[2.1][Video] "Only in 2.0" - IW BM Block BL Caster (with HC variant)

To play this build, you will need the following uniques (none of which are expensive):

1. Malachai's Simula


This item allows us access to Blood Magic without having to make the trek to the keystone at the bottom of the Marauder section of the tree, as well as providing up to 60% increased damage for our BL (as well as 20 STR for Iron Will). While we come relatively close to the Keystone, it is still 4 points away to reach it, and another 3 to get the big life nodes behind it. *If playing this build in HC, I recommend dropping the passive nodes directly behind and in front of the Sentinel node, netting you 5 points at the expense of a jewel socket, some projectile damage, some armor, resistances and a bit of STR. You can take the remaining 2 points from the Fury Bolts node and the node behind it. This allows you to both reach the BM keystone and the 35% increased max life behind it, as well as drop Malachai's Simula for a helm with more life/armor/resistances/dexterity etc. This makes you a lot tankier, but at the expense of a total of 102% damage and 50 STR (damage + life), plus whatever crazy stats you might gain from the jewel socket.


2. Doon Cuebiyari


This item is the bread and butter of Iron Will casters. Until you starting getting into crazy expensive gear (many exalts), this weapon proves hard to beat for our build. Offering up to 70 STR (damage + life), 18% cast speed, and a decent 10% elemental damage implicit, Doon Cuebiyari also comes with two very strong unique mods: 1% increased damage per 8 STR, and supporting socketed gems with a level 30 Iron Will! This weapon allows us to "double dip" on the Iron Will damage bonus provided by stacking STR, as well as offering a very powerful 4-link for us to use before we get a 5-link (just for reference, a level 30 Iron Will provides 58% increased spell damage, versus 38% increased spell damage from a level 20 Iron Will - something we probably won't even acquire until late game when we have a 5/6-link. It also allows us to socket a different support gem in our main spell links, as we don't have to use a socket for the Iron Will gem.)


3. Alberon's Warpath


This item may not seem that special if you simply glance at it - some armor, some chaos resistance, some movespeed. But taking a closer look reveals that the last stat on these boots is percent increased STR - up to 18%! The only other items currently in the game offering a % increase to STR are the Brawn unique jewel (covered later), and the Black Sun Crest (an excellent alternate helmet if you are choosing to play the HC variant of the build). While it may be possible to find competitive rare boots, they would have to have very high rolls in STR, maximum Life, and Increased Movement Speed to be a good alternative (I have yet to find a pair that gives equal or more total STR [both life + damage, as I mention a thousand times in this guide], especially while not costing an exalt and a half AT LEAST). Once you do not need the resistances on your boots, try and source yourself a pair of these to reach that next level of STR. Just keep in mind that in order for % STR increases to be most effective, you need to stack flat STR, so don't forget!


4. Clear Mind


This item greatly helps us to try and keep up with the DPS of casters with auras. Since we are using Blood Magic (and it is almost always a bad idea to reserve your life with no ES to cover it), we do not use any auras, dropping the DPS of our Ball Lightning. However, since we have no mana (0/0), none of it can be reserved, allowing us to take advantage of the % increased spell damage from this jewel (up to 60%!). Seeing as this jewel is limited to 1 per skill tree, you would be extremely hard pressed to find a rare jewel that can compete with that 1 slot - let alone afford it.


5. Brawn


This unique jewel offers us not just a % increase in STR (which we love!) but a % increase in DEX as well, a stat that we will have trouble increasing otherwise. The drawback of the jewel is a % decrease in INT - up to 15%. This does not trouble us much, however, as the Templar area of the skill tree has a good amount of INT nodes that we path through, and you can always roll whatever small amount you may need on your body armor, gloves, shield, or jewelry (your helmet as well if you play the HC variant). It never hurts to seek out a lower roll on the % decreased INT - it goes down to 10% - but if it increased the price of the jewel by any significant amount, then don't sweat it and just buy a well-priced one. It is possible to have more than 1 of these, but I think that the downside really starts to come into effect then - besides, you can always put in another rare jewel with good stats in that slot instead, if you feel it is superior. *Buy this unique last - it is the least important of the 5!

Some of the link setups in this build are fairly standard, and as such can be altered to your liking. Any setups I feel to be critical to the build will be marked with an asterisk (*).

1. *Main Skill Setup:
3-link: Ball Lightning - Spell Echo - Increased Area of Effect
4-link: Ball Lightning - Spell Echo - Increased Area of Effect - Iron Will
*Note: Once you have reached level 64 and before you acquire a 5-linked body armour, you should put your main skill links in your Doon Cuebiyari, using Ball Lightning - Spell Echo - Increased Area of Effect*
5-link: Ball Lightning - Spell Echo - Increased Area of Effect - Iron Will - Lightning Penetration
6-link: Ball Lightning - Spell Echo - Increased Area of Effect - Iron Will - Lightning Penetration - Slower Projectiles

The last link is up for discussion and debate as to what the best gem would be. Options include:

Faster Casting: A staple in many caster builds, this gem offers a good DPS increase against both packs and bosses - adds or no adds. It also helps with positioning, as the faster you can cast, the less time you are locked in place by Spell Echo and your cast time. The only downside to this gem is that, as Blood Magic users, with such increased cast speed, we drain our health a little bit faster than if we used another gem that isn't focused on cast speed (although not enough to put us in significant danger, it is still noticeable).

Innervate: A great gem for use in this setup, as it offers a huge increase in shock chance, as well as almost always proccing the Onslaught bonus, granting us 20% cast and movement speed (a very nice bonus to DPS and positioning). However, it suffers against bosses with no adds, and, from my experience, my lightning balls shock consistently enough without the gem. It also suffers from the same downside as the Faster Casting gem, in that it drains our health faster when the Onslaught effect is procced.

Added Lightning: I am honestly not sure how well this gem would do. I am unsure of its interaction with Ball Lightning (whether it adds damage to each ball, or adds damage to each arc off of the balls). I tried it and the damage seemed good, but then again the damage seemed good with every other 6th gem option as well.

Slower Projectiles: My personal choice, this gem offers us a nice, fat MORE damage multiplier %, which offers us more DPS than an INCREASED damage % (which is additive). It also doesn't improve DPS through a higher cast speed, so we don't drain our life quite as fast. The downsides to this gem include a fairly high DEX requirement (111 at level 20), and of course the high decrease in projectile speed (up to 49% at level 20). Some players actually consider the slower lightning balls as their preferred option, as monsters stay in the "damage zone" of the ball for longer periods of time compared to normal or high speed lighting balls (the latter being a poor choice if you ask me personally). It is possible though - through the power of patch 2.0 - to combat this "downside" through the use of passive point and jewels; something I will discuss further in the "Mechanics" section of this guide.

Controlled Destruction: A gem being introduced in patch 2.1, I will be sure to test this gem out as the 6th link in my BL setup. Offering another MORE multiplier like Slower Projectiles, the downside of this gem is that it reduces the critical strike chance of linked spells. As a non-crit build, this gem looks very promising; however, being able to control ball speed (discussed in the "Mechanics" section) allows for players to find their preferred balance between DPS and effective spell range - a hidden benefit of the Slower Projectiles gem. This is not to say that Slower Projectiles is the definite superior option, as using Controlled Destruction would allow players to search for rare jewels without the projectile speed mod, allowing for another DPS, resistance, or armor mod instead.


2. *Doon Cuebiyari links (requires level 64 and 5-linked body armour):
3-link: Vaal Storm Call - Spell Echo - Lightning Penetration

Once we have both reached level 64 and moved our main skill setup into a 5-linked body armour, we have the chance to reuse the level 30 Iron Will granted by Doon Cuebiyari. By socketing Vaal Storm Call into the weapon along with its 2 biggest DPS increases, Spell Echo (calls down 2 storms) and Lightning Penetration (reduces enemy elemental resistances), we can take the 58% spell damage increase from the free level 30 Iron Will and apply it to our rare mob/boss killer skill. This provides us with the best possible 4-link for this skill, as putting the setup into another item would only allow for a level 20 Iron Will, which, once all gems are max level, would obviously be less damage than a level 30 version. This also allows us to use this 4-link for another set of gems best suited to a 4-link, instead of relegating them to only 3 links.


3. *3-link: Lightning Warp - Faster Casting - Less Duration

Pretty self-explanatory really. Every build needs a good movement skill, and this gets us the fastest version of Lightning Warp available. You could also use Flame Dash if you wanted to, I just chose Lightning Warp because it does not need to recharge (and is thematic!)


4. *4-link: Tempest Shield - Chain - Curse on Hit - Conductivity

When stacking shield block, using Tempest Shield in your build is a no-brainer. Providing an extra 3% block chance, this gem refreshes itself every time you block. With a high enough block chance, you will barely have to refresh it. As further discussed in the "Mechanics" section, Tempest Shield releases an arc of lighting when refreshed, allowing us to also use this as our automatic cursing setup (seeing as we cannot use Herald of Thunder in this build without reserving our life).
Hint: It is easiest to roll these colors on Malachai's Simula versus the heavily armor-based gear in our other gear slots.


5. 4-link: *Enduring Cry - Summon Chaos Golem - Conductivity - Increased Duration

Not as necessary as the others, this 4-link is one of two I recommend changing if you feel the need. I chose this particular setup primarily for safety purposes. Enduring Cry is a necessary skill, as Endurance Charges cannot be overlooked; their physical damage mitigation is applied before other sources of mitigation, offering a huge boost to survivability; this is coupled with a decent amount of life regen (further bolstered by another gem in this setup). I also chose to put a self-cast Conductivity curse in this link setup, just in case the mob pack/boss isn't triggering the auto-curse setup, or if I would rather preemptively curse rather than wait to receive damage first. Increased Duration affects both of these gems, by increasing not only the duration of the Conductivity curse on the enemy, but also the duration (and therefore life regenerated) of the life regen portion of Enduring Cry. I chose Summon Chaos Golem as my golem because I value both the physical mitigation over the damage of a Flame Golem (and of course over the critical strike chance of an Ice Golem), as well as the fact that the Chaos Golem tends to run into packs ahead of me and draw mob aggro (and therefore danger) away from me. However, I am sure that Summon Flame Golem would be fine in this build as well (I cannot recommend Summon Ice Golem).


6. 4-link: Cast When Damage Taken - Molten Shell - Blood Rage - Increased Duration

This is my preferred setup for both automated defense and offense. Molten Shell offers an increase in armor when activated, and Blood Rage offers us a way of generating valuable Frenzy Charges. Increasing both our damage and cast speed, these charges provide a noticeable DPS increase. It is not without a price, however. Blood Rage deals a physical damage degen to our character over time, mitigatable through physical damage reduction from things like a Chaos Golem and Endurance Charges. While we regen enough Life to visibly cancel out the degen effect (our Life orb doesn't start depleting), we are still receiving less effective life regen, as now "part of our regen" is devoted to stopping the Blood Rage effect.

This reduced effective life regen, combined with a faster casting speed (draining our life faster), makes us less tanky in exchange for a faster clear speed. It is for this reason that I recommend examining the area you are about to enter (reduced/no regen map, Vulnerability map, desecrated ground map) as well as your aversion to dying (about to level up, playing HC) to determine whether or not you should remove the gem from the socket until you feel you are safe enough with it equipped.
Of course both of these gems (Molten Shell and Blood Rage) benefit from the Increased Duration gem, although if you feel that the socket could be put to better use than feel free to adjust it as you see fit.

Once you have acquired the necessary uniques for the build, you may find that you are in need of resists and life. These are obviously the most important stats to look for on your rare items, followed by STR (as much as you can get). Once your resists are capped, you can start shopping for certain upgrades discussed in the following section. As an overarching rule, if your resist are capped and you are looking for some better rares, the general hierarchy is (excluding resists) LIFE > STR > ARMOR = SPECIAL AFFIXES* (further discussed in each example below).


Weapon: Doon Cuebiyari


Body Armour: Rare item with high Life, STR, and Armor. This is where a lot of your resists will come from, as you want open SUFFIXES to craft special affixes on your other gear.
Hint: Try and find an Armor/ES body armour, as rolling 4+ blues on a pure Armor piece is not easy.


Helmet: Malachai's Simula
*For HC variant, either look for a Black Sun Crest with high STR and DEX rolls (STR more importantly), or a rare helmet with high Life, STR, and Armor.


Gloves: Rare item with high Life, STR, and Armor, with an open SUFFIX to craft 1-2% Increased Block Chance* from level 7 Haku.


Boots: Alberon's Warpath


Shield: Rare item with high Life, STR, Block Chance and Armor. If I had to pick 3, I would choose Life, STR, and Block Chance, as you can get Armor elsewhere but Block Chance is harder to come by. Try and get something that meets this criteria and has an open SUFFIX to craft 4-8% Cast Speed* from level 5 Catarina.


Belt: Rare item with high Life, STR, and Armor. It's possible to craft 1-5% Movement Speed from level 6 Tora on an open belt PREFIX, but you will most likely be more concerned with resists on this piece. Aim for a Leather or Heavy Belt base.


Amulet: This item has the opportunity to add some respectable DPS to your character. Amulets can potentially roll Spell Damage, Lightning Damage, Cast Speed, and STR, on the same item, as well as a flat Life roll. Buying an amulet like that will be very expensive though, so I recommend going for one with high Life, STR, and 2 out of the 3 potential DPS mods (this will be one of your more expensive purchases). It is possible, only through crafting and an open PREFIX, to add % Increased Armor to your amulet through a level 7 Elreon; however, it costs an EXALT to do so, so that would a step to take when you are really trying to min-max your character.

Alternatively, you can forgo a rare amulet with these kind of stats and replace it with a unique amulet called Stone of Lazwhar:


This amulet takes half of your Block Chance and applies it to Spell Block, making you significantly tankier versus spells (obviously). Reaching the block cap of 75% and wearing this amulet nets you an substantial 34.5% chance to block all those nasty AoE spells from bosses like Piety and Atziri. It also comes with a hefty bonus to cast speed, providing a good boost to DPS (although not as much as a DPS amulet would). The downside is of course that you sacrifice an amulet with a high Life and STR roll, lowering your overall life pool and, subsequently, your regen.


Rings: Rare items with high Life and STR. You will be getting a lot of resists from these items as well, so those will most likely be the driving factor when searching for rings. If you manage to fill the SPECIAL AFFIXES in your other gear slots (i.e. Increased Block Chance on gloves, Cast Speed on shield, maybe Movement Speed on belts), your resists are still capped, and you are looking for even MORE potential DPS, it is possible for rings to roll Cast Speed and/or Lightning Damage as well as Life and STR. These rings, however, will not come cheap. You must also keep in mind that if you plan on running Elemental Weakness maps, it is not a bad idea to be overcapped on resists. Having constant uptime on your Endurance Charges will help to recoup your lost resists in these maps, but it is always nice to have a safety net in case they fall off.


Flasks: Flasks are usually the items in a build that are most flexible to the preferences of the player. While you can set up your flasks in the way you feel most comfortable, there are a couple of requirements native to any successful Path of Exile build:

1. A flask with the suffix of Staunching (removes bleeding)
2. A flask with the suffix of Warding (removes curses)
3. A flask with the suffix of Heat (removes freeze)

While the flasks above are, in my opinion, mandatory, there are also some not-quite-mandatory flasks that I feel improve the build significantly, and anyone who plays the build should aim to equip them as soon as they can find/afford them.

1. The single best flask for this build: Rumi's Concoction


This flask is incredibly strong for any block build, and allows us to almost hit the block cap when under its effect + Tempest Shield. My personal character has 73% block with both of these buffs active, and I'm sure I could find a rare jewel or two with the necessary remaining block chance to fill the gap. If you also choose to equip a Stone of Lazhwar, then half of that increased Block Chance will apply to spells as well - a very desirable aspect. Not only does it massively increase our block chance, but it also provides us with a flat 3000 armor, scaled even further by our % armor increases on the passive tree and perhaps on our gear (if you can afford it).


2. Atziri's Promise:


This flask provides a nice offensive and slight defensive buff when activated. By adding some of our elemental damage as chaos damage, we gain some extra DPS of a damage type that not many enemies are resistant too - and on top of our usual damage as well, as it is an addition, not a conversion. It also provides a small leech percentage applied to the chaos damage we deal during the effect, so we regain some of our health as we deal more damage. A win-win!


3. A Seething Life flask


Often referred to as a "Panic Flask", a Life flask with the prefix "Seething" reduces the amount of life recovered, but applies it instantly instead of over a period of time. Human error is a large part of getting killed in Path of Exile, and having a way to restore a large chunk of your health in a split second is a good way to ensure your survival while you disengage, calm your nerves, and think of a more effective attack strategy.


4. A Quicksilver flask


The best flask in the entire game, simply because moving slow is boring.
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In reality, Quicksilver flasks provide a way of simultaneously increasing clear speed while increasing survivability through faster manual dodging ability. Movement speed is incredibly useful in Path of Exile, and having a quickly refreshing buff to your movement speed helps you to kill and not be killed. Also, you can modify it with any suffix you need on your flask bar, be it bleed removal, curse removal, freeze removal, or even faster movement speed.


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My Gear

Passives: Level 91
P.S.: The next passive point would go straight into that juicy 14% increased elemental damage node at the start of the Templar tree.


Mechanics/Ideas: One of my goals when creating this build was to make something that simply wouldn't or couldn't have worked before the introduction of patch 2.0. With this in mind, 3 specific things appeared together:

1. Using the new jewel system to offset a problem that couldn't be solved realistically in the past version
2. Using the new function of a gem that was changed in 2.0
3. Using a gem that was rarely used before 2.0

In past versions of Path of Exile, it was hard to justify not using auras. Blood Magic builds usually took that route in pursuit of tankiness and/or simplicity, knowing full well that they could never achieve levels of DPS reached by those utilizing auras. In 2.0, I found that making an effective build without auras fulfilled my goal of something that could realistically be done beforehand (meaning without mega expensive gear or horribly inefficient travel across the passive tree).

I then saw the Clear Mind jewel in a Reddit post and knew it was something that could help me with my build. So what is the most efficient method of not using your mana? One possibility was using Mind Over Matter to buff my EHP and simply casting off the unreserved mana. This would, as everyone now knows, take too much investment both on the passive tree and in gear into Mana and Mana regen to make it worthwhile when compared to simply using the Blood Magic keystone, eliminating my Mana, and just stacking huge amount of Life regen to cover both my casting cost and obviously my Life pool.

I then saw a brief message posted in Global chat from a new player who had a found a Malachai's Simula, as well as other more experienced players telling him about how useless the item was (at least in the past). I decided that MS would be the perfect item to provide the Blood Magic for my build, as it was something that in the past versions was seen as not viable or at least not a good choice. It also provided a buffed-up possible total of 60% damage for a lightning spell. At first I was using Lightning Tendrils, but then I swapped in a Ball Lightning gem just to see how it felt and was blown away by how much better it was.

So, now I was considering other less important aspects of the build when the subject of auto-cursing came up. While I would miss the damage from Herald of Thunder I knew I would miss the convenience of using as an auto-curse setup. But, as it turns out, GGG had changed Tempest Shield in 2.0 to no longer be a mana reservation, but a cast instead. This provided the perfect opportunity to not only make me tankier (by using a shield and stacking Block), but to use the chaining function of Tempest Shield as an auto-curse function - and, since it is no longer a reservation, it would still allow me to use the Clear Mind jewel to bump my DPS.

The last objective on my list actually went unsatisfied until I picked up the first 6-link for this build (and my first ever, aside from a Tabula Rasa). I was thinking of ways to buff the damage on my Ball Lightning and ended up trying out a few gems, one of which being the new and improved Slower Projectiles. Now a more multiplier, the benefit of using the gem was actually comparable to the disadvantage. However, after leveling the gem a bit, I just could not stand how slow the balls were. Sure, they did a lot of damage, but they traveled so little distance that I either had to wait for the mobs to come to me or recast them every few steps. The solution to this problem actually arose in the first objective. I learned that jewels could roll "Increased Projectile Speed", allowing me to, in a sense, choose how fast or how slow I wanted the lightning balls to travel. If I wanted them a bit slower, I could simply swap out a gem with Increased Projectile Speed for one without, and vice versa. This allowed me to keep at range (a large advantage of using spells in the first place), while maintaining that sweet, sweet more multiplier. And the cherry on top was that I had found a DPS boosting gem that didn't involve me casting faster (which I didn't really need positioning wise), allowing me to be a bit tankier in the end.

Naturally, I chose Iron Will as a way to scale my damage, as I already gather a lot of STR in my pathing through the Marauder and Templar areas, where I picked up a lot of the block, armor, and life regen nodes. Using crit was out of the question, as it requires quite a bit of investment, and I had already invested so much into Life regen, block, and armor.

So that explains why my passive tree is chock full of Life regen and jewel sockets, and why nearly if not all of my rare jewels have projectile speed on them. Build idea = complete.

Legacy Courtyard map, the highest level one I had in my stash. Boss at 7:50.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7V_s0kucIQ


More coming soon!

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