[3.9] Champion/Slayer - Stun and Destroy, Impale them with a Rain of Spears ($LUXURY$ RoA Guide)

Your main skill will be Vaal Rain of Arrows linked to the following supports, which are irreplaceable unless you cannot afford the awakened versions (2):

1) Awakened Vicious Projectiles
2) Awakened Brutality
3) Concentrated Effect
4) Mirage Archer
5) Impale

There are no viable replacements for any of these gems.



Your secondly skill will be Toxic Rain or any other bow skill of your choosing, which will be linked to these support gems:

1) Ballista Totem
2) Vicious Projectiles
3) Maim
4) Impale
5) Energy Leech/Concentrated Effect/Awakened Increased Area of Effect (these are optional if you want to maximize your totem damage)

Maim and Impale are indispensable, but you can experiment with the other support gems. Every hit you make must impale your enemy. With Maim supporting Toxic Rain, Maim causes enemies to take 14% increased physical damage.



Next, these are the the auras, herald, and banners you must use:

1) Pride
2) Precision
3) Herald of Purity
4) Dread Banner/War Banner

Use Dread Banner if you are playing as a Slayer; conversely, use War Banner if you are playing as a Champion.



Also, I recommend using these support skills and movement skills:

1) Blood Rage
2) Stone Golem
3) Dash
4) Blink Arrow


Most importantly, this is the one support skill you absolutely need:

1) You need Vaal Molten Shell to survive every Metamorph encounter!

Helmet


Devoto's is an amazing helmet that gives us a ton of armor, evasion, movement speed, and chaos resistance. Personally, I can't get over the 20% movement speed, so I haven't used other helmets because I'll feel like a snail. The best enchant to get is "40% increased Rain of Arrows damage".

Armor


Daresso's Defiance is my most recommended armor to get due to how much utility it provides in terms of damage, speed, evasion, and damage reduction. It's main benefits are onslaught effect and endurance charges on kill.



You can opt to use a hunter/elder/warlord's Astral Plate armor that grants +1 curse, critical strike chance (t1 only), and high life, but that will increase the cost of this build, and believe it or not, your damage will not increase. The benefit to using this armor instead of Daresso's would only be -mana cost to attacks if you managed to get it with +1 curse, crit, and life. You also get +12 all resists. The downside to using this armor is that you will move significantly slower, you will not generate endurance charges, and you will lose an enormous amount of evasion chance and a bit of physical damage reduction.

Belt


You need this belt. There is no other belt in the game, as far as you are concerned, as it relates to belts that are suited for this build. Ryslatha's Coil, if it is well rolled (30% less damage, 40% more damage), equates to roughly a 20% dps increase, meaning that you will be doing 20% MORE damage. There is no belt in the game that can match this power... not even close.

Just as importantly, it provides a giant amount of maximum life (max roll 100), additional physical damage, and--more notably--it gives you the ability to gain 50 life every time you stun an enemy. I recommend using Fertile Catalysts to boost the life rolls of this belt, and refrain from using the Abrasive Catalysts.

Rings


This is the ring you should use if you are playing as a Champion. Since you already receive intimidate through your ascendancy, this is the best ring to use.



Use this ring if you are a Slayer because intimidate is not available to you on the ascendancy tree. Using this ring easily remedies this problem.

I feel pretty strongly about the Circle of Guilt ring. You almost can't find a better ring, but if you want to be stubborn, you can replace it with an assassin's mark ring.




Ideally, you want to get a ring influenced by the Warlord and the Shaper that has both Vulnerability and Assassin's Mark on hit. You can craft your own with great results for relatively cheap by acquiring two rings, one with assassin's mark, the other with vulnerability--a Shaper's ring and Warlord's ring, respectively. You must ensure that there are no other influence modifications on the rings before doing this, meaning that there can be ZERO other Shaper or Warlord's affixes. You then must acquire an Awakener's Orb, use it first on the Shaper's ring, then apply it to the Warlord's ring... or vice versa. Either way should work. The result is a double curse ring.

If there is an open prefix, you can craft "Suffixes cannot be changed", then scour it, and you can even multimod it if it has an open suffix too! Otherwise, you can simply slam it twice and craft your final prefix. OR, OR, OR, you can repeat this process against by wasting another 4 exalts to try your luck again (2ex for the craft, 2 ex for the slams, or 3 ex for the slams if you're really crazy).



Alternatively, you can simply opt out of getting any curse rings and get a good resistance ring with intelligence and t1 life. I personally recommend finding a ring with an open prefix so that you can craft -mana cost, if you cannot do this on your amulet. The mana cost of RoA is 44, all while only having about 150 unreserved mana. With -9 mana cost, attacking becomes much more sustainable. Otherwise, you will have to sacrifice gem slots to get enlighten and/or sacrifice skill tree points for more mana nodes (which seems ridiculous to me).

Finally, if you are going to sacrifice a curse, let it be assassin's mark, not vulnerability.

Amulet


You want intelligence ranging from 24 to 50 (depending on your needs), t1 life, t1 critical strike multiplier, resists, and an open prefix for -mana cost craft if you need it. Optionally, you can craft 20% damage or more resists if you need it.

The only 2 relevant anoints for this build are Whispers of Doom and Assassination.

Gloves



For Champions, I recommend Warlord influenced gripped gloves with culling strike, life, and resists. If you could get some with attack speed, that's even better. I spent 100c for the base, and then about 700c chaos spamming it to get these rolls.. I was unwilling to spend more chaos to try for better mods. There are some on the market that I really liked, but one of them was being sold for 45ex, and the other pair was only for mirror service!




For Slayers, since you already having Culling Strike, these are most likely the most optimal gloves to get, ones with vulnerability on hit and attack speed or critical strike chance to attacks.


You can also choose some elder gloves with T1 life, attack speed, projectile speed, and resists.

Boots

This one's simple.. Just get some two-toned armor/evasion boots with Tailwind, life, movement speed, and some resists.

Elusive is superfluous and far more expensive to get with the aforementioned item affixes.

I crafted my own with a few hundred chaos spams.

Bow


Harbinger Bow is perhaps the most effective bow for this build. You can also opt for a Citadel Bow or Imperial Bow. Just make sure that your DPS is not only speed based but also based on your average damage. You don't want "Quill Rain" sort of damage, where you have to fire a million arrows at a million mph/kph to do damage. You want a "Goldilocks" effect where you have HIGH average damage and fast attack speed so that you can guarantee stuns on every single t16 mob. This also helps with clear speed because you will only have to shoot once (and rarely twice) to kill a pack of monsters. Think also of boss fights that require you to move around to evade their 1-shot mechanics. If your damage is highly reliant on being stationary to fire dozens of fast attacks just to chunk a boss for 10% of its hp, you're going to struggle to kill the boss quickly because of all the manual dodging required of you to avoid death.

In summary, thicket bows are bad for this build. Harbinger Bows are good. Thicket, bad. Harbinger, good.

And don't worry, with Tailwind, Onslaught, and Blood Rage, you'll have more than enough attack speed to feel "fast".

Quiver


Basically, for your quiver, you want 3 main mods:

1) T1 Critical Strike Multiplier
2) T1 Maximum Life
3) T2/T1 Projectile Speed or Increased Stun Duration on Enemies

Without sufficient Projectile Speed being allocated on your skill tree, your arrows will land with noticeable delay and slow your clear speed. It is particularly significant during delves. With the Slayer POB, projectile speed seems sufficient, so you can opt for more stun duration or even more projectile speed or critical strike chance.

With the Champion tree, I had to sacrifice a bit of projectile speed, so it seems almost imperative that you have projectile speed on your quiver to compensate.

Jewels


2 Lioneye's Fall.. These are very cheap and far too impactful not to employ in this build. They are used in two locations: one is by the Shadow side of the tree (claw nodes), while the other node is on the lower left corner of the duelist tree (sword crit + crit multiplier nodes). I've found these locations to be the most effective sockets for Lioneye's Fall.



A Watcher's Eye with chance to impale and deal double damage while using Pride. This jewel is somewhat pricey, but you can also choose to get a watcher's eye with solely chance to impale. It costs over 100ex to buy one of these with double damage and 2 additional impales. I'm not that rich, but maybe you are ;)



Lethal Pride is another indispensable jewel to have in this build because it can give us "#% reduced enemy stun threshold" and even more chance to deal double damage. My jewel gives me 20% reduced enemy stun threshold and 10% chance to deal double damage. Ideally, you will want to divine a lethal pride until you roll both of these mods at least once (10% stun threshold + 5% chance to deal double damage).

Totaling the mods from this jewel with your skill tree passives, if you get a jewel like mine, you will have a total of 35% reduced enemy stun threshold and 22% chance to deal double damage.



Lastly, you can choose to find a jewel that fills the gaps in your resists, or just find one that boosts your life and damage. This socket is optional, but I needed it for my defenses.


Flasks

Since this build is pure physical damage, you don't need anything fancy. Make sure that if you are playing Champion, you get a flask with bleed removal.


If you are playing as a Slayer, it's a good idea to get one that increases your armor by 95-100% during flask effect.


For mapping, you want to have a flask with curse immunity during effect and another with immunity to shock. You don't need a Silver flask to get onslaught, but because Daresso's Defiance only grants onslaught when you get hit and lose endurance charges, it's rarely going to be available to you for boss fights. Thus, it's a good idea to have one for bossing, so that you ensure you maximize your attack and movement speed, thereby significantly increasing your dps.