EK Nova Tornado Chieftain, my 3.18 Starter | Went waaaaay better than expecting

YouTube Video Showcase of the Build and Gameplay :

https://youtu.be/Yce_iFBSugI

I thought you guys would enjoy this here, so here's a quick post on my thoughts after playing it.



Hello, this is Dr3ad from Epoch Builds, and in today's forum post we are going to go over the final showcase and update for the EK Nova Chieftain. So normally I talk about if you should play the build later, but this time we are going to talk about that now.

Probably do not play this build, this was more of a fun project because I wanted to play Chieftain, and it just ended up being Ethereal Knives. I just want to showcase all of the inner workings so that you guys can learn from it and take that and apply it to your own builds.

So I was making this build for a very specific type of content. I wanted to farm as many Incandescent invitations I possibly could, as Crystallized Omniescience jumped through the roof in price. I didn't end up dropping one after like 30 exarchs, but I was able to just buy an Ashes outright by just farming. We did half of this with Ember farming.

Wrath of the Cosmos is a new keystone added in 3.18 that essentially makes you take a lot of increased damage, while allowing your embers to upgrade and duplicate. Once you get an altar with drop ember currency, you end up easily getting up to 20+ embers in one map. As of making this video embers are selling for 3c a pop, or much more in bulk. I usually ended up selling like 300 in each trade multiple times. Normally this node would be bad, especially if your playing your normal clear speed build, as taking a lot of increased damage is bad, even for the 6 portal people, as it just slows you down immensly dying constantly. So I decided to just play a tankier build, so that is why were chieftain.

Chieftain gets a lot of cool stuff, but the the biggest component of what allowed me to make the build function is Tasalio's Cleansing Water. The 100% to fire resistance on top of a Purity of Fire is a lot of resistance, and normally this is obscene overkill for most builds. But with last patch, Melding of the Flesh was introduced. Now with a melding equipped and Tsalio's and Purity set up, I barely have to care about 1 resistance, making gearing way easier than if you were to not have this. It was a dream getting to 90% all res on all 3 elemental resistances.

It also gives us increased life recovery rate, which is dope and of course other defensive benefits.

Some other defenses we have is close to cap on spell suppress. In theory if I jumbled my gear around more I could easily hit 100% spell suppress, but I found just having it capped on my gloves was enough for single target.

All of these defenses allow us to not constantly die, which is great for speeding up your farming of Embers and invitations. Not dying is great for the soul. Speaking of tankiness, I ended up going from level 93 to 94 while using Wrath of the Cosmos which feels insane, because there was a lot of stuff like Divine Shrines and Chaos damage to kill me.

I am also running a Glancing Blows setup with life recovered on block. I couldn't find a way to squeeze out enough passive points for full block, so I decided upon Glancing instead.

The best thing is, if we don't have Wrath of the Cosmos on, like in a Searing Exarch fight, we can just tank it all day, like the turbo exarch in the background.

Now we can talk about damage and clear speed. We utilize an Anomolous Ethereal Knives. The reason being, the alt quality gives us 2 extra projectiles, and with ashes we go up from 14 projectiles to 18 projectiles and it feels amazing. This is essentially required to make EK nova feel good like it used too. We are phys converting to fire, which gives us a lot of neat tricks, like Awakened Added Fire Damage giving our EK +1 levels at level 5, or getting to use a +2 sceptre.

I crafted my own Sceptre, and I ended up deciding on an Oscillating Sceptre base as it saves me 7 whole passive points, which is about a whole large cluster jewel. I rolled for +1 to all spell skill gems on a high item level base, then I crafted cannot roll attack mods, then rolled an Aug physical which at that point it will only add a +1 to level of all physical spell gems. This was about 10 ex in total at the time to craft, but Aug phys went from 6 ex to 14 ex now, so I doubt this would be the best way to craft my sceptre anymore with recombinators existing.

Part of our damage scaling is Herald of Ash buff effect scaling. Normally Herald of Ash gives us some phys as fire and more spell fire damage. We scale this using a Circle of Anguish Synth Ring, which not only gives us buff effect, but it also gives us +1 to maximum fire res, which matters because we are a melding build. We then do something special. The normal quality of Herald of Ash gives us 15% increased fire damage as an added buff. This counts as Herald of Ashe's buff, so Herald buff effect scales it. But we also utilize Ashes of the stars to add 30% quality to the gem, which scales the base 15% increased fire damage, which then gets scaled by the buff effect, which utlimately amounts to another 75% increased fire damage.

We also run a Divergent Righteous fire, which gives us 41% more spell damage while active, and 50% increased spell damage thanks to Ashes quality.

Our single target is carried by Tornado. So Tornado when cast has a base duration of about 2.6 seconds (thanks to our increased duration support), and we can hit it with projectiles. Then it will take the damage those projectiles would have done and applies it to an enemy as reflected damage. Essentially thanks to that and Snipers mark doubling our projectile output for Tornado, it means we reach the 20 max projectiles inside our tornado, which pretty much doubles our damage output. Its a little clunky but it provides so much damage its worth it. We proc it with a Trigger Socketed Spell when you focus, a lot of quality of life, making it so we don't have to self cast tornado.

I am also using a Zealotry setup with Divine blessing on lifetap. This lets us have another aura, and gives us some spell crit for our Elemental Overload procs.

Our clear is carried by a Piercing Shots annointment on our Ashes, and a pair of Asenath's Gentle Touch. We just wear these while doing maps, as they just make enemies explode after death, adding a lot to our clear. We swap these out for a pair of cast speed while focused gloves for single target, which lets us easily swap to damage when we do a pinnacle boss.

For gearing I utilized recombinators to make a lot of it. My chest took a fractured suppress mod and slammed it onto a high Ilvl astral plate, which was the cheapest base at the time. It took me a few times to recombinate, but after that I got an elevated 3% max fire res, then rolled some lower ichors for purity of fire effect which gives us a +4% to max fire res in total, which is a lot thanks to our melding setup. Then I just rolled it with harvest until I had good suffixes, then used roll prefix keep suffix harvest crafts till I got something I was satisfied with.

My helm, boots and belt were just simple recombinate crafts, just getting double fractured made rest of the crafting very easy. I bet you could easily upgrade these, but I felt they were good enough anyways.

For specific skill interactions, we utilize Immortal call on left click instead of molten shell. Why is that? Well as a chieftain we gain 15% more damage if we have lost an endurance charge recently, and the only way to force it with this build is immortal call. It does give us a lot of defense, and thanks to a small cluster jewel, Enduring Composure, it just keeps us gaining Endurance charges for it.

For specific uniques I am using, Impossible Escape with Precise technique is insanely strong for us, as it allows us to cap our spell suppression and also gain phasing on kill, some extra life and dex which we need a lot of.

We also of course run a Ring of Blades in the duelist area, so we can have buttery smooth clear with EK Nova.

We also run a Watcher's Eye with Zealotry cast speed and Determination block, helping us reach block cap.

So for content I eventually finished with this build, I am easily able to face tank normal Exarch and speed through T14 maps. I did finish my goal of killing Maven with this build. It took 6 portals not because the build is bad, but I am bad at the memory game and I despise it. If you were better at Memory game you could easily do Maven deathless. For other bosses you could probably do them, I wouldn't suggest Uber bosses though. This is a mapping build after all.

With all that being said, I think thats it for this video. If you have questions or comments, leave them down below. The PoB will be in the description at the bottom as well. With all that being said, this has been Dr3ad from Epoch Builds, off to make another build.

Pastebin :

https://pastebin.com/nKhnNL1k

Thanks guys!