3.12 - Spectral Shield Throw Deadeye - Frigid Table Thrower

Changes and thought: *Heist league*


Changes and thoughts: *Harvest league*


Changes and thoughts: *Delirium League*


Changes and thoughts:*Metamorph League*


Changes and thoughts:*Blight League*



Changes and The main build mechanic to SST:*Legion League*

Pre 3.9 videos:
Uber Elder(Super Elder?): https://youtu.be/y0RrkxD-8gA
Angry Cowboy(Minotaur): https://youtu.be/UvSfID6b7VM
Angry DogGoatSnakeThing(Chimera): https://youtu.be/S6XKKSz37f0
Some Angry Armies(4-way Legion fight): https://youtu.be/p34Do3S3gkk
Rare Cold guy found in mine(Aul): https://youtu.be/rynuRVZC9Vc
Valley with Angry Chicken/Dog(Canyon T12): https://youtu.be/qONU5XBmX8o

3.9 Videos (Making the distinction because bosses get a huge max life buff in 3.9):
Also most of these are around awakened level 4 Unless said otherwise
The Awakener Level 8: https://youtu.be/NfzS7dkqLH0(updated 27/06)
T16 Mapping - Average example while full clearing/looting: https://youtu.be/Wby46F7e0oM
Shaper: https://youtu.be/Ht-v-rrVRn8
Elder: https://youtu.be/_gV-wsAaiVo
Chimera: https://youtu.be/ryjV0Q3qlXY
Minotaur (Apologies for quality): https://youtu.be/qPq4SnbUFY8

This is now updated for 3.11, i've gone into the pastebin and added my current setup as i feel it's about 90% done towards me being happy with min-max.

There are leveling progression trees included, Separate gear sets
- A budget leveling setup aimed at starting the league/character and twinking a bit
- Starting Mapping, mostly showing what kind of recommended uniques i would aim for as i get into maps
- Finally a 'Random items from trade' setup, This is prettymuch items i've searched through trade with the aim of keeping them cheap but very good upgrades/examples of what to go for. *A small note for shields as i've mentioned a few times throughout the thread, i will always recommend trying to craft your own with dense fossils and an i86 Colossal tower shield*

3.12 Pastebin (updated 18/09) https://pastebin.com/PjBxw3kV

I highly suggest using the POB community fork as some features and mechanics may not be added to the original, If you're struggling to find the extra trees and gear sets i'll include screenshots below.
Lastly if you're having issues resembling the example dps in POB i would read the FAQ section to see if you're doing something wrong.

3.12 - Level 96 Skill tree: http://poeurl.com/c09D

There used to be a recommended Phase acrobatics version, i have since removed it, as i feel it's not necessary anymore and counter-intuitive to stacking armour

Leveling an SST character should be a breeze, only really requiring the Divide and Conquer Jewel, I personally league started as this build and didn’t run into many issues.
I need to re-level and test out some things but legion is too fun to stop playing to test stuff, I will for sure be expanding on this section a ton in the near future, Or if you feel like contributing let me know how you leveled and some advice on how it felt.

Suggestions for leveling:
You get SST very early on in act 1 from the “Siren’s cadence” quest, Although ranger doesn’t get it from a quest reward so you’ll have to buy it from Nessa.
Early leveling uniques are pretty straight forward, Grab a kaltenhalt and a Princess when you can equip them, You can later upgrade into a Titucius' Span at level 30 this should have double the armour/evasion of a Kaltenhalt.
For rare gear just grab life and resistances as you need it, nothing special should be needed.
Skill tree, you can start with the projectile damage nodes, as that will give you some nice starting damage then you can rush either the ranger jewel socket (By frenzy and Acuity) and put your divide and conquer into there, or if you feel like you want it earlier you can get the jewel socket above ranger start (Near Charisma) and respect those points later.
From then onwards you shouldn’t need to upgrade a lot, You can grab other high armour rare or unique shields (Chernobog’s pillar is a good mention) if you feel you need the damage upgrade but the best unique shields before crafting one, are going to be Lioneye's remorse or Magna eclipsis.

List of suggested uniques for leveling:
The usual, Tabula, Goldrim, Wanderlust,Blackhearts
Karui Ward
Hrimsorrow
Kaltenhalt
Princess
Ewar's Mirage
Praxis (If you’re having mana issues)
Titucius' Span
Atziri’s Mirror
Chernobog’s Pillar
Prismatic Eclipse (3 green socket)
Lioneye’s remorse
Magna eclipsis

As i said this section is small and will need some work/testing.

Kill all for +2 skill points
There are some advantages to going with alira especially for early game, but the expensive respec isn’t worth it in my opinion.

Far shot>Ricochet>Tail Wind>Fast and Deadly

It’s kind of hard to argue with the order of ascendancy, you really feel the lack of single target before getting ricochet, Tailwind you could skip if you’re having accuracy problems and get Fast and deadly early.
There is however a choice if you want to go down stacking accuracy on gear, you can take “Powerful precision” in place of “Fast and Deadly” This node is extremely strong and I would suggest trying it out if you feel like it’s something you want, since I personally haven’t tested it.

As with all Pantheons they aren’t extremely important to the build, it’s more of a personal preference to how you play.

Major gods:
Of Course the God of gods - Soul of the Brine King
Easy choice for the build, we don’t get any stun immunity or freeze immunity - Although we do have a high life pool this is still my #1 suggestion for the build. You will want to upgrade this as legion has some nasty hard single hits.

Soul of lunaris and Solaris
Both of these can serve as a Major god choice in builds having their advantages if you’re Mapping or bossing, i would suggest if you use these to have them fully upgraded to get the most benefit.

Minor gods:
If major gods weren’t all that important these are even less, But some honourable mentions.

Soul of Yugul
This is my personal favorite as most of my time spent on this character is in endgame, Shaper/Elder/Uber elder are all mostly cold damage the upgrade attached to it reducing cold damage in situations where you’re taking multiple hits. Being able to reflect chills also helps us a ton if the case may occur (Hypothermia requiring chill).

Soul of Gruthkul
While mapping this gets the most use, Some additional phys mitigation and upgraded allowing you to slow attackers which can be strong.

Soul of Ryslatha
A strong choice if you’re running a Lab or two, giving you passive charge generation on your life flask, The upgraded giving you a panic flask without having to use the roll on the flask.

Anointing was introduced in 3.8 with Blight league and is now part of the core game so we get to keep the glorious oils and amulet enchants.
For SST there's a few choices for anoints most of which can really be found by importing your character properly in POB and checking the "Show node power" function, most of the time you just want free utility or just raw damage increase for anoints. I'll list a few notable anoints in order of best to worst and explain each decision, also if you don't know where the nodes are on tree to see their passives just use the search function in POB or in-game.

Retaliation - This used to be the best annoints on the tree, since pathing down to the shield wheel was pretty bad for points, As of 3.11 this wheel got majorly buffed so annointing this isn't our best option - Instead (See below)
Ambidexterity - Is now one of out best annoints for pure damage output, Even outperforming things that seem like they should be better such as Heart of ice. It's cheap give some average hit and a ton of attack speed (Which we grossly need)
Command of Steel - Can be nice if you feel like capping out your block chance with some added benefits.
Tenacity, Heart of Ice and Master of Force - These 3 choices are all going to be very similar in terms of damage, all 3 of them focusing on just raw average hit increase, The POB damage increase between these 3 is less that 1% difference but the costs vary - With Tenacity being the most expensive by far Costing 2 Golden oils but giving us a 5% life increase along with the damage, Heart of ice Costs only 1 Golden oil but also an opalescent so only slightly cheaper but providing us with 6% penetration again with similar damage, Finally Master of force in a 90% conversion setup master of force might actually net you more damage since it benefits actually dealing a portion of physical damage, it is still somewhat pricy costing 1 opalescent and 2 black oils.


Other worthy mentions for anoints if you prefer them are:
Aggressive Bastion - An alright node in terms of damage, Block and endurance charge generation.
Rampart - This is good but quite hard to utilize, requiring fortify to be up to have the attack speed and attack damage be active.

6-Link main setup (SST)

This should be your main setup for 6-link, you can pick and change in extra utility gems, maybe you prefer extra Chain or Fork. Ofcourse any awakened gems just supplement normal gems, there's no mechanical difference between them it's just more % damage increase.

Previously we used Maim in our main links, This is now swapped to Inspiration support, i feel rather stupid overlooking this gem and how powerful it is. It adds some much needed reduced mana, ton of elemental damage and a tiny bit of crit. even if you're only 90% conversion the gem is just better than maim.

If you are not using a Lioneye's Vision supplement Cold penetration for Pierce if you want the utility of shatter projectiles piercing, It is however going to be less damage than using Penetration.

For Energy shield leech since it's a strange pick for a gem the short TL;DR on how it works.
You are always degenerating with blood rage, You are always leeching ES if you are hitting, filling the requirements for 39% more damage while leeching.

Hypothermia is one of the better damage links, Provided you can chill the boss or enemy in question, and for mapping situations where you are one-shotting packs, it's unlikely that hypothermia will help, since you have to hit a mob to chill it resulting in the first shot into a pack not gaining any damage from hypothermia. There's no real guide to tell if you're able to chill certain bosses or not, just test it and see, If you find you're not chilling the boss, running a lot of "Avoid ailments" maps (Which in 3.9 can hit over 100% to avoid ailments) Then i suggest using Inspiration over Hypothermia as the damage isn't all the much different and it's 100% consistent.

Aura setup + Enduring cry
Aspect Of the Spider
Nothing too special here for auras, Hatred is the best damage aura, Aspect of the spider is going to be a replacement for what was Herald of ice, providing 15% more damage and some defensive slows. Precision is there to cap some accuracy and help out with a tiny bit of crit (Make sure to keep it lower level instead of reserving all of your mana, SST has about a 40 mana cost and you quite easily hit 5aps on the build.
As for Enduring cry - This skill is exactly what i was looking for in this build since its inception, it got majorly buffed in 3.11 essentially giving free endurance charge uptime and what is effectively an extra life pot when used, I would suggest using this on left-click to auto-cast it aslong as you have the "Call to arms" keystone, making it instant.

Frost bomb

Frost bomb is extremely powerful for bossing on full cold builds, It's also made stronger by the fact most of the Penetration on skill tree reads as "With weapons" which doesn't work for SST sadly (One of the reasons we don't take fangs of frost)

Ancestral Protector/Blood Rage

The protector is mostly there for the increased attack speed on bosses, Multitotem allowing you to have upto 3 totems active increasing the chance to apply cull and atleast one of them staying alive during hard encounters. Bloodrage for attack speed, leech, Enabling Energy shield leech damage and finally Frenzy generation - Keep this up at all times while mapping and bossing, You can add in a culling strike or any other support you deem viable. I previously thought you could get increased damage taken debuff by using bonechill, this is not worth at all, a small explanation is the source of chill has to come from the skill supported by bonechill, you can however replace higher %chill with other skills (i.e our main skill) thus making bonechill usless.

Shield Charge

Bread and butter, nothing special here. You can add a culling strike or even an Onslaught gem in here(For onslaught on hitting unique enemy), but Fortify is too strong to replace in my opinion.

Cast when damage taken/Dash

A simple cast when damage taken molten shell setup, The amount of armour scaling we have in this build make it an easy choice. Dash is just a very nice movement skill and having open sockets to use second wind, i prefer it over Flame dash. If you prefer flame dash just 1-1 swap.
We would previously use a CWDT immortal call and a manual cast Vaal molten shell, this is not possible anymore due to a change where any guard skill now removes the molten shell, so if we were to try and do the same, if we took damage and procced out immortal call, it would remove the shell which is what the original setup tried to get around.

You can drop Taste of hate or Atziri's promise for another defensive flask and roll shock immunity onto it.
As with all flasks, you want Bleed,Freeze and Curse immunity at a minimum, Shock removal is an added extra, Ideally you have Bleed on your life flask, the rest on utility/duration flasks.

Is SST good for endgame?
Yes, I should say this with a grain of salt since a whole number of different skilled/experienced players follow and play builds.
SST isn't an op meta skill that you can throw random gear at and have 0 issues and i don't think it will ever be. It's going to take quite a bit of gear, skill in dodging if you're under-geared and a lot of love for its mechanics to interest people all the way into end-game.(By endgame i mean Conqueror's and Elder/Shaper)
I have personally downed every boss deathless so i could put all content in the title like every other thread does, but i feel like comparing someone who has done 100's of these bosses to an average player who will struggle to do exactly those things is dishonest and gives the impression that they cannot fail with the build. It's going to take a lot of effort to make a non-meta build perform anywhere near something that dominates the bossing meta every league.
A bit of a rant but TL;DR - Yes you 'can' do all of the endgame content.

Is SST good for Hardcore?
Yes, i've personally leveled and played till level 90 and had no real scary moments, despite never playing hardcore.

How can i craft your shield?
2.3k-2.8k is easily doable by just spamming dense fossils which should carry you through the entire game. If you wanted to try your luck at Deafening Essences of Dread that can also give very good results although much more expensive and less likely.
Note for Harvest league, Reforging with defense modifiers is extremely powerful, i would take advantage of it.

How do you obtain conversion?
For 100% conversion you can use 40% on tree from the winter spirit wheel, 35+% on the hatred watcher's eye and 25% from gloves, with either the craft or Temple mod.
Alternatively you can just use 40% from tree and Hrimsorrow for 90% conversion before making the Switch, Which is a totally fine setup for even upto red maps, Just be careful with phys reflect maps if you're yet to full convert.

I can't sustain Mana what am i missing?
So this is a question that i've had a few times, considered not adding it to here, But some people miss a few things.
One thing people miss is the small mana/life leech node next to Vaal pact on tree, That's all the mana leech i ever needed just for one point.
This is less of an issue as we use inspiration support over maim, but it's still applicable so i shall leave this in.
Another thing people miss of grab later, is the %Mana/Flask nodes near ranger start, i grabbed these mostly for flask gen but later found it very nice for increasing the leech from hits and allowing to reserve a slightly higher precision.
On the topic of precision i would suggest just feeling out the level of which you want it at, and for certain keep it at level 1 if you're not running enlighten (Or a lower level one)
Ideally you want your leech to work perfectly on a single-target, Good way to test is to just feel it out and look at your SST button on your bar to see if it greys out at any point.

How do you get Frostbite on hit Rings?
The mod is specifically from the delve rooms with "Cold items" as far as i can remember, not sure which specific one it comes from, but i imagine they're pretty rare.
The most likely way to get frostbite now is from redeemer influence rings, bare in mind when searching or crafting for these, you ideally want a level 8 frostbite on hit (Since they can roll level 5 too) just for a bit of extra damage.

How do i craft X item?
This section i'll go over a couple of crafting methods i always use to make my gear, I've league started multiple times and often no one even lists nevermind attempts to craft gear early on for SST, which can make it difficult if someone was to rely on the market.

Shields This is the biggest one for the build as no one really picks up shields or sees a lot of value in them, so early league this is essential.
So for your first shield craft all you want to do is beat out Lioneye's remorse's armour which on a max roll is about 1.7k, Grab yourself the highest ilvl colossal tower shield you can at the time i73 i84 and i86 are you points at which you want to get them at, just down to the tiers of armour you can roll.
-i73 hitting T1 flat armour and T3 %armour, i84 and i86 unlock T2 and T1 %armour.
-You can if you have any early league or want to spend the money, use perfect fossils - I would suggest only using these on i86 as they are quite expensive.
-Dense fossil spam until you either have good flat armour and good % armour - Or even just getting a T1 flat armour roll and crafting 74% increased armour on the bench will hit over 2k.
-If you hit a good shield with full suffixes but an open prefix you can craft Hybrid %armour and life, giving that little bit of extra
-If you hit a good shield with full prefixes and an open suffix (This is the most ideal) you can craft Quality/attributes.
-If you somehow end up with a shield that you consider worth mutli-modding depending on how many open affixes you can have any combination of (In order of priority) Quality>Hybrid Armour>Chance to deal double damage. There are two types of Chance to deal double damage, one is global and always up with a lower % chance and the other is while focused with a higher %chance, Both are good depending on how you like to play.

Helmets with -9 used to be very easy to craft and provide a huge buff to dps early on, it is now more of an endgame crafting option, requiring an i85 Redeemer base just to have the availability of rolling it, ontop of that it's quite an uncommon roll.
The best bet for rolling this is to use fossils - Frigid and Pristine i would recommend as you will always want a life roll, if you want to risk it just rolling frigid and hoping for an open prefix to craft life is also an option.
Harvest note: there are ways to get -9 deterministically if you would like me to add in info about that let me know, but it's info i wouldn't want to confuse people with - and to fully explain from no knowledge on crafting it's long winded.

What are the best rolls on Stat sticks?
The best rolls on Stat sticks are going to be prettymuch everything that beats out any of the leveling stat sticks (Princess/ewar's/Prismatic).
If you're just starting out and want to improve your stat stick i would ignore scepters for the most part the reason we pick them is for an elemental damage implicit, If you can find any other one-handed base with rolls that give you more damage then go for those - I would suggest using POB and importing your character at the time and setting up any necessary configuration to copy stat sticks and compare while you are trade searching using this feature:

Then pressing Ctrl+V when you're in the items section of POB.

My current scepter i suggest going for is using a Redeemer Base we can hit Phys as extra cold and Cold Pen, These together along with an open prefix for crafted Cold% should easily beat out Princess/Ewar's.
These can somewhat easily be crafted by spamming Frigid fossils or bought.
The current "God scepter" if you want to go ahead and try for it would be something like this:
-Phys as extra cold
-Cold Pen (Make sure it's not "Attacks with this weapon" as that doesn't work)
-Cold % (Crafted Or rolled)
-Hatred increased Aura effect
Then the last 2 suffixes could be, Suffix Cold% or Cold exposure on hit + Chance to deal double damage.
For obvious reasons don't expect to ever hit this it's more just to show an example of what mods to strive for.

What about using cluster Jewels?
I've messed around with cluster jewels for sure, the issue is most of them are good nodes by all means but you sacrifice a lot of points from life nodes to do so - And there are already some nodes nearby on tree that give decent increased damage if you would want that.

That said, using a follow-through/Eye to Eye medium cluster with a jewel socket (And just putting in another decent damage jewel). You lose about 600~ life/37% increased life from tree, But gain about 500k~ dps and 70k average hit (Assuming enemies hit are nearby and skills haven't chained).
So about a 15% more damage increase for a loss of about 15% health.

By all means doing so is totally valid - I always try and keep my ideas realistic and well rounded for the build. To me the damage gain and the investment of 7 extra points is considerable but not a no brainer.
If you added in a large jewel with some useful nodes it could be worth it but then you're investing atleast 16 points total for a large with 2 medium clusters - Meaning a lot more life loss. And as for chain it's prettymuch never going to be a better damage support unless you're doing some other type of chain scaling.

TL;DR - Increase in damage for sure, Loss of life too much for it to be worth it. Chain is almost always worse for pure damage.

What helm enchant is the best?
Helm enchant in builds are usually a non-argument and one is always the best, I wouldn't agree any enchant for SST is better it just depends on the content you're wanting to do, Strictly bossing and feeling fine in clear then go for damage. The faster projectiles enchant works quite nicely if you're stacking a lot of pierce since the secondary shards scale from proj speed in the distance they fire outwards, So a nice option.

The shard enchant might seem amazing to anyone glancing at the build but you have to remember the Threshold jewel 'still' reduces the amount of projectiles, The merc and uber enchant act as a +1 and +2 proj respectively, and i personally would say it's still worth it since with 5 chains you're effectively getting 10 more projectiles spread around the pack and possibly hitting multiple targets with piercing, and 5 more projectiles with the merc enchant. As i've said with a lot of this guide there's no real wrong answer here, the build is versatile and so can your choices.

Is this build 'viable' for uber/normal Atziri?
Y̶e̶s̶ ̶W̶e̶l̶l̶ ̶m̶a̶y̶b̶e̶ ̶n̶o̶ ̶B̶u̶t̶ ̶y̶e̶s̶ ̶-̶ ̶S̶e̶e̶ ̶v̶i̶d̶e̶o̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶m̶o̶r̶e̶ ̶d̶e̶t̶a̶i̶l̶s̶.̶
https://youtu.be/F_LjEQzdLAA
As of 3.9 Sibyl's Lament got buffed to 80% reduced reflected damage taken and combined with Yugul pantheon which is 25%, you can do atziri more than fine now.(Make sure to place the ring in the correct slot, Left slot for elemental damage)

Using POB to accurately show dps
While POB is a powerful tool a lot of builds aren't as simple as importing your character and clicking a few checkboxes, This is one that isn't super obvious if you're not familiar in mechanics for the build, I'm going to go over a few things people will miss out on since i've had a few people saying the POB's are still unreasonable since their damage is much much lower.
T̶h̶e̶ ̶s̶i̶n̶g̶l̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶i̶m̶p̶o̶r̶t̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶'̶e̶m̶u̶l̶a̶t̶e̶'̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶P̶O̶B̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶D̶i̶v̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶q̶u̶e̶r̶ ̶J̶e̶w̶e̶l̶
We no longer need to emulate the jewel, it should work as expected in POB now
Next we move onto the configuration which isn't too difficult if you want just go into the POB's i provided and look at what i have checked then copy those over to your config that's fine, if you want to know a breakdown of all things to change then read on.
First you want decide what it is you're doing, Mapping or bossing in my examples i have a Bossing setup, For that you want to take into account that you won't be killing mobs and you won't be chaining, So this means:

-No frenzy charges
-# of times Skill has chained will be 0 (This is the single most important)
-Projectile travel distance (This is a weird one to configure because of the interaction between Point blank and Far shot, It's not a huge amount of damage loss being closer/further away but the sweet spot is 10 units)
-No onslaught (Unless from other sources, maybe an onslaught on frostbomb etc.)
-The enemy being Chilled (Important for hypothermia support)
-The enemy being Shaper/Guardian (Or standard boss, Mostly what changes here is curse effectiveness and possibly resistances? i'm not 100% on the resistances part)
-Are you leeching energy shield? (This is important to show the more damage gained from energy leech support)
-# of skills used recently (This is important for Tailwind stacks, it's hard to tell now since the counter is bugged in-game but this is super important as it gives action speed)
-Do you have flasks active isn't important, but going into "Items" and turning on any flasks is important. (The check box is only going to matter if you have a mod such as "Increased attack speed during flask effect" or something of that kind.)

For mapping you're probably going to have to look into specifics of how your playstyle is, but the obvious things are that you're probably not going to frostbomb every mob in a map, so disabling that. Killing things to gain frenzy's and possibly onslaught ofcourse, Most mobs won't have the "Is the enemy chilled" on the first shield hit so disabling that might be accurate. It's hard to give an explanation to calculate mapping so play around with it and keep things reasonable if you care for optimizing your mapping dps.