How far off am I? - Fresh Char and style attempt

Throughout my time(s) playing PoE, I've pretty much stuck to Melee or Ranged chars, and have only flirted with spellcasting to a very minor degree. (I played Arc WAY back right after release) I've also, never bothered much with the Templar, mainly because I just have never cared for the character design (not the tree, the model / voice), deleting most of them pretty early on.


Well, I took a break from my Red Map Slog to get to Shaper, and decided I'd give a Good, Honest effort at building a Templar, and a spellcaster.

I went with Magma Orb, thinking that I could use most of what I've learned from playing Molten Strike as often as I have over the years to some effect with the build. I went with inquisitor, purely because it's what I felt most comfortable with as far as playstyles in the ascendancies. I killed Kitava, and started mapping, and I'm just curious what people thought about my char? Did I end up with a terrible build? Did I fail hard along the way?

Here is what I've got:

Level 71
HP: 5009
Passive Tree

Gear:


Most of the gear is just "stuff" I had sitting in my stash, or found along the way. I will say, despite being pretty mediocre, the Sceptre is the best essence "craft" I've ever had (just hit it with an essence), and the shield dropped in my first Atzoatl.

So far, the only thing that I've learned is that Spells are vastly more expensive to cast than attacks, and I may need to look in to investing more heavily in mana regen if I want to end up running an Aura to go with the Herald, or just sucking it up, and buying a Poacher's Mark ring.

Other than that, I'm into mapping, and for the gear that I have, that's going pretty well, I'm just curious if my research into the supports in PoB, and my time spent researching came out with a feasible build.

If it's trash, I'm sorry for wasting your time.
If you have tips that aren't "That's trash, you should spend 100 regrets to do it like this", I'd love to hear them.

It was actually fairly refreshing to go at this from a different perspective, and try my hand at a from scratch, self cast build.

Spent some time last night re-working some of my gear. Pretty happy with the boost in HP, and DPS. Wish that the defenses were better on some of the pieces, but I'm sure it will come together.

Again, still working off the ideas that I had put together based on using Molten Strike.



I was quite surprised that in PoB (and testing) that Doryani's Catalyst, even at 100% Elemental Damage is a DPS decrease over the sceptre that I currently have. I figured that the Catalyst would end up being my go to end game weapon.

Turns out, I guess I will be looking for something else. The only unique that is showing as a DPS increase in PoB is a Martyr of Innocence Staff. It does trade off 300 HP, and a significant amount of resists, meaning it will be a while before I could equip it, but it is close to a 22K DPS increase.