Seinfire's Build Logs 2

The basic premise of this character was to recreate the explodey goodness of my BV chieftan from legion, but do it as a fast clearing melee build.

The main idea was to use Panquetzalatellili or however it's called as well as a 6l leapslam supported by shockwave to one-tap entire packs while moving. Worked out pretty much as I expected, however I ended up crafting a mace as the unique version did not have quite enough damage in t16s.

Overall pretty satisfying char to play.

I wanted to play scourge arrow again in some fashion and this seemed like a good well-rounded option to relax and wind down the league with.

Poison prolif+sporeguard felt good for clearing and I ended up levelling very fast to 95. I went quite defensive with the setup annointing endurance charge generation and fortify on flask use, as well as a fairly defensive flask setup. It worked out quite well but if I were to play this char again I would invest much heavier into damage as it was rather low for SA(maybe averaging 1.5m peaking at 2.5m)

My leaguestarter. My main reasoning for playing scorching ray was that it was fairly well suited for learning bosses due to it's nature as a DoT skill with a fairly high damage floor. Inquisitor for regen and damage.

After having not played it for a while, as well as primarily pairing it with RF in the past, I did not realize how bad the clearspeed would be... It was playable being able to clear the screen in 1 sweep for the most part, but obstacles would often get in the way, doorways, stragglers, etc, all adding up to frequent stops trying to aim a narrow beam.

My solution to this was to use the combination of inpulsa's, storm's gift and herald of ash to wipe out packs of enemies. While the clearspeed still was not great due to scorching ray's mechanics, it was considerably faster and more satisfying.

Defensively the idea was to simply stack EHP by going life+es hyprid with corrupted soul, resulting in a pool of roughly 10k. Coupled with high regen
Seinfire's Build Logs 2
Content:
and minor defenses in the form of fortify, flasks, and vaal molten shell, in theory this would be enough for endgame. Well... maybe it would have been enough in 3.8 but the metamorph mechanic and the buffs to monster life and damage resulted in many deaths.

I did managed to map to the low 90's and take down all conqueror's+ awakener level 8 Sirus with this char, so it was successful in what I set out to do initially and I enjoyed playing it despite it's weaknesses.

After making another char for mapping I ended up doing a bit of regearing to a damage oriented bossing setup. With searing touch and a 6l firetrap the build ended up doing a respectable 4-5m dps.

I had wanted to play with vortex for a while and ended up going with a mana stacking setup. The idea was to split damage between life, es and mana while recovering all pools simultaneously for huge sustain, while also gaining aoe and damage from mana.

I would say the concept is fairly effective, however the build's issue is the inability to fully stack indigon, resulting in a less than ideal level of dps.

Aura totems (malevolence+precision) got me to just under the halfway point for indigon stacking, coupled with vaal rf it was decent single target while mapping.

Overall a decent build, although it could potentially be much better with a different skill setup (fully stacking indigon and using es leech).

I wanted a build that would clear maps quickly while still having enough damage to take down metamorphs, and vaal skills seemed like a good option. More specifically, I had wanted to try rf+inpulsa's during blight league but never got around to it.

By utilizing a few synergistic mechanics the goal was to create self-chaining inpulsa+herald of ash explosions on a running simulator build. I was hopeful that the build would be very simple and comfortable to play but unfortunately this was not quite the case. While it is mostly a running simulator, the necessity of somewhat precise flask+cooldown management had me constantly checking my buff bar, flasks, and vaal skills because a mistimed vrf/vms click could easily result in a death, or at best, drastically reduced damage.

Despite the builds weaknesses I did end up enjoying it a lot, and when everything lined up it worked very well.

After my somewhat hectic pathfinder build, this char started out with the desire to simply make a "comfy" cyclone build, something with decent map clear that could take down bosses and metamorphs without fear.

I started on a relatively low budget as a gladiator with dual ahn's might. This version had a lot of mobility and was very safe, but capping out at 2-3m dps that mobility was wasted as I had to stop frequently to take down beyond bosses while mapping, and while metamorphs were fairly consistent and safe, they were not fast.

So logically, if I had enough damage to mow down everything in my path I could afford to drop some mobility and still end up with a faster clearing character for the content I was doing. The first thing I did was craft an explodey as a substitute for gladiator's bleedsplosions, which allowed me to switch to champion. This was followed up by dumping some currency on the saviour+paradoxica combo, and crafting some gear (notably tailwind boots and culling gloves) to bring the damage up to the point that I was bursting down conquerors and metamorphs in under 10 seconds.

However, I still wanted to push the damage further without sacrificing survivability, which led to more expensive upgrades such as an additional impale watcher's eye and bottled faith which brought the build up to it's current 2-4 second boss kill level. I did sacrifice survivability in the form of dropping vaal pact in order to fit in a dps flask (sustaining only via leech is not comfy), but after testing it for a while it ended up rarely being an issue due to the extreme damage output.

Overall had fun with the character as it ended up being quite well-rounded and powerful overall. A good way to end the league.

After toying with a few ideas for my leaguestarter I decided to just go with something generically strong that I was familiar with and landed on Toxic Rain.

I set out to top my previous variations in every way possible, most notable is my defensive setup as the rest mostly boiled down to currency investment. With divine flesh, dodge, endurance charges, 60% uptime on steelskin, a couple influence mods and my flasks I ended up with a character that had high avoidance as well as mitigation against all damage types.

Overall was very satisfying to play, and also quite fun and rewarding crafting most of my gear.

This build started off with me wanting to do something revolving around synthesis rings and lone messenger for super buffed heralds. However, after seeing the strength of warcry cluster jewels I ended up going with a melee build instead.

Making this character was a very enjoyable process of smashing together various synergistic items and mechanics to end up with a fairly well rounded and powerful build. I had been interested in playing smite after noticing how smooth it felt levelling a few chars through early acts and it synergised quite well with fidelita's spike and the notion of stacking flat lightning damage.

Overall I enjoyed playing this character a lot due to the insane attack speed, coupled with high damage and recovery. The downside was the clunkiness of grasping vines and the low life pool, although at the point of the league that I made this character I was already planning on taking a break and didn't feel the need to correct these problems for what would ultimately result in the exact same playstyle of leapslam attack, just with the ability to click loot faster and maybe die slightly less.

I wanted to make some sort of spellslinger build, and bladefall+blade blast was one of the more obvious and potentially powerful combos. I also wanted to make a somewhat tanky character so I went with chieftain+divine flesh using synthesis rings+lone messenger with herald of ash to scale the damage.

With the amount of phys+fire scaling I had it made for some very satisfying map clears with an explodey chest (my fastest mapper despite not being less mobile than my other chars due to the smoothness and sheer coverage) and the single target damage was quite high as well.

The only point the build fell short on was survivability. While it wasn't squishy, the lack of damage avoidance led to many deaths where I would backtrack into some sort of on-death effect or die to a unique delirium attack seemingly out of nowhere. Outside of delirium the build felt fairly safe however, taking down sirus, uber-elder and the like fairly comfortably.

Fairly strong and fun to play character overall.

I wanted to have another go at playing scourge arrow, this time with a bit more damage. It was pretty smooth to level with, cruising through early maps with just a lioneye's glare, coralito's and a pair of embalmers.

I copied the divine flesh+defensive flask setup of my last toxic rain character, but with the combo of kintsugi+wind dancer over a rare chest. Character ended up being very tanky with good clear and ok single target.

My hope for this character was that the scalability of poison damage would result in a higher damage ceiling than toxic rain and that poison prolif would make for better clear but this was not the case. Although it isn't really a fair comparison considering the differences in currency investment, I feel like I would need to change my build drastically to gain more damage (popular setup uses a second 6l for single target and different clusters) and besides that I grew tired of the channeling aspect of the skill compared to the buttery feel of tr/ca.

While I didn't feel like pushing the character further,it was still a fun and effective leaguestarter and I will likely revisit it in the future.

Kinetic blast is my favourite skill in the game but with various nerfs on top of having already played it so much before, it had been a long time since I built one. My goal with this character was to firstly have a strong mapping build, secondly find the most cost effective setup for my budget, and lastly to simply build my strongest all-around wander to date.

Clearspeed is not an issue with KB so the focus was on single target damage and survivability. Ideally this would have been an elemental build with either int-stacking or phys to ele conversion, but starting with a budget of about 20ex these simply didn't have enough damage. Having harvest crafted a very good phys wand, the obvious choice was to then go impale instead. Defensively I went for the corrupted soul+soul tether combo for ehp and sustainability, on top of moderate defenses from dodge, evasion, flesh and stone, fortify and flasks.

I was pretty happy with the end results, a fast mapping character that also had the damage and defenses to confidently take down conquerors and sirus. The character was succesful enough for me to justify spending another 10ex on seeds and harvest crafts to recraft life rolls on a few pieces of gear as I was getting occasionally oneshot. As always, KB was a blast to play and the reworked power siphon did a good job of shredding bosses.

I wanted a character that could comfortably knock down a few of the conditional boss challenges as well as 100% deli maps.
Having not experienced the OPness of herald stackers last league, I decided to try out aura stacking.

I started with a budget of around 40ex which turned out to be pretty low for this type of build. In order to compensate for budget constraints I did a few things. Guardian over scion for an extra 1-1.5k es and easier phys mitigation cap, and the use of an actual single target ability to compensate for the loss of damage.

It was a lot of fun trying to optimize my gear and jewels for mana reservation, squeeze out as much power as I could from the character and gradually improve it. Spent roughly an additional 20ex by the time I was finished levelling and ended up with a very tanky character with massive single target damage and good clearspeed thanks to storm bursts high damage output and herald explosions.

Despite having so much damage mitigation this character did die a few times as having a relatively low es pool made me vulnerable to oneshots from anything that fucked with my resists, namely: -max maps, shaper balls, damage penetration mod in delve and simulacrum. Ended up being my highests dps character ever by several times over (consistent ~16m with a peak of about 60m), although I'm not sure how much of this is the power of aura stacking and how much is due to the strength of storm burst.

Overall very fun and powerful character to end the league with and I'm interested in revisting both storm burst and aura stacking in the future, although it will most likely be on different characters (I want to try trickster storm burst and scion aura stacker).

Not 100% sure what I wanted to play, I defaulted to TR/CA as it is not only one of my favourite builds, but a very strong league starter. I had two goals in mind: First, to optimize my single target dps through the use of aoe scaling for greater pod overlap as this was not something I focused on with previous variations. Second, invest the minimum amount of currency to comfortable clear the endgame and level to 95 as I was planning on either respeccing or rerolling CoC (not as important as TR was very popular which made for easy profits selling my gear, but still a factor).

I feel like 30 radius on TR is the sweetspot, achievable with 160ish increased aoe. This gives a consistent overlap of 6 pods, as well as the flexibility of dropping carcass jack for a more defensive chest with a higher investment setup (although I felt quite tanky on this char so 35 or 40 radius is also an option to min-max dps).

As always, TR was a lot of fun to play and I was satisfied with the amount of damage I was able to crank out with this setup. Ultimately however, while the damage could be pushed much farther, TR cannot compete with a crit build in terms of top-end dps which is the reason I planned to respec from the start. I want to have a go at a min-maxed TR setup evetually, but with how much I've played the skill this will likely not be in the near future.

I wanted to play with two of the new skills, blazing salvo and flame wall. The basic idea was to have flame wall autocast via asenath's chant, then have blazing salvo in my coc setup to consistently gain the damage setup. Based on coc's cooldown I figured a second spell would be optimal so I added in fireball for extra clearspeed. Additionally, I would invest into lgoh and life regen in order to drop my life flask for a defensive flask, either a quartz or a basalt depending on how the survivability felt.

I went all-in on gear investment right from the get-go as I was respeccing from toxic rain at lvl 95. I had the assurance that if the build didn't perform as well as I was hoping I could either salvage the build by swapping to the tried and true combo of icespear and freezing pulse, or swap back to tr and reinvest the currency into that build.

One uncertainty I had was the interaction between blazing salvo and additional projectiles. My original setup used dying sun rather than wise oak, and immolate instead of gmp. Brief testing on standard (using herald of agony with 100% chance to poison to count number of hits) revealed that additional projectiles and fork would increase the amount of hits per cast, but only up to a certain point as additional projectiles spread out further from the cursor. There is still uncertainty about this as aoe scaling does not increase the spread of the projectiles, resulting in greater overlap, but I'm not sure of the ratio of projectile count vs aoe required, or even what the base radius of blazing salvo is. Ultimately the build was tested by feel, where I dropped dying sun because I wanted more damage reduction, and used gmp as it provided a more consistent proc rate, better clearspeed, and more lgoh, which more than compensated for the reduced damage per hit.

From level 95-98 the character went through many changes and suffered many deaths as I played around with different trigger skills, support gems, and flask setups. The culprit for many of these deaths was a specific heist scientist mod lobbing yellow balls for massive amounts of chaos and physical damage, which eventually led to the current setup with chaos res on my clusters and annointing hardened scars+using a hybrid flask for perma fortify. After those changes it was smooth sailing up until 99, at which point I had completed 36 challenges and took a break from the league.

While I wouldn't say the build at it's baseline is particularly strong or worth replicating, several synergistic mechanics and a high level of currency investment resulted in a powerful character. With the lgoh from vitality watcher's eye and a decent amount of regen, I was pretty much instantly full healing from all incoming damage. Combined with a high life pool, dodge+flesh and stone, steelskin, and fortify+wise oak, I ended up with a very tanky character with good clearspeed and fairly high single target damage (although nothing insane, guesstimate it in the 6-8m range).

Wanted to play an mf character as I hadn't done one in a long time, and the new atlas passives seemed like a great opportunity to do so. I went with Ele Hit due to its high base damage and the opportunity of using the new Trinity support, as well as the speed of bow skills in general.

A few things went wrong here, the main ones being my poor atlas strategy where I started magic finding with no favourites unlocked, only 4/10 atlas passives in my chosen regions, and a poor choice of passives (no advantage to doing my strategy at low levels compared to just completing the atlas normally}. The result was me farming white and yellow maps for 2 weeks with a shitty glass cannon build before finally swapping out of my mf setup and starting atlas progression 2 weeks late.

After seeing what people discovered in terms of atlas strategies I think low-level mf could work, but I probably wouldn't do it as a league starter again.

Eventually swapped out of my trinity setup in the pursuit of big damages, the goal being to go fast and blow up bosses with barrage.

This character sucked, but I wasn't sure what to reroll so I just brute-forced my way through endgame leaving a trail of my own corpses.

The original goal with this character was to level as pathfinder due to the classes sustainability covering for the lack of damage early on. Once enough currency is acquired, the logical progression would to either stay pathfinder and go a tanky all-rounder route, or switch to raider and go the glass-cannon route with high avoidance+insane overkill damage resulting in a somewhat survivable character. I ended up going a pathfinder glass-cannon while not hitting the investment level needed to hit the mark on either damage or survivability.

Ended up selling all the gear pretty much as soon as my second char hit maps.

I really wanted to try something interesting using the new battlemage ascendancy node to make a true spell+attack hybrid. I started off with the idea of using earthquake+stormcall, which was kind of a meme. I would have these slow heavy hard-hitting slams and then follow it up by spamming 60+ stormcalls per second with fanaticism and awakened spell cascade. While this was fun for a while, the build felt clunky and the overall power level was not where I wanted it to be (although still managed to do maven invitations, including The Feared simply due to inquisitors absurd regen, it was just very slow).

I was expecting to dismantle the character once my gems levelled and sell off the gear to reroll cold bv pathfinder, but on a whim I decided to try out a different gem setup before that. Neither my earthquake nor my stormcall had enough investment to deal high single target damage. I decided to go with somewhat of a more traditional setup with a focus on one single target ability and one aoe ability, the only unique aspect being that I would still be alternating between a self-cast spell and an attack. I went with stormburst as a somewhat well-known but underutilized single target beast, and static strike as a mechanically strong clear skill with it's fire and forget playstyle and great synergy with shockwave support.

After a bit of optimization (aka throwing exalts at it to cover for it being weak) I ended up with what was one of my favourite characters of all time. The "running simulator" playstyle with high scaling phys explosions and static strike zaps, the satisfying bubble pops of stormburst comfortably bursting single targets, and inquisitors insane hybrid regen, I had a character that was overall strong and fun to play and I ended up taking it to 100 and completeing 40/40 challenges.

For the first time in a while I was really interested in the new skills, and thought that the blood skills could be pretty strong.

While levelling was not fast, it was pretty smooth once I got spellslinger reap+exsanguinate and corrupting fever going. I started off as slayer+trickster as with the idea of heavily oversustaining the high life cost of self-cast reap, and cleared most of the game with this setup to level 95 and beyond. However, I wanted more damage, and with the level of gear
I had I felt comfortable switching to a low-life petrified blood setup, with the combination of gladiator ascendant and pain attunement granting a hefty dps boost.

While the damage did not impress I felt like I ended up with a fairly well-rounded character that felt comfortable to play and was overall quite fun. I did not play as much as usual this league due to game performance, but still managed to get 36 challenges with the hardest one being 100% inc aoe The Feared which took me 3 attempts.

Before leaguestart I was thinking of either an attribute stacking or mana stacking build for my next character. With the announcement of the new skills, Galvanic Field in particular, I decided to try out archmage for the first time.

It seemed that Galvanic Field would have good synergy with Storm Brand as they are both duration based skills that attach to the target once cast, kind of like a lightning DoT. Storm Brand is also a fairly well established build, so I figured throwing in an extra 4l for more damage and clear was a safe bet. I somewhat misunderstood how Galvanic Field worked as I soon realized that I would have to recast the skill for each target, rather than having it reapply automatically on shocking an enemy as I had hoped.

Had a couple issues with the build, first of all was the damage. This was not as much of a concern as it was good enough for clearing, and the defensive playstyle allowed me to comfortably take down bosses and get my 4 voidstones. The more major concern was the survivability, as I was unable to deal with the spikiness of incoming damage, seemingly going from taking no damage to dying instantly. This was somewhat alleviated by a cast on death portal setup but it was still very frustrating as most of my enjoyment of the game comes from character progress.

Ofcourse the day I did a full respec of the build they released a patch preview saying that Galvanic Field was bugged and did no damage all league, which was pretty funny.

idk where i put the last flask

I was thinking of what to reroll as I needed a build capable of taking down uber bosses. That was when I came across a recent video by Akane where they were doing just that with Eye of Winter mines.

As a mana based build I would be able to reuse some of my archmage gear, and it seemed like a very strong well-rounded build so I decided to go for it.

Well, it did what I set out to do which was kill the 4 ubers required for challenge completion (although uber eater took multiple tries because I'm bad at the game). However... I can't say that it went as smoothly as I had hoped. First of all, going from an mom+evasion build to another mom+evasion build and expecting a drastic increase in survivability was a bit foolish. It was more survivable due to the giga-boosted mana flask and having 10x the dps, but the defenses still had the same holes. I died many times in my first few maps as I was trying to figure out the playstyle. When I did figure out how to play the build it felt pretty good but I was still dying enough to random spikes of damage that I ended up whipping out ol' faithful: the cast on death portal setup.

The most satisfying aspect of the build was loading up all my mines, lining up all my buffs, and just demolishing bosses with huge bursts of damage. Possibly the highest damage build I've ever played, only surpassed by aura stacker, but it does require that setup which isn't always a guarantee.

In the end, I stashed the gear and began looking for something else to reroll. I figured if whatever I rerolled too I could always come back to this as I knew it was capable of clearing all content....but I also kind of wanted some exp without having to run white t16s (which is how I gained 2 levels). I am writing this now because I eventually decided I wasn't coming back to this build and wanted to record it as my one good build of the league before selling off the gear.

So for my next respec I wanted 2 things: to not die, and to have good clearspeed. At first I wanted to play an old favourite: Storm Burst (which in my eyes was the premier single target lightning spell), and combine that with the now fixed Galvanic Field and Inpulsa kabooms for a well balanced combo of clearspeed and single target damage, as well as duration scaling that would allow Galvanic Field to add a fair bit of damage during bossfights.

Came up with two different setups, one armour based left side tree, one evasion+ghost dance right side tree. While the right side tree was overall more balanced with capped spell suppression, I settled on the left side build because it not only had much higher damage, but I wanted more consistent defensive layers than my previous builds.

Then out of curiosity I decided to plug Lightning Conduit into PoB since I was scaling shock effect anyways. Ofcourse it was massively more powerful than Storm Burst, so I somewhat regretfully dropped my duration scaling and went for big number more better.

In terms of clearspeed it was a bit of a mixed bag but I was overall quite satisfied. The amount of scaling I had for Inpulsa lead to fantastic chain explosions, wiping out the screen as expected. The mobility was not amazing, but it didn't feel bad either, and the single target damage was solid for mapping and guardians. Self-casting Conduit did not feel super comfortable, and my Orb of Storms setup was not sufficient for capping out my shock effect, so I went for a Cast While Channeling setup with Lightning Tendrils for those big shocks and an overall more pleasing playstyle. Just casting OoS and Galvanic Field was enough to clear most packs, and I would bring out the Tendies for beefier rares and bosses.

Now for the issues. I figured, armour scaling, molten shell, best thing in the game right? Easy win right? Well yes but also no, I did not have so much armour that molten shell would carry my survivability. I figured arctic armour and my immunities would help pad out the holes in my defenses but I could still very quickly die to random packs of monsters if I didn't hit them first.

Explosions=fun
Having to whip out Ol' Faithful again? Not so fun.
It was time for another respec, for something heavier on defenses with a sacrifice of clearspeed.

A good balance of clearspeed and survivability?...hmmmm. Well why not revisit an old favourite, a build I had hit 100 with in the past? CoC Blazing Salvo+Fireball Pathfinder was a build I very much enjoyed in Heist league, but the defenses were completely gutted/removed, the flasks were massively nerfed/reworked, and the support gem nerfs were not friendly to a build that barely had enough dps to be considered "good," given the mass of currency I ended up dumping into that character.

That being said, rebuilding that character for PoE in it's current state was a fun challenge that I was happy to take on.

In terms of offence, alternate ailments were the obvious choice, and I
ended up getting them by balancing my stats for Leadership's Price. On the defensive side of things, I decided that capped spell suppression was a must, which lead to a right side skill tree, which lead to evasion and Ghost Dance. So I thought, "OK, I have avoidance for attacks, mitigation for spell damage, and a way to soak up bursts of damage. Now I need more generic mitigation for physical, elemental, and chaos damage." Enter, the Doppelganger Guise+Divine Flesh combo. Perfect right? Except I can't read and I played for a day before realizing "All Damage Taken Bypasses Energy Shield," does not work so well with Ghost Dance.

Considering energy shield is such a large chunk of my hp, I decided to drop the timeless jewel and so far the build feels tankier overall and I even managed to find my grinding groove and get another level.

The damage is something I want to work on but I haven't figured out how exactly. The pathfinder version used clusters for most of it's increased damage, but there is nothing on my tree that I am willing to give up for a cluster setup. My previous iteration also used Replica Shroud of the Lightless so shove in a bunch of crit multi and life, which is not ideal due to socket pressure, as well as losing the core of my phys and chaos mitigation.

Maybe I will figure something out, maybe not, the build is a work in progress. Currently trying out Death Rush for some mapping juice. Tried uber sirus and eater of worlds... Decided I will never do ubers on this character which is fine, it is strong enough for regular pinnacle bosses and invitations. I also want to try a phys spell setup with Bladefall+Bladeblast, but one of the main draws of that setup is the synergy with Headhunter, which I don't see myself getting before I hit 100. It would also require regearing for damage conversion and potentially rebalancing my stats for Leaderships Price as brittle is pretty important for the build.

Ended up throwing around some currency and optimizing the character a bit. Pushed the damage to a level I was satisfied with and finished up my challenges. Tried to level just while mapping but was dying too much so I mostly did 5 ways from 98-100.

Overall fun character to play.

Wanted to league-start some type of marauder in order to reach my goal of having a lvl 100 of each character class. I also wanted something fairly tank. After theorycrafting a few options I ended on Shield Crush as a skill with good damage numbers and gear progression as well as some solid defensive layers.

One interesting mechanic I wanted to try out was using Kaom's Spirit+Immortal Flesh and the juggernauts regen nodes for high uptime on berserk. This made the character feel quite zippy while also providing extra damage and defense. To counteract the lack of life regen I went for low-life petrified blood to enable overleech. On top of a life flask, a bit of recoup, divine shield, eventually a vitality lgoh watcher's eye (which I needed to complete the simulacrum) and plenty of damage reduction, this ended up being enough. Eventually the Immortal Flesh was dropped in favour of the Magnate for a large damage increase, with some of the regen being moved to rolls on rares.

The character felt quite good levelling with precise techniques, and I switched to crit as soon as I got my hands on the Emperor's Vigilance and Seething Fury. For the regular game, progressing my atlas and completing challenges I would say this was one of my stronger leaguestarters, comparable in power to the Poisonous Concoction pathfinder I played in Archnemesis. For running sanctums however it was quite bad, I only managed to complete my first full clear at level 93 due to outgearing the content. I essentially brute-forced everything with damage and regularly got hit, but on top of some good relics it was enough to stop failing sanctums. I ended up skipping 2 of the sanctum related challenges and getting 38/40 with this character. Overall quite fun and I may try other variation of shield crush in the future.

I wanted to make a build using the new Progenesis flask, and also wanted to make a build for farming sanctum to finish it off. Defensively the concept was fairly simple, flasks + Doppelganger Guise. Offensively I simply wanted high single target damage, and traps or mines seemed like the easiest solution for a left side tree.

I enjoyed playing the build, ran some sanctums and it performed well enough. However this is not the kind of build I would consider for a no-hit sanctum run, just a solid casual farmer. The screen clutter, relative short range, need to aim, and setup time to reach maximum dps are all suboptimal. If I had put a little more though into this character I would have opted for something that did not rely on so many temporary buffs, although the damage is high enough that I mostly was fine just casting ele weakness+hatred.

I attempted some uber bosses with the build before ending the league. It was surprisingly tanky despite the low ehp, and the stutter step playstyle of traps lends itself well to bossing. With some practice it could be a decent bossing build but ultimately I failed due to making a lot of mistakes.

A return to one of my favourite skills. Pretty smooth league start. Was dying to Crucibles a lot despite heavy investment into defense. The turning point was to cheat by dumping 20 div into a flask at lvl 93 and it was pretty smooth sailing after that. Eventually tossed in Doppelganger's and Divine Flesh to round out the defenses against dots as well.

My initial plan was to level as TR and swap to either another bow build (LA/Iceshot) or CoC. However, I ended up just dumping currency into the character to squeeze in a bit more damage, enough to hit level 100 (without 5ways/rotations for the first time since Incursion because the character was just comfy to play) clear 40 challenges, all Ubers, and wave 30 Simulacrum because why not. Easily the strongest TR character I have made yet and I am pretty satisfied with it.

While doing crucible challenges I decided to try my luck adding trees to Emperor's Vigilance. On my second shield I managed to hit +40 ES with 10% defence modifier magnitudes. I didn't have any real league goals after 40 challenges so eventually decided to make a build with it.

With alt quality SST, Ashes and this overpowered 900+ ES shield it is quite easy to hit 1000+ crit multi. I thought to myself what to do with this and decided that using all of that to hit for millions of damage was kind of pointless. I wasn't going to be doing bosses, and if I was, shield skills would not be my first choice. Instead I decided to try converting all that crit multi to ailment DoT multi with Perfect Agony. The concept was to scale the damage with phys added as chaos modifiers, and combine high movement speed, SSTs screen coverage, poison prolif, and double explosions from Asenath's and Obliteration to create a clearspeed monster.

The character was mostly successful. I farmed legions in maps to 95. It was my faster 95 to date at about 14 hours without really trying. While a single SST with awakened fork and projectile speed on the tree could hit 3 screens of enemies, trying to snipe a single mob in a legion with just the initial shield was a minor annoyance that slowed the build down a lot.

I had about a dozen emblem sets after this and decided to have a go and see how the build performed. I was pleasantly surprised with the results, particularly the boss damage as vengeant cascade put in some serious work. Without any real optimization I was managing to consistently get over 4 rows of loot. Shoved double inspired into the setup and ended up farming solo 5ways to 99.

While I'm not sure if I will play SST again just because of the clunkiness of the initial shield throw, I had a lot of fun putting the build together and blasting mobs and am overall satisfied with the character.

I am writing this after not playing for 3 months and have the memory of a goldfish with brain damage. But anyways, I think I just wanted a comfy build and had been interested in EA Ballista for a while so I decided to go with the champion version.

Fairly smooth to level with and I decided to push to try and optimize it towards the endgame rather than rerolling. It did alright vs the league mechanic just due to the totem playstyle but the damage felt quite low.

Ended up not playing much this league, probably due to burnout so I broke my streak of challenge completion, only hitting 13/40, although I think the build would be capable of clearing challenges without issue. I guess I just got tired around the point of "clear 200 maps with x league mechanic" while going down the challenge list.

Doubt I will play this again, but I did enjoy it for the short time that I did play and think it performed fairly well overall.

I started the league off as self-cast divine ire trickster. The skill received some numerical changes which made the channeling portion deal more damage, which made it feel ok for clearing. Overall, the build was bad, but I managed to complete my atlas and get all of my voidstones without too much trouble (aside from juiced affliction rares being tankier than uber bosses).

Afterwards I was contemplating what to reroll to, I came across Jungroan's CoC VD build and decided to give it a go. It was a pretty strong all-rounder that I gradually optimized and started working on challenge completion with. This was the first league that I managed to farm up a mageblood and had a bit of fun with it, completing 40/40 challenges a few weeks into the league.

I enjoyed the build in terms of performance and playstyle (bow CoC being one of my favourite build archetypes in general), however I will never play it again because visually it is complete cancer.

I wanted to play another wander as it is one of my favourite builds, and decided to just brute force it as a league starter. As expected, it was a slow start but not unplayable.

Initially went with just raw ele damage stacking with basic rares and uniques plus Fury Valve for the extra clearpseed, then transitioned into a charge stacking setup with Ralakesh+Badge of the Brotherhood, before finally switching to int stacking and CI.

While I traditionally went with a Kinetic Blast+Barrage setup, I decided to try something different with a pure Power Siphon setup. Since it's recent rework to an auto-targetting ability, it felt quite comfortable and smooth to play while having respectable damage and clearpseed.

I thought that having an expensive build to farm for would make me want to play more, but it ended up having the opposite effect. The top end items seemed too far out of reach, with long stretches of grinding between each upgrade. In theory, Necropolis was a great league for this kind of character with the extremely powerful crafting options, as well as the profitability of t17 farming and other new strategies, but I ended up not enjoying the league very much after the first couple of weeks, and not engaging with those higher end strategies.

Overall I enjoyed the mapping experience with this character a lot (in no small part to Trickster's defenses and overall comfort), and even managed to take on some t17 content and ubers. I will be playing another wander sometime in the future, but probably not as a league starter.