Universal CI Trickster SSF Leaguestarter Guide

We do not care about ES. We are playing as life of course and the tree will be completely lifebased from here.
Here is a possible tree for the start with 52 points spend. The start of the tree is for chaos DOT builds. IF you are going for Fireball you just take the elemental nodes at the start instead of the chaos nodes. For Cold DOT builds you pick up Fingers of Frost and for a Chaos DOT build Atrophy before this or after this.

Reaching 800-1k ES before the first lab is quite easy and getting to 1-1.5k HP for Kitava in Act 5 is realistic.
www.poeurl.com/c7iw

From here on we will start looking for some ES on our gear and we will start going for some ES on the tree. We are playing hybrid.
Here is a Tree for about level 64. If you farm a little in blood aqueducts you will have more points to spend at this point.
www.poeurl.com/c7ix

ITEMS:

When I hit maps as hybrid I normally have reached about 1.8-2.5k life and 2-3.5k ES. At this point we have a significantly higher EHP Pool than life based builds and the one thing that hurts us hard is chaos damage. I recommend getting a amethyst flask at this point.

So now we just map. We can easily do white tier maps on this EHP level and I do not recommend farming a tabula if your damage is sufficent. On most DOT builds you can easily play into yellow maps on a 4link and easily clear red maps on a 5link.

So when will we do the switch from hybrid to ES? How do we do that and what are we looking for?
The most important pieces of gear to aquire a decent ES pool are Body Armour, Helmet and the Shield.

We will be picking up rares of course but also want to find a crafting base of sufficient ilvl. I recommend putting these into your filter before the league start and deleting them once you got one.

For the Body Armour we want to look for a ilvl 73+ Sadist Garb. However you should pick up rare Carnal Armours, since a good roll on these will be enough for us too. Ilvl 73 is the bracket to be able to hit T1 Flat ES/Eva which is the most important roll we want. We can also hit T3 %ES/Eva and the next bracket for this would be level 84 which is far further down the road. If you want you can play as hybrid for a bit longer and look for a ilvl 78 body to be able to hit T1 Hybrid but this is not a huge deal and I do not recommend it.

For the Helmet ofc we want a hubris circlet.
For the helmet we need ilvl 72 for the same reasons mentioned for the body. Ilvl 78 again is the next bracket for hybrid. Also look for rare Mind Cages, you might get a good roll on these.

For the Shield we want a Titanium Spirit shield. You can also pick up rare Harmonic Spirit shields, Vaal Spirit shields and Fossilised spirit Shields and look for a lucky good roll. Also a supreme spiked shield can be sufficient.

The other gear pieces do not have such a huge impact on ES but ofcourse we want Sorcerer Boots and Sorcerer Gloves and again ilvl 72.

Crafting the gear:


Here is the Tree I recommend for the switch: www.poeurl.com/c7iC

With the gear I mentioned above and that tree we reach over 5k ES (without Discipline).
The gear I recommended above is a minimum. Normally you would get a few pieces that are better than what I listed above and even reaching 6k ES at this sage is not hard at all.
Also Intelligence rolls on the gear get you a significant boost to ES. Often an item with 40+INT is a lot better than another with a higher ES value.

Ascendancy:


In Flashback I made the switch to CI at level 75. This was the earliest I ever did it. I had a lucky bated breath to go along with the early switch.

Crafting Bench recipe locations:
Defenses T2 A10 The feeding through
Defenses T1 Waterways Map
Global ES for Amu T2 Laboratory Map
Global ES for Amu T1 Lava Lake Map

We are stun immune while we have Ghost Shrouds, however I have to say you get permastunned pretty often and dying to that is bad. I highly recommend picking Soul of the Brine King over Soul of Lunaris until you get the 80% chance to avoid being stunned Enchant on your boots. With the enchant you can easily switch and it is very much worth running a view labs or using some Enchanted fossils to get it.
For the small Pantheon I like Soul of Garukhan for the extra MS mainly.

Once we have our starting gear it is pretty easy to get upgrades along the way. A big upgrade will be getting that T1 Defenses craft and that T1 %ES craft for the Amu. Especially gloves, rings, Belts and boots are easily upgraded along the way.
I recommend highlighting the ES bases a bit more on the filter to not miss any.

The next big bracket for ES rols is Ilvl 84. This means Rares and bosses in T15 Maps and Blues in T16 can drop these bases.
Also look for Vaal side areas and Abyssal depths in T14 maps, since these areas are a level higher.

Getting ilvl 86 bases is a bit harder. The easiest way to get these would be from Vaal sideareas and Abyssal Depths in T16s but only rares and unique monsters there can drop them. When you delve (and you should) and reach ilvl 81 you can look for areas with "+level of items dropped". If you hit the jackpot with a ilvl 83 delve area with (+2/3 level if items dropped) you can literally farm all bases you need there.
Also temple can have a room that upgrade the itemlevel and if you are looking for bases to craft on you should upgrade that room.

I recommend saving Dense Fossils and Perfect fossils until you have at least ilvl 84 bases to craft on.

https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Bated_Breath This is a very common drop and even for lategame this is hard to upgrade.
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Sin_Trek This is a very commonly used pair of boots. They have MS, decent ES and even Int. If you get a high roll these are really hard to upgrade and if you really get a pair of them you should not waste currency on crafting boots before your other gear is pretty good.
https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/The_Restless_Ward if you get your hands on that beauty you are really lucky since crafting a better armour is really hard. This gives us up to 620 ES and if you can get a Hilliok to boost it to 28% quality even a bit more.

Once you have decent gear you can drop the 3 points for Essence Surge but early on the flat ES is quite valuable.

Options for more ES:

If you are lucky and find a Energy from Within jewel you get the wheel with melding and put the Energy from within in the socket beneath it.

I highly recommend Utmost Intellect.

Void Barrier Wheel near Shadow start.

Filling the wheel at Foresight.

If you are going for the Aura Wheel with Sovereignty you can grab Faith and Steel.

There is a 2 point Jewel Socket at the Which start that you should grab and there are several 3 point Jewel Sockets on the tree that can be taken.

So you can see it is really easy to level with only a few life nodes and playing hybrid in the later acts and early mapping. Switching to CI between lvl 75 and the early 80s is very easy and you just know what gear to look for and how to do it without the need of a ton of regrets.

You can also go for 1-2 small ES clusters with Energy from Naught. Ideally you get 3 stat ones with 25% increased effect. Then the small nodes would be worth 7% each. If you are very lucky and get a ilvl 84 one you can roll it with 35% effect to squeeze out 8% ES from the small nodes.

In Flashback SSF I switched to CI at lvl 72 and reached a bit over 5k while still missing ES nodes on the tree. When I migrated to Flashback tradeleague because I wanted to play another build I had nearly 10k ES at level 95. I was still using bated breath and crown of the inward Eye.

I still have the character if you are interested. I only switched out the Wand, Shield and Amu after migrating. My old shield had 290 ES and with my old Amu with 50flat ES I actually had a lot more ES.