[1.3.x] Dual Flame Totems: Solo, Self-Found, Beginner-friendly. AA+EB!

hey , glad to see u started your own flame totem thread too! waiting to see your gear!
spread the love for flame totem! ◔ ◡ ◔

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ipoxthegreat wrote:

like the build idea and gave it a try. level 54 scion.
totems die instantly. Anything more than 2 mobs and they just die.

Shouldn't happen! Could you please post your current skill tree? (Click on your character icon above and open it in a new tab, then click on where it says "skill tree" -- this will give you a link to your current tree).

My only thought is that you may not have taken some of the nodes in the Ironwood cluster and in the one next to the Scion start area. A few months back I had experimented with a templar using two Stormacall totems and I tried without the totem survival nodes and without the Ironwood cluster, both to save points, but that didn't work out very well.

Sometimes you also get in an area where mobs do kill your totems very fast. In those cases I "spam" totems on top of whatever kills them. They do more damage close up because they can "shotgun". You should have enough HP regeneration at your level to spam 4L Flame Totems. I always use them very offensively, dropping them right on top of monsters I want taken out fast (in other areas I use them to block passages, or put them in a row so that the first totem "tanks" for the second one).

Actually! That may be the problem. This happens when you are around mobs with Lightning Thorns, like in the Ebony Barracks and in the Battlefront. Lighting Thorns is the spell cast by the bitc..ahem, the Blackguard mages, and you see it when mobs are surrounded by a belt of lightning. Totems go down immediately because they kill themselves. The best way to deal with it is to locate the caster and sandwich it with two totems while ignoring/kiting the other mobs.

Conversion Trap may help too. I didn't think of that before I was already doing maps, but it should help tremendously while you're leveling and encounter the mages or rooms full of cold skeleton mages that freeze and lock up your totems.

i dont get it , why did u take faith and steel node when you'r going for life not es? instead of having a total of 4 nodes 44%armor , 8all resist , 32% es ( which is useless ) you can just take the 4 nodes at marauder which can give u 24% armor ,24% life. or u can take 1 node of bloodless and the rest 3 in the marauder skill tree.

Furthermore , without totemic zeal wont your totem casting speed be REALLY slow?

While I like your build and links u have used, any specific reason why you went blood magic when you could have taken eldritch battery?

You can easily have a mana pool of around 2k with 1000 free mana and 150-200 mana regen/sec by just wearing AR?ES gear, while still having 3k+ health. Also mind over matter mitigates a ton of damage, and the mana regens super fast.

Need to run these 2 auras - clarity + discipline.

I think the following passive plan will give more damage as well:



Using templar as starting point but could be just as easily started with scion or witch.

Edit : Forgot to mention that with mana setup you can also run arctic armor and mitigate another ton of dmg. Titty bitches, voidbearers, chimraes etc do zero dmg with arctic armor.

Conversion>Multi Trap> Increased Duration

I usually use that as my oh **** button. It really does help with all the elemental thorns mobs on blockades or anything in that nature. The increased duration is usually flavor again. Some times the multi trap + duration can cause one mob to be controlled for an awfully long time.

Cold Snap traps with ele prolif can also be pretty wonderful. Depends on the situation!


Forgot to mention--another reason to go Blood Magic is the crazy HP regen and HP potions you can stack. Going EB is fine, but you'll have to worry about more things rather than just HP/Resist/Armor

Getting a sapping affix on a hallowed health flask can be amazing. I have a 20Q Sapping Hallowed that heals for over 1800hp. You never have to worry about the mana issues getting sucked away.

Also, I think after having done totems a few times, I've noticed the BM route leads to a smoother transition to high level content rather than having to hampered by the mana restrictions at about lvl 40-60. 4-6L stuff early on causes a mana build to be pretty rough.

Just my 2 cents!

"

Assmucus wrote:

i dont get it , why did u take faith and steel node when you'r going for life not es? instead of having a total of 4 nodes 44%armor , 8all resist , 32% es ( which is useless ) you can just take the 4 nodes at marauder which can give u 24% armor ,24% life. or u can take 1 node of bloodless and the rest 3 in the marauder skill tree. Furthermore , without totemic zeal wont your totem casting speed be REALLY slow?

I never had Totemic Zeal on any of my totem characters (it's just too far away), so I wouldn't know the difference. :) But I never felt casting totems was slow with Totem Placement Speed taken. It feels speedy to me.

I touched on the Faith and Steel cluster in the original post (in the spoiler box). Basically, my idea was (and still is) to try and get at least some armor going to deal with stray hits. The ES increase isn't entirely useless if you go with hybrid STR/INT armor, which gives you a few hundred ES. I'm not fully convinced that it is the best approach.

If I move the four points from Faith and Steel down to the Marauder nodes you mentioned, I still have to connect the Discipline and Training cluster in the Templar starting area. Those are important: 30 HP, 34% life and 1% life generation for four points. If you connect differently, you lose the Faith and Steel cluster and gain only one point (and gain 30 STR). If you remove the Discipline and Training clusster and also Faith and Steel, and the connections to it, you free up 9 points.

So, 9 more points and we're short 34% life, 8 res, 44% armor, 30 base HP, 1% life reg, and 10 STR (plus the ES if you use hybrid armor). How would you spend these points to make up for this? I already have the 8% nodes by Bloodless.

If I spend 8 of the 9 points in the Marauder start, they give me 24% life, 16 HP, 1.2% reg, 40% armor, and one point left. This looks worse to me, but I might be missing something very obvious. :)

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nightblade157 wrote:

While I like your build and links u have used, any specific reason why you went blood magic when you could have taken eldritch battery?

If you go the EB/AA route, you would need a ton of mana and mana regeneration nodes. You're looking at 300 mana per 5L Flame Totem cast (6L will be even more, but I have no numbers for those yet), plus the drain from AA, plus whatever MoM takes if you get a Cloak of Defiance, which you would probably want if you go EB/AA.

It's a heavy investment, and you'd still want plenty of life nodes in addition. I spam totems quite a bit on maps and if I did the same with mana, while also moving around (manually dodging projectiles, cutting corners, etc.), the mana consumption would be incredibly high (I played a FL totem build in HC that was mana based, which is what led me to looking into BM).

If you go BM, you use the same resource for "living" and for casting and you can get a ton of HP regeneration. I think 300 HP/sec is feasible without Kaom's. I'm at around 240 HP/s with no Kaom's obviously and with 1.2% reg still untaken. At currently 4400 HP at level 77 in Ambush and a 2H staff (so no life from a shield and generally crap gear since the league just started), these 1.2% would give me another 52 HP/s for a total of nearly 300 HP/s. It's like steadily guzzling a health potion. (I do currently wear a Belly of the Beast that dropped for me, but it's not the perfect armor for this build, but not all that terrible either.)

As Vulajin wrote, BM simplifies the gearing process significantly. All you need to get started with mapping is gear with life and resists. That's it. It doesn't even have to be a specific type (when you start mapping), so you can essentially "map with crap". It also makes leveling very fluid because you don't have to juggle with gear as much.

Lastly, you end up with more spare points that you can use for damage nodes (and life or resists). If you go for EB, you'd have trouble going into the Marauder tree for the extra +2% max res). Even points in STR nodes are multi-purpose: They give you life, they increase your resource regeneration for both offensive and defensive uses, they let you equip gear with higher base armor, and with Iron Will they would even boost your damage. BM is just very efficient for a build like this.

As an added bonus, you can do chaos/second and BM maps, too. Half-reg and no-reg maps are out of question, but an EB/AA build can't really do those either (or just as poorly as this build).

(You're right that EB/AA/MoM is a fantastic combination, and I used it for my summoner in Domination, but it'd be a fundamentally different build.)

You link to discipline and training like that and then you go for totemic zeal while getting steel skin, golem's blood and diamond flesh in the process.

"

Vulajin wrote:

Conversion>Multi Trap> Increased Duration

I usually use that as my oh **** button. It really does help with all the elemental thorns mobs on blockades or anything in that nature. The increased duration is usually flavor again. Some times the multi trap + duration can cause one mob to be controlled for an awfully long time.

Cold Snap traps with ele prolif can also be pretty wonderful. Depends on the situation!


Forgot to mention--another reason to go Blood Magic is the crazy HP regen and HP potions you can stack. Going EB is fine, but you'll have to worry about more things rather than just HP/Resist/Armor

Getting a sapping affix on a hallowed health flask can be amazing. I have a 20Q Sapping Hallowed that heals for over 1800hp. You never have to worry about the mana issues getting sucked away.

Also, I think after having done totems a few times, I've noticed the BM route leads to a smoother transition to high level content rather than having to hampered by the mana restrictions at about lvl 40-60. 4-6L stuff early on causes a mana build to be pretty rough.

Just my 2 cents!

I have to disagree with that. In fact EB ends up being much more tanky because of mind over matter and arctic armor. Also with blood magic u will have around 300 life regen. With EB, you can have 200 mana regen AND 200 life regen, plus the flexibility to run 1 or more auras.

Imho blood magic is mandatory builds with high mana requirement AND very high attack speed, because even leech can't sustain that kind of drain. Since u only need to cast totems costing ~300 mana per cast, mana should be sufficient. Does not sound like a good idea to run BM on builds with no life leech. Life regen alone isn't sufficient to rely upon.

Currently building the EB variant. Will post a video once I reach a high enough lvl to run 70+ maps. Right now mana cost is 200 for flame totem so easy enough with mana regen.

"

Kendo_PoE wrote:

You link to discipline and training like that and then you go for totemic zeal while getting steel skin, golem's blood and diamond flesh in the process.

This is an interesting approach, actually! I don't see the need for Totemic Zeal, but this means a major life boost and quite a bit more regeneration, too. This would be for 85 vs. the 71 of the posted build, and it costs quite a bit of damage, though. I'd skip Totemic Zeal and grab Shamanistic Fury, which may free up the 30 INT node. Then from 85 to 90 (which is the end of the road for my character) the points would go into damage nodes.

Like this at 84: Scion

edit: Thinking more about this, going down there and as a result sacrificing a bit damage and making Totem Range more or less inaccessible (until you play to 95 or so), Iron Will would become a better choice than Faster Projectiles, I think. Still need to look at some numbers, but I think this is a solid idea. (I added the link to the guide's skill tree section as an item for discussion and pondering.)

edit 2: OK, changed Kendo's proposal a bit more and altered the top connections, added the templar elemental damage nodes and Arsonist down by Blood Magic. I also removed the 30 INT/DEX node (which frees a 10 STR node) as they should be covered by the relinking. If not, there are 30 INT and 30 DEX nodes along the route. This way, people could take either Shamanistic Fury or Totemic Zeal, or a bit of both -- the 4% cast speed in the Shamanistic Fury is a good dps boost and it's close with the altered routing).