Titan - League Starter/SSF - Beginner Friendly - Fire Build to get to Endgame

hey can you show us your final skills tab please? also why are you getting dex instead of str at the start of your passive tree?

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Fritzloewe#1392 wrote:

hey can you show us your final skills tab please? also why are you getting dex instead of str at the start of your passive tree?

Hey there! I threw my guide over into MaxRoll so you can check out the ideal gem set-up there. https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/tqf5301q

Generally, you only take dexterity or intelligence for Gem Slots or to satisfy some gear/skill requirements. I most likely grabbed dex there to open up some more gem slots.

You should be stacking strength above all else.

How far do you think this build can go?
I'm currently in the early mapping stage and thinking if I invest further into this one or another build. Any advice would be appreciated.

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rirarumpel#3394 wrote:

How far do you think this build can go?
I'm currently in the early mapping stage and thinking if I invest further into this one or another build. Any advice would be appreciated.

Hello! Thanks for the questions!

I don't see it falling off much, honestly. You could invest into Giant's Blood once you get high enough Strength to wield the higher end Maces which would raise the clearing speed on this. Attack speed is the only thing the build is lacking, so gearing it out with that in mind would help immensely. That's basically the only thing I would consider the build needing.

Bosses are a joke to this build, so the big milestones of endgame would be absolutely no problem.

Hi, been loving Your build. But as a person who always tried to do something different - I actually LOVE the weapon swap mechanic and how fun it makes the game.

I am playing a witchhunter now with the aoe on kill and concentration damage bonus.

Idea here is to use grenades (oil + gas + stun) for mapping/clearing, and keeping dps on a boss.

The fun with build crafting begins here:
Radiant grief and blackflame are uniques for the fire DMG and explosions. Bossing with grenades is boring. So I grabbed a perfect strike, which ignite is doubled by the ring and keep it for bossing when they get stunned and weakened by grenades.

Oil grenade, blackflame, buffs from witchhunter ascendency, makes the initial hit 20k at lvl 52, and the ignite does double of it basically.

I have a problem with optimizing the passive skill tree (but a lot of str stacking and dual wielded DMG overlaps), and squeezing even more DMG (possible change to hammer of the gods?)

Feeling like dropping a suggestion?

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Exile_Wizard#4123 wrote:

Hi, been loving Your build. But as a person who always tried to do something different - I actually LOVE the weapon swap mechanic and how fun it makes the game.

I am playing a witchhunter now with the aoe on kill and concentration damage bonus.

Idea here is to use grenades (oil + gas + stun) for mapping/clearing, and keeping dps on a boss.

The fun with build crafting begins here:
Radiant grief and blackflame are uniques for the fire DMG and explosions. Bossing with grenades is boring. So I grabbed a perfect strike, which ignite is doubled by the ring and keep it for bossing when they get stunned and weakened by grenades.

Oil grenade, blackflame, buffs from witchhunter ascendency, makes the initial hit 20k at lvl 52, and the ignite does double of it basically.

I have a problem with optimizing the passive skill tree (but a lot of str stacking and dual wielded DMG overlaps), and squeezing even more DMG (possible change to hammer of the gods?)

Feeling like dropping a suggestion?

I absolutely love that you are trying this route. I really wanted to incorporate oil shot into the build because weapon swapping seemed really bad ass. I'm happy you are making it work with Witchhunter, that ascendancy isn't played by enough people.

I tend to stay away from uniques as I mostly just churn through builds to get to maps and help folks come up with new ideas and potential builds for them to play long term, I have a little bit of build ADHD and my pssion more comes from helping others enjoy the game as much as possible.

Outside of itemization and just focusing on the passive tree

A few questions I ask you that I would also ask myself making the build:
-Do we want to stack more ignite magnitude?

-Are we grabbing all the exposure and fire nodes we can?

-Do we absolutely need Giants Blood?
--Can we switch that out and save points for more ignite and straight melee damage?

-Considering Perfect Strike; do we want to lean more heavily into Melee Nodes? Can we take more advantage of the bonuses to Witchhunter's ascendancies for this?

1. Ignite magnitude. I am on the fence. Blackflame Ring is a big boost for the ignite DMG as it makes it chaos damage and increases the magnitude by 50% by itself. Eyeballing the damage, it does as much as the initial strike in time of me charging another perfect strike.

2. Oil gives a lot of fire exposure, + I am using the spirit buff for ailment exposure and stun threshold. It's more of a question if I want to go the route of "big number, neuron activation" Warframe style.

3. No giants blood. Grabbing all the two handed damage which works for both the mace and crossbow. Dual wielding works amazing for molten blast which I switched out for the gas-oil-stun grenade combo for mapping/clearing.

4.A lot of two handed damage, stun biuldup, fire damage works for both the crossbow and two handed mace which makes it a bit easier.

5.Witchhunter ascendancies seems like a gold mine for perfect strike and infernal cry to be honest. Cooldown recovery rate, 30% increased damage from breaking the constitution bar, 10% chance to explode bodies for 100% of monster HP, culling strike

(hit the boss at 15% of hp, initial strike drops the hp to 10%, ignite basically executes the boss)

6. The main issue I have now is if I want to go for even more dmg

- right now I experimented on the mawgun quarry boss, takes 4 rotations of "grenades, stun, 3 perfect strikes to kill the boss
- hammer of the gods, despite all recovery nodes working for grenades and the skill, doesn't work as good as perfect strike, the guaranteed ignite makes perfect strike deal almost the same dmg as hotg.
- if the grenades rotation can take a DMG loss I can make a gas grenade remove armour and use exploit weakness on a perfect strike, to be tested when doing some higher level stuff, right now I am just nuking everything

7. A small note. Dealing 15k-25k with perfect strike, watching the oil/gas double dip with perfect strike ignite damage for another 30-35 k is a dopamine heaven. On top of that You are just throwing the boss around with stun grenades.

8. The issue I have now is that the perfect strike switchup for now is a more of a novelty change, it doesn't give that much dps increase over another gas grenade rotation, but it just makes bossing/yellow monsters more engaging and fun to deal with.

9. Due to mercenary staring node on passive skills, I have a lot of evasion, which makes it almost impossible to get the perfect strike cancelled due to mobs missing You, and having a decent stun threshold as a backup.

10. Withering presence might be a nice way to increase the ignite DMG from blackflame and would let me save some passive points I guess.

So the main question is if going left on the skill tree for str nodes and mace DMG, or going with the typical crossbow grenades stuff for CDR, easier clearing, evasion. Most of the jewels I use for weapon swap speed, stun buildup, and I pick at random between front loaded DMG or ignite over time DMG.

Maybe I am not really cooking with it, but more like saute'ing lol. It feels so fun and fluid with weapon swap speed and in and out play style for bossing. Just thinking how to keep the build up in preparation for endgame.

The build feels right now like STR build from dark souls with explosive crossbow. Spamm aoe ranged stuff, and instead of backpedaling from few mins that survive you just go ham on them with a big bonk.

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Exile_Wizard#4123 wrote:

1. Ignite magnitude. I am on the fence. Blackflame Ring is a big boost for the ignite DMG as it makes it chaos damage and increases the magnitude by 50% by itself. Eyeballing the damage, it does as much as the initial strike in time of me charging another...

Yeah, I think overall I was having better luck just going full on upfront damage with Perfect strike, especially when getting a proc on Strike Aftershocks. Honestly, I was just enjoying the ignite as a cherry on top, instead of focusing on that damage as the main piece. If we switch to that mentality, it might be worth switching out Blackflame for another ring considering it doesn't really help with our up front hits, especially if we fall into more fire and physical nodes (like % increase Fire damage, Added Phys/Fire damage to attacks, some more life and resist, etc.)

I mention this in the guide, but HotG is basically just flare in my opinion. It's not more useful than Perfect Strike, even when Ancestrally boosted.

Weapon Swap is super cool and unique - I wouldn't want to lose that for the build and just be falling into another cookie cutter grenade build. I think we can make Perfect Strike be the Rare/Boss killer and then Gas Grenades be our map clear.

Gas Grenade also detonates with detonator skills and ignites/burning, I'm not sure if that still happens with BlackFlame as it turns into chaos damage, but it might also be a reason to dip more into the left side for extra fire nodes.

If we keep Blackflame, withering presence might be worth the 30 spirit as it will boost our ignites and also gas grenade. As long as we aren't losing something like Attrition, sounds like a good idea.

Love the Dark SOuls reference (I'm a huge Soulsborne nerd) I can see this being some sort of Evelynns + Dragon Tooth follow up build. Those were monsters in PvP, haha!

Gas grenades work with blackflame. There are some bugs that You have to reequip the helmet and You retain the normal fire visuals.

But that's my worry with blackflame. Trading upfront hits and useful modifiers for chaos damage dot gimmick. From what I played, it helps a lot with some bosses that have a lot of fire resistance. It looks super funny, hitting for measly and weak 2-3 k and then doing 10 k damage over time. But it is like 1/10 encounter.

About the withering presence, my worry is the int requirement.

We have the slots for it, 3 grenade skills, 2 mace skills.

I was experimenting out of the blue with ancestral totem. Dunno why. Remote armor breaker for exploit weakness seemed stupidly fun on paper, and allows for more dps on gas grenade.

I guess it all becomes clear when I get to mapping.

Option 1: gas, stun, oil grenades, armor breaker(totem?), infernal cry, perfect strike. Herald of fire, wind dancer, attrition.
Full fire/physical, str stacking, upfront DMG.

Option 2: gas, stun, oil, infernal cry, perfect strike, herald of fire, wind dancer, attrition, withering presence.
Blackflame/radiant grief, spirit heavy, abusing 0% chaos resist on most bosses.

I guess I just need to play a bit more with two variants, see how to incorporate some of the str/int/stun/evasion/fire/phys and what we can trade off depending on the clearing.

I really want to make the blackflame work for the heck of it. It carries heavy fire resistant bosses alongside the poison dot. The investment needed to fully capitalize on it is a bit off-putting. Might try using this ring on my Infernalist Fire Doggo Chober Chaber + Shield lol

My thought was basically Dark Souls 2 Avelyn/Bleed Dragon Tooth build, good catch hah

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Siup8697#8210 wrote:

Gas grenades work with blackflame. There are some bugs that You have to reequip the helmet and You retain the normal fire visuals.

But that's my worry with blackflame. Trading upfront hits and useful modifiers for chaos damage dot gimmick...

Yep! You have the same headspace as me when I was reading it up. Without fully testing both variants it's a bit hand-wavey.

Fire resist bosses are still a problem even with Oil Shot? Does flammability help with that (probably with Blasphemy for ease of use, speaking of int investment)? I guess we would be investing 30 more spirit for the same thing as Withering Presence, so we would just be getting a ring slot back.

Other thought would be cast on ignite shenanigans, but that was nerfed and I haven't gotten to test it much. Supposedly, it's still fine on bosses, so maybe we could slot in the Flammability into that - or if we want to lean more into chaos for Blackflame, we hit that up with Despair for the extra Chaos Resistance shred.


Tangent Convo: Dark Souls 2 had some of the best mechanics in my opinion (powerstancing!), even if it is typically most hated of the three. I still remember getting completed riddled with bolt and pancaked from the Evelynn+Dragon Tooth combo by Bell Bros in the Bell Tower, very hilarious and fun times!