[3.13] Anomalous Firestorm Totems - Bombs Over Wraeclast

I accomplish this by stacking up totems, cast speed, and boosting fire/spell/elemental damage everywhere I can while not sacrificing too much on defense. Rituals in tight spaces can be a death trap so the Chieftain provides just enough beef to survive most of the time.

The playstyle mirrors most totem builds, drop totems, run around and let them do the work. I add a couple things to make it a little more interesting. My weapon triggers Storm Brand and Frost Bomb with increased crit chance to help proc Elemental Overload and combat the regen effects from Suppressive Rituals and the Maven. I have Divergent Scorching Ray->Cast While Channeling->Flammability->Increased Duration to further reduce fire resistance on hard targets like Metamorphs and Maven buffed bosses. Since I'm already bumping cast speed up, I can reach Scorching Ray's exposure in about 1 second. I use Scorching Ray instead of Wave of Conviction because I take Ancestral Bond so WoC never deals damage and thus never procs fire exposure. Against packs I just drop totems and run.

For defense I have Cast When Damage Taken->Immortal Call. We have reliable endurance charge generation thanks to the Chieftain's warcry node which we pair with Enduring Cry-->Second Wind for a bit more damage reduction. The Chieftain's totem life leech node, and impressive regen per endurance charge take care of our sustain.

Manage expectations. I haven't tried it against any real end game encounters but for mapping it's been fun as hell watching the screen blow up. Bosses drop pretty easily if there's no other enemies to distract the totems.

So when recording I didn't consider how brutal the build is to the bit rate. It runs fine on my computer but every video I tried to capture turned out like this.
Forge of the Phoenix with Maven Witness

The main reasons I went Chieftain over Hierophant is the totem life leech, fire immunity for totems (thus reflect immune), the endurance charge generation, and sustain via regen. I think Hierophant would work just fine, doing more damage but being slightly less tanky since you don't benefit as much from enduring cry and immortal call. You may need to spam totems more often too in reflect maps.

You'll need to Path of Building Community Fork to load this
https://pastebin.com/3WfFBJhJ

Level 87 Passives

+ Tanky
+ Explosions
+ Very cheap to start, 6L Soul Mantle being the only expensive piece
+ Non-Meta

- Damage plateaus once you reach max totems, untested in real end game
- Reliance on curse immune flask, kikazaru x2, or Atziri Mirror
- Fast enemies can be a pain to hit (syndicate research, Harvest monsters)
- Totem targeting can be frustrating (bosses in Blighted maps, some delve encounters for example)

Kill all. We need the skill points and none of the bandits really help us.

I'm partial to Araakali and Abberath for general purpose running around and switch it up according to my needs. Shakari and Lunaris are good for this league too.

Valako: Endurance charges are a huge source of sustain and damage via the interaction with immortal call and warcries

Tukohama: This is debatable as with all the regen you get from Valako and
Enduring Cry the leech might not be necessary, but this lets me run no regen maps so it's worth it to me.

Tasalio: Frees up a lot of gear affix space for damage and chaos resist, also saves us a flask affix.

Arohongui: Basically makes us reflect immune so long as you don't have non-fire added to spells, gives us a bit more damage and helps to counter some AOE loss via concentrated effect

If you skip Tukohama I'd suggest Ramako and replacing Elemental Focus with Efficacy or Combustion on the main 6 link.

Gear priorities
Cap resists, get to a comfortable amount of life, then Cast Speed and spell/fire/elemental damage. Cast speed means more big balls which is the primary source of damage. Depending on what gear you can find you may need to get some dex on something. For me I get it on a ring because of my boots. I think we benefit most from Armor or Armor/ES hybrid gear

Lots of room to play here depending on how much you want to automate.
For me I'm comfortable with ~3-4 buttons. Main skill, movement skill, supplemental skill(s).

Until I get more to go on here's some to get started:

Why does my firestorm DPS look like trash in PoB/tooltip?
-Remember we only care about initial hit damage not the subsequent hits in Firestorm so to properly determine damage we use the formula (Initial Hit Damage * Totem Cast Speed) * Number of totems. PoB doesn't really calculate this, it gives you the initial hit damage but doesn't account for the recast, number of totems and I'm not sure but Scorching Ray's exposure didn't appear to show up either even with it enabled. The tooltip DEFINITELY doesn't so while you'll be running around with 6k tooltip DPS you're still cleaning out T16's.

Why go elemental focus when you could ignite?
-There's better ignite vectors than firestorm and I want big chunky hits. You can roll with ignite, I put a few things to try throughout the guide.

If you want big chunky hits why not slams?
-Honestly, that was my backup plan if this didn't work. I was going to respec into Tectonic Slam. This worked out so I didn't need to.

Doesn't Scorching Ray need to do damage to proc exposure?
-No apparently. The debuff gains stacks even with zero damage and with enough cast speed procs exposure fairly quickly. Wave of Conviction however does need to do damage to proc exposure.

Why aren't you doing x/y/z?
-Either I hadn't thought of it, the cost of trying was out of my budget, or I tried it and it didn't work.