0.1.0e Demonform Infernalist - Bonestorm /DD - bossing and speedfarming - Arbiter +4 EASY

Pro
- huge single-target damage and stun buildup
- high mobility and speed with Demon dash
- off-meta build means gear is cheaper
- comfortable high density clear with DD
- low requirement for gem links
- no need to find weapon and off-hand
- no need for fourth Ascandancy point
- ~6-10k Energy shield pool
- flexible skill choices: if you don't like Bonestorm/DD, you can just equip other gems, as your gear and passives scale all types of damage

Con
- requires a bit of Demonform managing; damage takes time to ramp up (but DD clears mobs even with low stacks) and you will have to start over at when the stacks get too high
- DD needs corpses to clear mobs, Bonestorm alone is not reliable to kill everything in one cast
- Not many layers of defense to raise our EHP, Hellhound dies fast and takes long to revive, Altered Flesh only benefits from Phys to Chaos conversion
- Less Life Recovery map mode significantly limits our max Demonflame stacks
- Tiny life pool means that any damage that bypasses ES is quite dangerous (but our high Life regen easily counteracts Poison)

Demonform gives us 18% increased damage per stack but also makes us lose 0.5% Max Health per stack. To proolong our Demonform we reduce our maximum health with unique items while stacking flat liferegen stat. As the result, you can comfortably reach 200 Demonflame stacks (3600% increased damage), or even up to 300 stacks if you minmax around this mechanic.

For example, I currently have 300 HP/sec regen, and my Demonform stack degens 1.4 HP/sec. 300/1.4 = 215 stacks until degen overcomes regen and I start losing more and more life.

Uniques

Body - Ghostwrithe, at higher budget corrupted to get up to 61% life converted to ES

Rings - Ming's Heart x2 with Life Modifiers quality, high Chaos damage is very welcome. The Extra Chaos damage is actually quite a significant part of overall damage this build does. At higher budget get it corrupted to 27% max life reduction. Ming's Hearts seem to add their life multiplier instead of applying it separately, so the life reduction is much stronger then it would first seem - exactly what we need for Demonform.

These unique items all reduce or Max HP to enable Demonflame stacking - without them the build won't work well

Rares

all Rares (except gloves) must have a high tier flat Life Regen modifier for this build to work properly!!! They also need to have as little Max Life and Strength. Ideally you would have not max life on your gear at all, but such items could be very expensive, so having just 10-20 max life per piece is acceptable. Even 40 max life could be acceptable if there's a lot of other good stats.

modifiers are listed in order of importance

Amulet - 31+ life regen/second (MUST HAVE), +3 to all (Spell/Physical/Projectile) levels (big damage boost), elemental resistances, max ES, crit chance, increased cast speed (some dps/qol improvement), mana regen, max mana - Annointed with Resilient Soul (or Goring if you are rich)

Helmet and Boots - 19+ life regen/second (MUST HAVE), elemental resistances, Movement speed, high ES, mana

Belt - 25+ life regen/second (MUST HAVE), elemental resistances, mana

Gloves - elemental resistances, high ES, mana

Gloves are later replaced for Maligaro's Virtuosity
- but this would lose you 500-1k ES and a lot of resistances that will have to be compensated through corrupted jewels

Jewels - all jewels are Rubies with Increased Life Regeneration. Other useful stats to look for are Stun Buildup, and Area of Effect. But more likely at higher budget you would want corrupted jewels with elemental resistances. Optionally, you can get some Saphires with max ES, ES recharge and faster start if you feel like you need it.

For a higher budget, you can get From Nothing near Unwavering Stance or Bulwark - this will save a ton of passive points that you can use to get more Crit or ES or Mana regen - whichever you need. But since Diamonds are limited to one, you'd eventually want to upgrade to a +3 Bonestorm Prism of Belief

Socket 5% all res cores in all your equipment

Charm - Thawing charm

1. Demon Form obviously
2. Loyal Hellhound - it will be squishy and mostly dead, but still some damage reductions is better than nothing
3. Altered Flesh - just some Phys damage reduction
4. Beidat's Will - will yield ~10 Spirit OR 2 small nodes for mana and crit

Grinning Immolation could be used in the future if there will be some way to deal with self ignite (the damage of ignite is tiny, but it delays the start of ES recharge, which is quite bad for bossing)

Pyromantic Pact - can enable some powerful cast on crit setups, but we'd need to somehow become fire immune or at least significantly mitigate the self-inflicted fire damage, or somehow restore more ES than we're losing to paying mana costs

current tree is here - https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/4a2770f6

This version doesn't have the maximum possible life regen but gets more ES nodes for survivability and Crit nodes for multiplicative damage

You can unspec some ES/Crit/Mana nodes and path towards Made to Last and pick small Life Regen nodes - with the extra Jewel socket it would give you around 30 additional seconds and max stacks of Demonflame. Similarly, you can pickup more Jewel sockets for more Life regen rubies if you want to minmax Demonflame stacks.

Demonform - Second Wind

Bonestorm









Detonate Dead - Spell Cascade- Spell Echo - Maginified Effect

Detonate Dead deals insanely high damage even if you have almost no Demonflame stacks, and with supports it covers huge areas. But it requires a Corspe to start blasting, which is not always available. Make sure to use a Level 7 Detonate Dead to reduce mana costs.

Bone Cage - Arcane Surge - Ambush - Physical Mastery -

at high stacks or even at low stacks and with Maligaro's, this skill will quickly kill a few mobs to jumpstart Detonate Dead. This is what I'm currently using together with DD for map clear



Persistent Buffs

Arctic Armour - Glaciation (if you want to freeze) or Elemental focus (if you want to kill and leave a corpse for DD)

This kills or freezes mobs that dare to attack us in melee

Grim Feast - Clarity

Every ES build uses this for maps

Lingering Illussion or Combat Frenzy - covered in Power Charge section of the Bonestorm paragraph

Cast on Crit - Comet - only for bosses

Since we don't need other Buffs for bossing, we could use our Spirit for Cast on Crit + Comet, but this would be very taxing on our mana, so it's better to equip Lifetap on Bonestorm for this version. Good damage supports are Concentrated Effect, Spell Echo, Unleash, Spell Cascade.

Cast on Crit can also be used in other ways, like casting Curses, Essence Drain, some Lightning spells to apply shock and so on.

I recommend leveling and early mapping as a minion build; right now it's very strong and respeccing costs almost nothing. Switch to this build once you have Ghostwrithe, Ming's x2, rare helmet, amulet, belt and boots with max tier health regen affix and jewels with increased life regen.

If you are leveling a new character, do not kill Candlemass, especially in Cruel - this gets you permanent maximum Life, which is a negative stat for this build

In Act 2 Valley of the Titans choose increased mana recovery from flasks

In Act 3 during Venom Vial quest choose increased mana regeneration

In Act 3 Cruel during Venom Vial quest choose Chaos resistance

example low budget setup - https://maxroll.gg/poe2/planner/ec1kwo01

You can easily sacrifice ES or elemental resists on rare gear for increased rarity of items found, then replace one Ming's for a rare ring with rarity find and resists. I'm currently doing maps with this setups, I traded off a bit of my max Demonflame limit and 1.5k of ES for 140% rarity find. Still destroying map bosses easily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87iJ696SV4o

Unspec Energy Shield recharge nodes, some Max ES nodes. Then either get more mana regen nodes (especially Aspiring Genius), or Pyro Pact + Recoup + some max Fire res jewels (test in your hideout how much infernal flame you can spend with your EHP). Other good nodes are Psychic Fragmentation, Vulgar Methods, Stun buildup, etc.

Equip Mana Tempest with Premeditation

Equip Eye of Winter with Withering Touch, Persistence, Deceleration. This applies max stacks of Withered + 10% crit vulnerability.

Spec Beidat's Will. With 20% quality on CoC and 110 Spirit you should have 20 Spirit for a Skeletal Cleric.

Equip Soul Offering with Ablation, Font of Mana, Font of Life

To correctly prebuff yourself, you need to know how much time you have before the fight starts, so watch study some boss kill videos.

Roughly 3 seconds before the fight starts, cast Despair - it will leave Cursed Ground, then cast Mana Tempest, then Soul Offering and finally right before boss becomes targetable, cast Eye of Winter. Immediately drink Mana Flask and Cast Bonestorm (don't fully charge it, pinnacle bosses are not large enough to be hit by 20 projectiles), then Bonestorm again and again until boss is dead. Drink Mana Flask after every cast, because CoC Comet will drain all your mana