[Retired Thread] Wallach's Hierophant Holy Flame Totems (Old)

nvm, im stupid xD

Hi there, I just wanted to thank you for this very detailed, yet easy to follow build guide. I started playing the game this league on the PS4, and was looking for a good starter for 3.7.

The prices for just about anything is very high on the PlayStation, so I wanted to find a build that was effective, fun to play and not "in fashion" as I expect gear for anything popular,such as melee builds going through the roof.

I've done a "test run" over the last couple of days, and even being a casual newb I'm able to progress rapidly and without any big issues.

I have one question; I linked Molten Shell to CWDT together with Immortal Call, just as an added layer of defence. Is there any reason I should refrain from doing this?

Thanks again for a very new player friendly guide.

Doesn't the extra totem with Soul Mantle outweigh the increased crit of the shaped chest? Combined with the fact that the Holy Flame Totems' consecrated ground makes you immune to curses, doesn't it become an extremely good, if not best in slot, item? With less focus on the need for crit in the tree, it would be possible to focus more heavily on cast speed and toughness.

I haven't run the numbers yet, but I wanted to get your opinion on it regardless of how the numbers turn out.

Thanks!

infused channeling no longer works on totems.

guess its still worth for the 39% more ?

disregard that.. could of sworn it worked on totems before

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OppneusKorsuss wrote:

Hi there, I just wanted to thank you for this very detailed, yet easy to follow build guide. I started playing the game this league on the PS4, and was looking for a good starter for 3.7.

The prices for just about anything is very high on the PlayStation, so I wanted to find a build that was effective, fun to play and not "in fashion" as I expect gear for anything popular,such as melee builds going through the roof.

I've done a "test run" over the last couple of days, and even being a casual newb I'm able to progress rapidly and without any big issues.

I have one question; I linked Molten Shell to CWDT together with Immortal Call, just as an added layer of defence. Is there any reason I should refrain from doing this?

Thanks again for a very new player friendly guide.

Thanks, glad to hear it is helping you get started.

Regarding Molten Shell and Immortal Call - this is fine right now in 3.6, however in 3.7 they are changing how both of these skills work and categorizing them under a new "Guard" category of skills. One of the new elements these Guard skills share is that when one of them goes on cooldown, it will prevent any other Guard skills from being used until that cooldown ends; that means in 3.7 only one of those skills would trigger from CWDT, and the cooldown would prevent the other from triggering altogether and make it a waste.

Molten Shell will actually scale its' damage shield based off your Armor in 3.7, which means of the two skills, Molten Shell will be much harder for this build to utilize and would be skill I drop if you continue to try this build in Legion.

"

zathrath03 wrote:

Doesn't the extra totem with Soul Mantle outweigh the increased crit of the shaped chest? Combined with the fact that the Holy Flame Totems' consecrated ground makes you immune to curses, doesn't it become an extremely good, if not best in slot, item? With less focus on the need for crit in the tree, it would be possible to focus more heavily on cast speed and toughness.

I haven't run the numbers yet, but I wanted to get your opinion on it regardless of how the numbers turn out.

Thanks!

So, I've actually tried to build a setup in Path of Building a couple times to see if Soul Mantle has any great use for this build and I can never really seem to make it worthwhile. There's a number of factors involved with Soul Mantle that you have to build around to make use of and I think collectively they wind up siphoning the efficiency out of the item.

For one, the (up to) +1.5% Spell Critical Chance on a Shaper chest is actually just deceptively powerful. We are already a build that doesn't have amazing access to critical strike chance (compared to a lot of builds that easily hit 90%+ effective crit when under a Diamond Flask) so this really helps improve the value of our Critical Strike Multiplier. I talk a little bit more about this very aspect in the video guide actually since it's a question I have gotten before, but in my Path of Building example gear just that 1.45% Spell Critical Chance on my current chest is worth about 60k DPS (or ~12.5% increased total build damage). So just out of the gate it is already covering almost half the abstract value the +1 maximum Totems mod would grant (going from 4 to 5 totems would give us 25% more DPS in theory).

However actually making use of that chest would require us to abandon both of our ring slots for Kikazaru rings to prevent the self-inflicted curses from being too devastating, so immediately we're going to have a big problem to solve since we are getting so much extra damage from those slots currently (allowing us to run both Herald of Ash and Zealotry without mana cost). I could potentially afford to run just Herald of Ash and eat the mana cost or something, but I certainly wouldn't be able to find a way to also run Zealotry (which reserves 50%) and dropping Zealotry is about a ~16% total DPS loss for this build. So that would be another big damage loss the +1 maximum Totem would have to offset and at this point it's already either breaking even or losing when we also lose the Spell Critical Chance.

When you also consider all the other affixes we get on a rare Shaper chest that the Soul Mantle doesn't provide, I think even that far into the comparison it looks like a hard chest piece to justify. You can also make a gain in opportunity cost by exchanging a rare Jewel for a Self-Flagellation jewel which increases your damage by an additive 15-20% per Curse effect on you, but this is not actually a big DPS increase over the jewel you are replacing it with, and can be a little more annoying to try and utilize with Holy Flame Totem since every time you touch the Consecrated Ground made by your totems, it will wipe all curses from your character.

Ultimately, I think Soul Mantle just is too hard for me to justify. Now, if you are playing a build that utilizes a Spell Totem support (like Arc or Purifying Flame totems), you immediately have a much improved opportunity cost because you are essentially getting a "free" 7th gem link from the level 20 Spell Totem affix on the chest. Since Holy Flame Totem can't make any use of that and gets to "free" damage out of it, I think this is probably what kills the opportunity cost of using it altogether for the skill.

"

basicen wrote:

infused channeling no longer works on totems.

guess its still worth for the 39% more ?

disregard that.. could of sworn it worked on totems before

Infused Channeling is kind of a confusing gem due to how the tooltip is put together, but the 39% more damage multiplier does indeed work with Totem skills (so long as that Totem skill is also a Channeling skill, which Holy Flame Totem is).

Infused Channeling as a gem essentially does a few things:

* It grants supported Channeling skills 39% more damage
* It grants the caster 8% less damage from the same damage types the supported Channeling skill deals (in our case, Fire and Physical) while you are actively channeling that skills
* It grants the caster the Infusion buff whenever you activate the supported Channeling skill for at least 0.6 seconds

The first two bonuses of the gem are not part of the Infusion buff, and so our Totem does benefit from them at all times (you'll see your Totems get a spherical blue shield while they fire, which is the 8% less damage taken shield Infused Channeling grants). For some reason, they decided that Totems should not get the Infusion buff (I guess just to make handcasting more attractive) so we don't get the additional 10% more damage multiplier it offers.

When you're looking at Support gems for Totem skills, you can always check the green description text on the gem's tooltip - if a Support gem does not work with totems in any regard, it will say "Cannot support skills used by Totems" at the end of that description. You can see that for example in the updated Bane gem they teased yesterday with the other updated Legion gems (far left, third row down). If it doesn't say so in that description, the support gem should work with Totems.

Hope that helps understand how Infused Channeling works.

heh, i'd probably enjoy watching your stream but it is going to be a choice of watching the stream or playing for me, my internet and laptop can only handle 1 of the 2 things when 1 of the options is PoE.

I'm reading reddit threads right now about people making crap loads of currency in the early days of league and feeling slightly discouraged that very likely i am not going to get any of that. I've played over 200 hours since i started last month (based on /played, though that likely includes a fair number of hours browsing the trade sites and PoB and research while logged in) and then there is all the reddit browsing done while not logged in.

But learning is learning, i am having fun and hopefully i can fix a lot of the issues i had with my last character with a fresh start and some increased knowledge. I was (barely) beating the guardians in synthesis with a HFT chieftain but the shaper took me out pretty easily because i kept walking into stuff, basically i need more practice avoiding stuff and choosing gear. I was lucky in that a friend from a different game gave me a bunch of good stuff and some currency when i started so that likely helped me get in over my head XD It'll be interesting leveling now with more experience but only a 4 link unless i get lucky.

Anyways, thanks for the guide, i appreciate the work you put in on it :)

"

Scathias wrote:

heh, i'd probably enjoy watching your stream but it is going to be a choice of watching the stream or playing for me, my internet and laptop can only handle 1 of the 2 things when 1 of the options is PoE.

I'm reading reddit threads right now about people making crap loads of currency in the early days of league and feeling slightly discouraged that very likely i am not going to get any of that. I've played over 200 hours since i started last month (based on /played, though that likely includes a fair number of hours browsing the trade sites and PoB and research while logged in) and then there is all the reddit browsing done while not logged in.

But learning is learning, i am having fun and hopefully i can fix a lot of the issues i had with my last character with a fresh start and some increased knowledge. I was (barely) beating the guardians in synthesis with a HFT chieftain but the shaper took me out pretty easily because i kept walking into stuff, basically i need more practice avoiding stuff and choosing gear. I was lucky in that a friend from a different game gave me a bunch of good stuff and some currency when i started so that likely helped me get in over my head XD It'll be interesting leveling now with more experience but only a 4 link unless i get lucky.

Anyways, thanks for the guide, i appreciate the work you put in on it :)

Hey I don't blame you, if I had to choose between playing and streaming I'd play too, haha.

Don't worry about trying to keep up with veteran players; this is one of the more complicated games on the market and is extremely knowledge-driven. You'll accumulate that knowledge over time, as they did.

I'm starting the league a day late and am thinking of using this build for my starter. How will this build be for the Legion mechanic?

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0sync0 wrote:

I'm starting the league a day late and am thinking of using this build for my starter. How will this be for the Legion mechanic?

Not certain yet but it feels fine to me so far. Obviously while you are leveling your totem range is at its worst, so you're not going to impress in terms of area coverage compared to something like Essence Drain + Contagion. I did get the "at least 100 mobs" Legion challenge complete towards the end of story mode, so it isn't terrible either. The nice thing is that the damage scaling stays healthy so when we are getting a lot more projectile speed going we'll also be doing enough damage that I think at least the monoliths will be pretty trivial.

I haven't even seen a video of anyone doing the portals from the splinter keys yet so I can't speak much to whether anything in there would concern me for this build.

skill tree is not updated yet :(