did a build from scratch and the endgame is pure pain and suffering

Ok, so for the last league i've played this game trying my best shot with some builds, and landed on one that i think suited best for me. Since day one of this league i've been taking my time playing and mainly farming heist (kitava is still to be killed) and minmaxing my build to the absolute maximum.

So far i could get 4.8k HP, 14k armour (unbuffed, buffed goes to around 40,50k), 105% all resistances including chaos (so it gets to 75%+ after kitava) and a decent amount of investment on damage.

I'm already at level 82 purely by farming heist, because the atlas had bonked me to oblivion in the last league. Spent around 2 divines worth of currency on making the absolute best build i could do. It was hours upon hours searching for the right equipment, and quadruple that for farming the resources needed to buy them.

The thing is, as many of you may already expect from a post like this, I STILL GET ONE-SHOTTED. The damage also seems so low, it's ridiculous. I get bodied by any magic monster (or even normals) the moment i try to enter a lvl 83 heist. It doesn't get much better on lvl 70+ either.

I'm so frustrated with all of this, i've worked so much in this build and i honestly can't see anything else to add on top of it besides a few health/armour passives from leveling, buying the Atziri's disfavour axe, 6-linking my body armour to put all auras there, and swap my gems for higher quality/awakened/alternate quality versions.

I honestly can't see this build reach anywhere close as some builds out there. I've seen other Berserker builds reach 8k hp and well over 10M dps and i'm sitting here wondering how in the world can someone reach those numbers.

welp that was my rant, i'm so done after spending so much time and mental energy in this league and end with a bad build. I need someone with more expertise to look into this for me. Any help will be much appreciated!

https://pastebin.com/YCjXe760

Something to pay attention to... some builds are better at clearing mobs vs bossing, others are better at single target and lack any realm of defenses and/or clear ability.. I made a viper strike assassin build a few leagues back that in full itemized gear, was doing around 250m dps, but had 2.5k hp and almost no mitigation whatsoever, so i had to get better at figuring out how to play something with low hp, leech is useless, so cut that from the build, cant leech if im dead, same with resists, i would get one shot with that low of hp anyways so why bother, so I started looking into other avenues of mitigation, one going for evasion cap and mixing it with phase run and withering step (for speed and clear). The build was extremely hard to gear and even harder to play, had to be good at dodging mechanics, and hope that the 95% evasion procs in your favor if you do get hit.. lol

That being said, Sunder is an AOE ability, its going to be better at clear speed vs single target bossing

Here are some notes from my own personal knowledge of builds and PoB in general, also your current setup

- your damage is abysmal for the type of content you are wanting to push. I don't mean this to be mean, just, you are doing 200k against a standard enemy, not a boss, or even harder at the uber pinnacle boss. Against the latter, you do a whopping 60k.

- gems
- your gems need to be level 20 and 20% quality, also making sure you dont need any cheap awakened gems will go a long way to improving your damage.

- Gear
- Atziri's disfavour would be a large improvement to your damage, however, most berserker builds are only using a 2h weapon if they are cycloning, otherwise dual wield tends to work better, on top of gaining access to block (unless you specifically use staves), dual wield tends to attack much faster and thus interacts better with the berserker ascendancy. If you want to continue to use 2h weapons, I would consider swapping to jugg.
- Warcries
- While warcries are strong in their own right, I wouldn't take the war bringer ascendancy node unless you were running primarily a warcry build. Defy pain would help with survivability, and if you run yugul plus a phys mastery node with phys reflect reduction, you can negate all of your phys reflect from running defiance. Use the tree to push your build.
- Items make up a significant portion of damage and resists, learning how to craft and use crafts or influences on gear will go a significant way forward into making your build work.
- Defenses
- Your effective hit pool is around 21k, while that seems high, its pretty low, most builds that survive are at least 100k if not over 1m ehp
- EHP (Effective Hit Pool) is an estimate on how much damage you can take based on the given type, resists, reductions, and other various modifiers (like being cursed with vulnerability against physical based attacks)
- Having maximum resists is a good start, however, most melee builds, and while stacking strength, which might seem like a good idea for a physical based build, 740 is a bit over the top. Blunderbore as an armour is interesting, but not exactly overpowered, sacrificing some strength in favor of better passives on the tree and other mods on gear would improve damage and survivability moreso than having 2 lesser shrines buffed with gull. While it is an interesting idea, it tends to be rather underwhelming, use a couple of rares with emphasis on life (like get the life mod on a piece of gear from running alva encounters, I.E. 9-10% hp and 100-130 life or something to that affect) running high block and going with the shaper mods to replenish life on block or kill is helpful as well for sustain.

- Strength stacking builds dont seem to do well as far as melee, they work amazingly well for zombies, but this isnt a zombie build.
- Class Fantasy - Sometimes builds change, dont get locked into a personal fantasy based on what you want to run for a particular build, sometimes they just dont work, or rather, work as you wanted or expected them to, for example, last league I ran a frost blades assassin, crit based, did upwards of 3m dps against uber pinnacle bosses, and it had around 100k ehp. The problem? Frost blades is terrible for single target, it hits a single enemy and then splits into projectiles, the projectiles are where all the damage is, I learned this the hard way. Also Vengeant cascade does not work with frost blades for some stupid reason, if it did, it would make frost blades viable for single target as well as clear, maybe the new ring will help with that.

- Also I find it odd you went for berserker, took rage ascendancy talents, and then didnt bother with berserk or rampage effects, I can build something similar to what you are thinking here, but even I am not as skilled in this area as some people on here. Other players in the community are far more knowledgable about build making, and asking for help in the class forum or even places like reddit would go a long way to helping you understand how to make builds.

- I will work on a PoB with this type of build idea and post it here within the next couple of days

I honestly don't know where to start... let's see..

First off, Heists are dangerous, much more so than maps. I never really delved into heisting so someone please correct me if i am wrong but if i remember people were either running contracts white for leveling where they killed the monsters or yellow for currency. In case of the latter you only open chests until the alert level is about to reach max then leave, you don't fight monsters in this scenario. I suspect you've tried to kill monsters in rare contracts? Level 83 contracts at that? Then yeah your build and gear has no way of handling that. It's not that your defenses are bad, they are average. The problem is you have no DPS and run content that's way beyond your capability.

Second, your way of getting your build ready. You just ran heists, made money off of it and then bought every little thing via trade right? That's fine i guess if you really enjoy heists but i suspect you just did that because you thought it's the most efficient way so you kept doing something you don't like hoping to get rewarded in the end. I mean it's up to you how to play this game but i'd recommend doing things you like and progressing bit by bit instead of trying to get from zero to hero in one step after doing chores for a long time. Aside of the chaos resists none of the gear you have is particularly good. If you just went with mapping you could have gotten comparable gear pieces yourself without spending currency on it and chaos res only becomes important in content that goes beyond red maps. If you look at my league slayer, i've spend 15 chaos on the gear you see there. 5 for the weapon and 10 for the armor, the rest i've found myself while mapping. I am not saying your way of doing it is wrong in general, if you are a veteran player and know exactly what you are doing it's probably the more effective way. But in your case i don't think it's a good method.

Now onto your build. Frankly i think it's a lost cause.
First mistake is resolute technique. Unless you play a bleed build you should never use that node, not having crit on a hit based build is shooting yourself in the foot big time. It's probably the main reason your damage is so bad.

Second, slams are designed around warcries to boost their damage. You want to run rallying cry and intimidating cry with warcry investment on the tree for higher recovery and speed so you can keep them up. You just slapped an unsupported intimidating cry in there that you likely can't even maintain all the time so your damage sucks even more. Third, your gear choices are beyond suboptimal. Your helmet and armor are fun/fluff items, not intended for serious use even less on a slam build. If you used this: https://www.pathofexile.com/trade/search/Sanctum/k4GlOZjI5

You'd have better warcry uptime and up to 30% more damage and life on your helmet. It's a mile of a difference already. Your armor would also be better off using either an influenced rare for damage or something like brass dome for defense.

Then there is your weapon. That thing has 400 dps. It's on a level you can get with like 2 dozen phys rerolls from harvest. It's ok for starting maps but it's miles away from being viable for endgame, why did you 6 link it? I don't know if you bought it fully linked or if you linked it yourself but unless you did the latter and just got incredibly lucky you just wasted a ton of currency on a stepping stone weapon you'll have to drop before red maps at latest. The weapon is the core of any melee builds damage so having a good one is important. Before thinking about six linking you should get one that's good enough for endgame. You'll want at least 700 DPS weapons to be somewhat endgame viable.

If you want a look on a somewhat decent slam build, check the Champion in my profile, that should give you an idea how it's done. I am not telling you to replicate it, it's a standard build with pretty decent gear, nothing you can easily get your hands on early in the league as a new player, just to show you the direction you want to take in regards to the tree, what skill gems to use (you aren't using pride for example which is another mayor flaw) and also what kind of items you should aim for.

OP: The only berserkers with 8k hp are likely strength stackers. If you aren't a strength stacker, you aren't likely to hit anywhere near that level of hp without severing gimping yourself somewhere else, high or low investment. And if you aren't strength stacking, you shouldn't compare your build to ones that do because that's a bad comparison.

What kind of content do you like to complete and what kind of build do you want to do it with? You'll want to start there.

Thanks everyonne for the reply, seems like i haven't even started to comprehend this game lol that's one thing i'm loving about poe, everything is just so extremely complex. I'll try to follow your tips to remake the build once again.

About the gull/blunderbore, i found it interesting because of the atlas nodes for shrines. kill everything in the area first, then collect 2 or 3 shrines on the map to achieve godhood for 3 minutes, and with that grind the area boss to dust. The lesser massive/brutal permanent also looked like a good investment so i didn't have to spend more precious passives onto more damage or health and focus on other things.

as for the 6L weapon, yeah i bought it off for 5, 10 chaos. can't remember but it was cheap. I'll try to dual wield now and see the results. I planned on two-handing because the dual wield mastery nodes seemed very far from the start point of berserker.

And yes, i like to do heists so it was less of a pain to farm all of this. I have found myself some good ways to improve drops overall and to choose which maps are good for dropping currency. I'm even able to get around an exalted worth of currency on every heist map (if i'm not focusing on leveling up members). ALSO, heist is not dangerous at all. If you find the area a bit overwhelming for you, you can simply get everything you need before the alert goes off and get out of the area to remove the contraband stat on all items. Then you go for the main treasure and in case you die, you won't lose anything else besides it.

As for the unlinked intimidating cry, FOR NOW it has to be like this while i'm trying to 6L my chest piece. What i do with it now is (while at full rage) i activate it, place the fully charged war banner and use the adrenaline given to give a big chunk of damage to bosses. Impale also works well with this one if it procs.

If you plan to stick with playing slams you should stick to two handed weapons as well. Dualwielding provides no benefit to that kind of build you only cut your damage again. Dualwielding only makes sense if you want to for high aps with multistrike.

jesus christ, you guys were right indeed, dual wield IS the way to go! I've spent like 50, 60 chaos to buy some good axes and used a ton of regret orbs to redo some stuff, and my damage is now significantly higher with an absurd amound of attack speed as well. I have invested more in warcries as well, now they're instant and with a few other small passives on them.

For now i'll try to 6-link my body armour, and then try to buy/craft weapons with equal/higher DPS and better explicits.

here's the most recent version of the build, for anyone interested:
https://pastebin.com/tfaYGi4a