[3.25]🔥Fire Slamming Chieftain🔥 (Tectonic Slam / Volcanic Fissure / Consecrated Path / ANY SLAM)

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CrispyXtreme wrote:

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ActuallyAnOreoIRL wrote:

There's also another option I didn't see mentioned for the sake of stacking a ton of warcry CDR: you can run Elegant Hubris with Supreme Ostentation to convert all of your small STR nodes into warcry CDR. If you're running crit staff as well, you can convert int nodes into Herald buff effect for a bit more damage.

This frees up a lot of room on your gear from having to mess with stat requirements for Precision or Awakened Elemental Focus (or Flammability, if you manual cast that ever). It does mean you'll be a bit squishier, but if you put it in the Eternal Youth socket you get two one-point notables and can combo a massive Thread of Hope in the jewel socket above it to get 3 more one-point notables to fish for fire damage/phys damage/melee phys damage/crit multi.

Thanks for the suggestion! Will definitely include it in the guide. The Thread of Hope combo seems insane if we can get around 4-5 good notables. Bonus points for roleplaying as a Chieftain covered from head to toe in tattoos. I actually haven't gotten to tattoing any warcry cd so I can't say how much better it is to have them.

After switching to Crit the attribute requirements for Dex and Int got really steep so it's a nice fix, but there's some tradeoffs that need consideration. We generally don't mind the extra Str as we really like life and melee dmg. Xoph's Blood loses a lot of value, and I think Covered in Ash is a really good dmg multiplier (with my setup it's around a 16% more dmg multiplier), but changing the Amulet to a rare with life + crit multi or something like that is simple. Now you got me curious and I will try to make a PoB with these changes.

Since my last post I've been trying to test a lot of things to squeeze as much as I can into the build, and the passive tree + jewels felt like the hardest part. I got many headaches from trying to get max value from combining one or more of Thread of Hope/Timeless Jewels/Intuitive Leap/Impossible Escape. Will definitely expand the Jewel section. The best results I've obtained are with Lethal Pride only.

The problem I've found with Chieftain is that he gets really Jewel socket starved due to wanting max fire res which is easily accesible through the base jewels at 2% so getting 90% will be tight as you can't easily get max fire res on gear unlike attributes.

I've been messing around with a staff version, and there's a very very silly version I've cooked up.

I was reminded that Versatile Combatant existed, and with the help of Elegant Hubris in an odd spot (cluster jewel socket next to Arsenal of Vengeance) and copious amounts of block+max res+life, you can make the build borderline unkillable.



The idea here would be to use a really juiced Sacred Chainmail in combination with Divine Shield to get a good layer of ES regen going, and then 65/65 block with 2% life gain on attack block to pad the hell out of your life in mapping against anything that doesn't oneshot you. In combination with stuff like Progenesis and life recoup on rings, the build starts doing very stupid things very quickly in maps that aren't rolled to kill the build on purpose (-max res, -block, etc). It also is pretty much pseudo immune to ailments, being fully shock/ignite/freeze/chill immune, and not caring at all about Scorch>much about Sap>only caring about Brittle if you run Delirium.

The build also gets 60% reduced extra crit damage taken for 2 points, or 1 point plus a body armor prefix if you run Essence of Horror and at least 7 endurance charges.

The main issue the PoB linked has is that the jewels are... likely gonna be pretty difficult to make optimal. The mana recovery on the abyss jewels in combination with the amulet basetype and mana cost reductions let you not have to care about costs, but you can patch it over by taking Fuel the Fight instead of Aggressive Defense on the large cluster, albeit it'll feel a good deal clunkier because of Flammability eating half your available mana pool on every slam.

On top of using seven(7) base jewels, running suboptimal 3-mod ones means dropping a lot of crit multi. It'll still work and mop up T16s for sure, but it might start running into issues on tank mod T17s or bosses if you don't gem swap out for Tectonic Slam of Cataclysm, which also doesn't get to take endurance charge gain if you've been hit recently very easily unless you find somewhere to strip 3 points out or are willing to use the super low cooldown on Enduring Cry between every slam, which is doable on pinnacles but not very good for maps.

The last issue is that once you're that tanky, triggering Vengeful Cry is kind of an annoying task unless you're willing to drop to ~60% chaos res with fortify up and using Doedre's Elixir. Doable, but not something I'd do on HC.

EDIT: Part of the reason for taking all those tattoos is specifically for Mob Mentality QOL, and for bossing with Tectonic Slam of Cataclysm. The faster your autoexerts come back (especially if you only run two on autoexertion instead of three), the faster your charges come back and are more likely to not drop a full stack of power/frenzy charges on you. Rage generation also gets a lot smoother the lower your cooldowns are, and you don't need to worry if you stagger the quality on your autoexerted warcries once you hit a certain point at all about it dropping.

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ActuallyAnOreoIRL wrote:

I've been messing around with a staff version, and there's a very very silly version I've cooked up.

I was reminded that Versatile Combatant existed, and with the help of Elegant Hubris in an odd spot (cluster jewel socket next to Arsenal of Vengeance) and copious amounts of block+max res+life, you can make the build borderline unkillable.

PoB

https://pobb.in/sOT-M-skdlyW

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Looks good, that's a nice version of the build! I think it's similar to how the One-Shot Tectonic Slam build used to look. When I was preparing for minmaxing my build I looked at some poe ninja builds and saw this Energy Shield tech, it looked really promising. But as you said as well, you need to get some good jewels, missing a few % of block can make a lot of difference, and it gets really expensive if you also want life + max fire res.

Some solutions for that are to Tattoo some block chance to fill the last points, Body Armour Eldritch Implicit and Veiled prefix, or use a Block Small Cluster Jewel (Enduring Ward seems like the best notable as it's really easy for this build to stay at Max Endurance Charges especially with the extra generation on Block). A Rumi's Concoction also works great here.

I think with a bit of fiddling you can move the Elegant Hubris to the Eternal Youth Keystone and try to do the Thread of Hope combo to solve lots of problems like Shock Avoidance without sacrificing the Belt slot, get some Life/Damage/Etc. This will make the Steelwood Stance wheel get consumed but you can use the other sources of Block to cap it.

I also think you can drop the mana regen portion entirely and just rely on mana leech through fuel the fight and damage recouped as mana (if you can get it). But that needs some testing.

I would also drop Vengeful Cry from this for a couple of reasons: Energy Shield will get in the way of proccing Savage Hits (needs to be 15% life damage), blocking itself will make you get less Savage Hits as well. One more thing that I haven't tested yet is if you can block the Echoes of Creation self-hit.

Yeah aside from bossing I would not run Tectonic Slam of Cataclysm with this setup as it needs resources dedicated to reliably generating max charges (for me even that node that gives 1 charge each second when hit feels too little). I also realized I will have to split the build into a Tectonic Slam of Cataclysm variant and everything else separate as there are more differences than I initially thought.

It's amazing how changing a few node wheels can give the build a whole different trajectory. Overall this Versatile Combatant + Divine Shield combo also looks like the go-to path for an Inquisitor variant as it has access to Consecrated Ground double regen for lots of value. Combining it with Corrupted Soul from Glorious Vanity (or maybe a variant with Immortal Ambition) may result in an extremely tanky character .

This is the version where I first saw the Divine Shield tech but it looks like extreme investment :D (it has max attack and spell block without versatile combatant): link.

Myself I went with an Eventuality Rod (wanted to craft both Eventuality Rod and a Block Staff variant but I got burnt out on alteration spamming for recombinators) for the Staff/Crit build and kinda sidelined the block mechanic. I also went for an accuracy variant instead of Hits can't be Evaded. I will be sharing my close-to minmaxed pobb soon, I want to go for 40/40 Challenges and I'm almost there. I hit the character limit on both initial posts so I will have to do some shuffling around.

Alright, finally done with the Challenges. I also crafted myself some shiny toys (will add Crafting steps for all of them):
The Boots are my favourite since they are unique to this build (couldn't find anything similar in the market), due to needing excess Endurance Charge generation for Tectonic Slam of Cataclysm. They may not be even that strong compared to the usual Tailwind-Elusive combo, but I like how they're giving the build personality.

The Weapons and Armour were created using Recombinators. I didn't play during Sentinel League but now I know why people missed them. These things can be crazy strong. The staff is one veiled suffix off of being Best in Slot, but I'd rather craft another than delete the double damage veiled suffix which can be sold for a nice amount. I got burned out on the crafting process and don't want to repeat it for the moment (or maybe forever lol).

Will take one more pass at updating the guide with all my latest findings and provide updated PoBs. This will probably be the final update until the next league where I will try to add more league start specific stuff and make changes based on the patch notes and feedback from people.

There's probably not many players left in this league, and even less trying new builds, so I'm excited for the new league to see if more people will try this satisfying build!