POE FOR POOR (PFP)’s Hexblast Chaos Ignite using Blackflame ring

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wow360 wrote:

If you enjoy playing all content in Path of Exile without switching builds while maintaining screenwide explosions, this build is for you!

Pros
+ Super fast clear (New Buffed Profane Bloom Explosions)
+ Decent Boss damage
+ Multiple defensive layers (Evasion, Defensive Curses with blasphemy, Spell Suppress Capped, Ward flask)
+ Cheap in trade league
+ Requires no cluster jewels
+ All content viable

Cons
- not Uber viable (requires good skill otherwise)
- not much life (3.5k)
- will make haters on reddit jealous

How does it work?
TLDR: Fast ignite scaling while stacking curses.

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This has been an incredible build for mapping tier 16 with a good damage and decent survivability. TLDR this build can easily farm expeditions, beyond, harvest, juicy stuffs and all master missions while still going boom boom with explosions on monsters. Total cost is 6 divine for this build but I had to spend more than 20 to try different ways to make it work in end game with good damage and survivability. The only expensive uniques we're using is the covenant and replica emberwake. Our main item, the blackflame ring is very cheap. I started this build with the normal ignite as an elementalist. Although the damage was very high, it was very annoying when I came across a map modifier that grant life as extra energy shield. This inspired me to entirely respec my passive tree to the oculist after converting the final fire damage over time to chaos damage over time. But yet this blackflame does not scale with chaos damage over time. It scales heavily from flat chaos damage and all types of fire damage. An important thing to note is that damage over time does not scale with spell damage unless it is specified in the gem. And since the end result ignite chaos damage does not scale with elemental exposure either, we switched to the oculist. Now the extra damage comes from stacks of wither instead of exposure. And we replace flammability with despair. Plus, we have to get our chance to ignite from the passive tree because hexblast can freeze, shock and ignite but does not guarantee it.

Leveling from Act 3 with hexblast is fun! It reminded me of the lightning conduit build I did in the last league where you'd use 2 buttons to hit the target. Later on I switched to profane proxy which turns your skitterbots into hexers. This was a great quality of life early on but was not impactful at red maps with huge pack size because your skitterbots can only target 1 pack at a time. This led me into a state where I get 1 shotted by something behind me or by anything that’s not targeted by my temporal chains. Hence I took the nerfed blasphemy support and linked it with my enfeeble and temporal chains. To my surprise, it felt much better and much smoother in playstyle and survivability. For the cheapest and best option I couldn’t craft anything better than a cane of Kulemack with huge fire dot multi and chaos damage. Since there aren’t many builds with this combo I got it for just 25 chaos. Without the spell suppression it is very hard to survive these days. This is why I had to give up half of my damage from the cluster jewels and path to the right side of the tree. Because in my original design from pob I had twice the damage but practically my character would die very often by some indirect on-death effects.

As a demonstration of how this works on bosses, we put down our wither totems, enable malediction aura and cast despair with the arcanist brand. Then we keep hexblasting every 3 to 4 seconds. All map bosses in tier 16 maps die in less than 10 seconds. The map mods to avoid are those that contain cannot regenerate and avoid elemental ailments. The expedition mods to avoid are immune to curses and immune to chaos damage. Everything else is fine. Hence this is a perfect build for a simple alch and go strategy.
Don’t get fooled by the large combined damage number you see in the POB of any ignite based build! This number can easily to pushed with the help of increased ailment or ignite duration modifiers. The real damage you deal per second is the number you see in the total dot DPS or ignite dps. To explain how ignite works, let’s take our combined total damage of 8 million which is the total damage that will be inflicted after you start igniting the enemy. This can take several seconds to reach this value. So we divide this total ignite duration into each second. Each second the value of damage we are actually dealing is 2 million of damage over time DPS. Once the 8 million damage is reached, we have to hit the enemy again to reset this. This is why you don’t require very high cast speed on most ignite builds. The way how we scale the damage per second value is by using modifiers that grant Ignites you inflict deal damage faster. By pushing this value higher we burn our foes faster per second. This can be achieved with items such as replica emberwake and dyadian dawn which is used in attack based ignite builds. But the downside of using some of these items is that we are lowering the total duration of ignite. This will cause you to keep hitting the enemy more often to maintain the ignite on them. This is why some players often avoid using support gems such as swift affliction. Overall, in any ignite build it is in your control to balance the damage while maintaining a steady ignite base duration on the enemy while casting. And this is why ignite builds like explosive arrows are much cheaper and show big damage numbers in the POB.
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Youtube Build Demo link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxtdR5JMycU

Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@poeforpoor

My Character: Witch_of_Cauldron
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/wow360

POB (Pastebin) link: https://pastebin.com/tk9h0nmW

Bandits:
Kill all (Be the hero!)

Pantheon: