[1.1.X] The One-Shotter : AoF EK Witch (With Videos)

Introducing my Avatar of Fire EK/Bear Trap Witch. She's a level 86, powerful and pretty fun to play. The character's name is Bleue.

Highlight (Level 86 stats)

-100% Physical/Cold dmg conversion to Fire dmg
-Dual Curses : Curse on hit + Elemental Weakness + Flammability = -119% Fire resistance
-5L Ethereal Knives : ~12,000 dps
-4L Bear Trap : ~5,500 damage x 3 traps (Multiple traps) with up to 69% chance to Ignite.
-4 auras : Hatred, Grace, Purity of Lightning and Clarity
-4 affordable Uniques : Lightning Coil, Chernobog shield, Hrimsorrow gloves and Windscream boots.
-Decent Evasion (~8,000) and Blind totem to make it even more effective
-High Physical dmg reduction : Lightning Coil + 84% Lightning resist
-Decent Life : ­4,200
-Eldritch Battery

Offense

Main Skill : Ethereal Knives

Bleue's main skill is Ethereal Knives supported by Faster Projectile + Added Fire Damage + Cold to Fire + Fire Penetration (5L). Self-buffed with a very powerful Hatred (+62% aura effect from passives = 58% of physical dmg added as cold damage), it deals around 8,900 tooltip dps. If you consider fire penetration to be at least 35% more damage, the real dps is 12,015 dps (8.9*1.35). Against double cursed (-119% fire resist) and non-resistant targets, it deals 26,312 dps. That also mean that EK can potentially deal 15,103 burning damage per second over 4.8 seconds for a total of ~72,500 burning damage (thanks for +187 fire/burning dmg from passives and gear)

Secondary skill : Bear Trap

Bear trap is supported by Multiple traps, Cold to Fire and Chance to Ignite (4L). Self-buffed (Hatred), it deals around ~5,500 tooltip damage and cast 3 traps. Against targets cursed with flammability and elemental weakness, it means a potential of 12,045 damage per trap and 6,913 damage per seconds for 6 seconds (or ~41,500 dmg per trap). With Flammability, chance to Ignite with a bear trap is 67%. The Rooting effect of Bear Traps is also very useful and powerful.

Keystones

Avatar of Fire : 50% of your physical/lightning/cold damage is converted to fire damage. You can't deal non-fire damage.

Eldritch Battery : Converts all energy shield to Mana.

Uniques

Chernobog's Pillar Shield : 25% of physical damage is converted to Fire
Hrimsorrow Gloves : 25% of physical damage is converted to Cold

[With Avatar of Fire, Chernobog (25% Physical to Fire), Hrimsorrow (25% physical to Cold) and Cold to Fire support gem (50% of Cold to Fire), 100% of the Physical and Cold damage is converted to fire damage.]

Windscream boots : Can cast an additional curse and +10% to elemental damage.

Lightning Coil chest : 40% of physical damage taken is converted to Lightning damage.

Uniques and Vaal Orbs : There's a hidden benefit of using affordable uniques for the build. Without much consequences, you can try to upgrade these uniques with vaal orbs. For instance, you can buy a Chernobog shield for about 1 chaos. Vaal orbs, on the other hands, can be purchased for about 2 chaos each. So, for about 30 chaos, you can buy 10 Chernobog and try to get a nice corrupted one by using vaal orbs on them. The same can be said for Hrimsorrow gloves and to a lesser extent for Windscream boots and Lightning Coil.

List of good corrupted implicit mods for the build's 4 uniques :



Other gear :

Four of the gear slots being already taken by uniques, it means you only need to get 6 rare items for other other slots : Ring 1, Ring 2, Amulet, Belt, Helmet and Wand (Or Sceptre).

I highly suggest to get the highest amount of life possible on those items. For the belt, I highly suggest a rustic sash (for the +24% physical damage). For the rinds and amulet, getting high mana regen rolls should also be a priotity. I also suggest an Evasion/ES helmet so you can use 4 blue sockets for the Curse on hit set up. Other than that, you will have to focus on resistances and attributes :



Auras

The build benefits from -26% mana reservation passives in addition to a large amount of mana thanks to Eldritch battery. This allows the character to run 4 Auras. I normally use Hatred, Purity of Lightning, Grace and Clarity (level 3). In addition, the build provides +62% to aura effect. All in all, it means that Hatred adds 58% of my Physical Damage as extra Cold Damage (which is converted to fire damage thanks to Avatar of Fire and Cold to Fire gem). Grace adds an additional 3266 flat evasion (buffed to 5552 evasion thanks to %evasion passives and dex from passives/gear). Purity of Lightning adds an extra 63% lightning resistance and +7% to max lightning resists, very helpful with the Lightning Coil. Finally, level 3 clarity provides an additional 8 mana per second. With the +184% mana regen provided by gear and passives, it translates into 23 extra mana per second.

Curses

Since 100% of my damage is fire, the best offensive curses are either Elemental Weakness or flammability. The other option (that I recommend) is to use Windscream boots and use both curses at the same time. However, casting both curses is both annoying and mana intensive so I came up with a very efficient solution : Casting Firestorm + Curse on Hit + Flammability and Elemental Weakness. 20% quality Firestorm hits 10 times over 1.3 second. That means 10 chance to apply the curses (Chance to apply the curses are 47% each time, so you are pretty much guaranteed to double curse with a single application of Firestorm). As a bonus, 20% quality Curse on hit grants +10% to curse effect. That means -11 extra fire resist reduction, 1.4% extra chance to ignite and 2% extra ignite duration.

Other Utility Skills

Blind totem: To take full advantage of the high evasion of the character, blinding your enemies is a very good idea Blind reduces the chance to hit of the affected targets by 75%. What does it mean precisely ? Without blind My 8k evasion gives me about 48% chance to evade against the average level 74 monster ((Accuracy/Evasion tables)). In other words, monsters have 52% chance to hit me when they aren't blinded. When they are blinded, their chances to hit is reduced to 13%. This also means that against blinded targets, my chances to evade jumps from 48% to 87%. Almost too good to Ignore ? You're right.

But how to blind effectively ? The best way I've found is to use a Barrage/Chain/Blind Totem. Barrage fires 4 times and chains twice. That means a potential of 12 hits per volley. With 12% chance to apply blind per hit, chances to apply blind are pretty good. As an added bonus, you also have a 5% chance to apply Enfeeble each hit. Why is that ? Because you use Chernobog shield. Of course, because barrage is an attack, it performs an accuracy/evasion check, and since your accuracy isn't very high, the chance to blind are a little bit lower than what I described above. However, despite that, I've found the barrage totem to be the most reliable way to blind. Of course, you'll need a wand for this. If you use a sceptre, you can use the slightly less reliable Arc+Faster Casting+Blind Spell totem set up.

Enduring Cry : The character needs high strength to use the Chernobog shield (154 str). You might as well make use of it ! For instance, you can use level 20 enduring Cry and level 20 Devouring totem (both require 151 strength)

Devouring totem : Awesome tool to leech mana and life from corpses, especially with a build that don't shatter any corpse. At level 20, it leeches 299 life and 59 mana per corpse. So, with only +24% faster casting from passive, it can leech 373 life and 74 mana per second (as long as there remaining corpses to leech from)

Defense

With my current gear, Bleue has around 4,200 life. She also has a decent chance to block (28% against attacks) and pretty decent evasion (8,000 self-buffed with Grace) which is made even more effective with the blind totem (see explanation in the "Other Utility Skills section). In addition, she use the Lightning Coil chest which converts 40% of incoming physical damage into lightning damage. With 83.5% lightning resistance thanks to Purity of Lightning and Elemental Adaptation, that means that 40% of physical damage is reduced by 83.5% which is pretty damn good. In addition, Chernobog, Lightning Coil and Windscream provide close to 2k armor. Not great but enough to make a difference. Finally, thanks to elemental adaptation, the build provide +2% max to all elemental resist. Other passives give +35% to fire resist and +20% to other elemental resist.

Link to the build's passives choices (at level 86):



Passives choices progression (Level 1 to level 90)



Bandit rewards (I underlined my choices)

Normal : 40 Life, or +1 Passive point.
Cruel : +18% physical damage
Merciless : +1 Passive point.

Gear and skills setup :




Maps Strategies

Most of the map mods aren't a problems for this build but there are some exceptions that requires some tweaking :




Gameplay videos

In a level 71 Unidentified Map
(Crazy Fracture action + killing the multistrike ground slam Exile)

In a level 70 Map
(Lower max resists, Multiple projectiles)

You can see how this build typically one-shot whites and two-shot blues.

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Any comments, suggestions or questions are appreciated !

Awesome! Can't wait to play this! Are you on ambush or invasion? This will be my next char...

Eh just look on Gear, then you might see its Standard League

"

bubblehulk wrote:

Awesome! Can't wait to play this! Are you on ambush or invasion? This will be my next char...

You should not be disappointed. The build is affordable, fun and powerful.

And yeah, my AoF EK witch is on standard, like all my other characters.

I just added a gameplay video on YouTube :

In a level 71 Unidentified Map
(Crazy Fracture action + killing the multistrike ground slam Exile)

And yet another video (level 70 map, One Shotting whites, 2-shotting blues)

And that explains the new "punchy" name of the build :)

I plan to run this with more burning damage. :3



Passive Tree should provide the following:
80% Increase Burning Damage
45% increase Damage over Time

From Support Gem:
59% Increase Burning Damage

awesome build, going to try it, but can you add build progression from 1-25, 25-40 and other, for newbies) thanks!

"

DarkyAnime wrote:

I plan to run this with more burning damage. :3

Meep x3

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-skill-tree/AAAAAgMBAnEC4wSzB2MHpQj0DkgRLxGWEmkUTRccFy8ZhRpsHNwdqh6UHwIkPCSqJLAmlSepLJwtHy1HL28xiDZ7NsU22DbpRKtGcUbXSRtJO0lRSbJQQlVLVa5V1lcrWm1dxmBtYqxk52aebRlwu3F5doJ5A35Zf8aApIIQgh6DCYM4htGHZYgbiGuLjIw2j6aP-pMnnC2dgJ2qna6iAKKjpLGnCKdcrD-vja-3tAy0OLSjtNG1BLb3wFTB88gM1U_Wndgk2RPa3dsL3Ffd895337Dhc-GI42rjhOQi5RnljuaB7BjtIO-F8B_z3frS-_U=

Passive Tree should provide the following:
80% Increase Burning Damage
45% increase Damage over Time

From Support Gem:
59% Increase Burning Damage

When I first theorycrafted this build, It was also my idea to capitalize on burning damage to increase the damage potential of Ethereal Knives. In practice though, the damage of Avatar of Fire EK is so high that you one shot any white monster, you two shot blues (stunning them with the first shot) and 3-4 shots Rares.

So unless you link it with Elemental Proliferation, burning damage wouldn't be as useful as it looks on paper. That's for soloing though. In party, the burning damage would be much more useful.

"

radiocity666 wrote:

awesome build, going to try it, but can you add build progression from 1-25, 25-40 and other, for newbies) thanks!

As soon as I some more free time, I'll do it.