ignite without having to get Crit. Ignite is absolutely key, since any Damage over Time caused by Vortex will scale with Spell Damage, including Ignite. This is what makes the build so powerful. We now have our stats apply to Vortex Hit, Vortex DoT, and then Vortex Ignite. Since Ignites base damage is determined by the Hit that caused it, it actually double dips from everything, and we're going to have an insane amount of Spell Damage. This results in some very heavy Ignite damage, and a lot better scaling ratios from our stats than just "two for one";
- Liege of the Primordial with a Flame Golem and an Ice Golem gives us a lot of Damage, Cold Damage and Fire Damage, as well as a few defensive benefits I'll talk about later;
- Pendulum of Destruction and Mastermind of Discord are straight up damage buffs. Penetration only works with Hits, but there's simply no better options available. Paragon of Calamity is not going to make us viable for Elemental Reflect maps, and single targets with reflect are not a threat at all as it is (only Hits can be reflected).

The other interesting thing is that DoTs can't be converted, which enables the usage of Pyre and Elemental Equilibrium. The Hit will be converted to Fire, but the DoT will stay Cold. On top of that, we're going to run Lightning Warp as our mobility skill, thus having an entire EE rotation going on between all three elements.

And the last thing we'll use to scale up our damage is an Elemental Weakness curse. There's only so much Spell/Elemental/Area Damage you can get, and just about the only thing left that will scale all of your damage at once, is reducing targets Resistances. This will be our third curse.

Defense

A good defense consists of a high enough effective health pool to not die from single hits, and a way to constantly replenish/sustain that pool. Considering that leeching with Vortex Hits isn't feasible, our starting point in the tree, and which items we're after, there's really only one viable approach here: Energy Shield and avoidance (Evasion, Dodge, Block). The idea is to take damage so rarely that Energy Shield will recharge between the times you take damage.

There's two viable ways for us to build a high health pool: hybrid Life/ES, or pure ES with Chaos Inoculation. Since going Elementalist for us is a must, we don't even have access to the extremely strong ES Ascendancies that CI builds typically get. Even though CI still looks slightly better overall, it's closer to being a trade off than an upgrade within the scope of this build, whilst being priced like an upgrade since you will be competing for pure ES items with builds that do run those Ascendancies. Personally, I think it's pointless, so I built Life/ES, and that's what I'm covering in this guide. I ended up with over 8k total Life/ES combined which is enough for everything.

The avoidance layer consists of Enfeeble and Temporal Chains. Vortex itself also applies Chill, which makes everything even slower (and, unlike curses, isn't penalized against boss targets). Whilst slows aren't exactly avoidance, they do make you take damage less often.

The benefits of having two max level Golems that are immune to Elemental Damage and can Blind is not to be underestimated. Single targets will be permanently Blinded, a nice bonus on bosses. Certain bosses seem to love hitting the Golems too - check the Argus fight in the Labyrinth video I linked above. It seems to work this way with most melee bosses. I've even seen Dominus spam his spirit attack at a Golem for the whole fight.

On the character itself, we'll end up having around 18-20% Evasion, ~55% Block, 75% Spell Block and 3k Armour (23% reduction). This is counting only one Flask which you'll pretty much always use. Depending on what you do with the rest of the Flask slots, you will end up with a lot more mitigation, avoidance, or even both. I'll talk more about Flasks later.

Setup

Passives

Here is the tree I am currently using at level 94: passive skill tree (use right click->copy link to paste it into planner)

Things worth noting:
- Those +30 Strength/Dexterity nodes are necessary, yes. This is due to the gear setup using two unique rings and a unique amulet, thus not getting the attributes from those slots (which is the "normal" way to get them). Even with Dexterity on gloves and Strength on the belt implicit, these nodes are still necessary in the final setup. But considering the benefits provided by those rings and amulet, it's very well worth it;
- Zealot's Oath is picked to use it in combination with Enduring Cry. If you reach the stage where you switch to Rallying Cry for its mana regeneration benefits, you can drop the node. You can also drop that node if you plan on using The Sorrow of the Divine Flask, but I prefer a different approach for Flasks.

Bandits: 40 hp (Oak), skill point (kill all), skill point (kill all).

Leveling/pick order: I haven't leveled with Vortex (switched to it from Firestorm at levels 70-75), so I don't really have an experience to report on that. However, I'd imagine it's very doable, as the skill has a very good base damage, and it's not that mana hungry since you don't need to spam it - just drop one and keep moving.

Here's a set of images with the paths I'd take if I was leveling a new char for this build:


Skills

- Main skill setup: Vortex -> Concentrated Effect -> Increased Area of Effect -> Controlled Destruction -> Rapid Decay -> Less Duration or Faster Casting

I'd recommend getting Concentrated Effect and Increased Area of Effect together, so as to cancel out the Area of Effect reduction of Concentrated. Less Duration should only be used if you don't suffer from having a much shorter Vortex (if your Hit one shots everything during clear); also, make sure you don't get quality on Less Duration.

Getting a level 21 Vortex is going to improve your damage very significantly. This build has no ways of scaling the base damage, it's all based around modifiers. And when you have a lot of modifiers, upping the base value gives huge returns. Level 6 of them in your secondary weapon slots for Vaaling. Quality is very important too.

Side note: take a minute to acknowledge how good Elementalist actually is. It allows you to apply Ignites without the usage of Crit, which in turn allows you to use that Controlled Destruction gem for a fat 45% Spell Damage multiplier. Crazy, right?

- Curse setup: Enfeeble -> Temporal Chains -> Elemental Weakness -> Blasphemy or Enhance

If you have to run double curse due to not having all the Mana Reserved reductions yet, just use both Blasphemy and Enhance and don't use one of the curses (drop EW). This goes into one of your three 4-Links. Also, if you're wondering why it's listed like that, the final curse setup we're going for involves Heretic's Veil, so we will end up using 3 curses and Enhance eventually, with no need for a Blasphemy gem.

- CwDT setup: Cast when Damage Taken (level 7) -> Immortal Call (level 9) -> Enduring Cry or Rallying Cry -> (Increased Duration)

Increased Duration is in paranthesis because rolling 4 red sockets on an Intelligence base item is extremely hard. Don't do it until you have nothing else to upgrade and you're sure you will stick to the item. Also, use the Vorici calculator to determine what's the best way to do it (spoiler: it'll be by using the "at least two reds" craft).

Which Warcry to use depends on what you're doing and how good is your gear. Rallying Cry is basically necessary for clearing when you run 6-Link, simply because your Vortex costs 80 mana and that becomes an issue when you have only 160-180. Enduring Cry is what I used most of the time, though. Together with Zealot's Oath it was a mini ES "Flask" (that short 200-400 life regen effect scales with Increased Duration too). You can also just carry one of the gems with you and swap whenever needed. It's just one slot of your inventory. I do this in Lab, for example.

- Golem setup: Summon Flame Golem -> Summon Ice Golem -> Blind -> (Minion Life)

Minion Life becomes optional if you get 20 quality on the Golem gems. They just become tanky enough on their own. One of the utility gems will go into that free slot.

- Movement setup: Lightning Warp -> Faster Casting -> Less Duration

This goes into one of your weapons. If you feel like Lightning Warp is too slow for you (i.e. you're just leveling and can't use the high levels and 20 quality versions of these gems yet), then Flame Dash is a viable movement skill to use as well, and only requires the Faster Casting support. But you absolutely want to switch to Lightning Warp as soon as you can afford it.

- Blade Vortex setup: Cast when Damage Taken (level 1) -> Blade Vortex (level 8) -> Increased Critical Strikes

It's crazy, I know. The reason for this is to proc Elemental Overload. Since Vortex itself will have a 5% crit chance due to Controlled Destruction, we need something that hits often and has a decent chance to crit, and preferably takes no effort or cast time from us to manage. This is it. And it's absolutely worth doing that for a 40% more Spell Damage (multiplier!).

- Utilities: Frost Bomb, Frostbolt

Both are to be kept level 1 for mana preservation. Frost Bomb is used for a bit of extra Cold Resistance reduction, and Frostbolt can be used for a ranged way to drop Vortexes. Neither needs any links with them. Frost Bomb is an extremely fast cast even baseline, and Frostbolt has very few niche uses where its quality doesn't really matter or is worth investing into.

Gear

I'll talk through the uniques first.

1. The most important unique you should get is Pyre. It enables the usage of Elemental Equilibrium and is a cheap item. There's really no reason not to have it if you run this build.

2. Chestpiece: Carcass Jack or Beast Fur Shawl are both viable, but I'd recommend going for a Carcass Jack. It's just better tailored for Life/ES, whereas Beast Fur Shawl seems to be designed for pure ES. Don't bother buying the other one if you already have one of these, though.

3. Shield and amulet: Rathpith Globe and Stone of Lazhwar. Note that you really want good rolls on these, and dropping an exalt on a good rolled Rathpith is worth it. Lazhwar is a cheap item, but is pointless on its own, so don't bother looking for it until you get a good Rathpith. Make sure you grab the Spell Block passive nodes once you switch to this setup:


4. Your final endgame upgrades are Heretic's Veil and Doedre's Damning. The ring ring is cheap but is pointless without the headpiece, and Heretic's cost around 5.5-6.5ex at the time of writing. This makes your curses become absolutely insane as it allows the usage of 3 curses and Enhance, coupled with all the mana reservation reduction we get from the tree.

As for rares...

- Weapon: you're looking for a Wand or Sceptre with a good amount of Spell Damage (>60% on the explicit roll - don't confuse this with total, as the total will differ heavily for Sceptres which have an Elemental Damage - not Spell Damage - implicit mod), Cast Speed (>20%) and Mana Regeneration Rate (>50%). Ideally you also want it to have an open suffix so that you can craft Cold Damage on it. A weapon with the stats I mentioned won't be cheap, though. If you're still lacking uniques and your rings/amulet have the Mana Regen, you can drop that mod from the search, as well as you can ignore Cast Speed for the time being.

There's no difference between Sceptres and Wands for this build. Our damage scales equally with both Elemental and Spell Damage. Wands will be much cheaper, as there's a lot of builds that are after Elemental Damage specifically.

- Chest, helmet, gloves, boots, belt: Life, Energy Shield mods, and Resistances is what all of these are for. Boots must have 30% Movement Speed, so whenever you build a gear set, start with these. Belt should be a Heavy Belt base for its Strength implicit - you need the attribute. Having Dexterity on gloves (at the cost of one of the resistance rolls! keep that in mind) is necessary when you obtain both the unique rings and amulet.

Stick to cheap items until you complete your unique setup, and only then invest into actually good ones. You're looking to have 164% to all Elemental Resistances in order to be capped against Elemental Weakness map mod for red maps, or 159% in yellow maps. It's very doable due to us getting a lot of Resistances from our passive tree, and 4 of our 6 uniques providing some Resistances too. You can check my profile and my character (Jainayo) for an example.

- Ring and amulet: it's totally not worth it to invest currency into good rare rings and amulets when you are going to eventually replace them. The only noteworthy stats available on them are mana regeneration, cast speed and attributes, so you should look for some cheap items with those, or just look for Life and Resistances like for the armour rares. Amulets also have the "increased maximum Energy Shield" stat.

- Shield: before you get Rathpith, you can either run a rare shield, or simply run dual wield. Personally I've simply dual wielded for extra damage, but a shield can have Spell Damage, Mana Regen, Resistances, Life and ES mods. Good rare shields aren't cheap though, so just prioritize whatever you lack at the time and stick to cheap items - you are going for a Rathpith anyway.

Use poeaffix.net liberally.


Jewels

Picking which Jewels to get is fairly easy. Just open the wiki page for them, look through the list affixes and suffixes, and pick 2 of each. Pay attention to the numbers, some mods have better ranges for stats that are totally equal for the build.

Personally, I go for the increased maximum Energy Shield and increased maximum Life prefixes, and then any 1-2 offensive suffixes (Damage, Area Damage, Spell Damage). It's a good place to get a bit of extra health, but you could get offensive prefixes if you like that idea more. You can't get Life or ES in suffixes.

Note that getting 4x "right" mods is extremely rare. It'll either cost you a lot of currency or a lot of time. I've had live searches up for weeks and only managed to get one 4x. Going for 3x good modded ones is completely normal even if you're rich.

Flasks

Flasks work very similarly to Jewels, except they have one prefix and one suffix, and there's a lot less mods overall.

For this build, there's only two Flasks which I'd recommend always using: a Seething Divine Life Flask of Staunching (instant and bleed removal mods) and Rumi's Concoction.

The Life flask is just necessary to deal with Chaos Damage, so you have to stick to it no matter how good your defenses get. Rumi's is just incredibly good for us, and with the Rathpith/Lazhwar setup, you end up having 75% Spell Block and 55% Attack Block while the buff is up. It's a huge part of our overall avoidance setup.

All the damage flasks are lackluster for us. They're all based around either conversion or extra damage, which only work for Hits. There's the Sulphur Flask base type, but 40% increased damage isn't a lot when we have so many increases already ("increases" all just add up).

And so, my approach was getting movement speed flasks for clearing (Silver and Quartz), and then just adapting my flask setup for specific bosses or whatever else I was doing. And that's what you should do, too. Just use whatever you are most comfortable with, or whatever makes most sense to you and your playstyle or activity. To give you an example and explain the logic I've followed, though, here's my clearing setup:



I rolled Movement Speed on the two Flasks that already have Movement Speed, and then rolled the Freezing removal/immunity (which you always want to have with you) on the one Flask that doesn't. I also rolled Increased Duration on the Quicksilver in order to make it match the duration of the Silver Flask. I then just tap 23 whenever I know I'll be taking some hits, and tap 45 whenever I want to go faster. Very simple, very lazy, just what I want for clearing. I've also fallen in love with Phasing (Quartz Flask) on this build, since it lets you get into better positions for a Vortex drop. The 6th Flask is something you just want to have around when you go into Chaos-heavy maps, e.g. Poison + Desecrated Ground. It helps.

By the way, a very cool side bonus of Movement Speed is the fact that Lightning Warp scales with it. It's duration is calculated based on the distance between you and the point you cast it on, and how long it'd take you to run there by normal means. It's very noticeable when you're warping around with big Movement Speed buffs.

And here's my setup for Labyrinth/Izaro runs:



All I did was changed the movement ones for defensive ones. Those Armour and Evasion rolls give a lot. Sulphur Flask should've probably been a Quartz Flask (for the extra Dodge and Spell Dodge), to be honest. I kept a Quicksilver in not only to get through the Lab faster, but also because most of the other mods I could get are meh. The Flask mods don't stack with each other - only the strongest one is active at a given time. That 6th Flask has Curse Immunity on it, which is something I use on days that Izaro has Fonts. You can find out before going into the Lab by checking poelab.com.

Gameplay

And finally, it's time for some pro tips. These are of various level of importance, but the first few are must reads.

1. Map mods to avoid: Elemental Reflect, Blood Magic and Hexproof. Reflect is technically doable - you could avoid Hitting many mobs at once (3 or less is safe-ish), and just killing things by kiting them into the Vortex - but it's just not worth your time and you should reroll or dump the map. Blood Magic is stupid because the moment you'll encounter any Chaos Damage you will instantly die. Hexproof disables a core part of your build completely, however it doesn't break you: you can still do everything that you do, you're just much worse at it. Generally I'd still avoid it, but if you get it on some map you greatly outscale, you can do it.

Maps/bosses to avoid: Torture Chamber and Plaza. The problem is their beam spells. Unavoidable damage on top of having to be close to deal damage just doesn't interact well with those beam spells. Both of the maps have crappy layouts as well, so you're not missing much. Skipping a Tier 7 map doesn't hurt you at all. Skipping Tier 14 Plaza feels bad, but as an extra bonus to the beam, she has this huge Chaos Damage AoE spell, which is among the worst things you can face. All of my boss kills on that map were incredibly sketchy, and I've died to her too (twice). You can just sell it and buy any other Tier 14. If you insist on running them, you can, it's not undoable - it's just painful to deal with.

2. Learn the sources of Chaos Damage in the game! This is super important. Being Life/ES hybrid means you'll only have your 3.5-4k Life pool against Chaos Damage, and it gets very spooky. Off the top of my head: beware of Desecrated Ground, Poisons, Caustic Clouds from Strongboxes, and basically everything that looks green and necrotic. Check the Chaos Damage page on wiki, there's a list of mobs with Chaos Damage at the bottom. Knowledge is your only defense against this particular mechanic.

3. Make good use of Elemental Equilibrium and Shaper of Desolation! For example, against most bosses that spawn adds, you should always try to go and kill the adds to try get Elemental Conflux up, then Lightning Warp on the boss to reduce his Cold/Fire Resistance, Vortex on him to do damage and cause the Ignite, and then Lightning Warp again to make his reduced Resistances be Cold/Fire (to make Ignite do even more). Understanding the interactions between your spells and passives will make you more efficient and will make the game more fun for you.

4. When clearing, try to optimize the number of Vortexes you drop per pack/location. It's very easy to fall into an inefficient mindset and start hitting things with the edge of Vortex, and you want to avoid that if you want to consistently clear fast. You're sort of forced to do this right when you get a 6-Link too, due to mana constraints. Train good habits from the start.

5. In the beginning of this guide, I said Ambrius in the Colosseum map is hard. This is due to the fight having no adds at all, thus not giving you a chance to get Elemental Conflux and Ignites. The fight just lasts long and Flask charges become a big issue. The other problem is that his small spinning ground AoE blades become even harder to notice through your own Vortexes, and that one of his Attacks completely ignores avoidance (just can't miss). The "trick" is to let your Golems tank him, but you have to constantly resummon them because his unavoidable attack WILL kill them over and over. Luckily, you get enough downtime in his phase switches to do it. Other than that, you do what you do on all other bosses: run around and keep Vortex up.

But generally, I'd suggest to just sell Ambrius kills on trade chat. What you do is, you open a portal near his gate, invite 5 people that will pay you 5c each (or 10c for twinned), tell them all NOT to enter until you say "go". You then enter the gate, tag the boss (the moment he notices you, he's tagged), say "go" in party chat, and have your 6 man group zerg him while he has 1 man HP, all the while returning all the money invested into the map or even making a profit. You don't even have to do anything, the ranged characters will kill him. Selling challenges is a great way to make money if your character is capable of clearing T15, use it to your advantage. /trade 820 has a lot of this stuff going on.

6. I also said Core bosses are easy. Shavronne and Doedre are trivial: Shavs reflect does nothing to us, and against Doedre you just stay in green and kill her like you would kill any other mob. Maligaro is also trivial: spec into Chaos Inoculation for that fight, then walk around him and drop Vortexes (make sure you stay close, the tactic is to have Vortex keep his traps permanently out of your way). That's literally a pay to win method, but well, you weren't really expecting Core Map runs to be profitable... right? Malachai is extremely hard as the fight restricts your movement a lot (it's all about that ground AoE and dodging stuff), and we sort of need to be close to him to do damage.

Credits

The initial concept belongs to ZiggyD. I was just inspired enough to take his build from the early Prophecy league days and try to push it to the limit. And here we are now, big and mighty.

The forum decided to rek my formatting, but the post is up now fully.

Reserving 2nd post for myself just in case.

Very T1 build from Russia.

thank for your great guild!
but how to use 3 curse at once?
and show up all your gears please!

"

THANHPOE wrote:

thank for your great guild!
but how to use 3 curse at once?
and show up all your gears please!

My profile is public so you can check my gear (Jainayo character)

Three curses is ran with Heretic's Veil and picking up all the Mana Reserve Reduction nodes available to us. You end up with 150-200 mana which is enough to play comfortably.

Going three curse is basically the 'last step' as Heretic's cost 5.5-6.5 ex. That's very affordable though, and by far the most expensive part of the build. Consider it your last big upgrade.

Edit: I linked my full set in the guide (Gear section).

Seems strong, digged the videos, ggwp!

Classic Tier 1 build.

Why do you mix hp / ES like 50:50 or will you go to 100% ES ?

"

most1010 wrote:

Why do you mix hp / ES like 50:50 or will you go to 100% ES ?

I went hybrid Life/ES.

CI is doable, but since we don't go Occultist (or Trickster) and don't get any of the juicy ES Ascendancies, I just don't think it's worth it. You gain a bit more total EHP (as pure ES is definitely more efficient), but you also have to deal with the Stun and Freeze problem fully, which forces you to sacrifice Lazhwar amulet for Eye of Chayula and all of your Flask rolls for the purpose of dealing with status ailmets. And all that to have 10-11k ES instead of 8-9k Life/ES combined. Chaos Damage is manageable with Life/ES unless you want to do Maligaro or something.

Going another Ascendancy is out of the question. Ignite scaling/double dipping is literally the whole point here.

You will also have to compete with pure ES items (which are a lot more expensive) with builds that do run powerful ES Ascendancies. It just seems like a waste.

I've covered this subject/question in the guide.

---

Update: I've also edited in this paragraph into the Gameplay section.

"

Maps/bosses to avoid: Torture Chamber and Plaza. The problem is their beam spells. Unavoidable damage on top of having to be close to deal damage just doesn't interact well with those beam spells. Both of the maps have crappy layouts as well, so you're not missing much. Skipping a Tier 7 map doesn't hurt you at all. Skipping Tier 14 Plaza feels bad, but as an extra bonus to the beam, she has this huge Chaos Damage AoE spell, which is among the worst things you can face. All of my boss kills on that map were incredibly sketchy, and I've died to her too (twice). You can just sell it and buy any other Tier 14. If you insist on running them, you can, it's not undoable - it's just painful to deal with.

Forgot to write about this the first time around.

Can Empower (lvl 4) be used in place of Less Duration? The damage boost should be a lot higher and with no duration penalty.