[3.0] [Video] [HC/SC] Flee the Fire! Chieftain Sire of Shards Fireball/Flameblast Tri-Totem Build

Normal Lab: Ngamahu, Flames Advance. This is a pathing node, but the extra chance to ignite and burn damage is useful.

Cruel Lab: Hinekora, Death's Fury. Totems can leech for you and fire penetration? Sign me up!

Merciless Lab: Ramako, Sun's Light. Getting Endurance charges is very useful, especially since so many bosses have extra spawning enemies you can generate charges from. Getting this is useful for Uber Lab later.

Uber Lab: Aromongul, Moon's Presence. Extra damage to enemies and reduced damage done by enemies.

After completing Uber Lab, I suggest respeccing out of Ramako, Sun's Light and into Tukohama, War's Herald. The damage reduction from the taunt, combined with Aromongul, is better and more consistent than the Endurance charges for our build. In addition, you confuse enemies rather well with Taunt + Chance to Flee, resulting in enemies that don't attack much.

Weapon: Sire of Shards Serpentine Staff
This is one of the core items for this build. It's main draw is that your projectiles explode out in a nova instead of shooting straight ahead. In addition, you get four more projectiles for free. This gives you the effect of the Greater Multiple Projectiles gem without any of it's drawbacks. A basic version will run you next to nothing. Purchasing a 5 link, 6 socket version will cost around 40 Chaos. A 4 link will work just fine, but you will want to upgrade to a 5 link once you're ready to add in Chance to Flee. Either socket and link one on your own or pay the Chaos.

Weapon (Off Slot): Realm Ender
Wait a minute now, this is a Sire of Shards build. What am I doing telling you to pick up a Realm Ender? Well, let us be totally honest here. Sire of Shards is terrible for single target in most cases, and this is one of the cases. Now, you could pick up a second Sire of Shards, set up a second Fireball with single target focus, and use that. But why do that when you can set up a Flameblast single target attack and get +3 to the spell gem and some of the support gems for cheap? This unique is dirt cheap (a Chaos at most) to pick up. Try it in the build; you'll be glad you did.

Chest: Soul Mantle Spidersilk Robe
This is an Energy Shield-based chest armour, which is unfortunate, but it provides us with two key things for this build. It provides us a third totem and it lets us curse ourselves (via dying or expiring totems). It also supports all gems in it with a level 14 Spell Totem, which is unfortunate since our main skill is going in Sire of Shards. It makes placing utility gems awkward, but it is a necessary piece. Pick one up today for dirt cheap (1 Chaos or less). Then socket and link it (4 Link suggested) yourself. I like to put Searing Bond in here, but I've used it for gem leveling as well.

Ring Slot #1 and Ring Slot #2: Kikazaru Topaz Ring
This is where you will start to see the synergy of the build come together. The Kikazaru Topaz Ring is a Unique Ring which grants us all sorts of useful bonuses for our build. It gives us mana regeneration (very useful), decent flat life regeneration, Lightning Resistance, and 10-15 to all attributes. Those are all excellent and useful things to us. However, the main draw of the ring is that it provides 20% Reduced Impact of Curses on us. You're going to be cursing yourself a lot thanks to the Soul Mantle. Reducing that impact is huge and wearing a pair of these allows us to remain Resistance Capped. They are also ridiculously cheap. Pay more than a Chaos and you're paying too much.

Rain of Splinters Crimson Jewel
Adding two more projectiles at a cost of 30-50% Reduced Totem Damage may sound bad, but the DPS hit per projectile isn't bad. In addition, the extra two projectiles really increase your spread and add more explosion damage. Pick a decent one up for a chaos.

Self-Flagellation Viridian Jewel
And here is where the synergy takes hold. 10-20% Increased Damage for every curse that you have means that all the curses you're putting on yourself with Soul Mantle are boosting your DPS. This jewel will take care of a lot of our DPS needs. And, like everything else, it is quite cheap. A chaos or so should get you a good one.

Empire's Grasp Goliath Gloves
These provide a boatload of armor but, more importantly, they provide us Reverse Knockback. Get these set up in your build once you get Chance to Flee in your link setup. Use decent rare gloves before then. If you can, get a corrupted version with Temporal Chains. It will make your life much easier.

Lion's Roar Granite Flask
This is used for knockback purposes and to push our armor up to decent levels for short periods of time. Our end goal is Reverse Knockback, but we have limited gem slots in our Sire of Shards. This lets us use Reverse Knockback without sacrificing a gem slot. Now, we can Reverse Knockback enemies while hitting them with Chance to Flee. You now have enemies who won't attack you or your totems who are trying to get away but are being pulled closer and closer to their death.

Impacted Slots: Helmet, Belt, Amulet, and Boots

Get rare items for these slots. Pack on as much Life and Resistance as you humanly can into these items. You are really going to need your Resistances pumped up on these. Your boots should have 25% Movement Speed or better. While you're going to be reducing the impact of Temporal Chains by 40%, if you don't have movement speed life is going to be pretty terrible.

You should be focusing on either Armour or Hybrid Armour/Energy Shield gear. We go nowhere near Evasion nodes but do pick up some incidental Armour boosters. Energy Shield, of course, adds to our effective hit point pool and makes coloring the sockets (a lot of blue gems are needed) much easier.

A Goldrim Leather Cap can be a good "Resistance Fixer" in the short term, but long term you will want to replace that with a better helmet.

You will also want some Dexterity on your gear. We do need Dexterity for our gems, so be ready to either craft some or make sure to buy some with a good bit of Dexterity on it.

I run two life flasks, a Lavianga's Spirit, Lion's Roar, and a quicksilver flask. You may want at least one Warding Flask (to remove curses in a pinch or when Enfeeble shows up ) and at definitely a Staunching Flask. I have linked my flasks in my gear section.

Jewels are incredibly useful on this build. Obviously we're using two of them on Rain of Splinters and Self-Flagellation, but you can use more jewels to more efficiently fix stat/resistance issues or up your DPS. I've allocated, at this time, four additional jewel slots for a total of four jewel slots in the build. I have plans to potentially get a seventh jewel socket should I reach level 95.

This build doesn't cost much to start up. Sire of Shards is cheap. Realm Ender is cheap. Soul Mantle is cheap. Self-Flagellation and Rain of Splinters are cheap. You're looking at 10 chaos there.

Then you need to link your staffs and chest. That'll take some fusings and jewelers. Go for 6 sockets with your jewelers (make sure to Quality with Whetstones and Armourer's Scraps first!) then go for at least a 5 link, prioritizing your weapons (Sire of Shards, then Realm Ender). You have twice as many possibilities for a 5 link with a 6 socket, which is why you go for that first. Depending on your luck, this can be very expensive or very cheap. If you want to buy the 6 socket and focus on fusings, you're going to spend 10 chaos on each of the Sire of Shards and Soul Mantle while Realm Ender seems to be around 20 chaos at the moment. If you're looking at spending that much chaos on your chest + weapons just to get the 6 sockets, I actually advise buying a 5 link, 6 socket Sire of Shards (30-40 chaos) and focusing your jewelers and fusings on the other two. A 4 link Realm Ender is good enough early on, and the Searing Bond in a 4 link is fine too.

Jewels are the other spot you can get a little pricey. If you really, really don't want to run Purity of Elements, you may find yourself spending upwards of 20 chaos on each of the four free jewel sockets to get Resistances + Life + Damage (+possibly Dexterity). If you want to keep it cheap, you do Purity of Elements or respec a few points into Diamond Skin and it's neighboring resistance nodes (or take the 3 nodes in the Scion wheel).

Getting the Lion's Roar and Empire's Grasp (with appropriate corruption) combination rolling is 40 chaos roughly. It's optional, but does help the build out with the entire control aspect.

I've found that Lavianga's Spirit is an excellent unique flask if you want fast and easy mana regeneration. This flask makes running no regeneration maps much easier, if you can get your hands on it. It can be a little pricey but it does open up another map mod for you. If you don't want to buy one of these, that's fine. Just run a Hybrid flask instead.

All in all, you can run this build pretty cheaply. But, like most builds, to really make it shine, you'll want to invest a bit of currency in it. Then the build does the job of clearing maps and getting you currency itself.

Your main skill is Fireball. You'll use this for clearing packs. It should be linked as follows:

4L: Fireball - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - Fork
5L: Fireball - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - Fork - Chance to Flee
6L: Fireball - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - Fork - Chance to Flee - Controlled Destruction

Your off weapon skill is Flameblast. You'll use this for killing most bosses and possibly high life rares. It should be linked as follows:

4L: Flameblast - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - Fire Penetration / Concentrated Effect
5L: Flameblast - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - Fire Penetration - Concentration Effect
6L: Flameblast - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - Fire Penetration - Concentration Effect - Less Controlled Destruction

Your Soul Mantle comes with a free Level 14 Spell Totem. This limits what you can put in it, so you could put in a Searing Bond, as the first Searing Bond totem is free and doesn't reduce the number of Fireball / Flameblast totems you can have out. You can use it for extra damage to bosses and rare monsters. If you follow my linking guide, be warned that this is seriously off-color. Prepare to burn your chromatics! This should be your third priority of your spell links after Sire of Shards and Realm Ender.

4L: Searing Bond - Rapid Decay- Elemental Focus - Less Duration
5L: Searing Bond - Rapid Decay- Elemental Focus - Less Duration - Increased Burning Damage
6L: Searing Bond - Rapid Decay- Elemental Focus - Less Duration - Increased Burning Damage - Empower

Fireball: Most people are going to look at Fork and Chance to Flee a little bit oddly. They aren't commonly used gems. I've chosen Fork after dozens of hours of testing for a couple different reasons. First, it has a smaller mana modifier, making it cheaper on the mana cost. It also reduces tooltip DPS less than GMP. Most importantly, it creates more explosions, doing more damage. Three GMP totems with Rain of Splinters create 33 total projectiles (11 per totem). It's very straightforward. Three Fork totems create an initial 21 projectiles (7 per totem), but then each projectile forks, splitting in two and causing its own explosion. That 's another 42 projectiles (14 per totem), totally 63 projectiles in a hopefully small space. This will do a lot of damage to a pack of enemies.

Chance to Flee is an underrated defensive mechanic that keeps enemies from attacking you and sends them scurrying off to some random location a random distance away. It has the full listed gem effect on white enemies. Magic (blue) enemies have a 50% chance of ignoring the Chance to Flee. Rare and Uniques completely ignore it. That makes this excellent for mapping because we heavily reduce the amount of incoming fire because enemies aren't attacking us. Once you get your Empire's Grasp and Lion's Roar set up, you're very party friendly because you group up enemies but those enemies don't attack anybody. If you've got Temporal Chains as a curse, then you get to slow their movement down.
You can run this build without it if you want. But I highly recommend giving it a try. I've found it an excellent defensive mechanic despite being highly skeptical of it to begin with.

Flameblast: We're focused on boss killing here. That means as much damage as possible. Concentrated Effect for the More modifier is a no brainer here. We don't care about massive AoE because we have Fireball for that. In addition, we get a lot of Increased Area of Effect on the tree, so our AoE is fine. Faster Casting speeds up our stack acquisition. Fire Penetration, of course, does just what it says it does. Controlled Destruction is yet another More modifier for us. I don't choose Empower because we're already getting 3 levels out of our Realm Ender and Empower just doesn't add as much DPS. Less Duration works alright, but I didn't like having it cut totem uptime down so much. For boss killing, I like to not have to worry about recasting totems every few seconds.

Searing Bond: Again, we're all about the More modifiers, but Searing Bond doesn't work with a lot of classic gems. All our gems are taken with the More modifier in mind whenever possible.

Iron Will: This build gets upwards of 300 strength. This gem is surprisingly strong as a result and can really help push your DPS upwards. Usable on Fireball and Flameblast.

Increased Area of Effect: This makes your splashes bigger. This is probably, in my opinion, the weakest option (I think the AOE you get in the tree is sufficient), but you may find a use for it over the other gems. I mention it here because it is a valid choice.

These don't need to be linked. However, you cannot put them in Soul Mantle. Otherwise, you get totems casting these buffs, and that just won't help you. If you use pure armour gear (like I did), prepare to spend some chromatics coloring your sockets.

Purity of Elements: You may need this to push your resistances high enough. I pushed on gear and the tree to not need this. If you can avoid using it, do so.
Clarity: Mana Regeneration, plain and simple.
Arctic Armour: This gives you Physical and Fire mitigation.
Enlighten: If you can get it, link it to your auras, obviously.

3L: Cast When Damage Taken - Immortal Call - Summon Flame Golem
This gives us some instant defense if we get hit with something hard (and serves as a warning bell). I found my golem dies a lot without a lot of minion supports, which is something we just don't do. Letting it be summoned when we take damage is one less thing you have to worry about and it's a tiny tradeoff in golem-boosted DPS. Totally a Quality of Life investment that I make every time.

Flame Dash: We're a fire build. This is a fire movement skill. It fits well. Use Lightning Warp if you hate this skill. Or Leap Slam.

Decoy Totem: Keep enemies in a specific spot. Excellent in certain scenarios, plus it is a red gem, so it's easy for us to slot. Not useful once you get totems that taunt though.

Vaal Haste: You can't level this all the way, but it's excellent for boss killing. Just beware the dexterity requirement and make sure you have enough dexterity with Realm Ender (not Sire of Shards) equipped.

Flammability: Your curse, if you don't get corrupted gloves with Elemental Weakness on Hit. Link it to Increased Area of Effect.

Temporal Chains: Your curse, if you don't get corrupted gloves with Temporal Chains on Hit. Link it to Increased Area of Effect.

Portal: I hate hauling portal scrolls. Totally optional.

The biggest concern that letting yourself be cursed so much is really the drop in your elemental resistances. These are level 20 curses. That means you're cursing yourself with Level 20 Elemental Weakness (39% of Resistances gone) and Level 20 Frostbite, Flammability, and Conductivity (44% of their respective elemental resistance gone). Without mitigation, you could be looking at 83% of your Elemental Resistances being cut away, which is a rather difficult number to overcome.

The Kikazaru Topaz Ring, however, drops the curse impact by 20%. Two of them drop it by 40%. That means Elemental Weakness now hits you for -23.4% and the other three hit you for -26.4%. Because of PoE's rounding system, that comes out to -23% and -26%, for a more reasonable -49% to each resist. That is a number you can make up with a heavy focus on resistances on your gear.

This makes your Merciless Resistance Goal 184% instead of the standard 135% total resistances. The planned tree, you will notice, puts you very close to two sets of resistance wheels: The Scion southern start (Sentinel for 10% all and individual 18% nodes) and the Diamond Skin wheel (15% all and 12% individual). These should be used as crutches until your gear catches up. As you improve your gear, you can spec out of these wheels and invest in other nodes. You get 20 free respec points throughout the story and Orbs of Regret aren't too hard to get a hold of. Use them, don't hoard them.

Other curses are mitigated in a variety of ways, detailed below.

Assassin's Mark: You can't do much to mitigate this except for the Kikazaru rings. High health helps a lot, but killing things quickly does a lot too. Don't worry about this one unless you run an increased critical strikes/damage map.
Enfeeble: Our rings help a bit, but I pop my Warding Flask on this if it shows up in the first three curses that I get cursed with.
Poacher's Mark: We have very little evasion, so we don't care about this.
Projectile Weakness: We just kind of soak this one up. The knockback is annoying, but we're a totem build, so it isn't a big deal.
Punishment: Whatever, we don't care about this one being on us. We're a totem build. Stuff that gets close enough to melee us means we're doing something very wrong.
Temporal Chains: We wear high movement speed boots and run a quicksilver flask. The rings help a lot too. This isn't too bad, honestly. Just slows your speed a touch.
Vulnerability: This is hitting us for 20% Increased Damage from Damage over Time effects and 18% Physical. We mitigate this with a high life regeneration value and by running mostly armor gear and Arctic Armour.
Warlord's Mark: Another one that only the rings help with, but they help a lot. I've not found this a problem.

T12 Shipyard: This is pretty much a terrible map for this build to run. Teleporting bosses, lots of damage, and a layout that isn't very good for us. It still shows how the build functions, however.

T15 Abyss: This is probably only my second or third time every running an Abyss, so I'm slow, but the build is quite safe and able to handle T15 without a problem.

T10 Boss Kill Video: Shows the build killing all T10 bosses. Includes double Arsenal boss and LMP Piety.

T11 Boss Kill Video: Finally got myself video of killing all the standard T11 bosses.

T11 Voll Kill: Just a quick video of the build killing Voll with relative ease.

T13 High Gardens Boss Kill: Another boss kill. This time the T13 High Gardens boss. Corrupted too.

T15 Abyss Boss Kill: Kaom's clone goes down in less than 30 seconds.

Atziri Kill: This is a simple Atziri kill. The first 55 seconds or so are me going back to my hideout to drop off loot and get the correct flasks, because I forgot to grab the right ones before going in.

My first thought when making this was to go Thief's Torment. But the Kikazaru rings offer five excellent mods for our build. Thief's Torment only offers two, and only one of those is significantly better. You can certainly do it with the Thief's Torment, but I think Kikazaru is the better choice. Here are the two rings to compare and a breakdown of their positive and negative attributes as they relate to this build.



The Thief's Torment has multiple mods that don't really help us. Breaking them down:

--- Life Gain on Hit does nothing for this build.
--- Mana Gain on Hit does nothing for this build.
--- The Quantity bonus is nice, but we're not a MF build and aren't stacking IIR gear, so it isn't doing a ton for us.
--- Can't wear other rings means you're stuck with just this ring.
--- 16%-22% to all Elemental Resistances (for a total resistance bump of 48%-66%) is useful and technically better than Kikazaru, but only by a slight margin. Two Kikazaru rings get you 40%-60% Lightning Resistance though, so the total difference in resistance is quite small.
--- 50% Reduced Effect of Curses is 10% better than a pair of Kikazaru.

The Kikazaru has no wasted stats on it.

--- The implicit is 20-30% Lightning Resist. Two of them give you a total of 40-60% Resistances, a comparable number to the total amount of resistance a single Thief's Torment gives you.
--- +10-15 all Attributes on each ring does a lot of work in getting your Dexterity up.
--- 13-17 Life Regeneration doesn't sound great, but double that to 26-34 with two rings and that's sounding pretty nice for a Life Regeneration tank. To put that in perspective, I have 5190 life on my character and 506.9 life regeneration. If I was to remove the 0.8% Life Regen node, I drop down to 465.4 life regeneration. That is a 41.5 life regeneration difference for a 0.8 regeneration node (one of the best we get). At my level of life, 34 life regeneration is equal to a 0.65% life regeneration node. That is excellent, even at a high level.
--- 20%-40% Mana Regeneration is very, very useful. Two rings makes that 40-80%.
--- 20% Reduced Effect of Curses. Two of these gives you 40% Reduced Effect. This is the only spot that Thief's Torment is significantly better.