[3.23] Yaomac's Vaal Breach Bomber

unfortunately the MF version of this build has gotten quite popular. so while I put this build together on a 5d-10d budget pretty easily, now each and every meaningful component is 15d+... it should hopefully be cheaper next league

So the first thing you'll notice when you pop 3 vaal breaches right on top of each other is that it spawns a lot of breach monsters.
The second thing you'll notice is the "revive" popup because you just spawned three breaches worth of monsters on top of yourself.

To remedy this, we first recognize that chieftain is naturally tanky if we stack phys taken as ele & max fire res. With +5% max fire res from level 23 purity of fire, +4% on tree, and 3x +2% on charms, we quickly hit the 90% cap for all our elemental resistances. We then equip Cloak of Flame and Dawnbreaker to take 60% of physical damage as fire damage. These two items notably affect degens too, not just hits, so are especially effective. Viridi's Veil along with a magic ring make us take none of that deadly spike damage from crits. With leftover resevation, we can turn on Arctic Armour to further mitigate physical and fire damage, and we also equip a ruby flask to go even further. We also have 5 (6 with a corruption) endurance charges which are generated both on kill and when hit, giving us great uptime there. The only thing left is chaos damage, and in most cases just capping it is good enough. These together make us incredibly resilient against oneshots.

To prevent a death by a thousand cuts, we equip Defiance of Destiny and turn on Petrified Blood with at least 30% recoup. This combo is truly absurd and I consider an auto include on any build that uses life and doesn't have a build defining amulet. Petrified Blood, assuming you take the low life mastery and enough recoup to offset the degen, cuts your maximum hit taken to 91.67% of your max hp. A bit of a loss, but not too bad considering what we get out of it. In return, it makes all recovery (other than the 30% recoup reserved to offset the degen) 67% more effective against hits. This is pretty good just in general, but is stellar with Defiance of Destiny. Any hit that deals less than 70% of our maximum unreserved life will heal us. A hit that deals 71% will not kill us outright, just tickle a bit. 80% starts to be noticeable but is still reactable. At 90% it's starting to hurt again, and at 92% we outright die. In order to die from a thousand cuts, we'd need to take >70% of our maximum hp as a hit post mitigation... many times in quick succession... without being healed in the interim, which can happen from anything else hitting us for <70% of our maximum hp... It's not true "oneshot or survive" but it's quite close given how little investment it takes to achieve.

The last little bit of the defensive package is just a some sauce on top. Annihilation's Approach prevents chill and freeze. Unwavering Stance prevents stuns. We take CB immunity via the mastery since nobody was selling a good enough CB jewel. We also put a cwdt molten shell in to fill out some leftover sockets, which isn't the most impactful with our Defiance of Destiny setup, but is still good to have. My Berek's Respite is also corrupted with poison immunity, which is handy. And my pantheon grants resistance against bleeding damage which is mandatory as breach mobs like to puncture you.

So while having a pure bossing character is great, I wanted to have this character be at least somewhat capable of fighting his way through some wisp-empowered maps. To that end, we look to the 3.22 chieftain classic: Fulcrum self ignite.

Without the ability to stack explosion chance tattoos, the consistency of the setup is worse, but you best believe it still works at the end of the day.

The engine is thus:
1) Flameblast a pack of mobs (if no pack exists, consider using vaal breach to make one).
2) The enemies are ignited.
3) Fulcrum reflects that ignite back onto you (you are unaffected but not immunte thanks to Tasalio, Cleansing Water).
4) Your gloves cause that ignite to spread in a radius of 1.7m around you.
5) Run at enemies and stand near them to burn them.
6) The die.
7) Some of them explode.
8) That explosion ignites everything nearby since it's huge.
9) Go to Step 2.

The ignite on you lasts a solid 9-10 seconds, so you have plenty of time to run from pack to pack to keep the engine running. If the ignite ever runs out, restarting it is simple, especially with 5 uses of vaal breach at your fingertips.

To boost the damage, we wear Annihilation's Approach which grants us adrenaline, and stack fire damage and fire dot multi on tree.

To boost visual clutter (and consistency in sparse maps), we take AoE per endurance charge on charms to make the explosions massive.

To boost our chaining consistency, we ring swap to Berek's Respite and stack ignite duration on tree and on our Cloak of Flame. We also juice up our movement speed modifier via adrenaline, phase run, & a quicksilver flask to allow us to run from pack to pack before the ignite timer runs out. We also gain onslaught on kill via our timeless jewel.

If you really want the chains to feel consistent, get explosion chance on your charms and on the new jewel. They'll be a bit more expensive, but with three charms and a jewel, you're looking at 80% more explosions, which will make it harder to drop the loop in sparse maps or when you roll poorly.

All of our single target comes from Hinekora, Death's Fury. As such, our boss killing package is the Yaomac's tech mentioned above used to put a single massive ignite onto the boss then keep it going forever. To that end, we have Yaomac's in the weapon swap, and a Flammability curse inside it. We pop vaal breach, gather up the otherwordly invaders, stack our buffs, and pop as many as possible on top of the boss. Hopefully you prayed to Hinekora recently and they bless you with at least one explosion. From there, your life is easy. With the defensive package, you are capable of standing still and face tanking most mechanics, which is great since enemies will have -20% to fire resistance against our dot while we're standing still. Just in case we have to move, we do include a bit of resistance stripping, but we try to stand still for as long as possible. Once in a while, we refresh the duration of our ignite using the curse notable "Defiled Forces" by casting flammability. We can also debuff the enemy a bit with infernal cry for a bit of extra damage through the ash it applies.

The only thing I haven't mentioned yet is the belt. Just get high life and enough flask mods to keep your juice active 24/7.

the tree

We get Blowback & Cooked Alive on our cluster jewel for the ignite chance they provide. Our regular jewels aim to provide life, ignite duration, fire damage, and fire damage over time multiplier.

Our timeless jewel is a Balbala (Traitor keystrone) Brutal Restraint placed in the templar socket. Ideally it grants us onslaught and as much dexterity as possible.

If you push to level 100, I recommend putting the last 7 points into more life and jewels.

if someone is in your party in a zone where they can be damaged, ask them something. get em typing something nice and long that they won't want to delete. ping them on discord. ring their mobile. knock on their door. do anything to get them to stop focusing on their character for a moment and pop vaal breach on top of them.

most characters aren't set up to handle going afk in a breach. the results are predictable.

my kill count so far is 4. seems to work best right after doing a boss carry since people especially don't expect the arena of bosses to suddenly fill with enemies after all the animations/voicelines are done playing. the labyrinth treasure room on top of the divine font when people are picking which gem to transfigure is an especially devastating place to pull this off, though I have yet to convince people to do lab with me.

big list of other builds in case you're interested in what I've done in the past. not all have guides, but I try to at least note down what all I played

mageblood for more flask effect

still need traitor to charge up soul ripper though

mb also lets me run these two for some MFing action


+1 endurance corruption on my boots

I'm also experimenting with guardians blessing for my malevolence instead of divine blessing which you can see in the links.

chaos res & endurance charge when hit on jewel
bonus ele reflect immunity to not have to reroll map mods


phys taken as fire watchers eye + dot multi


vermillion ring with dot multi suffix



double corrupted cloak of flame

youll also note that I've swapped to RF for mapping to really go hands off. I still keep flameblast + infused channel in my fanny pack just in case its a no regen/reduced recovery map and prefer flameblast for bossing.


guardian's blessing worked well, so I dropped reduced mana cost on my ruby flask and went for curse immunity instead.

hit level 100 by doing chayula rotations & blight ravaged maps. specced out all my hanging life nodes, jewels, and cluster jewel notables. this also means all my gems levelled up with me. only upgrades left would be to recraft the gloves with more chaos res & life, get the 400 div charms, and corrupt all my gems/uniques, but I've already got 40/40 challenges with this guy, so think I'm done playing em. will liquidate eventually or hand off the build to a friend.


i also vaaled my mageblood as a sendoff and got crit chance, which is a downgrade since we lose strength (life) for no meaningful benefit