[1.3.0 HC] Zaun's Level 100 Blood Magic Dual Crit Flame Totem (Atziri HC Capable, 200k+ shotgun dps)

Just one small tidbit, Curse on hit doesnt really work with herald of thunder and ancestral bond.

The only way to trigger it is to let the ignite of the ice portion with herald of ice kill a mob which is shocked.

That happens once in a blue moon, but is very noticable on immortal aura totem/packs where they all die at once to the ignite.



I can fully get behind the comfort notion of regen, so considering that i can agree.


To everything else I can aggree mostly aswell. For further discussion I think we need to see how 1.3 turns out!

Tyranastrasz do you have more gameplay footage of the build?

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Tyranastrasz wrote:

Just one small tidbit, Curse on hit doesnt really work with herald of thunder and ancestral bond.

The only way to trigger it is to let the ignite of the ice portion with herald of ice kill a mob which is shocked.

Interesting. I haven't tried HoT yet with anything other than empower/reduced mana. I see it proc somewhat frequently though (couple times per map), but just assumed that most of the time I wasn't close enough to enemies for bolts to appear.

There's a lot of stuff to play around with for a mana-based version with EB + COD, given the reservation flexibility.

Guys could you point out the main differences in offense/defense, early game/end game play between mana witch and BM marauder? Which build provides smoother experience, easier item swaps, less dependant on gear and etc.?
Don't want to read 100 pages. Thx.


P.S. A leveling guide would be appreciated.

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QuantumEchoEcho wrote:

Tyranastrasz do you have more gameplay footage of the build?

I can try to record some stuff but keep in my mind that i play on an overpriced toaster right now so Its a big deal to make it decent.

Anything you want to see in particular?

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Guys could you point out the main differences in offense/defense, early game/end game play between mana witch and BM marauder? Which build provides smoother experience, easier item swaps, less dependant on gear and etc.?
Don't want to read 100 pages. Thx.


P.S. A leveling guide would be appreciated.

Its hard to go indepth into the mana to bm comparison because i never played a mana version.

From an educated guess BM offers a smother leveling experience with BM and ancestral bond basically rushed. Also It BM witch and Mana witch, Marauder is now in allmost every way inferior.

For leveling you basically rush ancestral bond, bm, Get the left side of the tree all done in terms of life nodes certain keynodes that provide excaptional boni and THEN you switch to the shadow area and rush assasination into sniper. You get the only crit nodes mostly at last.

On one side before this there should be a new 1.3 tree for the BM version.

With the witch start nerfed (one 16% spell damage node down to 12%), one thing I want to test with the marauder start is taking celestial judgement + 1 elemental damage node instead of the 12% and 16% nodes at the witch start.

The comparison is 26% elemental damage and 2% resistance penetration vs. 28% spell damage. The elemental damage won't buff the added chaos support but it should buff herald of thunder + herald of ice. It's an easy test: I'll use 2-4 regret orbs and record the sheet damage for each option. If the witch start provides more than 2%*the fraction of sheet damage that is elemental than the celestial judgement option, then I'll know to keep those 2 spell damage nodes. I suspect this will be the case, so I'll spec into celestial judgement first to save regrets (I know the difference will be marginal but it's one thing I'm curious to investigate).

I'll edit this post with the results after 1.3

Edit: well, they nerfed the celestial judgement option down from 26% to 24% elemental damage. I suspect the 28% spell damage is better in most cases.

Any kind of gameplay videos would be nice, but what i would really like to see is the build in action but using the flame totems on a 4 link or a 5 link

Tyranastrasz,

Given that:
1. The path to blood magic is further away from ancestral bond.
2. The crit mult node along the way is gone.
3. Mortal conviction is nerfed.
4. We gain 10% chance to shock, freeze, and ignite from elementalist + celestial punishment.
5. We only need to shock once since shock stacking is gone.

What are your thoughts on dropping three dragons and going malachai's simula for blood magic?

You'd have to use at least 1 wand with T1 projectile speed, then swap out faster projectiles for added lightning damage. You'd also give up both heralds (since you wouldn't be taking mortal conviction) and need a good enough belt, boots, jewelery to still cap resistances.

But you'd gain 22% more life (from not reserving 2 heralds + empower), an open 4-link for whatever, 30% spell damage & 20% lightning damage (on helm), and 9-10 skill points (which could be +28% cast speed or +60% spell damage, with points left over).

It would be 20% chance to shock + 20% increased shock duration with a quality added lightning damage, which should be fine given the flame totem hit rate of 12-20 times a second (depending on cast speed), assuming added lightning + spell/elemental damage scaling is high enough to get a shock duration longer than 0.3 seconds. Maybe that's not enough, but given our 700 to 800+ crit mult, crit's should still shock so it's probably fine either way.

Example tree (if you fill the points in with cast speed; not sure how rounding works but I'd probably stop adding cast speed once the skill says 0.06 or 0.05 cast time):
https://poebuilder.com/character/AAAAAgMASbIC4welghDfsCyc0PVBlgVCTLOuszpYVcaD2wQHrJh_xqKjwfMRlklR8NWVLgce8h1knev1j_pd8g5IcFKJ03DVtUjz6ioLH0EGIxa_Ax5h4iaVVUuMNrb696aOZB0Uj0aboffXwBpmnvrSsULzEXGFgpvsOJo71abtPASzogDhc8BmaPLwH1OlDF8cp8auPC1M_69s2L3-Crc-_o81kjrh8kVN46ZXKhNY5aPyWit7IP6HEMz4k7jKO3wPxONqFm826SSqkFUnLxo4lSAtHxXn8Gtzs0bX2rl-WSY8FvMvnVeU

I wonder if going this route will actually out dps the heralds (and you could always use 1 herald, for 18% life reserved, which I think is definitely higher DPS than snaking all the way down to blood magic manually, assuming you can still shock).

Note: This option is best with witch start, but templar and shadow also work.

Edit: I guess this is a hard option for you to explore, given the difficulty of recoloring your +1 gems infernal mantle (I can't test it in the immediate future because my 95 totemer is a marauder). If you think the malachai's simula option has merit (I think it might, because ~9 skill points is pretty huge when we have so many directly adjacent cast speed, spell damage, elemental damage nodes + the damage on the helm itself), I suppose you can test it by keeping faster projectiles (and current wands), and swapping added chaos or crit mult for added lightning. Not optimal, but sufficient enough to determine if flame totems can shock meaningful targets without three dragons.

Thats an interesting Idea..

My First thoughts on that matter:

2 Heralds give about 40% more damage calculated from the Nonherald base, so thats in terms of numbers what we would give up.

The New gem settup most probably would need to a powercharge generating settup, which in exchange means we should spec into the power charge nodes. Its a bit hard to calculate but we are looking at 7 power charges + 4 % spell damage per charge, and the hassle of keeping them up.

Regarding the "chance" to shock:

Its Hard to estimate how effective that is and it also matters a lot what the content is you are looking at using it.
First: Does chance to shock goes of the total damage applied per hit? If so the high-end of damage that can shock is higher BUT at a far lower rate 10% of lets say 35% crit chance. So everything that needed crits to shock will only be shocked 10% of the time.

Consistency on mobs that matter will suffer a lot.


At a certain damage point though noncrit are enough, but that applies to mostly white mobs. I would assume that rares and medium bosses wont be able to get shocked with this.

To keep it realistic, in our gear we both probably dont need to rely on shock at all anymore, as the crit itself recks the target, so id say that when it comes to discussing its value, we should evaluate how effective it is at shocking Bosses and where it fails.

Now for reference in my settup i am capable of shocking the atziri clones, but i doubt I will be able to do that in the non- 3 dragons settup.

For a FRESH character this settup is probably even weaker, as they wont have the damage output neccessary to shock meaningfull mobs consistently.


What is worth considering wether it makes sense to just swap BM and Heralds for Malachai but I'll be honest im scrapping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to resistences. Im not sure it would be coverable without dropping a key Item that would made that whole idea pointless in first place.


Also worth keeping in mind, dropping Faster proj, which I plan to do aswell, We would drop the chance of using empower.
I firmly believe that the defensive and offensive gains of an empower are very valuable especially when it will come to do uber atziri.




I had a different idea for what its worth in total.

How about dropping 3Dragons and just use a Life trires Helm?

We would basically let Herald of thunder passive damage take the shocking job.
The trade off is here to get lets say 80 Base life more for an average damage reduction of the part that is able to shock from about 190 damage per hit to average 75 damage per hit if i remember correctly.

Having crits still trigger the shock might be enough for usual content, while obviously atziri clones etc will probably not get shocked anymore.

Also BTW, the Infernal mantle recolor is rather easy. 3 offcolors are easy to get, the 4th will get a little pricey.


In any case I'd opt the tree a little different as i said earlier that im not so determined on life regen beside what you get on the way.

This is my approach for now

https://poebuilder.com/character/AAAAAgMAghDfsCyc0PVBlgVCTLOuszpYVcaD2wQHrJh_xqKjwfMRlklR8NWVLgce8h1knev1j_pd8g5IcFKJ03DVtUjz6ioLH0EGIxa_Ax5h4iaVVUuMNrb696aOZB0Uj0aboffXwBpmnvrSsULzEXGFgpvsOJo71abtPASzogDhc8BmaPLwH8auPC1M_69s2L3-Crc-NZIqE1jlo_JaK3sg_ocQzPiTuMo7fA_E42oWbzbpJKqQVScvGjiVIC0fRtfauX5ZJjwW8y-dV5S18krIbqr5vQagZIQ_J1Wuj6ZEq9n8CarAmg==

It has swapped the nodes from regen and life to the path to Totemic zeal and the resistences on the way, im pretty sure in this settup they are needed.
Also due to getting the Zeal we can drop the cast speed nodes which are dps wise inferior for spell damage nodes OR power charge nodes depending what route to take.

Bottom line is I think its overall inferior to the standard BM speccing settup, but we look at an interestint alternative that might shine in other places.

from patch notes:

"Auras and aura-like effects can now affect totems.
Summoned totems are only affected by auras that affect defensive properties.
Summoned totems still use their summoner's skills. In order for an offensive aura to have an effect, it must affect the summoner, not the totem."

mana based is officially better now?

came up with this: https://poebuilder.com/character/AAAAAgEAxthYY4zPPfz2SF8_7w4UIPIvGj6vbEz_PC13464-Z5vkUVBHaPKiAPAfwGYEs-0g4XOCmycv7DixQvMRcYXAGho4kFVG19q5gKRV1mTnFy_60mae42oWb7b696aOZB0UVcY6WKyY99eboY9G0PVBlq6zTLMEB4PbBUJJUfDVlS4HHhGWf8aio8HzlSAtH-v1j_ryHWSdXfIOSHBSidNw1bVI8-oqCx9BBiMDHmHiJpUWv4w2VUssnALjSbIHpd-wghDDE1jlo_JaK_noQYe3Psau2L3-CjbpJKo=

is shaper enough to support the mana cost of totems? or reduced mana cost of skills nodes are better?