[3.23] [SC+HC] Righteous Fire (RF) Chieftain: One build to go from Act 2 leaguestart to pinnacles

3.22.0/Ancestor League Update

This build guide has been updated to reflect the changes made by the 3.22 patch, most notably the changes to the Chieftain Ascendancies. I will likely make some more tweaks down the line after league start, but for now, the guide & PoB are up-to-date.

To address a few possible questions:

• Why doesn't the PoB work when I import it? You are using the wrong version of PoB: the "original" version (often known as the "OpenArl" version) is outdated and does not work with most published data today. Instead, get the "Community Fork" (https://github.com/PathOfBuildingCommunity/PathOfBuilding/releases) and use that instead.
  
  
• Is this a good league starter? This would be rather solid at league start. Required gear is very minimal, and dirt-cheap.
  
  To be honest, you actually don't need Kikazaru to start anymore; if you instead rush the mastery Fire Damage - Regenerate 1 Life per second for each 1% Uncapped Fire Resistance, this will give you plenty enough regen to actually even start with RF a few levels earlier. (In a later version I will actually edit the pathing to take this first!)
  
  
• What does Chieftain do for this post-rework? The main advantage this has over taking Juggernaut is that gearing it is a lot simpler; you just focus on fire resistance, and your cold & lightning take care of themselves. In fact, just getting to Purity of Fire largely solves it for good.
  
  
• I thought Chieftain got nerfed? I mean... Yeah, it really did. We no longer have access to easy endurance charge uptime, and in general at the high end we've lost about 1/3 of our DPS. There's no denying that. However, we also no longer have to worry about Melding of the Flesh & its downsides; we can hit triple-90 resists a lot easier & cheaper.
  
  
• What updates will be coming later? The next part I'll be addressing is to revisit the leveling process; one of the silver linings of the passive reworks (Mastery & Ascendancy alike) is to actually make this build even more accessible. The current progression in this guide was not fundamentally changed from before, but in honesty these changes have opened up some even easier routes; however I will have to spend some more time working out an optimal new route.

Thank you for reading this far; as always, any further questions or feedback is invited!

Chose this as my 3.22 starter, looking forward to the refinements!

Update: Went right for the fire mastery and bought a cheap Aurumvorax, and can now sustain RF at level 19 :D Who knew low level fire res items were this cheap! And with the Ancestor rewards, it should also be easy to make a 6 link body armor the same way.

Havent played in a few leagues now and after wasting some time on the Turd that is D4 Im now back to POE. Always wanted to try a RF build and have it work. Ive tried in the past but Im going to go for your build this league and see what I can do..

-first cursed dungeon - got a Vaal RF gem !!

I'm playing this build for 3.22 starter. One thing I feel hard to play is mana for Fire Trap.
Currently, I'm in Act 6, unreserved mana is 140, Fire Trap has 4-links 30 mana, but regen is only 10 makes me feel truggle to throw trap.
As I see in your pob, in low budget, Fire Trap has 4-links 47 mana, but mana regen is 16, 21 if we go regen mana nodes. It still seems hard to manage.
Even in high budget build, mana regen is only 13 with Fire Trap having 6-links over 100 mana.
I can only think about using mana flask. Any other suggestions? Thank you.

Please help me understand something. Doesn't the change to "Ramako, Sun's Light" Ascendancy node get completely negated/contradict with flammability? At max level, its something like -36% fire resistance, so isn't this hard-capped 20% actually worse for the build than just moving and using flammability?

With the mastery changes I think some small adjustments to the tree might be worth it.
Especially the new '10% more max life with with 6 or more masteries allocated' seems rather juicy. The current tree is already at four, so two more for a fat multiplyer could be worth it. Don't know which other to take to fulfill the condition. Maybe the extra '-5 res with exposure' from the fire cluster or sneaking in a lvl 1 clarity on life for the +1 max res from the aura cluster.

"

Z_Dragon wrote:

I can only think about using mana flask. Any other suggestions? Thank you.

In short: you avoid using it as much as possible, and largely reserve it for single, nastier enemies (bosses and some rares) rather than spamming it to "reach" packs of mobs you don't want to physically move to.

This is (as far as I've observed) a constant struggle for *all* RF builds, regardless of ascendancy. A popular route (that I might add in in a later revision) is to use Lifetap Support, converting its cost entirely to life. I'm personally not as much of a fan of it (as it means you're spending 200+ life per trap thrown) but that could be the easiest solution for that.

"

AnimatedGamer wrote:

Please help me understand something. Doesn't the change to "Ramako, Sun's Light" Ascendancy node get completely negated/contradict with flammability? At max level, its something like -36% fire resistance, so isn't this hard-capped 20% actually worse for the build than just moving and using flammability?

It's a bit more complicated (and I'll admit right now I don't personally like the node that much) but one must remember that not all enemies start with zero resists.

Still yes, for most applications... You're better off just constantly moving around. (after all, it's safer than standing still anyhow) This is why I currently have it picked first:

• It's kinda useful for act bosses; in my own testing I found this being the most "sluggish" part of leveling the build. You could safely just AFK, but they took forever to die.
  
• Later bosses (where you'd want to not stand still) will be better served moving about.

All told, it's not a really great ascendancy for RF. But overall, the rework left it kinda shorted on quantity. It's mostly that Valako is insanely good for it (and Tasalio pretty solid) that are the core here.

"

Iodid wrote:

With the mastery changes I think some small adjustments to the tree might be worth it.
Especially the new '10% more max life with with 6 or more masteries allocated' seems rather juicy. The current tree is already at four, so two more for a fat multiplyer could be worth it. Don't know which other to take to fulfill the condition. Maybe the extra '-5 res with exposure' from the fire cluster or sneaking in a lvl 1 clarity on life for the +1 max res from the aura cluster.

I will likely try to fit the -5 exposure fire mastery in a later revision; I actually personally run it myself, (and IIRC it was actually on a prior version of the build!) just I hadn't been able to get it to work post-rework in a way that wasn't terribly jank.

The life mastery however is bait: note that it reads 10% more Maximum Life if you have at least 6 Life Masteries allocated, (emphasis mine) which means that no, we aren't close: it means you have to allocate all six life masteries... And we aren't eligible for more than 4-5 life masteries.

Hi,

TRhinking on playing RF in Hardcore , whats pro/cons of Chieftain over Jugg or Inquis? Which is better for Hardcore and why

Ty

"

ACGIFT wrote:

The life mastery however is bait: note that it reads 10% more Maximum Life if you have at least 6 Life Masteries allocated, (emphasis mine) which means that no, we aren't close: it means you have to allocate all six life masteries... And we aren't eligible for more than 4-5 life masteries.

I see, that's indeed quite the bait. No wonder it's not working on my other build, somehow I completely missed that small detail.

Four life masteries would be readily available, but the other two would require some bigger changes. One more could be reached through the Scion cluser maybe grabbing Iron Will on the way. For the last one Cannibalistic Rite would be closer but mostly useless, Quick Recovery needs one more point but would also have value.
Not sure if the benefits '10% more' would justify the investment.

"

Camaron wrote:

Hi,

TRhinking on playing RF in Hardcore , whats pro/cons of Chieftain over Jugg or Inquis? Which is better for Hardcore and why

Ty

Inquisitor is almost purely in on stacking offense, with none of the defensive options that either Chieftain or Juggernaut could offer; that's the big reason why they're far less popular in HC Ancestor than SC Ancestor right now.

As far as Chief vs. Jugg, I'd say it boils down to how much investment you have. While ultimately Juggernaut could scale higher, it will require a lot of very expensive gear to do so. For instance, it won't be able to reach 90 fire/cold/lightning resist until you have a Melding and all the right gear to go with it; generally this means Aegis + perfect Brass Dome, a level 23 Purity of Ice w/20% aura effect, and +3 from the passive tree... Plus another 70 points in each resist.

By contrast, you can reach 3x90 almost trivially with this, since you don't need to counter the 4+ points of loss you'd get from Melding. You can actually be fine with sub-par rolls. For instance, with 6 points from Purity of Fire and 5 from the tree, you can actually use a 4-point Brass Dome + Aegis instead, which would never fly with a Jugg.

So in short... If you had a few hundred divines in league already, I might go for a Juggernaut to absolutely max out survivability, but if you're starting a league, I'd definitely go for Chieftain.