[3.4][Written and Video Guide] Grey Spire RF/BV Chieftain - The Flaming Stickboi

Hello Wraeclast! Welcome to the Path of Exile build guide for the Flaming Stickboi Chieftain Build. This build features below average clearspeed, above average single target damage, and excellent survivability. Despite playing Path of Exile since closed beta, this is the first time I have ever made a Righteous Fire character. The idea for this build was spawned when a viewer on stream requested a build for the new Grey Spire staff introduced in Delve League. After giving it some consideration it seemed like Righteous Fire was the perfect skill to pair with the staff and I eventually settled on pairing it with blade vortex to take full advantage of the power offered by the Chieftain ascendancy.

Let’s start by looking at the centerpiece of the build, the Grey Spire unique staff. This is a new unique item in Delve league that offers some interesting bonuses at a reasonable opportunity cost. Basically, it’s exactly what a unique item should be. Why is this item so perfect for righteous fire? First, Righteous Fire is somewhat difficult to scale because it does not benefit from spell damage. This means that on a Righteous Fire build, along with stacking as much life as possible to boost the base damage of skill, you are looking for increases to fire damage, elemental damage, area damage, and global damage. As you can see, the Grey Spire offers a massive global damage roll of up to 300%, making it an excellent source of additional damage for Righteous Fire. Second, you want to get as much maximum fire resistance as possible on a Righteous Fire build because the higher your fire resistance, the less of your life regeneration will be eaten to counteract the self-damage applied by Righteous Fire. The Grey Spire provides up to 4% to all maximum resistances, which is only 1% less fire resistance than Rise of the Phoenix, and equal to the resistances provided by the other popular Righteous Fire shield, Saffel’s Frame. Finally, The Grey Spire provides a massive attack speed roll of up to 30%, which means you can leap slam very quickly with the weapon for mobility. In total, The Grey Spire is roughly equivalent to two Doryani’s Catalysts and a Saffel’s Frame combined into a single item with excellent mobility provided by a large attack speed roll. The downside is that The Grey Spire cannot have any sockets, meaning you have a total of six fewer sockets to work with compared to most characters.

The next question is why I decided to pair Blade Vortex with Righteous fire in this build. First, Blade Vortex simply synergizes extremely well with the bonuses provided by the Chieftain Ascendancy and provides excellent single target damage. Second, The Grey Spire provides no cast speed, meaning you would struggle to reach decent levels of damage when utilizing a spell whose damage per second is dependent on cast speed. The damage per second of Blade Vortex is not dependent on cast speed. As long as you have sufficient cast speed and skill duration to reach the maximum 10 stacks of Blade Vortex, you will reach the maximum damage per second of the skill, regardless of any additional cast speed. These factors combined with the fact that Blade Vortex covers roughly the same area of effect as Righteous Fire make the skill an excellent fit for this build.

Now let’s talk about the rest of the gear you will want to use alongside the Grey Spire. The most important piece you will want to aim for is a good helmet for holding righteous fire. It is important that you work with an Elder helmet base to gain access to gem support affixes that work with righteous fire. Here is the helmet that my character is using. You want to aim for some combination of socketed gems are supported by Concentrated Effect, socketed gems are supported by Burning Damage, and socketed gems deal 30% more elemental damage from an Essence of Horror. If you are just starting out you can easily get a helmet with one of these three affixes for a few chaos, but you will quickly want to upgrade to a helmet with two of these three affixes and a good life roll, which will be a little more expensive. If you really want to invest heavily into the build, a helmet with all three affixes and a good life roll would be great, but that will cost you several piles of exalts. If you can get one, a Righteous Fire or Blade Vortex lab enchantment would be nice on your helmet.

Beyond the Grey Spire and Righteous Fire helmet, the rest of the gearing on a righteous fire character is very simple. You just want to cap out your resists, making sure that your uncapped fire resistance in the highest for the Wise Oak flask, and then stack as much life as you possibly can. This means aiming for maximum life rolls plus strength rolls on every piece of gear, ideally with percentage life rolls and percentage life regeneration rolls from the fossil affixes introduced in Delve or on Elder or Shaper bases. After that, it is excellent if you can get any bonuses to cast speed, attack speed, fire damage, or anything else that boosts the output of your Blade Vortex. One particularly nice item to aim for is a good pair of gloves crafted with an Essence of Insanity, which will significantly boost the speed of your leap slam as long as you make sure to put your leap slam setup in your gloves. Another excellent optimization is a good amulet corrupted with an implicit that grants you a level 23 Purity of Fire skill. This will grant you 1% additional maximum fire resistance compared to a level 20 Purity of Fire gem and save you a gem slot. I also strongly recommend aiming for the boot labyrinth enchantment that provides additional life and mana regeneration if you have been hit recently.

For flasks, I recommend a Catalyzed Eternal Life Flask of Staunching, The Wise Oak, a Ruby Flask, and a Sulphur Flask. Your fifth flask should change based on the type of content you are running. For example, in the video you may notice that I am using a Basalt Flask against the Purifier, Topaz Flask against the Eradicator, Amethyst Flask against the Constrictor, and Sapphire Flask against Uber Elder. I typically keep the Basalt Flask in for general mapping and delving, but you can certainly use a Silver Flask for a little extra speed if you want to. Make sure that two of your utility flasks have Warding and Heat suffixes to protect you from curses and freezes.
For jewels, the focus is similar to the rest of your gear, get as much life as possible, followed by any relevant damage stats. Additionally, a Watcher’s Eye unique jewel with increased mana recovery when affected by Clarity is extremely useful for solving mana problems. Mana rolls on some of your rare jewels are also a good idea.

Next, we will talk about the gem links for this build.

The first setup is the righteous fire setup, which will go in the helmet we discussed earlier. I recommend:

Righteous Fire – Elemental Focus – Efficacy – Increased Area of Effect

Next is the blade vortex setup, which will go in your chest. I recommend:

Blade Vortex – Fire Penetration – Combustion – Added Fire Damage – Increased Area of Effect – Controlled Destruction

If you manage to get a chest with four blue sockets, Immolate should give you slightly more damage than Added Fire Damage. Additionally, be sure to swap in Concentrated Effect instead of Increased Area of Effect for boss fights. If you are only running a 5-link, drop Controlled Destruction.

In the aforementioned Insanity gloves, I recommend:

Leap Slam – Faster Attacks – Fortify

In your remaining sockets, you will want an Enduring Cry for maintaining endurance charges during boss fights, Herald of Ash for extra damage, Clarity for mana sustain, Purity of Fire for the additional maximum fire resistance, and Orb of Storms to help with activating Elemental Overload on bosses. If you have an amulet corruption for Purity of Fire, you can attach Increased Critical Strikes to your Orb of Storms for greater reliability. If you are struggling with mana issues, you can either drop Herald of Ash to leave more mana unreserved, or try to get an Elder ring that curses enemies with Warlord’s Mark on hit for mana leech.

Finally, let’s take a look at the passive tree, ascendancy tree, and pantheon choices for this character. If you want too, you can use some of the methods available for leveling with Righteous Fire from the beginning, but I chose to simply level with Molten Strike using two-handed axes and respecc into Righteous Fire after I completed the merciless labyrinth and reached level 68 to equip the Grey Spire. If you want to follow my leveling method, I recommend and early tree that looks like this:



For bandits, I chose to kill all three for the passive points, but there is an argument to be made for sacrificing a few passive points and helping oak for the extra regeneration and mitigation.

Your final tree should look something like this:



The skeleton follows a pretty basic Righteous Fire tree, picking up all of the available life regeneration and life, but with a few alterations based on passive tree changes introduced in 3.4 and some considerations for Blade Vortex. Specifically, we pick up the duration cluster to the left of the Scion, which makes sustaining Blade Vortex stacks much easier. We do not take Elemental Equilibrium because we are using Blade Vortex for supplementary damage, rather than focusing purely on Righteous Fire. I recommend taking Righteous Decree in the Templar area to help with some of the mana issues faced by this character. Be sure to grab Avatar of Fire to convert half of your Blade Vortex damage to fire, with the other half being converted by the Chieftain ascendancy. Finally, there is an excellent little group of nodes to grab in the minion cluster to the left of the Templar. The new Spiritual Aid node added in 3.4 causes increases and reductions to minion damage to apply to your character. By working around the top side of that wheel to Spiritual Aid and considering the 10% minion damage that was added to the Retribution node in the Templar area, these 5 nodes in the minion wheel give nearly 16% global damage each and the Righteous Army node gives a very handy 1% life regeneration.

Regarding the Chieftain ascendancy, because I decided to level with Molten Strike, I took Ngamahu, Flame’s Advance following the normal labyrinth, followed by Tawhoa, Forest’s Strength, Ramako, Sun’s Light, and Hinekora, Death’s Fury in the cruel, merciless, and uber labyrinths, respectively. If you are attempting to level with Righteous Fire, you should take the top branch through Tawhoa and Ramako first, followed by the right branch through Ngamahu and Hinekora.

For your pantheon choices, I recommend Arakaali for your major god choice because it reduces the self-damage inflicted by Righteous Fire. The Shock and Horror, and Armala upgrades are certainly worthwhile for this node. For your minor god, I recommend Ryslatha for the life flask sustain during boss fights, with the Gorulis upgrade being very important for quickly recovering after you take some big hits. You can of course take different nodes depending on your playstyle and preferences.

That wraps things up for this build. The playstyle for this build is very simple, you just jump around everywhere and try to keep up a few Blade Vortex stacks while clearing. For bosses, simply stack your Blade Vortex to 10 stacks, then jump in and pop Vaal Righteous Fire and Vaal Blade Vortex. Take some time to learn which attacks from which bosses you can simply facetank, and which you need to avoid.

You will notice that I die a lot in the Uber Elder fight in the video. In fact, I actually kill him after I die on the last portal. Thankfully, he didn’t drop anything good so I didn’t lose much. Based on the large time and currency investment required to fight Uber Elder, I just haven’t practiced him much so I am very bad at the fight. I am confident that if I tried him again on this character, I would probably kill him with 1 or 2 deaths. I think someone with sufficient practice could easily do it deathless on this character. I just suck at the fight.

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Thank you all for reading, and I’ll see you in Wraeclast!