[3.5] Alpha and Omega, Molten Strike Raider. League Starter and End Game Finisher

looking pretty good. i think your damage is quite a bit better than you think it. in pob you gotta input projectile distance of 1 in order to simulate point blank bonus.

from calculating you probably have about 1m shaper dps if around half the projectiles hit. this is respectable, and you have a ton of room for improvements here and there.
so ya where you are sitting this looks good and i imagine performs pretty well all around, as long as you're feeling tanky enough.

im not noticing a chance to blind somewhere in your setup, so i'd recommend replacing your abyss jewel with one that has a 6% chance to blind, which will be plenty enough to you evade capped

Got up to 91 on this build, having a super good time and mowing through maps. Having the usual "Dodge/evasion" character issues of random gibs, but its not happening enough for me to really matter.

About to do shaper, then trying to work on uber elder for the first time ever. I have fortify on one of my beltimbers (I corrupted it before I quality...fml) and I kind of like it. Using poachers mark on hit...at the moment.

I've been switching between aura poachers mark with just anger, or poachers on hit with anger and herald of ash (My current favorite)

I don't even swap ancestral call out for any bosses below t16.


Got a super good helm recently. I'm running three unique dps flasks, Dying Sun, Sin's Rebirth, and a very poorly rolled Atziri's promise.

just keep in mind if you actually have avatar of fire either on the tree or through xoph's, you can't actually do any chaos damage so those flasks would be rendered useless.

Holy damn I'm literally retarded.

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xMustard wrote:

just keep in mind if you actually have avatar of fire either on the tree or through xoph's, you can't actually do any chaos damage so those flasks would be rendered useless.

Well I killed shaper solo for the first time ever, with my bad flask on lmao. Died twice because last phase I got careless. really smooth kill though other than my own badness.

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xMustard wrote:

looking pretty good. i think your damage is quite a bit better than you think it. in pob you gotta input projectile distance of 1 in order to simulate point blank bonus.

from calculating you probably have about 1m shaper dps if around half the projectiles hit. this is respectable, and you have a ton of room for improvements here and there.
so ya where you are sitting this looks good and i imagine performs pretty well all around, as long as you're feeling tanky enough.

im not noticing a chance to blind somewhere in your setup, so i'd recommend replacing your abyss jewel with one that has a 6% chance to blind, which will be plenty enough to you evade capped

Hi, thanks for correcting me!

I'm not sure if I'm being daft but i don't understand what I'm doing wrong

These are my POB configurations: https://pastebin.com/5kgzA1qQ
Online POB configurations (with projectile distance of 1 inputted): https://poe.technology/poebuddy/5kgzA1qQ

When I put projectile travel distance as 1, I don't quite see a difference in my DPS. For my magma balls, I'm seeing 40k DPS, while for you original build (not the betrayal one), I'm seeing you doing 300k dps per molten balls. Clearly you have way better gear than me, but why is the difference so great, and how can I improve?

k so pob molten strike calculations are....not exactly correct.

what you have to do is not look at the ball dps, but rather the ball damage, which in your case is 8,335.1. then you go to molten strike, melee part, and here you can see your actual attacks per second. which again in your case is 10.26. then you can multiply those, as well as multiply by about half of the projectiles you shoot out.

you fire off 10 projectiles, so basically go 8335x10.6x5 = 427k dps in and around.


keep in mind, if you look at your setup, your gem levels are ridiculously low. so make them 20/20 (which you can buy corrupted versions for super cheap, or just level up and get eventually) and it goes way up.
do the same thing with your other gems, like anger etc. this is an insane damage boost.

next, you're running ancestral call in your calculated setup. if you swap your gems to be r,r,r,b,b,b and use molten strike, conc effect, ele focus, immolate, multistrike, ancestral call/ele dmg with attacks....this lets you swap out ancestral call for ele dmg with attacks vs bosses or single targets, so you can get much higher damage.
you can run immolate because you have combustion linked elsewhere in order to get the ignite needed.

basically if i mess around with these things your damage goes up to 43,872.1 ball damage @ 11.5 attacks per second and approximating 5 balls hitting each time that gives you a dps of 2.5 million.

if you then factor in adrenaline for planting war banner, you'd have upwards of 3.1 million dps

Thanks for your patience xMustard. I fixed a lot of my gear, and will now proceed to level my skill gems: https://pastebin.com/2P0rDyH3

Unfortunately, after buying all the new stuff I don't have enough currency to buy level 20 gems that are quality 20 for everything.

I have an additional question about your suggestion about my gem setup. I did actually consider adding in immolate (and in fact replacing elemental damage with attacks with fire penetration), but currently my ignite/burning is only dealt by herald of ash or ancestral protector. Do you think that is reliable enough? If not, do you have any suggestions?

Thanks a lot mate, will report back after I'm done leveling the gems. I did kill elder pretty damn quickly though, not jinxing it for shaper and uber elder (if i even manage enough DPS to get to the latter this league)

you have a few options you can do for immolate etc.

so basically the benefit of combustion gem is it lowers mob resistance by 19% when they're ignited by supported skills. this is a perm negative resist, so you don't need to have it on your main skill setup. this means you can essentially turn any fire based skill to a 6.5 link just by running combustion somewhere else.

so right now you have combustion on ancestral protector, which is decent for bosses but it won't help you at all in general clearing.

this is why i typically have combustion on my movement skill. this is a little harder for you, because you want to use fortify as well as needing to have it linked to blood magic in order to spam it.

so i'd say you can either run molten strike with combustion and immolate (molten strike, combustion, immolate, conc effect, a.call/ele dmg with attacks, multistrike)
this would help you with general clear, but would ultimately be a little less damage against bosses.

or

you can skip out on immolate and just run what you're doing. swap out a.call for fire pen vs single target and just get a benefit from igniting with ancestral protector + combustion vs bosses.
this would be the easiest for you to do, because it doesn't really change anything.
you just need to swap a.call with fire pen for difficult single target (basically t16 bosses) and make sure you get your ancestral protector totem to hit/ignite the boss which will give you the benefit of lowered resistance from combustion

Quick question for anyone who is well into the end game. I recently found and sold a mirror (yippee)... Is it worth switching out one or both of the Beltimbers for a much higher dps sword? I know you'd lose out on 2 projectiles, but wondering if they extra damage would make up for it. Especially just switching 1 as you wouldn't lose far shot. I want to see how far I can push this build now that I have some real currency to work with.