[3.5] Totem Branding - Chieftain - WIP

As the title suggest, I am planning an Armageddon Brand Totem build for the Chieftain. Mostly because I've never played a Marauder Before and since people are quite upset about the Totem changes on the Hiero, the totem items might get cheaper in general.

It will be my first guide and I'm looking for some tips on Leveling and budget gearing.

I will edit this post with a proper template when I get started.

No

Care to elaborate?
A single "No" doesn't help much to understand your point.

I spent like 4 hours trying to make it work but it just doesn't worth smoothly. Runesmith is so far away from Chieftain, and so important to get to since we need the castable brands. It just kind of falls flat on it's face for life, or damage, or something else because of all the pathing.

Think the most I managed to get was around 168% life from tree, and respectable damage but it was at the cost of damage mitigation, mana regen, and other stuff.

If there is +castable brands mod for items and shit, it'll be a lot easier to do since we don't have to make the jump to Runesmith.

Gonna wait until PoB updates again and give it another shot.

i gotta say as a avid totem player and my first 100 was a chieftan kinetic blast totems. Chieftan might have a chance this season. I feel chieftan fell behind do the to the lack of totem count but the new gem, totems immune to fire, leech and tuant. The possibities could be strong for chieftan other than brand i need to check out this new skill.

i remember back in the day i had a 17 grand spectrum low life flame totem chieftan with 4.5k es lol that had like 5m dps. Build was horrible but it could drop guardians in 5 seconds the first season they came out lol

as for the guy with a no some people are just racist against totems lol

So there is some good news and Bad News

Good News:
1- The build is working fine with no items what-so-ever (Only small problem with sockets color, but no big deal), Damage wise.
2- We don't need The Totem Notable Node since dual totem helps us greatly to get 2 Scorching ray + Branding totem (More details below)
3- Our Clear speed is fine so far with no gear to speak of and the Passive tree is free enough to get more Defensive nodes.
4- Totem nodes have some Branding nodes inside so we kinda get a Double Dippish (nothing as crazy as it was before)
5- It is starting to be a great budget option
6- It is a more active totem caster, but nothing very hard to do. Get close once in a while to cast Brand Recall and back away.

Bad News:
1- The must important and worst of the news is how Branding work unfortunately. The amount of Branding is linked to the Character and not the Caster, its kinda unfortunate, but having 3-4-5 totems will not increase or stack the meteors falling. However, we can still use Brand Recall without problems so its not a big deal.
2- Because of the above, we rely on Scorching Ray debuff to increase our damage output, using Dual Totem Support does reduce its damage, but since our main skill is brand, we enjoy the debuff with 2 totem for faster stacks. (Note: Dual Totem does increas our max totem, but only for Scorching ray making it 1 Cast of Brand totem and 1 cast of Scorch Totem)
3- It is very slow to level up, at least I didn't find a good way yet to level it up. So arm yourself with patience, but it is fun to play when it is started.

There might be other stuff I discover that is missing. Ask questions and I will try to answer them.
I will update it in a Build guide when I start mapping with it.

I was hoping to do something similar, using flame totems and armageddon brand, threw this together in my spare time, have not had time to test it all though.

https://pastebin.com/HiCW62mu

Some important things to note

* Everything gear wise was using cheap gear or gear I had something similar to in Standard on my old Totem Chieftain. The rich can obviously improve on some things the gear currently lacks.

* Uniques aren't mandatory, but each did something that I thought might be worth trying out.

* Flame Totems could be swapped out for Firestorm/Magma Orb with Soul Mantle, putting the Brand on the staff instead.

On top of that, a few questions on theories to improve.

* Multiple Totems has a staggering 21% damage nerf at 20th level, would it just be better to go the path of the Soul Mantle + FS/MO and make sure to always have an anti-curse flask on hand?

* An Alternative idea I wonder about is the following. Swapping the staff out for a 1H thing + Tukohama's Fortress + the Soul Mantle idea above, taking the Runebinder keystone, using the bonus two totems to help offset Runebinder's downside. In this version, The Brand would go to a 4-link and flame dash would go to a 3-link.