[3.18] Gryph's Tank Simulator - A Detonate Dead Ignite Elementalist

If you plan to league start with this build, I would recommend using Desecrate+Bugged Spectres until you can get Phantasmal Unearth.

First of all, DD Ignite is not even close to dead. It is, however, no longer super duper cheap and easy to get insane damage numbers on literal zero gear.
First of all, Ignite damage was globally nerfed by 28% to compensate for the massive buff to spell damage and effectiveness. AKA: -28% damage for us. RIP
Spectres+Desecrate were hit harshly and rightly so. It basically means that you're doing about 33%-ish of the damage you would be before and with less QoL (specters only have 15% chance to desecrate).
HOWEVER
Unearth setup was ONLY hit by the ignite damage nerf. And that is completely fine. this takes my curreny Scourge DD ignite from 40m-ish DPS to 30m-ish DPS....oh noooooo. Here's my (minmaxed character) POB with 28% less damage with ignites slapped into the configurations to emulate 3.17 nerf:
https://pastebin.com/C0XcYprt

Some further thoughts on the matter can be found here:
https://youtu.be/z8vBu6T7KZ0

So after playing a few different characters I landed on the idea to use Detonate Dead with Ignite. truthfully, my brother had given me the idea in passing and while I was looking at a POB for a friend to help optimize their Flame Burst Ignite tree I thought to myself "I wonder...how much damage with an ignite off of a DD do when I explode a Stoneskin Flayer/Lithomancer?" After all, ignite got a massive buff this league and a great way to scale damage in this game is to abuse corpse life with DD and Vaal DD. It was very high. And thus I knew there was potential for a very strong build. Insert about a week of trial and error with different methods (CWC Staff+Corpsewalker boots, spellslinger+poet's pen, desecrate+specters etc...) I landed on just self casting Desecrate with Specters and Self Cast Detonate Dead. This was temporary as I knew I would want to go Unearth Eventually, but needed to put the items together.

From there is was a battle of getting the defenses right. I remember cycloning around with Corpse Walker boots channeling Detonate Dead and dying 3x per map. It was greeeaaaaat...but the concept *worked* the damage was there and there was more to the puzzle. I swapped back and forth between Necromancer and Elementalist a bit until I finally was happy with my defenses as a Necro.
I had gotten to armour stacking with recovery on block shield (The Surrender) and that felt good for defenses. At the time my dps was abysmal though so I swapped to Aegis Aurora, Glancing Blows, and Elementalist. This ended up getting me almost double my damage and with Aegis recovery I felt nearly unkillable.

I was able to start farming comfortably. I eventually managed to switch to Unearth which OMG felt amazing and then I started improving my gear one piece at a time.

The rest is history! Now I can compile it all into one big ol' block of text for you!

Thanks for reading, Exile!

Explodey Map Showcase
10ex Budget Version Minotaur Run
Blight-Rabaged Map with Teal Oils
Flawless Chayula with Explodey Chest
Quick Map Showcase - Minotaur
VS Sirus 8, most recent iteration

The videos below are all half or less of my current damage. POBs of the character as she was when I recorded the videos can be found in the video descriptions
The Feared: of Challenge, released all bosses
The Cortex
The Formed(Shaper Guardians)

My character as she is currently (including 3.17 damage nerf):
https://pastebin.com/C0XcYprt

This is approximately how I plan to progress this build as a league starter (Naked Character)
https://pastebin.com/skZEQEte
Includes leveling progression for that the acts up to about level 85.

PROS:
- We take advantage of a powerful mechanic (corpse life) to gain massive damage. This means we can focus more on defenses.
- Obviously the defenses on this character are quite insane for the level of damage output.
- Ignite Prolif means clearing is surprisingly smooth. Not a zoom zoom build, but not slow either.
- Just kidding! If you invest into Explosions(Chest/Obliteration Wand) the build will clear 2-3 screens at a time! ZOOOM!
- Most gear slots are very flexible/uses a lot of rares. This brings down the overall cost of entry.
- HC Viable. Would make some changes, but definitely HC viable.
- Uses a Level 1 Vaal DD. xD
- It's fun to stand in Sirus Die beams! :D

CONS:
- Damage over time can be rough. Though we take measures against this.
- Glancing Blows. While this is fantastic with Aegis Aurora and Armour stacking, it's not my favorite thing in the world to have to take. That said, it enables Life Recoup as a great defense against chaos damage and degens. We're always taking damage from hits to our ES and thus get a hefty amount of life recovery for when things DO hit our life pool.
- Getting the high end "required" items can be difficult/expensive depending on the market. Makes an SSF version a little tricky (though not impossible)
-3.17 Nerfs mean starting with Spectres is not as easy and overpowered as before. Feels kinda...normal until you get Unearth going. level to maps as Arma brand+Cremation anyways :P

The idea here is very simple. I wanted a tanky character with decent damage to enjoy a more relaxed and carefree playstyle. Ignite is great for this as the proliferations make clearing feel pretty smooth even with the 2-button playstyle.

That said, the idea here is very simple:
Use Unearth for consistent, non-variable ignite damage. Scale it via Gem level and corpse life. To do this I am using a Phantasmal Unearth (2% increased corpse life per 1% quality) socketed into a pair of +5 Hands of the High Templar. Further boosted by Enhance and Empower:


This exact setup with a 21/20 Phantasmal Unearth gets me to a level 30 gem. Level 30 is the goal because after that, it takes 2 gem levels to raise the corpse level by 1, while up until that point it's a 1:1 ratio. Level 30 gem=level 90 corpses. To get higher, you need 2 additional gem levels to get 1 corpse level.

We then get an additional +5 to corpse levels (level 95 corpses) with the helmet enchant:


And that's really it. Use Vaal Detonate Dead on Bosses and scale Unearth Corpse life for huge ignites.

Elementalist provides the most damage and is why I chose her for my ascendancy. Necromancer can also be used as a more defensive option especially in a Solo Self Found environment where you might not be able to get your hands on an Aegis Aurora.

So defenses on this build all come from gear and gem choices. We are aiming to stack a decent amount of armor for physical mitigation as well as ES recovery from Aegis Aurora.


We do this with:
Determination
Defiance Banner
Flasks that auto use and refill themselves...


And the Glancing Blows keystone to make sure our chance to block is very high.

Tempest Shield for huge spell block and Shock immunity.

Watcher's Eye modifier for Determination with "Take 60% reduced extra damage taken from critical strikes while affected by Determination."
and an additional 30% from the tree from Sanctum of Thought.

A grasping mail with "100% increased global defenses" goes a long way for scaling more armour and ES for us.

A Chest with Explosions and Aura Effect will give insane clear while still scaling your armour from the aura effect.


But you could also use the Brass Dome, Skin of the Loyal, Incandescent Heart, or a generic rare.

Lastly I use a Small Cluster jewel with Enduring composure for 100% uptime on Endurance Charges and a hefty boost to armor at the same time.

I am using a Topaz and Ruby Flask on autofill+use to balance out my elemental mitigation as we get +5% max cold res from Aegis.



One last layer of defense that we implement is the Vampirism Wheel (Next to Undertaker) for the life gain on kill and 20% of damage taken from hits recouped as life. We are CONSTANTLY taking damage and out-recovering it with Aegis. Hits very rarely actually touch our life pool. However, when there are chaos damage hits or chaos dots we have this recoup that is constantly building up to keep us topped off.

Chest 6L:
Level 1 Vaal DD is intentional. Keeps mana cost low and the only thing you gain from levels for this build is some AOE.

4L Auras

You can get away without using Enlighten, but the mana is a little tight. (I end up with 53 mana left without it). If you have a level 4 Enlighten you can replace the mana reservation mastery with the Aura Effect one.
3L CWDT

This is flexible. You can choose to put this as an arcanist brand instead of CWDT with Flame Surge if you want or self cast it with Hextouch+Flammability. I also put Flame Dash in these links as an additional way to apply Combustion Debuff.
4L Phantasmal Unearth

Ideally these go into a pair of HoTHT gloves. But if you're running another +gem levels setup then you'd naturally put this there.

3L Arcanist Brand

Arca Brand to proc Flame surge on the enemy periodically for 25% more damage. Flammability for curse. As mentioned above, you can also 4L this with WoC if you want to. Flexible slot.
2L Shield Charge for mobility

You can use any movement skills you like. I personally like to use Shield Charge supplemented with Flame Dash. You do you Boo.

Single Sockets looking to Mingle!

These gems do not need to be linked to anything and can be placed in any of your spare sockets/unset ring(you will need 1 unset ring if you are running Enlighten). Flame Dash likes to be paired with the CWDT WoC+Combustion as an additional way to proc the debuff.

Ask away!

Video Explanation
When calculating the corpse life of our Unearth corpses there are three things to consider:

Level of the Corpse
% Increased Corpse Life.
Area Level of the Zone you're in.

So, basically, the level of the corpse is noted on the Unearth gem itself when you scroll over it in game. This will take into account all sources of boosted level etc...At gem level 30, Unearth will spawn level 90 Bone Archers.
Combine that with the helmet enchant mentioned earlier and you end up with level 95 Bone Archer corpses.

https://poedb.tw/us/Monster#MonsterStats
This gives us the *base* stats of monsters up to level 100. At level 95 a monster has base life of 31,220. We want to then take this number and factor in the 140% of base life multiplier from the Bone Archer stats (x1.4)=43,708 life for a level 95 Bone Archer.

You can then, once again, check the Unearth gem for the increased life value that it's generating:

Take this value (170% in my case) and add another 70% to it from the tree and Corpse Pact Ascendancy(If you're Necro or have the forbidden jewels, otherwise it's 20%) for your total %Increased Corpse Life.

I get 148,607 corpse life in the above example.

From there, you want to go to:
https://poedb.tw/us/Monster_level
And look up the Area level for the content that you are doing.

So with the above example of 148,607 life, if I were in a level 83 zone (T16 map) then I would multiply by 2.09 for a total of 310,588.

league start leveling progression. Includes tree progression for all the acts up to level 85-ish. From there you'll want to refer to the end game POB. This is a naked character. Ooh la la. xD
https://pastebin.com/skZEQEte

https://youtu.be/tZIOBAnerYg
Made a video talking about this briefly, but basically you want to wait until you have a skill level 20 on Unearth...at minimum. Ideally, you wanna swap after you ALSO have a +5 Corpse Level Helmet Enchant for a good boost to damage.