[3.15] Elemental Hit Ballista Totem Hiero | Budget Friendly | League Start to Endgame

After the latest patch it's possible to drop "- manacost on rings" / mana flask. Feels good

I leaguestarted this using holy flame totems. It was ok untill act 8, then the low damage really became problamatic.

I bought a tabula + drillneck + quill rain and switched to elehit. Been smooth sailing since then, just started mapping with basically the same setup.

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bartpio wrote:

Hi all.

I'm back :D A little late for the league.

Vei - don't know if you check that but looking at the numbers for end-game bosses it might be good to switch to Focused ballistas.

If my math is not wrong it looks like we could get more single target dps than last league on bosses like sirius :)

B

Hey bartpio,

Welcome back, Good to see you! :)


With regards to Focused Ballista, I wrote my detailed thoughts about it in this post.(Ignore Point 2 in the Post)

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3005581/page/102#p24188815

The DPS is higher than Awakened Elemental Damage with Attacks, however the points I mentioned in the above link makes me think it's not ideal for this build.

Ultimately, if you think it suits your playstyle, by all means go for it! :)

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Beverice wrote:

The veiled chaos method is just extremely risky. It can add additional mods which makes it very very expensive. If you have infinite money you can still do it.

I see, guess I got lucky and hit the correct veiled mod in craft of exile with 2 Veiled Chaos Orbs XD

I will look into the steps(Still not very familiar) and test again plus check the numbers to see if the whole thing makes sense for rich people who want to min-max.

Thanks!

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Vague_Density wrote:

I've got the chaos for it but I'm hesitant on buying the frostferno and rain of splinters atm, doing fine on yellow maps right now tho

Yeah those are still pretty costly. Good to hear that you are doing fine right now on Yellow Maps!

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Hey0cean wrote:

After the latest patch it's possible to drop "- manacost on rings" / mana flask. Feels good

The main reason to use the -mana cost on Rings wasn't because we don't have enough mana to cast our Totems. Even before Today's Patch, it isn't too big of an issue with Mana as long we don't spam our Totems. We use the -mana cost on Rings so that we have enough Mana to cast Immortal Call when it is triggered by Cast When Damage Taken.

To achieve that, we need to have the available remaining mana for casting Immortal Call:

A Level 1 CWDT + Level 1 Immortal Call + Increase Duration requires 68 Mana
A Level 10 CWDT + Level 12 Immortal Call + Increase Duration requires 100 Mana

Numbers are based on after Today's Patch.


That said, the setup for L12 CWDT + L10 IC + ID can be hard to setup as it requires quite a few things, Enlighten(Level 3) and 2 sources of -7 to -10 mana. So I think it doesn't need to be a high priority thing until we start facing issues with our defense versus the content we engage.

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The main reason to use the -mana cost on Rings wasn't because we don't have enough mana to cast our Totems. Even before Today's Patch, it isn't too big of an issue with Mana as long we don't spam our Totems. We use the -mana cost on Rings so that we have enough Mana to cast Immortal Call when it is triggered by Cast When Damage Taken.

To achieve that, we need to have the available remaining mana for casting Immortal Call:

A Level 1 CWDT + Level 1 Immortal Call + Increase Duration requires 68 Mana
A Level 10 CWDT + Level 12 Immortal Call + Increase Duration requires 100 Mana

Numbers are based on after Today's Patch.


That said, the setup for L12 CWDT + L10 IC + ID can be hard to setup as it requires quite a few things, Enlighten(Level 3) and 2 sources of -7 to -10 mana. So I think it doesn't need to be a high priority thing until we start facing issues with our defense versus the content we engage.

I have been using the 1 CWDT + Level 1 Immortal Call + Increase Duration even with old multipliers it feelt okay mana wise. I agree with lvl 10/12 it would require additional investment which isnt required at least at this stage i guess.

Once again thanks for the detailed explanation mate :)

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Beverice wrote:

I currently have 1m dps exactly, per totem on my league character. Red maps are a breeze. (With bottled faith popped it goes up to 1.4m)

I looked at your char and noticed you made a Raider. Do you think if I switched the bow to Quill and not go Point Blank it would still be viable? Hierophant is fun and all with 7 totems but I miss that speed.

PS. Im stealing that ring. And armor.

Question, liking the build alot, but now that im looking for further upgrades i checked poe.ninja top 20 for some ideas, and i see them all using one Call of the Brotherhood, yet i never seen you even mention it. any ideas ?

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oLaudix wrote:

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Beverice wrote:

I currently have 1m dps exactly, per totem on my league character. Red maps are a breeze. (With bottled faith popped it goes up to 1.4m)

I looked at your char and noticed you made a Raider. Do you think if I switched the bow to Quill and not go Point Blank it would still be viable? Hierophant is fun and all with 7 totems but I miss that speed.

PS. Im stealing that ring. And armor.

I'm slightly confused by the question. Quill rain is a good bow. I'm not sure why you would not take point blank.
Point blank is for bossing, for mapping the damage loss is not noticeable at all.

Raider is very nice, I prefer it over hierophant for the defensive capability of dodge/evade.

And yea The Taming is a very nice budget ring before u start to min-max the end-game rings. And Daresso's Defiance is nice too :) Last league, I used kintsugi and I think I liked kintsugi better, it is just very expensive.

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vegeta1991 wrote:

Question, liking the build alot, but now that im looking for further upgrades i checked poe.ninja top 20 for some ideas, and i see them all using one Call of the Brotherhood, yet i never seen you even mention it. any ideas ?

Call of the Brotherhood has that

"40% of Lightning Damage Converted to Cold Damage"

which can be increased to 48% with the right Catalyst.

What that means for this build is we can achieve 98% (50% from Avatar of Fire and 48% from Call of the Brotherhood) Lightning to Fire Damage base on how Damage Types are converted, which is done in this order:

Physical → Lightning → Cold → Fire → Chaos

Call of the Brotherhood will convert 48% of Lightning Damage to Cold Damage, then 100% of Cold Damage will be converted to Fire Damage through Frostferno's Level 30 Cold to Fire and Avatar of Fire which provides a total of 100% Cold to Fire conversion.

Since this build is about converting everything to Fire Damage and boosting it, this is obviously awesome!


In the past when I checked Call of the Brotherhood(Before 3.15), the DPS numbers was Ok, but the pricing is crazy, e.g. 40ex in that Aura Stacker League IIRC makes it not worth using. Thus I never mentioned anything about it.


However since you asked about it, I checked it again. The price is decent now and it seems to be still providing quite a good amount of DPS with all the 3.15 changes/nerfs to other areas. Other than that, it also provides Int and Mana Regeneration, both which are useful to us also.


DPS Comparison(You might find some good info here)

So I did some DPS number crunching and compared the following:

1. Call of the Brotherhood(Max Roll with 20% Elemental Catalyst)
2. The Taming(Max Roll with 20% Elemental Catalyst)
3. Rare Elder Opal Ring(Max Roll with 20% Elemental Catalyst) with 2 affix:

Implicit: 30% Elemental Damage
Affix 1(Suffix): 40% Fire Damage(Guaranteed from Deafening Essence of Anger)
Affix 2(Prefix): 20% Global Critical Strike Multiplier(Could also be other High Tier Offensive affix like Flat Accuracy, Elemental Damage with Attack, %Attack Speed)


Result:

Call of the Brotherhood - 573k DPS
The Taming - 565k DPS
Rare Elder Opal Ring - 586k DPS

Base on the above, I think Call of the Brotherhood/The Taming make sense(at the current pricing) as DPS Options for Rings, though using them would mean we cannot go for the -mana craft on a Rare Ring which we need if we want to utilize a Level 10 Cast When Damage Taken + Level 12 Immortal Call + Increase Duration.

Though, if you look at the Rare Ring, 2 offensive affixes actually beat the 2 Uniques in terms of DPS, and there is still 4 more open affix available for some other stuff so it's DPS potential is much higher(At a higher cost) with the possibility of getting the life affix and the ability to craft -mana on it.

Talking about cost, an Item Level 86+ Elder Opal Ring cost about 30c atm. Maybe some might want to try their luck with crafting it, but before you do, here's a tip for you - Buy Void of the Elements Divination Card, its 3c each and 3 of them give you an Item Level 100 Elder Opal Ring.

I'll let you all do the Maths :)

So, i start another character ! I have a question for levellin process, when can we start use ballista totem + EH (i have a tabula, an can buy all gems since it's my 2nd character) ?
Or do we still use holy flame totem until we can equip frostferno and / or Skirmish ?

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scorflex wrote:

So, i start another character ! I have a question for levellin process, when can we start use ballista totem + EH (i have a tabula, an can buy all gems since it's my 2nd character) ?
Or do we still use holy flame totem until we can equip frostferno and / or Skirmish ?

I switched at level ~60 AFTER I got a quillrain, Skirmish (this isnt even a must but its really cheap so why not), the 2 combat focus gems, and a 5L chest piece. Total cost was probably ~10C and it immediately made a difference, I would switch when you have the above! After this you can work on the frostferno, it will make it even better but is not a requirement to start.












I finally got all the core basics of the build put together and the build is pretty ridiculous; I am able to throw and alchemy on virtually any red map and then clear it basically as fast as I can run by stutter-dropping the ballistas as I go. If I didn't have to stop to loot I think most maps would be maybe 1-2 minutes long.

2 Quick questions:

1) I have scoured every elemental reflect map I got, but I just realized, can this build run ele reflect? My totems never die already, if they start taking some damage I can resummon, is this one I have been rerolling for no reason?

2) What is "Resists Fire" and why is it just as bad as Fire Immune? Specifically talking about the new expedition mobs, I never pay attention to how I plant my bombs and sometimes the entire pack is "Resists Fire", which makes it so they take about 10% of their hp in damage then dont take any more damage at all, even with my level 22 flammability. I end up just skipping these packs entirely, but shouldnt this aura and my fire pen support gem let me do SOMETHING against this mod? This is like immune but with an added level of "Maybe if you try you can!"