[No longer updated] Pizza Sticks: Flameblast Totem Hierophant
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How do you run Anger, Blasphemy + Curse and MOM without running out of mana whenever you take damage?
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" That would be ideal, I'm curious myself, I'm trying it now but no MoM yet. Another thing: is it me or daggers cannot roll cast speed in Beta? That would be quite important and probably force us to use a wand? Shavronne wrapped Kaom's waist,
with her gilded purple boots. "You want my sockets?" | |
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3.0 Update
A fair amount of the balance changes in 3.0 affected this build. Here's the short version.
This guide has been extensively updated for 3.0. Large sections have been rewritten. Good luck in the new world of 3.0! -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  CONTENTS 1. Build Concept 2. Why Play the Build (Pros and Cons) 3. Ascendancy Choice and Skill Trees 4. Gearing Recommendations 5. Gems 6. Levelling Tips 7. Playstyle 8. Stats 9. Videos 1. BUILD CONCEPT Flameblast charges up while you channel it, increasing in damage and AoE the longer you hold it before releasing. Traditional Flameblast builds have struggled with the awkwardness of standing still for such a long period of time. This build does away with that by having totems do it for us, letting us run around at our leisure while our totems blow up the whole screen. Flameblast also faces issues with reflect due to its high damage per hit. Again, totems deal with this by tanking the reflected damage for us. This also allows us to go crit with no fear. Totems pretty much solve all of Flameblast's problems. It's a match made in heaven. 2. WHY PLAY THE BUILD? (PROS AND CONS) Pros:
Cons:
3. ASCENDANCY CHOICE AND SKILL TREES Trees This is just the final skill tree at ~level 90. For advice on what to prioritise while levelling, see section 6: "Levelling Tips". Recommended Skill Tree Path of Building Import Bandits: Kill all (or help Kraityn if you really want the movement speed). BUILD VARIANT — If you prefer a more offensive version sacrificing a bit of life and totem QoL, you can follow this tree instead. In the past, there was a fair bit of back and forth over whether Inquisitor, Elementalist or Hierophant was the best ascendancy choice. With 3.0's changes to ignite damage, it has become pretty simple. Ignite-based elementalist versions have entirely ceased to function, and Hierophant no longer has sufficient damage to compete (in testing, one Inquisitor totem dealt the same damage as four Hierophant totems). This leaves Inquisitor as pretty much the only choice, as it hardly changed at all. BUILD VARIANT — Inevitable Judgement is a guaranteed pickup from your Inquisitor nodes. However, whether you go for Pious Path or pick up Instruments of Virtue + Augury of Penitence is up to you. Pious Path provides massive amounts of tankiness against bosses or in other cases where you're standing still. Instruments + Augury provides more damage and a huge attack speed bonus for your movement skill. I would advise going Pious if you're focusing on Shaper, and using your own preference otherwise. BUILD VARIANT — That all said, if you want something spicy in another class check out this Elementalist version by kudrya. Defenses With the huge nerf to energy shield in 3.0, that version of the build has become a bit sketchy. You can still go for it and achieve 8k+ ES if you have a very high budget, but I don't recommend it (and at that point I'm going to assume you know how to build) so I'm not going to cover that in this guide. The best form of defense we currently have access to is Mind over Matter. This gives us a huge amount of extra effective life for very little investment - about 8 points on the tree. The build has very low mana costs, which makes the potential risk of being caught out of mana very low. You can also fairly easily get around 2000 unreserved mana to provide a hefty barrier even against scary bosses. 4. GEARING RECOMMENDATIONS
Sample gear
In-depth gear discussion
Weapons
Three main options. The first is to dual-wield daggers, or use a dagger and a sceptre. This gives us access to Whirling Blades and plenty of attack speed and crit. Howevever, daggers with cast speed are very hard to get. Most important mods: Spell damage Increased critical strike chance for spells Cast speed Desirable mods: Added damage to spells (preferably fire) Global critical strike multiplier Increased attack speed The second option is to use a dagger or sceptre with a shield, using Shield Charge for mobility instead of Whirling Blades (or whichever if you use a dagger). This is particularly attractive if you can get a shield with cast speed and spell crit. Tukohama's Fortress used to be a very attractive option for this build, but with MoM buffs and Blood Magic not triggering Arcane Surge, it is no longer worthwhile. Finally, you can use wand and shield or dual wield wands, and use Lightning Warp to get around or just run. I don't recommend it though. Possible unique options (though neither are very good): Armour This is where a couple of uniques can come in, specifically: Both of these are very strong with Mind over Matter. I would recommend using them if you have the budget to support them, but they are definitely not hugely important. Otherwise, nothing special. Life and resists, mana where possible, and movement speed is nice on boots (particularly if you use Shield Charge). Possible unique options (none are remotely required): Jewelry and Accessories Rings: Cast speed, life, mana regeneration, mana, resists. Amulet: Cast speed, crit chance, crit multi, life, mana regen. Belt: Life, resists. Possible unique options: none really. Flasks As with almost all life builds, one or two Seething Divine Life Flasks are basically mandatory. They will save you from 90% of sticky situations. As a MoM build, a solid mana flask is also strongly advisable to avoid running out of mana and getting stuck in sticky situations, and because mana is basically your second life pool. Beyond that, a Silver Flask is highly recommended for attack and cast speed, a Quicksilver Flask is pretty much required unless you use Whirling Blades, and a Diamond Flask makes our crits very consistent. Possible unique options: Jewels Unlike most crit builds (which tend to want to pick up as much crit multi as possible on jewels), I recommend trying to get as much cast speed as possible (unless you are doing boss runs, in which case by all means stack crit multi for the best DPS possible). Your blasts do enough damage already, so the extreme QoL provided by more cast speed is generally better. Attack speed for Whirling Blades and life are also highly desirable. Other than those, pick up damage stats of your choice. Possible unique options: 5. GEMS Flameblast - Spell Totem - Faster Casting - Increased Area of Effect - Increased Critical Strikes - Elemental Focus  Flameblast - Spell Totem - Controlled Destruction - Concentrated Effect - Increased Critical Strikes - Elemental Focus Primary damage setup. Gems are listed in order of importance, e.g. drop Elemental Focus if you only have a 5L. Both Increased AoE and Faster Casting make it easier to hit mobile bosses, so don't swap off them unless your totems can consistently hit the boss you're facing without them. Anger - Clarity - Summon Lightning Golem Auras and buffs. Turn off Anger if you need a larger mana buffer for scary situations. It's only about 12% more damage. Whirling Blades/Shield Charge - Faster Attacks - Fortify Primary movement. Which one you use is partly down to your gear of course, but also personal preference. Shield Charge likely will be a bit faster for you. Flame Dash - Faster Casting Something to get over walls. Can use Lightning Warp - Less Duration - Fasting Casting if preferred. Orb of Storms - Power Charge on Critical Amazing power charge generation due to Orb of Storms' crit mechanics. Feel free to add extra support gems, such as Increased Critical Strikes, Increased Duration and/or a low level Arcane Surge. Temporal Chains - Arcane Surge - Increased Duration - Increased Area of Effect This build used to use Orb of Storms to curse on hit, but with the introduction of Arcane Surge it's a lot better to manually cast your curse now. Curses have a nice combination of high mana cost and low cast time, meaning that with this setup you can trigger level 20 Arcane Surge in two casts, or about 0.4 seconds. Feel free to swap curse to whatever you like (e.g. Enfeeble, Assassin's Mark)! There are some leftover slots here. Fill them with whatever takes your fancy (e.g. CwDT Immortal Call, Vaal Haste). No other gems are particularly important to this build. 6. LEVELLING TIPS
Spoiler
Levels 1-11: Level with Frostbolt and Flame Totem. Get the Quicksilver Flask from killing Hailrake (heck, use a second character and get two if you don't have any lying around already). Pick up Clarity and Flame Dash after Brutus.
Levels 12-28: Grab Firestorm and use that and Flame Totem. Grab Mind over Matter and its subsequent nodes for endless mana and tankiness. Head towards Ancestral Bond but don't take it. 31-point tree. Level 28-45ish: You can start using Flameblast totems right from level 28. You can also continue with Firestorm + Flame Totem or use Bladefall (self-cast or totems). Levelling should be pretty breezy from here on. Pick up Ancestral Bond if you're going totems now and head into Witch. 59-point tree. Level 46-65: Start picking up a little crit. Head into the life wheel. Also consider doing normal and cruel Labyrinth. 89-point tree. Level 66+: Farm up in [whatever the farming zone in 3.0 is?], get your endgame gear rolling, pick up lots more crit, finish up your ascendancy. Pick up jewel sockets as you get the jewels for them. Go nuts! Final tree. Ascendancy priorities: Normal: Righteous Providence Cruel: Inevitable Judgement Merciless: Instruments of Virtue or Sanctify Endgame: Augury of Penitance or Pious Path 7. PLAYSTYLE This is just a few general tips on how to play the build. To get a better impression of what it feels like overall, head to the videos section.
8. STATS Please check out the Path of Building import for this build to see representative stats. If you don't yet use Path of Building, you should! You can find more information and a download link here. As a taster, single target with decent gear (per totem):  and pack clear:  9. VIDEOS Many excellent videos courtesy of blajo (linked with permission). These videos were recorded on patch 2.5 but the gameplay and damage are pretty much unchanged since then. Shaper Run Uber Atziri Run Phoenix Run Minotaur Run Hydra Run Chimera Run Chayula's Domain Run Normal Atziri Run Uber Lab Run Thanks for reading, and I hope this guide has been useful to you! Have you done something awesome with [url=http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Sire_of_Shards]Sire of Shards[/url]? PM me and tell me all about it! Last edited by viperesque on Jul 31, 2017, 7:28:01 AM
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" Wouldn't advise playing the ES version without an enormous budget, regardless of league. MoM version looks very hardcore viable on paper though, especially if you go a slightly more defensive tree than the one in the Pastebin above (e.g. this). " Because the socket colours are convenient, and ES is more useful than armour or evasion even though none of them are that good for us. " You certainly can use Carcass Jack. In the full guide I'll go through a whole heap of options for unique items. That said, I don't think the build wants more damage over more survivability. The resistances on Carcass Jack don't matter because it's easy to cap resistances with our other gear. Cloak gives us an extra 10% damage to mana, and increases our total mana regen by about 50%, which is huge sustainability. Really nice defensive option. " You can't. Reserving all your mana with MoM is always going to be a bad idea. Hell, in the current version it's going to be a good idea to deactivate Anger sometimes for the extra buffer. " Daggers have never been able to roll cast speed. You need to use an Essence of Misery to get it. The alternative is a sceptre though, not a wand. You really want Shield Charge access unless a wand-usable movement skill comes out. Have you done something awesome with [url=http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Sire_of_Shards]Sire of Shards[/url]? PM me and tell me all about it! Last edited by viperesque on Jul 23, 2017, 7:00:04 PM
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" Yup, got it. Shield charge is absolutely fantastic, I'd rather stick with a scepter in this case. Some interesting (and cheap) unique options come to mind, like Axiom Perpetuum or Singularity. (you might have mentioned them earlier already, apologies, I haven't read the whole 180+ pages yet :) Shavronne wrapped Kaom's waist,
with her gilded purple boots. "You want my sockets?" | |
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Trying following this guide but have some questions.
Main question is: why we taking so many crit nodes and then using Controlled Destruction stomping crit chance down? Maybe would be better to use Elemental Focus or Fire Penetration or crit multi support? Why we dont take starting templar manareg node and 5% life node beside it?.. Why we dont take asassin's area fat crit nodes? Why we dont take totem ele resist node? Can be better to craft one mace and one dagger with Essence of Misery than just two daggers? | |
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I would like to also adress the question why Pious Path is not considered any more. A while ago it was said that it will be OP with this build.
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" The loss of crit from CD is tiny. It's easy to still crit cap with it. In 2.6 ignites are a large portion of the build's damage so Ele Focus is no good. In 3.0 ignite damage is negligible so Ele Focus would be a bit better than CD, except that Inquisitor's crit multi against burning enemies means CD is still very slightly more DPS. Fire Pen is useless because we ignore resistances (including negative ones). Crit Multi gives about half the damage increase of CD or Ele Focus. " Because there aren't enough skill points to take them. " In 2.6 yes. In 3.0 it won't be better, but it's still absolutely fine. " It absolutely is considered. I personally dislike it because I hate trying to stand on the consecrated ground, but I will give it equal weight in the 3.0 version of the guide. Please don't take that PoB link as the one and only possible version of the build. It can't display all the possible variety. Have you done something awesome with [url=http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Sire_of_Shards]Sire of Shards[/url]? PM me and tell me all about it! Last edited by viperesque on Jul 24, 2017, 5:14:59 AM
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" Thank you for quick response. I was still investigating the build itself and there is one more question from me - the usage of The Three Dragons is significantly increasing the damaga output, at least on paper. Will you consider also this item ? | |
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I do thank you for writing this guide and I do plan to use it again come 3.0 but RiP to my post and question getting ignored. I found and started this build on the two week race and having trouble going higher tier maps. Currently able to clear up to tier 8 when things start getting pretty hard. If you have the time I would greatly appreciate you looking at my last post from a few days ago. I did make some changes with my gear and spent most of the currency I had but still have a little over one ex to spend to further improve and get to higher tier maps. Still just under a week left in the race and will be farming my butt off. I would like to get to the higher tier maps as possible.
Again, Thank you for taking to write this guide! Very helpful especially for beginners! Last edited by Dustin158 on Jul 24, 2017, 5:51:11 PM
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