3.27 | Banner Slammer | SSFHC | 25M DPS with No Uniques | 150M+ Endagame | T17/Ubers Viable

Changes for 3.27: banners last longer for free. Makes bossing even lower stress now. Just cleared T17s on day 2 of the league in SSF (softcore because I was experimenting with a rebuild, but still HC viable for sure). Version 2 of the build I'm working on is playtesting to be much stronger than even version 1, which is a little surprising for me. And it's quite a different level of power, funnily enough.


Short and rough video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG6BJ_EC6ws -

My character is linked below. It shows some ideas I was having at the end of 3.26.

Hi! I'm Seiki. I sometimes write stupid things in global chats and once showed up in the yellow text in the SSFHC death alert log. I think I've created a zero to hero league starter that, for all intents and purposes, is also a league ender. Because I am an SSF player who spends about half of my time in SSFHC as well, SSFHC viability is my goal here.

As such, with SSF in mind, I have chosen to adopt the following restrictions:
- no mandatory uniques
- no Essence/Delve/Incursion mods to start
- no mandatory cluster jewel setups
- no setups that more or less require level 100 to function
- I can in theory just start playing the build once I get my main skill because I think respeccing/regemming/etc a character is ridiculously boring and deprives me of the feeling of discrete character growth

This build leverages Champion's 3.26 ascendancy node that "grants Having a placed Banner does not prevent you gaining Valour, and Banner Skills have 50% increased Duration."

The beauty of this node is that it functionally means Champion now has a built-in Perfidy and it solves the main thing that banners used to have going against them - not being able to actually build your banners up while using them or benefiting from multiple effects. Now we can have all 3 banner effects.

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE, ARE BANNERS CLUNKY AND AWFUL TO PLAY?

I think this is subjective. If you as a player place utmost value on complete 1 button builds, go play Cyclone or something. Banners are absolutely nowhere near as awful as old school warcry piano though. For casual mapping, this build is your slam, movement speed banner, and then use other banners as well when bumbling into more difficult enemies and league mechanics.

Banners are better than ancestral totems in every way for those who still have PTSD from the before times. They do not die, draw fire, clutter your screen, and they are completely instant to cast. You can even cast them while casting other abilities.

Banners now can be made to last like an entire minute or so, so unless you're doing pinnacles, you really shouldn't need to spam them during bosses. Does require some presence of mind but still.

You can self-sustain the movement speed banner while running and leverage the lingering effect to run in any direction you wish at upwards of 400% movement speed depending on how you choose to itemize. So in that sense, for travel, it is zoomy - but it is not fully passive movement speed, so if moving at giga speed at all times without exception is a requirement for your goals (softcore, most likely), then this might be a demerit against the build. But you can reliably still choose to scoot around at seriously boosted speeds with almost 100% uptime. As a character that is not a fully committed Heist/lab runner in a trade context and I can still play the rest of the game, this is pretty handy for SSF.

HOW DOES THIS BUILD MECHANICALLY WORK?

We use automated warcries as an engine for efficient valor generation, which is scaled by passives. From there, when we have valor stacks, we can place whatever banners we want. Full valor stacks do not take long to build this way, and even half-charged banners if needed on short notice are quite strong.

The lingering effect from Champion's ascendancy means we have some wiggle room while clearing and periodically putting down whatever banner we want.

The 30% refund on Champion also scales with valor generation, which means that by the time you walk out of a banner's circle, even with boosted movement speed, you'll be refunded roughly 70 valor and generate the remainder passively, so this is where the movement speed sustain comes in.


SOUNDS KIND OF NEAT SO FAR. ANY DRAWBACKS?

From my experience so far, the build like just about any has some map modifiers that can be a nuisance.

- non-curse aura reduction hits your banners and basically toggles Precise Technique off, but then again, this mod hurts every build. No surprises there.

- enemies can't be leeched from can, depending on your character state, brick your mana pool if you don't have enough mana cost reduction. This can be alleviated with mana gain on hit jewels, the leech passive nodes by duelist start, or a leech jewel. I can swap in a mana gain on hit jewel and be fine in T17s. The build has enough regen and life gain on block to not feel too bad without overleech feeding it too.

- the longer cooldown map mod doesn't necessarily brick the build, but it does slow down valor generation. It's pretty fine in regular maps, but in scaled T17s, it becomes super annoying. Doable, but usually worth skipping because it is a reduced fun modifier.


HOW DO WE SCALE DAMAGE?

The damage from this build relies on the generic setup of overexertion, automating a lot of warcries, and sometimes manually using Rallying Cry as a damage nuke. What differentiates this from a regular slam build is that it continues to have more vectors of scaling with banners, impale, and precise technique.

I think Earthshatter might be the premiere skill for this. It mechanically benefits from autoexert valor engine anyway, but beyond that, Earthshatter is maybe the only slam skill that is actually okay with impale scaling, which enables us to leverage Champion's Master of Metal to thus give us the ability to take passive tree nodes that give 6% more damage instead of the typical 3ish% per point. Efficient, I think.

BANNER/AURA SCALING FIGURES:

In short, at this level of investment, banners are running at almost 2500% effect of their baseline effect. The POB shows an aggregation of the valor stacks and increases if you want specifics.

Incidentally, having 216% aura effectiveness also makes other auras good. This is why I go Precise Technique; Precision and War Banner, both scaled up, is an easy 5k accuracy. And as this build is not stacking life in favor of trying to be a mitigation machine, we don't need much more. However, if we get REALLY good life rolls, we can just keep upping Precision's level.

I still can't tell if banners with the passive mastery makes enemies take 8% increased damage per banner or not. But hey, still a lot of damage for one point if it doesn't work like that.

BANNER AREA OF EFFECT

This is the current AoE without any additional investment beyond what we incidentally have:


If you go with an unset ring to offload your movement skill, take inc. AoE on a 4l with your banners, and take the inc. banner AoE passives, you can make the AoE like 2-3 times the area of ritual. It's pretty funny, but not all that necessary usually. If in endgame with a cluster setup, and maybe even with belt corruptions and the banner explode node if you're farming simulacrum or whatever, you can push the AoE to be so large you can't actually see the boundary of it on your screen at all.

SUMMARY OF DEFENSES/UTILITY:


1) ~80% max elemental resistances, or ~85% with flasks. 90% possible with Brass Dome. Melding of the Flesh builds are possible due to the absolutely hilarious resistance totals this build achieves with aura stacking variants, but that's sort of hyperendgame trade league content.
2) Attack and spell block cap with Versatile Combatant.
3) 200% suppression on banners alone if not itemizing suppression at all. And, interestingly, a lot of flat spell reduction on suppressed hits from Defiance Banner - several hundred's worth. This more or less makes you functionally immune to mundane spell hits when mapping if you're using the banner.
4) Freeze/chill immunity from Pantheon and crafted suffixes early on. Later, ailment avoidance from 50%+ avoid boots and a reworked passive tree that takes Crystal Skin.
5) Permanent 26 fortify.
6) 10% less DoT taken.
7) 30% reduced extra damage from crit; crit immunity if Brass Dome.
8) Reasonably high armor - around 30k totally unbuffed with completely reasonable gear. Getting the build to facetank max rolled Shaper slams is hard. You can get close without or slightly overdo it if you really set up for it and definitely tank them with guard skills though.
9) Lots of movement speed when demanded. It's so fast that it makes dodging things like Maven's ground lasers actually really hard.
10) Permanent no effort rage sustain. I am thinking about the new ascendancy node as part of the 3.27 mechanics with adrenaline since this build generates a lot of rage passively, but I'd have to think on this and how to set it up. I think the build can manipulate things to have high uptime on adrenaline while still having reasonably good rage damage multi.
11) Reliable endurance and frenzy charge generation. Can eventually be passively automated with cluster jewel as a big QoL buff.
12) 1300% combined uncapped resistances. Not that this is super helpful, but it is pretty funny.
13) Passive options to passively maim enemies, which can be useful for things like Ritual if you want to create space.
14) Passive options for a 75% instant heal on demand on fully-stacked banners.
15) Passive options for ailment purges on every single banner use in earlier stages of the game prior to immunity.
16) Regenerates around 15% of max life per second.
17) Overleech is great on this build.
18) Can purge damage ailments. More of an early game HC thing but still.
19) Life sustain is from multiple sources: about 15% passive regen, standard amounts of (over)leech, and 870 life gain on block from Defiance Banner.
20) Easily capped Molten Shell.
21) Many warcries means we can leverage the debilitation mastery, resulting in quite high uptime of enemies doing 10% less damage to us.
22) Stun immunity.
23) Defenses provided from Lunaris Pantheon after ailment immunity is achieved.
24) An incredibly strong corpse explode effect that can be specced into, which is really good if you're farming circle mechanic leagues.

LEVELING:


Do whatever you want. No need to overthink this. If you want to be "optimal," go do the usual Sunder thing. Playing Earthshatter from level 12 is fun too because you can better feel your character come online gradually.

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PATH OF BUILDING (3.26 - Now Includes Commented Uniques of Potential Later Game Value in Item Tooltips)

https://pobb.in/aSIx4MviBeKy

My 3.26 character: https://poe.ninja/builds/mercenariesssf/character/seikikoo-3400/Seiki_BannerSlammer?i=9&search=class%3DChampion

I have chosen to build around level 98 for the first and arguably main passive tree because this is where I've gotten to in SSFHC quite a few times. 93 feels pretty certain for me personally, and I've achieved 99 once, but never 100.

POB warrior disclaimer: I hope this is a fair PoB configuration until the very obvious aspirational tier gear setup. Of course the final stages of the build are a little silly, but it shows that there's high investment room for growth in the build idea for high budget trade league enjoyers.

For Earthshatter's config, some bosses are quite big, many maps have obstacles which means Earthshatter clusters more densely than it's unobstructed pattern, and so on, so I don't think 3 Earthshatter spikes is too crazy for general reference. Also, I have 1 ally marked in PoB for Rallying Cry because I am guessing the mercenary in 3.26 counts as an ally.


HOW DOES THE BUILD FEEL NOW THAT IT'S BEEN PLAYTESTED?

Pretty good! Lots of damage, especially for a build that doesn't abuse unique interactions or potential unintended unique interactions and multihitting. LOTS of movement speed, and it's quite tanky. In other words, it's an ethical build.

One major issue for me on my character was chaos resistance, but that had a bit to do with RNG things acquired along the way.

I've done my first deathless uber Elder and uber Shaper with this character.

Mapping felt good with so much movement speed early, and it really stabilized after gaining overleech to the point where I don't really think of being shotgunned. Even if I do, block banner is there for me.

I am farming T17 pretty effortlessly so long as I don't accidentally roll a brick modifier.

36 challenges were cleared within about 10 days. I'm a job haver, and I'm not known to be efficient, so this was pretty blistering for me.

Uber Shaper helmet has been acquired and I am 2 hitting regular Maven phases.

Things I could see improving this build as longer term progression:
1) Warcry CD tattos can help up overall DPS a bit in instances where I'm just sitting trading hits. But they're not really that necessary or beneficial when mapping or actively dodging.
2) Some certain sizes of Thread of Hope enable interesting passive shakeups that can tip the character in favor of either more durability or more DPS.
3) Utilizing a certain skill and unique interaction to capitalize on a unique aspect of this build to potentially push well into 6 figures of millions of DPS. However, because it is incredibly speculative until playtesting, I don't want to mention it it for now unless I can make it work later. I really don't want to bait anybody.
4) +Gem amulets, but that's probably hard to make with other rolls.
5) Runegrafts! 20% chance to not eat a cooldown Runegraft is worth pursuing. No cooldown burned? Great. 20% more valor per second and more scaling on # of warcries recently passive. Good stuff. The buff duration graft is okay too.
6) Sources of "buffs expire on you slower" will extend your linger time. Not useful vs. bosses, and not a huge deal for moment-to-moment mapping, but still QoL nonetheless. Good if needing to make the gameplay lazier or even lower APM, though it isn't really a high APM build.
7) Chains of Emancipation is great for this build. I dug one up in Heist the other day and build my resistances around it. It was a little hard to fit as I'm insistent on keeping a natural unbuffed res cap, but doable. It's also relatively common, so you can throw it into the krangler and fish for even more power. I corrupted one to have AoE size and increased (banner) duration! I like running this belt especially in T17s if they hit triple curses.
8) Phys % Light of Meaning to the left the tree alone is a tremendous amount of damage. It actually competes with a +2 impale Watcher's Eye.
9) Ryslatha's. This thing is a hilarious amount of damage on impale-based Earthshatter. Pain to get though in SSF. A cooldown reduction belt is a good rare craft option (more valor, faster pops while running, and more intimidating uptime).
10) Stormshroud could still be an attractive option, even with ailment avoidance boots. Stormshroud enables the usage of the intimidating cry boot implicit, meaning much more uptime on the double damage hits especially at the high end where you might be hitting too fast, (I'm noticing this myself with a Karui Chopper that has double attack speed suffixes).
11) A Mob Mentality + Warning Cry cluster jewel is a great late game option. Really annoying to roll (you'll likely need about 100K red Harvest juice), but it fully automates charges and results in more overall armor/damage than the 2H attack speed node with armor mastery at the bottom of the tree. We can compensate for the passive tree strain by cannibalizing the endurance/frenzy charge banner node. I think it's worth it IF and ONLY IF you have a reservation cluster as well and have a 6Led weapon. A 2P with reservation on Pride (or Determination if you're prioritizing it yourself) enables utilizing a 6L, squeezing in another warcry (Battlemage specifically because it applies exerts). This compensates for losing the +valor % gain passives, and it also translates into significantly more overexertion/admonisher scaling. It takes the build up to about 7 warcries within a "recently" window.

I would absolutely adore any feedback on this build - pointing out shortcomings that I might've missed, suggestions for future scaling, small optimizations you might see, and so on.

Reserving second post in case I have some expansion of these thoughts and want to detail them.

cue is a rat

excellent build friend

hey great pob, one small optimization you can make is side with oak to get +40 life and drop the +30 life mastery

Can you just touch on leveling a little bit? Or maybe add a section in the POB or the guide?

Other than that fantastic explanation and logic very interested and will probably start this

How do we handle ailments like ignite chill and shock

"

leegeyerburnest#1005 wrote:

Can you just touch on leveling a little bit? Or maybe add a section in the POB or the guide?

Other than that fantastic explanation and logic very interested and will probably start this

Not too much to touch on here. Level however you like to. I'm not a speedrunner for leveling, and I think leveling is more fun if I can do it with the identity of hte build I'm working toward in mind, so I'm just building out this passive tree as I go. I'm sure you could do the usual Sunder leveling and switching over if you like speedrunning your leveling.

I have a low level test character at the moment and it feels fine for leveling in HC. Again, definitely not a speedrunning build, but it does start to take on its form and mechanics while leveling, which I find a lot of joy in.

Amazingly well-written and thought out!

Just wanted to say *be-all end-all not end all be all :) very commonly mixed up

"

leegeyerburnest#1005 wrote:

How do we handle ailments like ignite chill and shock

Freeze is handled by flasks early as usual, then pantheon. Later, Ancestral Vision with at least one active banner can be one solution. Stormshroud is another. Making ailment immunity boots in conjunction with avoidance on the tree (and through essence modifiers) is also yet another option.

Shock is a real danger for me in HC, so that's why I have some crafted modifiers that reduce shock and will be using the -shock minor Pantheon until I have a more permanent solution deeper into progression.

Also, until permanent passive avoidance is secured on the character, we can purge ailments by summoning banners.

Awesome tree setup! I wanted to play this archetype in softcore and all I found were some heist trees. Has anyone played this with Awe and Terror? "Also cause" usually means it applies to the base effect meaning it should always be guaranteed 10% explode even with a single banner. The increased AoE is possibly a burden for keeping valour up while zooming and this doesn't have much %phys so I dunno how it would play.

Impossible Escape Eternal Youth to grab the 72% warcry CDR from deep breaths wheel would let you anoint Sovereignty or something else instead. Maybe not attainable in HC trade. That would take passive valour from 14.6 to 17.5 from my napkin. I don't know if that much warcry CDR is even necessary for circle mechanics. You'd have 2 full ones up by the time mobs spawn either way or 1 full one and 2 partials. Dread Banner might be the lowest priority I suppose.

It's gonna be fun to play around with. Fire pen ring with phys to fire might be the endgame play because it's like a 5x damage multi.

P.S. I saw that the small node between the two banner nodes gives another 5% increased aura effect which is a nice bonus.