Molten Staff Scion [1.2.x] (AoF, RT, US, IG)

**EDIT**

Having taken the build up to level 72 maps with a 4 link I am very happy with how the build performed in a fresh league. Thanks to how well the build tanks with high armor, life gain on hit, and a fast attack speed I was able to roll through most content and keep up a pretty decent clear speed in maps.

In the end I used this build to farm Dominus, level gems, and buy the unique items I wanted for my next build. I would highly recommend this build to people starting from scratch as it can get you to endgame easily and safely and allow you build up currency and a map pool for other characters.

If I were to find a Hegemony's Era I will be experimenting with turning this into a crit build. I would absolutely love to see a crit ele prolif molten strike build!

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Welcome to the molten staff scion build thread. The goal of the character is to get the high damage of a 2 hand weapon without sacrificing block chance you would get with a shield. In the last league I played a wings of entropy dual striker that does something similar, so this time I wanted to try out staves.

After going through the gems available for staves I set my sights on molten strike. My dual striker had leveled with the skill and now I wanted to see how well it would do in the end game.

Here is my planned level 85 skill tree. I have gone through many revisions so far while leveling up. The current one is what I feel is beset based on my experiences up to level 76. Keep in mind this is probably not the best way to get the most damage out of molten strike. I think the community molten strike build achieves that.

http://poeurl.com/yYdS1s3

Current Tree (lvl 76)

http://poeurl.com/yYdROht

Banidts: Oak, Kraityn, Skill Point

Links:



Gear:



Flasks:



For the flasks the topaz is for Dominus farming. I typically run double quicksilver, but once Atziri flasks start flooding the market I will be getting one of those.

I got to play last night after work. Got level 40 so far in the rampage league. I am extremely happy with the changes in 1.2.

Here is what I did for my main gems so far.

As far as quest rewards go, you have to choose between hatred or leap slam. I went with hatred and bought a leap slam, but you could mule this if you wanted to.

Weapon elemental damage from sharp and cruel.

Warlord's mark after finishing the chamber of sins.

Herald of ash for saving Clarissa.

Curse on Hit from helping Siosa in the library.

I bought a multi strike with chaos I found + selling my added fire damage gem from merviel. If you are in act 1 cruel you get a blood magic gem you could sell too if you don't have enough chaos yet.

I am able to run hatred and herald of ash without needing a mana pot. I did keep my leap slam and molten strike at level 5 so they are in the lowest mana cost tier.



As for weapons I have been crafting staves with the vendor recipe. Though I did use a corroded blade at the start. Also until you get some attack speed and leap slam I would recommend farming a fire trap and using that and spectral throw to start.

I've made some changes to my planned skill tree due to some of the changes in 1.2 (like warlord's mark). I will aslo be sharing my 20 pt and 40 pt allocations in the main post.

For anyone wanting something more min/max. This build relies on some old favorites for physical damage mitigation and has almost 170% more increased damage than my thematic scion build at the expense of life, mana, and armor.



Go with a duelist, pick up iron reflexes, point blank, and try to manage your mana with revelry. Use the BoR for more block and ditch the armor nodes and rely on lots of endurance charges, block, and the base armor granted through the grace/iron reflexes combo.

So auras would be herald of ash and iron reflexes.

Your molten strike setup should change to account for avatar of fire

Molten Strike -> Multistrike -> Weapon Elemental Damage -> Fire Penetration -> Life Gain on Hit / Life Leech

Use faster attacks if you obtain a 6 link staff.

You could also replace warlord's mark with flammability if revelry can sustain your mana without the mana leech from warlord's mark.

If you do this i would recommend you drop molten shell from your CWDT setup in favor of enduring cry.

I have my old BoR/WoE duelist I will be respec'ing this afternoon to test out the mana situation.

I don't think the min/max duelist is anything different than you would find in other molten strike builds, but I figured I would share for anyone who scoffs at the atrocities of my scion skill tree.

I respec'd my bor/woe duelist last nihgt. Mana is not an issue with revelry.

As for my current character I hit level 52 last night. I am doing some farming in act 3 to get my resist up to snuff so I can finish it out and head over to merciless.

I am contemplating a few changes my mapping setup. I think I will ditch the BoR idea so I can stack more armor and have more links for a vaal molten shell setup. I am also contemplating swapping my warlord's mark for flammability once I am comfortable with my life/mana sustain. The other big change will be to add in purity of fire to get myself 80% fire res to handle reflect issues. This may require me to pick up some mana reservation nodes.

Overall I am having a good time with the build my single target damage has been top notch the whole time. Leap slam and herald of ash are greatly helping spread the damage around.

With a 180 pdps (vendor recipe) coiled staff I am cranking out 1.7k tooltip with just herald of ash and up to 2.1k with hatred.

I have not had a lot of luck with gear especially concerning my resist. Even so I have ~30% phys reduction and 40% with determination going. I've never felt squishy except against void bearers when I had 30% fire resist.

I was able to get level 73 over the weekend. There was some good luck and some not so lucky things that happened. First I will start with the good.



This dropped off dominus in cruel difficulty. It is a pretty awesome weapon and I am still using it in maps. With it at level 73 I have 7k tool tip dps using a 4 link and only herald of ash for damage auras.

For my aura situation I found I was completely able to run Determination, Purity of Fire, and Herald of ash without aura nodes. I originally had 40 mana available when I made the switch. With my mana regeneration and rouse, I never have mana issues and I can spam for days.

I went avatar of fire and was pretty happy with the damage increase. I am able to sustain life and mana with my passives and I have no issues with ele reflect so Avatar of Fire was a win.

Upon going avatar of fire and have no issues with mana I switched my curse on hit from warlord's mark to Flammability. I also have a flammability on my cast when damage taken setup. This allows me to get mobs curses when I am surrounded in a big pack and don't want to leap.

The build is very tanky. I have 6.5k armor right now and expect it to get close to 8k by the time I get level 80. With my granite up I get over 20k armor. I have 4.3k health right now and It's enough to let me tank Merciless Dominus "Tough of God". In fact I can face tank him when he is doing the lightning spiders with my topaz flask up.

I will be testing life leech in place of life gain on hit over the next week. I am also going to work on a Vaal molten shell setup (increased duration, concentrated effect, life leech) to speed up my map and boss clear speed even more.

I was also able to get all my geared squared away after selling some rainbow strides and other small drops I found. Right now I'm happy enough with each piece that I won't worry about upgrades unless I find something or until I'm ready to spend multiple exalts on each item.

For the bad after getting my gear squared away I tried to get a 6 socket 5 link Maelstrom staff to start crafting. And good ol PoE rng didn't let me down. It ate all my remaining currency and I only have a 6 socket staff (~300 jewlers, ~140 fusings). Now part of this was dumb on my part and I don't recommend people go for broke. However I was gambling in hopes that I would get lucky with a 6 link.

As for my goals this week, I want to have 150 fusings saved up by next sunday to use voici to craft my current staff into a 5 link. Fire penetration will be a big help going into the higher level maps. Once I have that 5 link I will go back to the maelstrom staff and try to get a 450-500 dps weapon.

Nice Build, man!

I just tried it with my scion's free respec and some leftover gear I had lying around and i can say it's tons of fun!
Never played Molten Strike before and it feels quite powerful.
I also have around 4,7k life which is enough to feel quite safe most of the time.

Cheers for the build!

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you liked it!

Out of curiosity, what was your tool tip dps and how much dps did your weapon have?

I'm thinking once I have the last damage node cluster my tooltip will be around 8.3k with my current weapon, but that doesn't factor in fire penetration, the projectiles, or the curse.

my tooltip is @ 6730dps
and my weapon is:



the rest of the gear:


do you think it would be good to take unwavering stance?
i feel like i get knocked around a lot (maybe i have to little armor) and then i can't gain life fast enough to facetank difficult mobs...

Actually yea, Unwavering Stance would be a good thing to add in. I've also noticed that if I get stunned, sustaining my life can be difficult. I am only at level 70 maps so far, but I've noticed I have to have my granite on to face tank the high phys damage bosses. Things like arctic breath monkeys have been a real pain for me too, I typically have to hop around smacking just a few times, then moving again to take down large blue packs of them.

I will try out US tonight and figure out which points to drop to accommodate it.

So I changed out the two 4% life, 4% chaos res nodes in the purity of flesh cluster to take on Unwavering Stance. I've updated the main post with my current tree (lvl 76) and I updated the projected level 85 build.

Last night I got the combat stamina cluster which gave me a pretty substantial boost in armor. I'm sitting at 4.4k life with 8.5k armor with determination. I also tested out hatred now that I have avatar of fire. It still nets me almost 2k dps. I have to give up determination to turn it on, but I still have over 5k armor without determination. So I may start messing with a higher damage setup using the cold to fire gem to get the most out of hatred.



I also got this bad ass Maelstrom last night (~420 pdps). Traded everything I had for it, but I feel it was worth it. With this weapon I have ~8.5k dps with herald of ash and ~10.4k with herald of ash and hatred. My next 4 skill points are all damage nodes too, I'm hoping to break 10k with just herald.