[3.2]♦Pants On Fire! LLRF Scorching Ray Guardian ♦ FULL VIDEO GUIDE UP! ♦ NO CHANGES FOR 3.2

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KatKira wrote:

Your budget recommendations are not budget at all.

Death's Door ~4ex cheapest

Presence ~3ex


(Harbinger SC)

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Derptime wrote:

Hey, so I'd like to share my Harbinger League story. I'm level 95 with 12.6k ES, having great success with the build and enjoying its gameplay a ton. I've experimented with a number of variations and have considered a lot of options I've seen in this thread, reddit, streams, and stalking profiles on poebuilds.io. I'm sharing this both to help out people doing this build in the league and to get feedback on my logic/decisions. I'll cover everything piece by piece, provide a progression path, and point out the differences with Ahfack's version. I'm a bit of a theorycrafting freak, so this will probably end up long, bear with me.

I've made my characters public if you want to import it into Path of Building or view it with the official tools. I'll use poeplanner.com for the passive tree links since it shows jewels.

My current tree at level 95: www.poeurl.com/bznF

Things to pay attention to:
- Different pathing compared to Ahfack's version. I think the route through Precision and Retribution is not worth it. The attack/cast speed isn't bad, but the Precision cluster is just very inefficient per point. I rather connect to the Scion area with 3 Strength nodes than with 6 inefficient attack/cast speed and Dexterity nodes;
- The points behind Mind over Matter are insanely efficient. Check how much ES you get from them in Path of Building tooltips. With my gear specifically, the small nodes are worth almost as much as 5% ES nodes (83 ES each - 5% ES nodes are 110 ES each), and the big node is worth a whopping crazy 433 ES! This is more than the major ES nodes like Foresight and Unnatural Calm give (414 ES and 429 ES respectively), and this is before considering that you will adjust your Clarity level to reserve as much as possible, which then converts into even more ES. And the other big advantage of it, is that mana regen is based off of maximum mana, so increasing your mana pool increases the regen flat value, which eliminates the need to have a mana regen % roll on the ring;

Example

Example of a tooltip in PoB to check ES value per point:

- Deep Thoughts is an incredibly efficient cluster too, not just due to the mana stuff I mentioned above, but the node comes with a bonus 20 Int on it. Every 10 Int is worth 51 ES for me, which is like half a 5% ES node - don't underestimate Int. Deep Thoughts ends up being worth 255 ES for me;
- I skip a Mana Reservation node near Sovereignty. Most setups running this build can safely drop it. I know for sure that level 3 Enlighten in The Vertex helm can do it (so a level 4 Enlighten without Vertex would work too, and if you can afford a Hubris better than Vertex, you must be able to afford a level 4 Enlighten too). Ahfack's version with level 4 Enlighten, level 4 Empower and Reserve Reduction helm enchant can do it too. The only excuse for having that node is if you are really poor and run level 2 Enlighten in The Vertex or something (please upgrade). Check for yourself in PoB;
- Grab the Aura Effect node! This is critical, because if you grab both Aura Effect nodes available to us, and then use a Conqueror's Potency jewel, you will increase the maximum fire resistance from Purity by 1%;
- ...not just that, but the increase of flask effect from that jewel, combined with the Alchemist cluster, results in 2% increase in maximum fire resistance granted by Ruby Flask! These things, put together, result in 99% fire resistance, which is really freaking insane for regen. If you have my character open in PoB, check for yourself by going into "Items" tab and ticking the Ruby Flask on. Removing the jewel results in losing 2% (both the Purity 1% and the Flask effect 1% rely on it);
- In the Ascendancy, I prefer the Warcry one over the Block. They are both nice, but I really don't mind using Warcries, and Rallying Cry is 100-200% generic damage (which scales everything!) while mapping, or Enduring Cry for a nice "ghetto life potion" + Endurance Charges vs bosses. I do like the Block one too and you should use it if you don't like pressing Warcry and/or want to free up a socket;
- Bandits: Oak. Just spelling it out if you hadn't noticed it. If you are specced into 2 passives and don't have spare currency, you can keep it, it's not bad. I just really like regen.
- Pantheon: Soul of Arakaali until I reached 99% fire resist, switched to Soul of Solaris when I did. According to PoB, my degen is only 100 with flasks up, so Arakaali isn't worth much at this point. What I like about Solaris is the Lady Stormflay upgrade (no extra damage from crits after getting crit). For the minor, I ran Abberath until I reached 99% fire res, then swapped to Gruthkul.

The progression path I'd follow if I was making a new character with this build...

Level 80: www.poeurl.com/bzom
- Don't forget to use the extra Mana Reservation node if you need to - depending on what order you gear in, it might be useful.
- The link is actually level 81 because I included Harrier. Spec that whenever you can without "breaking" things, it's a very nice node for its speed benefits vs its cost. I just unspec it whenever I can reach another big milestone.

Level 90: www.poeurl.com/bzof
- Notice that I removed the jewel at Scion area and placed the Conqueror's Potency in the Witch area. Until you can get Heart and Soul and Cruel Preparation, putting an Energy From Within there is worthless, and the jewel socket at Scion area isn't very efficient (3 nodes for it);
- I moved those 3 points freed up by the jewel into Faith and Steel on the far left. It's a very cost efficient cluster;
- You should dump points into 6% ES nodes around Foresight until you can afford Heart and Soul and Cruel Preparation. In other words, your level 94 should look like this, and then your level 95 should look like mine.

Past level 95, the plan is to get Harrier and Faith and Steel (dumping points into the 6% ES nodes until I can get it).

And that's it for the passives. Now the gear.

First off, my current stuff for reference:

Gear

It's not as optimized as I'd like to show off. Ring base, Doryani roll, flask rolls, head enchant and rolls - I know all those could be improved, just being lazy or can't find replacements (for the ring).

- Shavs is core for Low Life. If you're on a budget, then running 5Link is no problem - the build only gains single target damage from getting more links on the Scorching Ray, you are running the Righteous Fire on 4 anyway. For maps that aren't T16, there is basically no difference between having 5L or 6L.

- Chayula amulet is necessary. You can use Eye of Chayula if you're on a budget, but upgrading to Presence should be one of your top priorities. You gain like ~1.5-2k ES from it. I've read about someone running this build without any stun immunity, but I wouldn't recommend this (Eye of Chayula is like 1c anyway). I started out running this with just an Eye and it was fine, ~8k ES is plenty enough even for tier 11-13 farm maps.

- I strongly prefer a Scepter to a Wand due to being able to link Fortify with Shield Charge, which you can't do with Lightning Warp. I do love how LW feels, and I can understand using it in Standard with insane gear, but I also think Fortify is stupidly strong for the investment required. In my opinion, the general suggestion for people starting out this build is to use Shield Charge and Fortify.

Doryani's Catalyst is a lazy/cheap choice, but finding a rare that beats it is hard (taking into account the cast and attack speed, not just the burning damage), and they're very expensive compared to just getting a decently rolled Catalyst. I'd especially underline the importance of the Attack Speed roll, it has a huge effect on your Shield Charge speed due to how Attack Speed rolls work on weapons (modify the implicit).

- Rise of the Phoenix is definitely the shield to go with in the League/post-3.0 world. They nerfed Leo's DoT reduction mod from 20% to 5%, and top end shields are only 330-350 ES now. With 12-13k ES and our mitigation levels, it's already very unlikely to die to a single hit, so I'd prioritize a crapton of sustain over a little bit more effective hit points any day.

- The Vertex is superb. A top rolled Vertex is 304 ES, and depending on which exact setup you're running (Empower or not), the +1 increases your Discipline by 1 or 2 levels, which translates into 10-19 ES extra. For comparison, top rolled Hubris are 330-350 ES, and cost 10-100 times more. On top of that, it's not like the Evasion or the Chaos Resistance are bad (I'd even say Evasion with the Witchbrew flask is great when mapping).

I'd only replace Vertex with some insanely high 345+ Hubris with Intellect on it, and those cost 30+ exalts. Unless you're really crazy about gear in PoE, you can consider Vertex to be your best in slot item here.

- Sin Trek. It seems like people didn't mention it much in this thread (or I missed it all), but pretty much every person I've stalked running this build in the league has been using Sin Trek. And it's no wonder: top rolled Sorc boots 210-230 ES, Sin Trek go up to 192. The Int, Dex (we're very much Dex starved!), guaranteed 30% movement speed, Evasion are all great additions.

I strongly prefer them over Death's Door. All it does is free up a flask mod slot from having to roll Bleed immunity, which is not as good as ~120 raw ES, 20-30 Int and 5% movement speed in my opinion. According to PoB, my Sin Trek give me 1200 ES. They're also much, much cheaper.

- The rares. I'll take this opportunity to brag that I crafted my gloves myself on week 1 of the league. Top rolled Sorc gloves only go up to like 200-210 ES now, and considering mine also have Int, they're quite insane. Slammed for Dex too, which is totally useful in the context of this build.

...but that aside, you should start building your rares by crafting the gloves with Essence of Delirium. If you're on a budget, just use whatever you get and build around it. If you're not, then craft until you hit like 160+ ES, and then build around that. Resistances on them aren't necessary. This is true regardless of which version of this build you're doing.

For the rings and belt, I had to put an especially big emphasis on attributes. Since I skip so much Dex and Str in the passive tree, I really needed to get all that Dex and Str on these two slots. Note that you CAN get Strength on the belt - it means that you will need to move one of the resists from the belts onto the rings, but you can. Note that these slots are the last place you can fix your resists in too, and both resists and attributes are suffixes so it's pretty tight. The base type of the second ring is totally up to you, so you can grab some extra resist there too.

The other priorities are getting a +2 (or +3) Unset ring; +2 is fine, it just means you need to use a level 21 Purity of Fire - it's more expensive, but +3 rings with the correct stats are... very rare in a temp league, so you should consider that option. One cold/lightning damage to attacks mod (to proc Elemental Equilibrium with my Shield Charge while mapping), and make sure you avoid added Fire damage - that breaks your EE.

A thing I can recommend doing is writing down which prefixes and which suffixes you're after, and which are locked to certain slots, e.g. belts can roll strength but can't roll dexterity, the +2/3 has to be on the unset ring. Use poeaffix.net for the mod tables. Keep in mind that you can craft a decent amount of Dex/Str and you only need enough to function (159 str, 117 dex). You can also craft elemental damage to attack mods.

Now if you want to optimize, what you can add here is Int and Energy Shield rolls, and prefer Mana and Life for the leftover prefixes - these stats convert into ES (Mana converts at a better ratio than Life). According to PoB, my rings are worth 500 ES and 600 ES, and that's just thanks to the ES and Int rolls. I'd say rings are a pretty big deal.

- And lastly, flasks. Rumi's, Ruby, Sulphur are ones I've never taken off. The Consecrated Ground from Sulphur is really nice to have, on top of the generic damage. Ruby and Rumi's should be obvious.

Witchfire is incredible for maps, but I drop it if I'm doing pure boss maps due to how nerfed curses are against bosses. I've also taken off the Silver and used a Basalt at times during slower and more dangerous maps (T16 with spooky mods, T13 Shores with all sextants), but otherwise just ran Silver. Topaz/Sapphire go here if needed.

I rolled Bleed immunity on Sulphur Flask specifically because of Atziri's bleed from spear and running out of flask charges on that fight. This is due to the above average number of uses a Sulphur flask has - it could have even more if I got a Chemist's one (reduced charges used). Something to keep in mind if you run into the same issue on Atziri or get particularly annoyed by Freezes/Chills in maps, depending on how sloppy you are with flask uptime/usage, is to roll that immunity on the Sulphur Flask.

Other than Bleed and Freeze immunity, I roll Curse immunity. Since 3.0, the flask actually counters map-wide Curse mods, so this totally trivializes a lot of maps. The only ailment I'm left open to is Shock, which I don't really see as a problem outside of specific cases that involve shock (like Shocking Ground maps or Esh breaches). It's really uncommon for me to get hit/crit high enough for a significant shock to even apply, and I'm so tanky that I won't even care anyway. The only lightning thing that scared me once were those lightning mobs from the Sextant in a -max resistance map, which I just ported out and grabbed a Topaz flask for. Can also use the Shock effect reduction Pantheon (upgrade of Arakaali) for those situations.

And that's it. One last thing to cover is potential upgrades from here, and things I've already tried/considered.

- I really want to get a +1% max resistance Presence of Chayula (100% fire resist!) and a +1 to gems Shav's. Not much to say here, just very unlikely to happen;
- Speaking of 100% fire resist, I used to be specced into Barbarism. As much as I loved that 100%, 6 points for having a mere 100 less degen is just a bad use of points;
- I'm not using the level 4 Enlighten + level 4 Empower + head enchant setup that Ahfack runs yet, but that is the final goal. I just prefer having my currency in a usable liquid form instead of in the form of 300-500 ES or whatever that setup gets me. The Empowers and Enlightens are available 24/7, I'll just grab them once I finalize the char. (I'll most likely get another Unset ring and run the Golem in that when I switch, which is why I don't care much about my Gold Ring atm. It's also why I don't care about my Vertex roll or Enchant too much yet.)
- Dropping the Quick Recovery (and thus removing the Energy From Within jewel I've taken for it) is something I consider a lot, but will probably only do for a VERY good rare jewel.

If anyone has any cool ideas or wants to contest my choices/reasoning/logic, feel free to post.

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Ahfack wrote:

Will try to respond to comments later today - pretty busy atm.

Here's a new upload though per request!

Will be up in about an hour or so

[3.0] AhfackNoPants - Hall of Grandmasters Low Life Scorching Ray (No RF)
https://youtu.be/nT0BSa5jVqg

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Don't use RF for HoGM. Also, take out your empower linked to your blood magic/discipline/clarity so you're above the 20% life mark. There are slayers here that will kill you automatically if you are below 20% life.

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Riusaldregan wrote:

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Ahfack wrote:

Will try to respond to comments later today - pretty busy atm.

Here's a new upload though per request!

Will be up in about an hour or so

[3.0] AhfackNoPants - Hall of Grandmasters Low Life Scorching Ray (No RF)
https://youtu.be/nT0BSa5jVqg

"

Don't use RF for HoGM. Also, take out your empower linked to your blood magic/discipline/clarity so you're above the 20% life mark. There are slayers here that will kill you automatically if you are below 20% life.

SO THAT'S WHY THAT ASSHOLE WITH THE LIGHTNING SHOT WAS KILLING ME instantly, holy fuck. I was wondering why I couldn't get past him when I tried HoGM the other day. Fucking hell, lol.

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soulesschild wrote:

Level 85 now. Definitely one of my most relaxing and fun builds. Definitely going to finish this out to end of league as I'm a bit tired of my Cycloner's squishyness in certain situations.

I had gear that I liquidated (woo love when people pay exorbitant amounts for perfectly rolled items. Got 20ex from my 40% belly). So my view is slightly skewed as I went LL ASAP. I would say I invested close to 15ex to get all the gear together. Maybe a bit less as I spent 2-3 ex buying jewels/gloves/rings to craft. RIP, should have just bought them off poe.trade but I was stubborn to get exactly what I wanted. Still didn't end up quite right.

Generally just gonna focus on getting gems up and getting the mana reservation enchant so I can run clarity. Mana regen is still sort of an issue for me as I can't just AFK hold down SR. I could just swap PoL or PoI depending on the situation but I'm just lazy. RF + EE pretty much eliminates any trash while a bit of SR downs most map bosses/rares easily.

Sitting at about 8.6k ES. All maxed res, 55% chaos resist which is not too shabby.

General thoughts,

- Leveling can be done with RF if you invest a bit in some starter uniques.

Basically let me level with RF for the most part and just AFK/shield charge through everything and RF just passively kills.

A lot of the gear aside from Presence and Shav's is actually pretty cheap. Maybe 3.0 ES nerfs made a lot of things I feel underpriced. Rings I got for about 1ex a piece. Belt was 1 ex. Gloves actually I got for 50c which I thought was ridiculous.

Still playing around with the passive tree. Haven't decided if I want to go with Derptimes or Ahfacks or do a hybrid. I like the idea of alchemist with the increase dura of flasks and all that jazz but there's just not enough points to go around (I'd have to lose the arsonsist cluster IIRC) I'll play around a bit more with the tree tonight in PoB to compare.

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Tanaomit wrote:

Up to 88, almost 89 now, REALLY enjoying this spec a lot. My luck also seems to have taken a turn for the better & got Kaom's Heart two days in a row. So now that I have some currency, I'm debating what to upgrade next. Looking for some suggestions. Here's what I'm currently using:

I have a Vertex that I tried using, since people said it would allow us to run all our aura's without a reduced mana cost helm enchant. However, I wasn't able to do so with mine. Is that because I only have a +2 enlighten?

I know that my gloves, belt & rings are the biggest things to upgrade. I'm just curious if people think going Death's Door is worth the investment or not. Cause if I bought those boots, it would mean not being able to upgrade my rings/belt until I got more currency.

Oh & lastly, you can see the current belt I linked as the one I'm using. However, I crafted this one yesterday & I'm debating selling it, or using it. Thoughts? It has only cold res, shit roll too & no open slots for more res.

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soulesschild wrote:

I have to say I really like what you got going on here. I may follow this if I can get enough dex from items!

HOw does MoM work though with all our mana basically reserved? Do we basically go manaless everytime we get hit and just have to have good regen?