[3.2] Scionic Flametank "16k ES ed." (ES-CI-ZO-GR, SR-CWC-FS, extensive guide)

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endoscient wrote:

Speaking of gems, do you think it might be worth it to slot in Concentrated Effect for harder bosses? You lose a good amount of Scorching Ray dps, but I wonder if the more Firestorm hits make up for that.

I can see no possible justification for going through the inconvenience of lugging around a spare CE to slot in on bosses for a minimal gain in damageoutput against some bosses and a decrease against others.

You are engaged in the mathematical game of throwing circles at circles within a circle and while reducing the area of effect does increase the number of expected hits for Firestorm, it does not radically change that situation when you reduce both the area of the large encompassing circle and the circles you are throwing by the same 30%.

So I did a quick check in the calculator, and as excepted for very large bosses the total damage of stacking Scorching Ray + sustained Firestorms is actually lower when using Concentrated Effect than when using Elemental Focus for the 6th line as the loss from SR beats the gains to FS.

And that's entirely disregarding that for bosses that are not stationary when you fight them concentrated effect means that the target will more often not remain within a given firestorm instance for the duration and will thus on average be hit by fewer dropped balls per firestorm.

Wow, just got my first Shaper kill and no deaths. Could literally just facetank everything he did, felt pretty crazy. Favorite build I played so far, thanks for the guide.

I went for a bit more damage over some tankiness. Have only 13.2k ES, but PoB shows 13.9k per Firestorm hit against Shaper with Flasks plus the Firestorm duration Helm enchant. Think going to just leave my gear as is, could get some marginal upgrades but I like having the triple The Wise Oak effect.

Congratulations on your first Shaper kill.

Hi Pi2R. I am one of your fan and so far really enjoy this build. Thanks so much. Now I am running into an issue with mana: When I activate all 3 Arctic Armour, Discipline and Vitality, they say not enough mana. I am lvl 77 now and shouldn't be into that problem. Maybe I did something wrong? Can you please look at my character and advise. Thanks so much

@VioletM - and others interested in the answer to his question.

This turns out to be one of those quaint issues with POE's UI, where it displays a "not enough mana" tooltip on an active aura when you don't have the amount of mana free to activate it, should it be deactivated.

This is technically a true tooltip. Just confusing, potentially misleading, and not at all helpful to the user.

I.e. you reserve 95% for Discipline, Vitality, Arctic Armour, leaving 5% mana that isn't reserved, so if you deactivate the Discipline aura, you won't have the 35% aura to activate it (i.e. not enough mana) until time passes and you've recovered 35% mana.

I have complete sympathy with anybody who sees a "not enough mana" tooltip when hovering over an active aura and wonders just what the hell is going on. It is not at all obvious that things are working as they should.

This build was my main one back in Harbinger. I did a lot of min-maxing on it back then, and I have always thought of leaving a review in this thread but never did it because the thread was kinda dead at the time. I will do one now since the OP has returned.

In general, the build lived up to its promise, that is, it is very tanky. You will almost never die while mapping, unless you do something stupid like standing still on a pack of bearers on +damage less regen maps.

The QOL of the build wasn't so good, however. You had no movement skill, and the required boot only had 20% MS, so you had to rely on Quicksilver flasks. And the CoC Firestorm took so long to ramp up, you usually had to stop a few seconds at each pack flaming at them before they died, obviously not very good at clearing.

I didn't mind the QOL that much to be honest, since I know this is a tank build. With that said, there is one aspect that does not stand out at the beginning, but becomes more and more apparent as you approach endgame: this build is bad at killing big bosses. Or rather, the recovery options of this build simply don't work well against bosses, such as guardians or Uber Atziri/Shaper. Why?

- Warlord's Mark leech is severely affected by the reduced curse effectiveness
- Trickster's recovery bonus simply doesn't work, because you killed nothing recently
- Berserker's leech also does not kick in, because you did not kill anything recently

So when fighting bosses, you usually have to rely on your base regen only, and you also generally have to move around to avoid mega-attacks like Phoenix's fire bomb or Hydra's bow shots instead of standing still, so Tukohama's pantheon is not that useful.

From my experience, the limit of this build is around easy guardian maps with no damage mods. As soon as you have some damage mods on Phoenix, Hydra or Minotaur the fight became extremely hard, often impossible.

(Chimera is the exception. Since you're CI, the Chimera fight is a joke for this build.)

I have tried Shaper several times with this build and haven't succeeded even once. The main problem is that the DPS is too low so you can't kill adds fast enough to save Zana. And the fight is usually so long that the area is filled with vortex degen, which the regen can't counter since we only have 75% ice res. I can survive his tanks, but it's usually pretty close (I had around 13k ES)

One of the thing that the build is really good at is running labs. With the insane amount of degen, you can AFK on traps with bleed no problem. Uber Izaro can never kill you. The downside is it usually takes quite a bit of time to kill him because of the low DPS. In short this is a very safe lab runner if you don't care about speed. I did around 100 lab runs in Harbinger with this.

This build can kill Chayula with relative ease because of CI, but beware that it takes a very long time, because he has tons of HP and you can't just stand still and channel Firestorm, every once in a while he does his cyclone attack you'll have to run around to avoid it since it deals significant phys damage.

With regarding to map mods, this build is rather restricted. It cannot do no regen and reflect for obvious reason. Less regen is potentially deadly too.

I think the 3.2 Ascendancy changes buffed the DPS of the build a lot, so that wouldn't be an issue anymore. I went for the Chieftan-Elementalist version, over the current recommendation of Chieftan-Occulist, which made the difference even larger.

- ~5% from 10% increased Strength (Chieftan)
- 20% from Covered in Ash for Rares/Uniques (Chieftan)
- 11% from 10% Resist Pen (Elementalist)
- 10% from minimum Shock (Elementalist)
- 17% from Improved Herald of Ash (Elementalist)
- 13% from Arcane Surge (Elementalist, from Orb of Storms Shock setup)

All of those together double the damage of the build on its own. Comapred to 3.1 you lose 10% more damage / 5% damage taken, and the leech/recovery on kill that you weren't getting in bosses anyway.

With my current setup I have 14.4k ES and with Flasks against Shaper I have a Scorching Ray dps of 95k and Firestorm hits of 13.4k. Without Flasks it goes down to Scoring Ray at 90.8k and Firestorm at 10.3k. Against larger sized bosses that gives me a dps of 512k with Flasks and 405k without Flasks. Against small sized humanoids it goes down to 401k with Flasks and 321k without Flasks.

As I mentioned in my previous post I did Shaper for my first time ever with this build the other day, and it was a total breeze. I had no problem killing the adds in time, but I can see how without all the extra damage it gained in 3.2 it could have been an issue. I also did 3 of the 4 Guardians on a 5-link too (purely due to my own stupidity), with little difficulty.

Did you consider switching to energy shield gained for each enemy hit while affected by Discipline jewel + incinerate instead of SR? With incinerate hit speed it can provide valuable leech even against bosses.

How do you sustain mana with 2 auras active and a herald? i went with the elementalist option btw

Hi, I was curious about a couple things:

First: How well can this build handle Shaper/Guardians/Red Tier Elder? By that I mean, my screen freezes up every time Shaper or Elder uses a skill, which leads me to just being dead by the time I can do anything again. No reaction time possible whatsoever. So, would this be able to tank long enough for the lag to subside for 5seconds? :)

Also, How do you feel about using Esh's Visage+Righteous Fire? Specc out of CI and move Herald of Ash to Life. I am considering this for leveling/mapping to speed things along.

I already have these to greatly enhance my regen



For end-game content I think I would switch to CI+ES Shield of course--for extra tankiness.