[3.15] Elemental Hit Ballista Totem Hiero | Budget Friendly | League Start to Endgame

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cfaftw wrote:

Hi, thanks for the detailed guide! I play mainly SSF, and did an EA totems Hiero during Heist. But I am interested in trying elemental hit instead next league.

How would you compare EA vs Ele hit? Looking at it, it seems like EA is simply easier to build due to zero required uniques. But I have no idea how scaling compares between the two. Do you think it would be easy to transition from EA to Ele hit after finding the jewels?

Hi there, unfortunately I have not played EA before so I can't really tell you the difference between their scaling.

As for Transition, base on looking at EA Hieros(SSF) on poe.ninja

Skill Tree
Only the path towards Ancestral Bond + Avatar of Fire is shared and similar to Ele Hit. The rest will have to be respeced so that will be quite a number of regret orbs needed.

Ascendancy
Ascendancy wise it's mostly similar, some(Both builds) take Divine Guidance some not, I personally don't take Divine Guidance because its "Mini Mind Over Matter" effect will make us unable to cast our totems when we stand on DOT grounds(Fire/Poison Puddles, etc) Especially real bad when in deeper delves, tight narrow areas and unable cast our totems!

Gear
Seems like the common gears between them are Quill Rain, Skirmish, Kaom's Heart and Rain of Splinters. The rest seems to be different(Didn't check the rares)

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cfaftw wrote:

What are your thoughts on using a 6L +3 bow (super easy to fossil craft) instead of Frostferno? Fated uniques are very difficult to get without trade.

I would be basing on a 6L +3, 1.5 Speed Bow(i.e. Thicket Bow family) with 19% Attack Speed and 38% Crit Strike Chance(These 2 affixes gives the most DPS on a Bow)

On the low end i.e. "Budget Tier level", the bow is better in terms of DPS compared to an uncorrupted Frostferno, but later on, once you get to mid/top tier gears and higher levels, it falls behind an uncorrupted Frostferno by a bit(Say around 15% POB DPS).

That's how the bow stands depending on your equipment status.

Well, its SSF not much choice, but with the much lower DPS without Frostferno, since I am comparing it to a non corrupted one, maybe look at EA Ballista Totem to see if that works better with the equipments you have access to.

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Vennto wrote:

Hey there. Too bad my 3.13 League Start practise is done and I know what I am going with (if it survives patch notes that is xD), but I just wanted to quickly congratulate on the insanely well structured guide. For a first introduction into the guide there is literally no question left open and it was fun to read, even while not considering running it. Good job!

Hello! reading your post makes my day. Thank you so so much!

I wish you have a great and smooth league start with the build you have chosen! :)

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esseyekay wrote:

Superbly written guide, Vei, and much thanks to Ahewaz for the vids. I did look at this build for Heist but ended up going poison BV assassin (no regrets, lots of fun!) but will definitely be following this for 3.13 assuming no major nerfs.

Never played totems before but like the play style from Ahewaz's vids. I know this isn't a proper focussed delve build but how does it perform in delve as it's a part of POE I quite enjoy.

Thanks a lot!

And I will just quote my personal experience with the build for Delve. So far I manage to reach Depth 473 with this build, using "Top Tier Gears", with 6.6k Max Life. I had a hard time(died many times and gave up didn't bother to go around looking for a safer path down, none visible within the area) breaking to Depth 474 because the path to the next node is a triple damage affix one lol. This was like in 3.10 iirc

After 3.11 Harvest, which I made a set of perfect gears for this build during the league, I tried again, but this time with my Scion version of this build which is much much stronger defensive wise compared to Hiero, 8k Life and Totem Leech 1% Life to me, and managed to do it on 2nd try. Went to 500 easy no deaths(only did 1 or lesser damage affix paths) and stopped there.

From my experience, I think if we are patient and play very carefully, keep chugging potions to keep life full as often as we can(Forbidden Taste is god send when we get those big hits), and only go for 1 or lesser Damage affix paths, 500+ is definitely doable(Gonna be hard!) with Hiero with top tier gears.

Thanks for detailing the differences with Deadeye, it's pretty clear cut.

Looking forward to play this in 3.13 !

Thanks for the info Vei, as long as it can run down to the 400-ish level that's fine for me. Looking forward to trying this out. Roll on the 15th!

I'm thinking about league starting this build for 3.13. I'm currently up in their air between this, balista totems, and FP totems.

The one thing I really like about this build is you say it scales well with gear investment and my league start is usually the only character I play per league.

How does this build stack up against balista or FP in terms of bossing and survivability?

Also the only thing really concerning me about this build is the availability of frostferno in the first few days of the league. How long does it take for them to start showing up on trade at reasonable prices and how hard is it to progress this build without it?

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MikeyTwoGuns wrote:

How does this build stack up against balista or FP in terms of bossing and survivability?

I haven't play much other builds outside of this so I am afraid I can't really give any comments on this.

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MikeyTwoGuns wrote:

how hard is it to progress this build without it?

I'll answer this question first.

I have written a Note for Early League Rushers under "10. Budget Equipment Details"(Quoted below) which I recommend anyone rushing to maps in Day 1-3 to do unless you are confident to get a Frostferno.

Note for Early League Rushers


Tabula Rasa can be farmed by farming the Humility Divination Card at The Blood Aqueduct at Act 9


I don't really recommend continuing with Holy Flame Totems(HFT) after 60 as their range is limited and also, at level 60 you will already have 2 more Ballistas from the Passive Tree(Through Watchtower and Panopticon). Around 60 is the time Ballista Totem start to shine while HFT, although still fine, will start to show a bit of "age".

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MikeyTwoGuns wrote:

Also the only thing really concerning me about this build is the availability of frostferno in the first few days of the league. How long does it take for them to start showing up on trade at reasonable prices

The key to Frostferno pricings and accessibility is pretty dependant on the starting tier of Estuary Map(The map where Frostferno is created). We will know this before league start as GGG usually releases a list of the Starting Tier each Map so from there we can see how rare Frostferno will be.

In the leagues I played this build, 3.7, 3.9, 3.10 and 3.11, all except one had Estuary Starting Tier on White/Yellow maps and I got my Frostferno between 20-25c on around the 3rd day... And to be honest I was pretty fussy and only wanted to buy 28%+ Resist ones XD. I recall there were cheaper low rolled resist ones at like 15c, 18c... so yup lol

One league, 3.11 Harvest had Estuary on Tier 14, that made Frostferno pretty rare and costly. I think I was lucky to catch a cheap one from a guy who sold 2 at 20c each on Day 4.

In case you are not aware, there's this website poe.antiquary where you can get an idea of the pricing history of Frostferno for the past leagues.

https://poe-antiquary.xyz/Harvest/Armour/Frostferno/4884



As you can see from the previous answer, Tabula Rasa can be used as an inbetween transition so everything is pretty covered from Start until we convert into Elemental Hit Frostferno. :)

this is one of the most detailed and comprehensive guides i've ever seen.
big kudos to you and thank you for all the hard work

this is in my top 3 for the next league start
good luck everyone

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poe_shniggies wrote:

this is one of the most detailed and comprehensive guides i've ever seen.
big kudos to you and thank you for all the hard work

this is in my top 3 for the next league start
good luck everyone

Thank you so much!

Good luck to you too :)

Can I league start with this in 3.13? Getting tired of playing "league starters" which costs "nothing to start" and gets to a point where red maps can only be reached if you invest a lot (50-100ex) in a build. I'm a fairly new player and still learning the game. So atm I can manage to make somewhere between 10-15 ex per league at max. Will that be good enough to get this build to do all content? I wanted to play a totem which can do all endgame bosses plus simulacrum, legion, 100% delirium etc. So can I league start with this or is it better as a second build?

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Shad0wT3mplar wrote:

So atm I can manage to make somewhere between 10-15 ex per league at max. Will that be good enough to get this build to do all content? I wanted to play a totem which can do all endgame bosses plus simulacrum, legion, 100% delirium etc.

I would just say that 10-15 Ex does not let you do T16 100% Delirium Maps. That's one of the hardest content in the game. Doable? One can try. Pleasant Experience? Definitely not

But doing like 90% of contents in the game? Definitely doable if following the guide. Some players like to change things and end up with unpleasant experiences though.

Example: Two players in the past mentioned(Different posts) they keep on dying when doing T15-16 maps. I checked their profile and found that one had 4.7k life and the other 4.8k life. Basically they skipped many of the life passives in the Passive Tree and don't have much Life on their equipment, both which are mentioned and suggested in the guide. Suggested them to aim for at least 5.5k life which is what one will have following the guide, and after that no more issues.

And I also would like to point out that bosses(Sirus, Uber Elder, etc) are more about knowing their Mechanics and playing around them rather than about having good gears.

Just want to be honest here and set realistic expectations. This build might be budget friendly but for the hardest contents in the game, definitely still need more investment.

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Shad0wT3mplar wrote:

Can I league start with this in 3.13?

Of course, assuming it doesn't get nerfed.

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Shad0wT3mplar wrote:

league start with this or is it better as a second build?

This is a league start build since the strength of this build comes from the low investment required to do low to high tier Red Maps plus this build has a leveling guide that shows how to get there from Level 1.

The above will give us a good foundation to earn more currencies to play other builds(If we want) or invest back into the build if we feel like it, which makes it a good league start build.

So, since your build really intrigued me I started playing around a bit with it and will keep it as an alternative starter if my planned build gets hit (which I don´t think since it is off-meta anyway but you´ll never know...).

In terms of the leveling though I kind of have a bad experience. Not that it doesn´t work, it is just kind of slow. Let me point out though: My aim is to reach BA around 3.30 - 3.45 and maps after max 4.30 hours. So yeah, high demand in terms of speed.

I saw that templar has access to frost bomb, OOS so I was thinking of a typical Witch-Setup for Racing A1/A2 with stormblast mine. The missing smoke mine I would buy from a friend, onslaught is available so that´s fine. In terms of the passive tree I would travel up from retribution to arcanist´s dominion into lightning walker, grabbing light of divinity and divine judgement before I keep travelling your typical path which should push the dmg quicker.

Another problem with this is though we have no access to swift assembly support or trap and mine damage support, leading me in a kind of weird place. Do you have any suggestions how to get this build faster? Maps after 1-3 days are really no option, I am normally half done with my atlas at that time.