[Tempest] Can't Touch This: A Tempest Viable and Tested Reflect tank
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Ladies and Gentle Exiles,
May I present my extremely silly, but extremely viable reflect build. The full version
Gear and gems
This build is centered around the new Tempest-only unique, Crown of the Pale King. The important mod here is '30% of damage you reflect gained as life'. In short, the reflect in this build is not an offensive tactic - it's a defensive tactic. The more damage you reflect, the more you heal! As the damage is 'gained' as life, not 'leeched' as life, it's instant without vaal pact.
Discussion of the tree and gear choices
There are three tiers of damage reflect for the three damage sources Spellcasters: they don't get traditional reflect, but they will get hit with a buffed tempest shield every time you block - and this is linked to life leech. Ranged attackers: they get hit by tempest shield, but they ALSO get the large reflect off thousand teeth temu on block. This is rather potent, and can instantly heal you for 300 health (though 150 is average). Melee attackers: they suffer from your tempest shield AND thousand teeth temu, but they ALSO get massive amounts of reflected damage thanks to Bramblejack and the reflect on Crown of the Pale King. Bramblejack works well as an endgame chest despite having little-to-no defense on it because of its reflect stat. 40% of melee physical damage is reflected back to attackers, 30% of which is regained as life. This means that you absorb 12% of every melee hit. You'd be hard pressed to get consistent 12% physical damage reduction out of any chest on its own. Obviously, if you get one-shot, you won't get a chance to heal the 12% of that hit, but then armour is much less effective against one-shots anyways (whereas bramblejack's reflect is consistent, regardless of the size of the hit!) In short, if you block a melee attack (75% of the time), you take no damage, they take lots of damage, and you regain life. If you get hit by a melee attack, you absorb 12% of the damage, and they take lots of damage. By and large, almost all normal (and most magic) melee mobs heal you more than they hurt you! The combination of these three means you actually rarely need your life flasks. However, since this is built around absorbing damage, you need a LARGE life pool. You'll want to get as much life as possible on every rare you use. I've put a ton of armour and life on the tree. With Grace, a good armour and life belt, and decent rings/boots/gloves, you can easily stack a very respectable amount of armour, despite wearing bramblejack. Furthermore, getting the Primal Spirit and Druidic Rite notable passives means you'll pretty much be able to permanently keep a Rumi's Concoction flask active if you have 2 (quality helps). Perma-Rumi's also allows us to spend fewer points on block in the tree, and thus more on life and armour. The build is quite spread out, but the advantage of this is that you shouldn't need any stats on your endgame gear. This is handy, since with 5 unique items, you're going to have limited space to get all your resists in. If you want a bit more armour for a particular boss, I recommend swapping out a life flask (probably the Warding flask, depending on the map) for a Jade flask of Iron Skin. Cybil's paw, Iron Will, and Hypothermia provide us with some thoroughly respectable damage, and Spell Echo gives us high cast speed at impressively low mana cost. If you get a 6l, throwing an Added Chaos Damage gem in there will send your dps through the roof. Two good Elreon's rings give us free incinerate. And frost blades-fortify lets us fortify without being right in an enemy's face (more for quality of life than necessity). I have a +1 curse Stone of Lazwhar equipped, which is quite expensive. Worry not, it's not remotely necessary (though it is very nice). Without this, I'd recommend sticking with Enfeeble in your cwdt setup. The only necessary and expensive part of this build is the two Rumi's concoctions. However, if those are out of your budget, don't despair: there's a budget version of this build which is also viable! The budget version Block isn't capped here, and crafting some block on your gloves would help. Instead of two Rumi's Concoctions, you can just use two good Granite Flasks (of Iron Skin would, of course, be delightful). You should be able to keep them up all the time. The rest of the gear is pretty cheap. Your dps won't be quite as high without capped block, since Cybil's mean block=damage, but it's still pretty respectable. And Granite flasks of Iron Skin will actually give you quite a bit more armour than Rumi's Concoctions would, making up for the loss of capped block. Capping your resists when you've got no res on your shield, helmet, chest, or amulet could be quite challenging on a budget, so I've included a fair amount of resist on the tree - 62% to all resists, in fact.
Levelling
1-20
The build at lvl 20 You'll start off as a melee character. Choose what skill you like, though I prefer molten shell from level one, and ice crash from 28.
20-40
The build at level 40 Go for Iron Reflexes first, and start running Grace. This should help you greatly in the fight against normal Malachai. Get Thick Skin next, and then Tetsudo. Finally, work your way up to the scion life wheel. Once you hit 37, get Cybil's Paw and switch to Incinerate-Iron Will-Spell Echo-LMP. You may need a 2nd Elreon ring from this point, and will almost certainly need a Brute Force Solution jewel.
40-55
The build at level 55 I recommend moving through Sentinel and the scion resist nodes first, since that will make the journey through merciless much safer, and will mean you have to spend less on gear. Next up grab the endurance charge closest to the Marauder start, as well as that lovely regen-per-endurance charge node. Then, go get Command of Steel for some extra block and defense. You'll be taking on cruel malachai at the end of this span, which is where you're most likely to die. If you want to be safe, there are usually players selling malachai kills. Otherwise, provided you make sure to avoid his one shots (the voll-style smash and the teleport attack), you should be ok. You may want to use Whirling Blades as your movement skill through this instead of Flame Dash. If you have malachai targeted and you flame dash, you'll dash straight to him. Whirling blades, however, will send you right past him. It's a small difference, but every little bit helps. Outside of this instance, though, I generally prefer flame dash.
55-80
The final build I prefer to get the stat nodes out of the way first. In this light, work your way along the path of mostly int nodes, towards purity of flesh. Once you have enough int, spec out of your current jewel node, ditch brute force solution, and (if you can afford it) get an Anatomical Knowledge jewel for the node between the templar and the witch. You can start using Crown of the Pale King once you hit 63 and can equip Thousand Teeth Temu. Whether or not you switch to Bramblejack at this stage as well depends on three things: how much armour there is on your belt (200+ would be good; the more the better), whether you've got good life on all your non-unique gear, and whether you can cap resists with bramblejack equipped. A note: when you do get a bramblejack, make sure the itemlevel is at least lvl 50 so you can 6s it. If you can buy one with 6s already, great (also 5l-ed would be even better!). Once you have and can equip two Rumi's Concoctions, respec out of the block nodes in the ranger and scion areas (note: this will result in you losing resists! make sure your gear is good enough, or make up for it with diamond skin). Get Primal Spirit first and foremost. If you want to get rid of the dex on your gear (and also add a bit more dps), you can also spend 2 more points and get Ballistic Mastery. Life takes a priority in hardcore leagues, so move down through Retribution, and get Discipline and Training. Depending on how safe you feel, you can either get Mental Rapidity (cast speed) or Soul of Steel (armour, down below the marauder) first.
80+
There's very little in the way of dps on the tree. The only real chunk I've invested into is the Mental Rapidity cluster. Cast speed scales very well with Incinerate, and spell echo magnifies this effect. For more dps as you level past 80, you have 3 choices, depending on how complicated you want your gameplay to be (with flasks, EC, fortify, and tempest shield, there can already be a lot to manage, fyi).
Option 1: EE
Spend 1 point in EE, and swap out the flame totem (which loses usefulness in later levels) for a ball lightning totem (ball lightning - spell totem - GMP)
Option 2: Add a herald
Spend 5 points getting Sovereignty, which should give you enough reduced mana reservation for a herald on top of grace and AA. I prefer Herald of Ice, since it synergises a bit with Hypothermia. You can combine this with Option 1, though EE will reduce the added effectiveness of a herald.
Option 3: invest in straight up dps
Your first port of call should be to invest 4 points in the Explosive Impact cluster. Next up, get Light of Divinity (spell damage and cast speed), and then move to Elementalist. A bonus of Elementalist is that it comes with 12% resists, so you might be able to respec out of Diamond Skin. Alternatively, you might keep both nodes, and switch to gear with less elemental resist and more chaos resist (my preferred option - especially if you like pvp).
Gameplay videos
Some short examples of gameplay. I'll see about getting a full mapping video up Me yoloing a rare strongbox in merc harvest a bit of a gorge map run You'll see I don't have any problem keeping my flasks up constantly, and my clear speed isn't bad for an entirely defensive HC build. My health dips rather low at one point, cause I was being lazy and hadn't been keeping up fortify and my charges :b. Last edited by Kerosene8#1936 on Aug 2, 2015, 9:20:20 AM
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Good work Roach.
I can confirm that this is a good build. |
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link to skill trees not working :(
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This tree is on cb.poedb.tw this site sometime is down.
Got question about ressist... you got cap on merc? |
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Definitely looks fun, but your health dips to some scary levels a few times there.
What about subbing out Stone for The Anvil to get more reflect/life on block and more block chance? Last edited by Kyokuji#6764 on Aug 13, 2015, 6:45:39 PM
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What about adding Riposte, Reckoning and Vengeance for just even more punishment for anything that touches you?
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Skill tree links don't work...
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Yeah, I'm also having trouble viewing the passive trees. Build looks very interesting though, would love to try it! Any way you can re-do them or do you plan on waiting for 2.1 to update it completely?
Edit: Just wanted to share that I found out that you can salvage skill trees that are lost on poedb by simply plugging the part after the last slash into the passive tree. Linky. Last edited by Lady_Siara#2099 on Dec 4, 2015, 8:50:21 AM
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